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Chris McCombs: … and management hat. That’s why I outsource all the training, outsource all the management, customer service, everything. Now the trainers still want to train, right? Let’s say you own a training business and you still want to train 20 hours a week. That’s great. But I would also spend some of those other hours a week with the entrepreneur’s hat on building the systems, the marketing structures and things like that so you can get more trainers, more people working for you, more clients and actually have a business to where at some point if you want to sell the damn thing or if you’re like, “Hey, you know what? I want to go start another business. I don’t want to be training all day,” or whatever, you can have the freedom to do that.
So look at your business as the series of systems, step-by-step documented systems that runs with or without you. I know I can go on vacation for like three to six months anytime I want with about one day, maybe two days, of phone calls and emails and my income will probably only go down by about 10 percent.
Now it’s not going to grow during that period but it’s only going to go down about 10 percent. It’s not going to hurt me very much. You don’t want to be a personal trainer to where if you don’t show up at the gym next Monday morning, Tuesday morning, Wednesday morning, Thursday morning, Friday morning, you don’t get paid the following week or the following month. That’s not a business. That’s a job. You work for yourself but still a job.
Michael Duivis: Exactly, because that’s all every trainer is in the healthy club, is that if they’re not in the gym, they’re losing money pretty much and …
Chris McCombs: Oh, yeah.
Michael Duivis: And if you say you’re going on a vacation for six months, first off in America, that’s almost taboo and that’s unheard of and if you say your income drops by 10 percent, I don’t think many realize how high your income really is because right now, you would call yourself an information marketer, right? Is that true?
Chris McCombs: Well, yeah. I am an info marketer. That’s really what I wanted to do for a while. My personal training business, I built it. I used to train long hours. I systemized it. I created the marketing systems and honestly it took me – yeah, it took me about a year to create these systems to get my sites high in the search engines, to get them to convert, to get the sales growth [0:02:11] [Phonetic] in place. It took me about a year of a lot of work. I mean like full time, 20 to 40 hours a week putting all that together; some weeks even 60 or 80 hours of putting it together. But once it’s together, damn, that damn business is down to – it’s less than five hours a month. It doesn’t even take me an hour a week. I mean that business takes no time at all today.
So what I do with all the free time is at first I was just kind of loafing around but that can get a little old at first. I mean after a while so I started creating more businesses and I go, “Hey, I want to create an infomarketing business,” so I launched the Market Annihilator and that was six weeks of when I launched it, I put – for about six weeks, I worked like 15 hours a day, 6 days a week. Kind of a stressful time, a lot of long hours, a lot of long, frustrating phone calls with web guys and merchant accounts and shopping carts and all this crazy stuff but at the end of the day, after the six weeks, that being launched, it did over $50,000 in just a couple of days. A few days, like six days, it did like $52,000 and have a nice reoccurring chunk every month, nice five-figure reoccurring chunk every month and now the business – I mean it’s like two hours a week of creating content that it takes me for what’s a really nice other income now.
So now I have a personal training business that takes about five hours a month and that business does over $300,000 a year. I have the Market Annihilator which gives me – it brings in a nice five figures every month and that business takes about two hours a week and now I’m creating more stuff.
I like to create systems on the front end. I will work my ass off. I mean I know I kind of have this kind of lazy reputation out there and yeah, I am lazy but here’s kind of the twist. I work really fucking hard so I don’t have to work. I don’t know if that makes sense but I will bust my ass off to create a system in my business that automatically makes me money so I don’t have to keep working on that system and that business. I can build it, work my ass off then that thing automatically makes me money.
Now I have free time. Now I can either go ride around my Harley all day, go to the movies, hang out with the kids, which I do a lot or I can create another business or another system. So I created the Market Annihilator, right? And then that thing is on autopilot.
So then I will go create another system on something else. I’m a big fan of not working today to get paid next Friday. I’m a big fan of working on some kind of system that automatically makes me money and will bring me money for years and years and years that won’t really require any time after I built the system and if it does require time, it’s very minimal time. I can schedule it into my month, my week and it’s really easy. Does that make sense?
