EPISODE 210 WITH ROCKY LALVANI: GROWING YOUR BUSINESS WITHOUT SPENDING A FORTUNE

Ready Yet?! Podcast Episode 210 with guest Rocky Lalvani: Growing Your Business without Spending a Fortune 

Transcribed with Descript

Erin Marcus: Oh, right. All right. And welcome to this episode of the ready yet podcast with my guest today, Rocky Lalvani. And Rocky, I got to tell you, one of the reasons I’m excited for this conversation is I talk to 10 to 20 new business owners a week. And you are one of the very, very few one handful of people who’ve ever used the same phrase that I use about business.

Erin Marcus: And it’s this concept of reverse engineering. And it shocks the heck out of me that more people don’t understand that. But I was very excited to talk about that with you previously when we first met. And how much that is in your vernacular. So before we get into our conversation though, why don’t you tell everybody who you are, what you do, all the cool things.

Rocky Lalvani: Sure. So I’m Rocky Lovanni. I run my own business. We’re, we’re small. I don’t want to scale because that takes work and I’m very lazy. I reverse engineered laziness into my business. Phenomenal. And I, I work with other business owners to help them be lazy and make lots of money and keep it. Because I don’t care how much your top line revenue is, I care how much you keep.

Rocky Lalvani: So I actually, I was just having a conversation with one of my clients today and, and the conversation is like, look, I don’t care. You know, if you’re going from 10, 20 million to a hundred million, if you’re not going to get more money and you’re not going to work less, what, why are we doing this? Right?

Rocky Lalvani: Right. Why? That’s just utter silliness, and I think too often people just They chase a vanity metric, which is their top line and say, Oh, I made all this money and they’re like, where is it? And they’re like, we don’t know. We don’t know.

Erin Marcus: Well, and I think there’s a big difference between, you know, depending on scaling your business, how you’re running your business, all of those things.

Erin Marcus: There’s also a big difference where like, okay. The first year you make a lot of changes and you do a lot of things, you’re going to potentially spend more of your top line, but if you stay in that place, right, if there’s no plan to improve those numbers, there’s a big difference between making an investment to make a leap forward and staying stuck in spending 99.

Erin Marcus: 9 percent of what comes through the door. On getting the

Rocky Lalvani: business to work. Why are they spending so much in their first year?

Erin Marcus: Some people just say I mean investing in certain strategies and it’s to do that

Rocky Lalvani: intentionally

Erin Marcus: Intentionally and and this is it’s interesting to me I’d love to get your take on it because if you look at a lawyer and and you know Let’s look at a lawyer look at a doctor.

Erin Marcus: They don’t necessarily expect to make back their entire investment in their education In one year or in the year that they make that investment

Rocky Lalvani: They don’t doctors have a proven path Like if you’re a doctor, you’re pretty much going to make a certain number and it varies by the kind of doctor Attorney’s a little different half of attorneys don’t even practice law whole nother story So for attorneys, I think it you have to be very careful as attorney I can’t tell you how many people have probably spent 150k on law school and are stuck with a massive bill and No way to get out of it.

Rocky Lalvani: So I think that’s the most important thing as a business owner. How do I grow my business without spending a bunch of money that. Unless you know you’re going to get it back, like you have a proven program and you know you’re going to sell. Too often we have all these wild, crazy ideas. We spend money on all the wrong things the first year.

Rocky Lalvani: Oh, that I

Erin Marcus: don’t disagree with you. That I don’t disagree with you at all, right? But this goes back to this reverse engineer idea. And I think one of the reasons people spend money on the wrong thing is they haven’t done that reverse engineer. They don’t know what they’re trying to create. They’re just

Rocky Lalvani: trying to do something.

Rocky Lalvani: Right, but then they also, so I see this a lot with many of my, I don’t know what the right word is, a lot of people who do what I do were in similar places, and we all chat. Because they didn’t reverse engineer it, or because they don’t do the math, even though they’re math people like me, they start taking opportunities that, quite frankly, Aren’t worth it.

