Episode 003 – Ben Adkins

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Richard Matthews 0:02
Heroes are inspiring group of people every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes you see on the big silver screen to the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives. We do. Every hero has a story to tell the doctor saving lives, your local hospital, the war veteran down the street, who risked his lives for our freedom, the police officers and firefighters who risk their safety to ensure hours every hero is special and every story worth telling. But there was one class of heroes that I think is often ignored. The entrepreneur, the creator, the producer, the one to look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what I can fix that I can help people and I can make a difference. Then they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service. Some go on to change the world. Others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to the hero show. Join us as we pull back the mass of the world’s finest hero printers and learn the secrets to their powers, their success and their influence, so you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host Richard Matthews, and we are on in 321.

Welcome to another episode of the hero Show. I’m your host Richard Matthews, AKA The Alchemist. You are listening to Episode 3 with Ben Adkins How to Go from Chiropractor to Seven Figures Online. I’m really excited for today’s interview because Ben is such an excellent person to do business with. I’ve learned so much from him over the years but before we get to the interview, I have a few things to cover. First up, this is the very first video interview that I’ve done on The HERO Show. So if you want to see that, check out The HERO Show on my YouTube Channel by going to “https://www.youtube.com/akathealchemist”. Second for those of you who are new thank you so much for listening. The HERO Show is all about unlocking the power of influence and success and empowering you, our listeners, to discover your own superpowers so you can take your business and your life to a whole new level. We have a three-step process by which we do that: identify, interview and integrate. First, we identify modern day heroes like Ben by their influence, their success, or their epic works. Then we interview them. Get them to pull back their masks and take off their capes so we can discover the secrets behind their success. And last, we work tirelessly to help you integrate the common principles that each of our heroes share into your own lives so you can build your own success and become heroes in your own right. Now, if you missed our last episode, you’ll want to make sure you check that out. I talked with the genius behind The Middle Finger Project, Miss Ash Ambirge. We discussed how she’s built a million dollar business by embracing her Moxie, all while globe-trotting, sipping wine and getting massages in exotic places like Costa Rica. It was an incredible conversation so make sure you check out the interview on iTunes. Also, don’t forget that you can stay connected to me and the show by subscribing now. Just text “HEROES”. That’s H-E-R-O-E-S TO 38470. Or you can visit our website richardmatthews.me/podcast and look for the box that says “Subscribe to The HERO Show” and put in your email address, you’ll get all sorts of cool gifts, be updated about our contents and polls, and get notified when we publish new episodes. With that, let’s get to our interview with today’s hero Ben Adkins. So you can learn his four core tenets of building a big, profitable, lasting business and start tapping into a whole new world of influence and success.

Here we go. We are live. So I am here with Dr. Ben Adkins. Hopefully you guys can see, whoever is watching on the video. We got the fancy little video chat room here going. So it’s good to have you here. Ben.

Ben Adkins 3:18
Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Richard Matthews 3:19
Awesome! Well, I’m going to do a quick little intro on what The HERO Show is for you guys. Just chatted a little bit with Ben about it. So basically, The HEROES Show -we talked about heroes. Some heroes fight crime, some heroes fight super villains, some heroes are fighting wars, some heroes save lives somewhere else, some protect and serve. Some heroes are real, some are make believe. This show really isn’t about any of those heroes. The show is about a different kind of hero, the producer or the creator, the entrepreneur. The ones who look at this world full of problems and think to themselves, “You know what? I can solve that problem I can help people.” I’m calling these people Heropreneurs. So this show is about you, Ben! You’ve been identified as a hero, the kind of person who has built influence or success by building or creating something of value and sharing it with the world. So it’s about your hero story. And I want to share your hero’s story with the world and use it to help other people. So they may understand how they can also become a hero. So with that, I want to talk a little bit about where you guys are now with Fearless Social, and what you guys do. So we can sort of contrast that later with where you started and how you went through this hero journey.

Ben Adkins 4:28
Sure. You know, it’s crazy. It started off as being in that mode of, “Okay, I’m going to do something with the rest of my life.” And I always wanted to help people. I think that’s where we all start. We don’t know how we want to help people. But we know we want to help people. I’d love to have enough money to eat too, while I’m helping people. So that was the criteria to getting started. I started out as a chiropractor with the school that seemed like forever to do that. It was a good seven years out of my life and got out. While I was sort of getting ready to take one of the final test to get certified, I ended up with a job at a mattress store. Crazy, right? It was one of those things where I’m like, “Okay, I gotta study for this test. I need a job in the meantime.” I can’t really work as a chiropractor yet, but I can still talk about backs with people if I’m working in a mattress store. So that kind of fits in your head.

Richard Matthews 5:29
All of my chiropractors asked me about my mattress.