Michael Duivis: Yeah. No, it definitely makes sense. That kind of sounds like – I was watching a video of Bedros Keuilian about the Seven-Figure Formula about how you have to have multiple income streams.
Chris McCombs: Yeah.
Michael Duivis: Yeah. You know what? I’ve learned a lot of points now from this interview and I think we’re going to have to skip a whole lot because this is really good stuff. I don’t want to take too much of your time but yeah, let’s just talk about – you’re going to be a speaker at the Fitness Business Summit. I signed up myself. I definitely recommend all the readers or listeners to this post to definitely attend that and there, you’re going to talk about your Market Annihilator Program. Is that correct?
Chris McCombs: I’m not going up there to do a pitch for the Market Annihilator. I’m going to go up there and talk internet marketing. I actually have no idea at this point what it will be about. It might be in-depth search engine stuff but honestly, that stuff is pretty simple and it can get pretty boring to talk about after a while. I might go in-depth blogging. I’m not sure where it will be but it will be something that personal trainers – that I use, that other personal trainers could use to make a lot of money in their business. It will be internet marketing stuff, yeah, and that’s at Bedros’ big event here. It’s going to be a killer event.
Now one of my best bros Steve Hockman is speaking. Jason Moffatt, man, total like surfer stoner genius internet marketer. The guy is just awesome. He’s going to be talking. Another one of my friend is Valerie Waters who trains a bunch of movie stars. It’s going to be cool, man.
That’s a crazy month because I’ve got the other one. I’m speaking at the – like Fast Track to Fitness Millions or whatever it’s called, with Jim Labadie and Pat Rigsby that month and I’m speaking at Bedros’ thing. And you know what’s crazy is like I’m not like a public speaker, man. It’s not my thing. These dudes like twisted my arm to do this. I told them I would do it but I’m not going to go up there and dazzle the audience and be some amazing, powerful presentation. Man, I will probably be in like flip flops, shorts and a T-shirt and I’m just going to go up and do my thing and teach some killer stuff.
Michael Duivis: Yeah. No, that definitely sounds cool. Like I said, I have like a million more questions. But you know what? I just want to end off this interview by talking a little bit about the Market Annihilator.
I would say from my opinion, for anybody, any new trainer out there, I think the first thing they want to do is once they leave the gym or once they become a personal trainer is create a website and have that website be like a business card, like a real high end corporate look with a nice logo and a nice Flash animation.
That’s how I was when I started up my website and I have like this big Flash intro because I thought that as long as I put it up, I will get a whole bunch of leads but then I had joined your Market Annihilator Program and I was proven really wrong. It’s definitely, definitely worth checking out. I would endorse that anytime. Can you talk to us a little bit about – just that little discussion that I see a lot about long copy websites versus the corporate look? Do you know what I mean?
Chris McCombs: Yeah. The corporate look is typically people trying to impress the person by saying, “We’re the best,” and they’re kind of just trying to brand themselves and it’s all ego-based and it doesn’t make people want to buy at all.
I would not make a website that looks like a business card on steroids or a brochure on steroids. I mean like it’s not going to sell anything even though most web designers will tell you it’s going to. Dude, those guys don’t know shit, man. I swear what you want to do is you want to have a direct response website. When I say direct response, you’re trying to get a response, a single response out of your visitor. There’s something you’re trying to get from the dude and if you have a brochure website with a bunch of links that point to all these different pages and it just kind of – it’s like hey, we’re great and we’re awesome. Dude, it’s not going to get a response.
When people land on your site man, you want to take them down a greased slide to exactly whatever you’re trying to get them to do and whether that would be opt-in to get on your newsletter list, whether that be call to come in about personal training, whether that be register for your boot camp, whatever the main goal that you have for that page to do is that entire page should be focused around that goal. If you’re not good at writing sales copy, I will give a quick tip. Instead of just going out, if you’re not good at it, and trying to write some 10,000-word thing that will probably suck because you’ve never done it …
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