Rocky Lalvani: Like, Oh, I got to get revenue. So I’ll do this. I’m like, you realize you’re working for peanuts now and say no, because otherwise you’re never going to have the time to grow and to build the business the way you want it.

Erin Marcus: And people don’t understand that side of it. And there’s a learning curve in the business.

Erin Marcus: If you’re new to being business owner and you’re going to make mistakes. And that’s. That’s part of it. I get it. Shorten your learning curve as much as you can, but there has to be a point where you’re doing an ROI assessment on the investments that you’re making. And one of the mistakes that I’ve seen over and over again is like, okay, well, if I, if I make an investment to take advantage of this opportunity, what other costs are there?

Erin Marcus: In order to make that opportunity work, and that is one of the place I’ve seen people go really horribly awry like so for example, they’ll pay to be part of a group they’ll pay to be a sponsor and I that’s a strategy that where I use it it works it’s fine, but if you don’t know all the other associated costs.

Erin Marcus: with doing a good job at that opportunity, making the most of it. A lot of these opportunities are three and four times as much money as what they look like on paper.

Rocky Lalvani: We don’t believe in putting money behind marketing, which is what you’re talking about paying to be these. We don’t believe in putting money behind marketing. Until we have a proven message that works. Absolutely. Absolutely. But if you’re a beginning business owner and you’re going to all these events and paying for all these events, you don’t have a proven sales process yet, most likely.

Rocky Lalvani: Yeah, unless you’ve got sales under your belt.

Erin Marcus: I was going to say, I mean, because I, yeah, there has to be a place for you to go vet your offer, right? There has to be a, you can’t get sales unless you vet your offer, right? Unless you’ve been out there and had these conversations. I, there’s different times to use events, there’s different times to use rooms, there’s different ways.

Erin Marcus: I will go to events to test my Language, right? To test what’s landing, talking to hundreds of people over the course of two days to see what responds, what doesn’t respond, what works, what doesn’t work, because it’s a fast track as opposed to if I was just trying to do that one person at a time.

Rocky Lalvani: Okay, so here’s what we do.

Rocky Lalvani: Mm hmm. If you’re a new business owner and you have no money, okay, or you have money and you want to waste it. Not. Figure out where the event is locally. Do not go to the event. Go to the bar. Okay. You’ll meet everybody you need to meet. They’ll all be wearing a name tag. They’ll all be just chatting away thinking you belong there.

Erin Marcus: I did that on LinkedIn where there’s certain networking groups that I was part of and then I just wasn’t getting anything out of it. But. I saw like, well, you can tell who’s connected to who and I could just reach out to them myself. I didn’t have to be part of an expensive networking group. I can tell by who’s commenting on what and going from there.

Rocky Lalvani: I think people too often want to throw money at things to make it easy. That I

Erin Marcus: absolutely agree with. They’re looking for an easy button.

Rocky Lalvani: They’re looking for an easy button. The easy button doesn’t work. No. It doesn’t. So it’s funny because I get emailed 10 times a day, but the same stupid email drives me up the wall.

Rocky Lalvani: What if, would you do if we could give you another 20 to 50 phone calls with potential clients a month? And I’m like, My head would explode. I can’t deal with that many calls. That too much work for me. And I’m like and so the other one was, I got one the other day. I was actually going to respond to him.

Rocky Lalvani: We’ve built a seven and eight. We’ve helped people build seven and eight figure businesses. I think he was talking with YouTube ads or something. Right. And so he’s emailing me trying to get me to talk to him and I was going to respond because he emailed me like four or five times. I, you know, I looked at the thread.

Rocky Lalvani: Why are you emailing me when YouTube ads work? Like, seriously. I did

Erin Marcus: the same thing when I do those to the people who I can tell. Sometimes I can tell how the messages come in and I’ll get all these messages about wanting to help me with my SEO. Well, you found me, so clearly it works, right? I’m doing something, right?

Erin Marcus: You found

Rocky Lalvani: me. But that’s not the point! If you’re going to help me with SEO, what’s wrong with your SEO? Why are you calling me? Does your SEO suck? Like, seriously, this is the, like, you know, when we take a step back and think about it, we’re like, wait a minute. But I will tell you what these people are really good at.

Rocky Lalvani: Selling you on the concept of whatever it is that they’re selling. Not actually doing the work. So here’s a, here’s a dirty little secret. The best people are not the best marketers. And the best marketers are usually not the best providers. So be careful who you’re listening to.

Erin Marcus: Oh my God. I’ve seen that so many times where people get very, very good.

Erin Marcus: For example, you know, they take a class and learn how to make an offer from the stage, right? That’s a whole thing. Make an offer from the stage, sell from the stage. I don’t have events. I sell from the stage. That’s fine. Didn’t start out that way, right? But they get great at selling from the stage. But they have no client fulfillment process.

Rocky Lalvani: Well, they don’t need one. You know why? Well, they’re not, people aren’t going

Erin Marcus: to stay with

Rocky Lalvani: them. Well, people who buy from the stage generally don’t s They buy because the excitement they don’t actually do the work so they don’t really need fulfillment

Erin Marcus: Right, I

Rocky Lalvani: depends on this but they might ask for your money back

Erin Marcus: Depends on the stage depends on the stage.

Erin Marcus: Yeah, but So what do you see one of the things that I say does work? I I always go back to this idea like reverse engineer being a thing, you know, what are we trying to create? What do we actually want? What not just dollar that’s where it starts not just how much money but To your point, I’m lazy, I don’t want to work a lot because you can make a lot of money doing a little work or a lot of work.

Erin Marcus: They’re both possible. That’s why you have to reverse engineer it. But also connecting as a human before, right? Connect as a human first. Connecting interpersonally before you try to scale anything. I think that’s one of the things that’s really missing in so many people’s approach to growing their business is understanding that People buy from other people.

Rocky Lalvani: Well, they’re too busy selling their stuff instead of having a conversation. It’s funny, because sometimes I get the email do you need a fractional CFO? I’m like do you even know what I do? Did you read? Did you look at it? Well, and it’s

Erin Marcus: all this AI, it just mass sends things. I have a friend who’s got six New York Times best selling books, he’s been National Speakers Association Hall of Fame, and he’ll get LinkedIn messages and emails about, I can help you write your next book, and like, really?

Erin Marcus: Because I’m pretty sure I’m okay on that

Rocky Lalvani: front.

Rocky Lalvani: I get it. I mean, that happens all the time. But so you, I, I think too often though we get stuck in the hype and you have to learn to turn that off. Honestly, you know, this whole time I’m thinking, you know, one of the simplest ways to do thing is to pick up the phone and call people and yet people don’t do it.

Rocky Lalvani: I

Erin Marcus: was just talking to someone about that. There’s a couple people now who all we just do is text or call each other. And it’s just so much easier. And those are the closer connections. It’s it’s the difference between going to networking events or actually building your personal network. Who’s in your phone that you could actually

Rocky Lalvani: call.

Rocky Lalvani: And that’s really what matters. And it’s, I think, so people don’t realize you go to a networking event, there are. Two purposes at a networking event. One is to serve other people. And two is to find people that you want to connect with. after the event and set up a coffee or something. It’s not to sell at.

Rocky Lalvani: No,

Erin Marcus: it’s not prospecting.

Rocky Lalvani: And, and too often, you know, I mean, I think it’s gotten, well, COVID stopped it all, but people just walking around handing out cards and interrupting people. And it’s like, everyone’s like, who is that fool?

Erin Marcus: Well, and I said, if you think about that, And then how the world’s gotten to be so online, to me, when you connect you know, someone sends you a LinkedIn request, a Facebook request, a friend request, and you click yes, and then they immediately start pitching you.

Erin Marcus: If, in the real world, that would be like somebody going into a networking event and just running from person to person to person. Want to buy my thing? Want to buy my thing? Want to buy my thing? They would look so ridiculous. in person doing that, and yet that is what people

Rocky Lalvani: do online. I can usually tell by the request whether or not that’s going to happen.

Rocky Lalvani: Oh yeah. And a lot of times I ignore all those requests because I know that’s what the next step is, and so I’m like, yeah, no

Erin Marcus: And they think, right, or someone will think, oh, well, if I go like three of your posts, now I can friend request. Now I can send you

Rocky Lalvani: a connection. I don’t know who liked three of my posts.

Erin Marcus: So let’s flip it. If this is what everybody’s doing wrong, what are some things that they could be doing to get the ball rolling and get to where they

Rocky Lalvani: want to be? I think you have to figure out how does it work in your market. And then how can you be different in your market? So that’s really the situation.

Rocky Lalvani: So the first thing is who is your ideal client? Too often we go by demographics. I don’t go by demographics. I go more by psychographics. I’m looking for people who behave a certain way because those are better clients for me because I want them to behave in the way that I want to deal with people and the kind of people I want to work with.

Rocky Lalvani: Where are they hanging out? And then how do you start to build a relationship and give value? And then over time, things will happen. But it, it takes. A lot of time. So I think, you know, for people starting out, I tell people it takes three years to build a business. You don’t have a three year runway or a three year glide path or, or, or the financials to get that far.

Rocky Lalvani: You’re not going to make it. I think too often people think that they’re going to be up and running and fully functional in 90 days. Well,

Erin Marcus: Instagram would have you believe you could be a millionaire your first year in business.

Rocky Lalvani: Yeah. Wow. No Instagram. I know those people and they are correct. I can show you how to get a million dollars in sales on Instagram this year.

Rocky Lalvani: You want to know the catch? It’s going to cost you about 1. 2 million in advertising and delivery and fulfillment.

Erin Marcus: That’s all. You know, you said earlier that great marketers are not good at the thing and people who are great at the thing aren’t great marketers. And I say that about Client Avatar. Like, when I talk to newer business owners or struggling business owners and I start talking about What’s your niche and who’s your ideal client avatar?

Erin Marcus: They’re the ones that say I can help anyone. And I will tell you that I have never talked to a massively successful business owner who says that. I’ve never talked to a massively successful business owner who has said to me, I can help anyone, or I want to work with everyone, or they didn’t know their avatar.

Rocky Lalvani: I can help everyone, but I choose not to. But you don’t want to, exactly, exactly. Because, because 80 to 90 percent of those people, A, can’t. won’t pay me. Or they’re, they’re just not, it’s not a good fit. Right.

Erin Marcus: They’re not ready. It’s not a good fit. I say that as well, right? It’s like, they’re not going to like me.

Erin Marcus: There’s a lot of people out there who are not going to like me because of what I believe in and how I choose to move forward. Absolutely. So how did you start doing what it is that you’re doing? What’s your origin story as it

Rocky Lalvani: were?

Rocky Lalvani: So looking backward, I see how everything goes together, but to start the business, actually, there were multiple, like I spent a lot of time investigating and testing the market. And so my original business idea had nothing to do with business finance. It was all on the personal finance side. And I came to realize that it wasn’t a, it wasn’t a market that was going to work.

Rocky Lalvani: Like, As much as I could teach people how to become millionaires in 10 years, nobody was willing to pay for it. Nobody was willing to wait 10 years to become a millionaire. They all listened to the marketing guy who took 10 grand and told him they could do it this weekend. Right. And, and that, so you have to find that product market fit.

Rocky Lalvani: Once I found that business owners weren’t looking at their financials, I was like, Oh, they’ve got a problem. And they’re going to need to fix it or they can’t make payroll. And so, and I still took another year or two years testing the market. And then I think the final step was partnering with Profit First, Mike Michalowicz and all of them because I was like, Oh, I could build this, but I was like, but I don’t want to.

Rocky Lalvani: That’s not, that wasn’t the part you wanted. It wasn’t the part I wanted. And I didn’t want to spend the time and effort doing that when I could go out. And actually get clients and do the part I wanted. So that was kind of the, the, the, the story and then the rest is history, but it took a lot of time to think through it, figure out pricing, realize what pricing could be, and then starting with, Hey, we’re going to start with, Hey, we’ll take anyone who walks in the door.

Rocky Lalvani: Now, we’re very picky, so, but that takes time, that’s not day one. In the meantime, yeah, we, I, we really looked at the concept of how much do I want to pay for marketing, and I was told if you build your marketing program on somebody else’s system program, advertising, you will always be stuck on that.

Rocky Lalvani: Totally. And so I said, well, I’m just going to build it myself. We’re not going to spend on that. We’re not going to spend on this. We’ll, we’ll be careful what associations we join. Because once you start going, you start to be, you really start to get the ahas. Oh, that isn’t what I thought it was. Or a lot of these networking groups are everyone handing everyone leads, but it did not fit.

Rocky Lalvani: It didn’t fit my business and it didn’t fit my values Like i’m not going to hand a lead to a real estate agent because they’re in my group When I know five better real estate agents because now that’s ruining my brand totally agree with you. Yeah So it was just taking the time, testing, failing, trying, you gotta keep showing up, but it does take time to build, and I think that’s what people don’t realize.

Erin Marcus: And I think it’s interesting because I see the problem on the flip side also. Number one, I think you’re right, people don’t understand the amount of time it takes to actually build something of value, but on the flip side, I also watch people staying stuck. Right? You talk about, you did the market research, you tested the market, you did all these things to, in order to keep moving forward.

Erin Marcus: And on the flip side, I, you know, that, that takes a while. And also I watch people not do that work. Just, you know, what is that, that definition of insanity, you know, doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome.

Rocky Lalvani: Most people don’t take action. I agree. It’s just the reality of it. And

Rocky Lalvani: you’ll see that a lot with Relatively new business owners, you know, they’re just stuck in their own way.

Erin Marcus: Or they take action and I say they take X amount of action because they started a business and so they knew they were going to be nervous. So the first year they expect to be nervous. So they take a bunch of action, but then that becomes their new comfort zone

Rocky Lalvani: and they have not real action.

Rocky Lalvani: So. They buy business cards. They spend hours figuring out the business card. They go to two networking groups. They spend all this money buying a website that they don’t even know the messaging for. Right. And then of course we need a nice office because everyone’s going to buy from me because I have a nice office and a nice car or whatever it is, you know, go out and get sales people, right?

Erin Marcus: Start. Yeah. First, you have to learn how to make money in order to learn how to manage it. But if you can’t even make money, you get stuck at the first step. Yeah. So what else? So taking the action, let’s shorten some people’s learning curves. What’s something that you tried that just didn’t work? I, one of my big things is like, if you just don’t do what I did over here, you’ll already be out of the game.

Erin Marcus: Oh,

Rocky Lalvani: well, I mean, no offense to the group, but I went to the chamber. You joined the chamber. Well, the only people at the chamber were salespeople. And, and people either too big or too small for me. It wasn’t the right place. It wasn’t the right fit. Yeah. And even some of the other networking groups I would join, I’m like, this is, sometimes you’d know immediately, but sometimes it would take a while to go, wait a minute, this isn’t the right fit.

Rocky Lalvani: So what do you

Erin Marcus: have in place to figure that out? Like what do you, I know what I do. What do you use besides good instinct

Rocky Lalvani: to. I think in the beginning, you’re running around everywhere, you start weeding things out. I think for a lot of business owners, you just gotta go through the weed out, or, if you know who your avatar is, and you’re crystal clear on that, then just go hang out where they’re at.

Rocky Lalvani: I mean, that’s really it’s that simple and it becomes more enjoyable, but not, I think a lot of times people don’t always know who their avatar is. So let’s just say you’re a marketing agency. You don’t know who you’re really going to connect with business wise, right? Sometimes it’s accidental. Maybe you somehow become the marketer for attorneys, but that was because of luck and happenstance.

Rocky Lalvani: And once you start building that, it grows. But in the beginning, I think it’s a little bit hard. But if you’ve already got expertise, so in other words, let’s say your spouse is an attorney. Well, now you have an into a market and you’re getting invited to parties, which is where you’re networking. Like

Erin Marcus: I always say, use your natural credentials.

Erin Marcus: I had a fan. I left corporate with a fancy title and financial services. So I could use that credential to open doors. Just, you know, an easy bit faster than if I didn’t have the credential,

Rocky Lalvani: you have to figure out what works for you. And I think in the beginning, it’s a lot of testing and, and seeing what work or do the other thing, look at people who are successful in that industry.

Rocky Lalvani: And go see where they’re hanging out. There are shortcuts. Going to conferences and events, the right conferences, the right events where those people are hanging out, works. I think, I know, in the beginning I went to, well, I didn’t, it’s not that I went to the wrong conferences, it’s that I probably didn’t know better.

Rocky Lalvani: And the other thing is, I think people too often rely on social media. Nobody buys Most people don’t buy most business services from social media. If you’ve got a social media product, great, but again, if you don’t know how to build out that ad that converts and sells, social media is not going to work for you.

Rocky Lalvani: And

Erin Marcus: I’m, I’m a big fan of using it as a re engagement tool, not a meet new people and sales funnel. I think it’s so much easier as that credential people you meet out in the real world who may or may not be ready. You can easily reengage and stay top of mind with people that you’ve already met elsewhere.

Erin Marcus: I’ve, I’ve not really used it very intentionally to grow my audience.

Rocky Lalvani: No, and I think that’s where a lot of people get it wrong. They start posting a lot of stuff on social media. The only people following you on social media are your friends and they’re probably not your clients. So that’s the problem.

Erin Marcus: I had that I, I’ve frustrated a lot of people who tell me they’re going to build a course, right?

Erin Marcus: Oh, I’m going to create a course. And I’ll say to them, okay. They’re going to sell it online. I’m like, great. How many followers do you have? And they have like 11 and six of them are cousins. I’m like, well, then I don’t think you’re ready to try to sell something online. No,

Rocky Lalvani: that is correct. I think people think it’s a lot easier than it is.

Rocky Lalvani: If it was easy, we’d all be, we’d all be nice. The rest of you would all be millionaires.

Erin Marcus: It was easy. Everyone would be doing it and being successful at it. Absolutely. Awesome. Awesome. So if people want to continue this conversation and learn more about how you can help them and learn more about your approach to things, how do they find you?

Erin Marcus: What’s the best way

Rocky Lalvani: to reach out? Honestly, my podcast profit answer, man, we. We share everything we do for our clients. We bring on success stories. We, we, we show you how to do everything. We give it all away. You can do it yourself. And a lot of people choose not to, and then they hire us, but at least you know what we do and how we do it.

Rocky Lalvani: So wherever you’re listening to podcasts, you’ll find us.

Erin Marcus: Profit Answer Man.

Rocky Lalvani: Profit Answer Man. See, that was good SEO, wasn’t it? That was

Erin Marcus: very good. It’ll be on our website. You’ll get the backlinks the whole nine years. Absolutely. But

Rocky Lalvani: before they do that, can they do me a favor? Yeah, absolutely. Well, if they like you, Aaron, can they hit the like button for you?

Rocky Lalvani: That would be magnificent. Yeah, and then they could share it too, right? They must know somebody who needs to hear this conversation. Like, how about a little love here?

Erin Marcus: Well, and also what I really want to point out, because you and I have kind of been making light and giving a hard time to people who are doing everything wrong, and it really is because The way to do it right doesn’t have to be hard.

Erin Marcus: If it’s hard, I’m not doing it. Right! I mean, I, I, And that’s what I think was, is so hard to get through to people is, It, it doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s all possible. You make it hard. You make it so hard. And, It just doesn’t have to be that complicated. You’re going to have to take some action.

Erin Marcus: You’re going to have to learn some things, but it doesn’t have to be hard. Love it. Awesome. Well, thank you for your time and your information and your energy and your effort and all the things you know. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And you know, profit answer, man, go listen, reach out. I’m the say, I agree with you.

Erin Marcus: I give it all away. Just go make it happen. You’ll make it happen. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you.

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