Ben Adkins 5:32
Right. Well, exactly. So, I ended up there. And it was one of those things where, you know, serendipity; but I had no idea what was going on at the time. I was in this mattress store, and in between studying for a test and selling mattresses, I ended up on a couple blogs and forums. And I was like, “I really got into this internet thing.” And I was like, “Okay, so there’s people out there that like, make their entire living on the internet, that seems kind of cool.” So it started out as simple as that. And then I got out and I started practicing as a chiropractor. And the really cool thing was that whole time I was able to build my practice really quickly, because of what I learned sitting in the back of the store about the internet stuff. Yeah, because I didn’t have a lot of money for radio and TV. I was doing that and I grew the practice really fast. And that’s where things got really interesting. I had other business owners start hitting me up and be like, “Hey, so it seems like you’re doing really good with this, can you help us out. So without even knowing it, I got into consulting and was helping other people.” I really liked that, you know. I would see patients. I love seeing patients and helping them out. And then I would go to my alter ego type thing, right? I would go…

Richard Matthews 6:53
Put on your other hat.

Ben Adkins 6:54
Yeah, and be this consultants to small businesses but I didn’t have time. That’s what was really crazy. As with the clinic, we got busy so fast, because of how effective the marketing was that it got really busy. So I got this crazy idea. I’m like, “Well, why don’t we start recording everything that we’re doing, why don’t we start writing everything that we’re doing down and just turn it into a PDF or a little video course that people can go through step by step and put it in front of the people that are doing stuff.” And that’s where it all started. It was just like, I didn’t have any time to do the things that I wanted to do. So that was the solution. And then I look up very quickly, and we’ve got people that are buying from us in pretty much every country on the planet that had internet at the time. And I was like, “Well, what just happened here?” And yeah, so that’s three or four years ago. And here we are.

Richard Matthews 7:50
It’s just gone from there.

Ben Adkins 7:52
Yeah, at some point I was like, “I really am digging this.” And I had another chiropractor in my office that was also doing really well. She was like, “Can I buy this practice from me?” I’m like, “Sure, you know, why not? I can always go back.” That’s two and a half years ago that has happened. Now, I pretty much do the consulting and the online marketing full time. And I love it because like I said, “We get to help people from all over the planet.” It’s fun!

Richard Matthews 8:19
Yeah. So, your origin story started a couple of years ago. Where you fell into your role as a hero helping people.

Ben Adkins 8:33
Yeah.

Richard Matthews 8:34
I have a real quick story I wanted to share with you because one of the reasons I wanted to have you on as one of the first interviews is because it’s kind of your fault I’m doing the show. Partially. You and two other people. I already had one of the ladies on her, name is Ash Ambirge. She was on the last interview. And she sent me -she sent all the people on her list an email -but it spoke directly to me…said something along the lines of “Go out there and do something and call it project: whatever.” And so I wrote down on my little notepad that day. I was like, “Project: Hero.” Because I had been, I had been fascinated by this whole study of influence for a long time. And I was like, “I’m gonna do a podcast about that.” And I sat down and forgot about it for like, years!

Ben Adkins 9:23
Love it.

Richard Matthews 9:23
And my first introduction to you was actually a promotion you did for the ??? software.

Ben Adkins 9:31
Yeah. Okay.

Richard Matthews 9:32
So it was a couple years ago when you promoted that. It was right when they launched.

Ben Adkins 9:43
A year. Like a year, I think.

Richard Matthews 9:44
A year and a half. And I was like, “I want to do that podcast. On Hero Show!” I had the idea from Ash and I got the tools from you. And I needed to get it done. A couple of months ago, I was like, “I’ll actually get that started and get going.” So you were part of that origin story here. This show.

Ben Adkins 10:08
I love it. Cool. That’s cool. I love that.

Richard Matthews 10:12
Yes. So anyways, I you guys do a lot of stuff over at Fearless Social. Everything from traffic driving, to this the cool new birdsong thing you guys just released with some retargeting things. And you do coaching and all sorts of stuff. What I want to know is, if you could narrow down…what is your actual superpower? What do you do, or build that offers this world…to help solve problems for people? What’s the thing you use to help people slay their own villains?

Ben Adkins 10:44
Sure. It comes down to four things. As I’ve been doing this, it gets really complicated because there are all these tools, there are all of these courses that have tons of options out there. Which is I think it’s a really good thing.

Richard Matthews 11:00
Yeah.

Ben Adkins 11:00
But it’s really easy to get lost. A while back, we started putting some things together to help folks really focus because it was how I got my focus. There’s really four things that…if you want to go from “not doing anything online” and “not doing anything”…it doesn’t matter what your businesses is. Let’s say it was a chiropractor still. I wanted to help people that were outside of my normal area. There’s really four things that I would have to do. There are four focuses of what everybody online should be focused on. The first thing is, you have to have a product. And if you want to work online, you have to have something that’s portable, and can be delivered digitally. So that first thing is the product. Now, if you don’t want to, you know, you can still do physical as long as you can ship it. But as long as you can get it out of your area to someone else, that’s a big thing. And that’s it’s all about product. The second thing is the real focus. Once you have that product, you have to have a way to convey to other people that it’s unique and it’s a good fit for them. Or it’s not a good fit for them.

Richard Matthews 12:05
And that’s really important.

Ben Adkins 12:09
Right. And that’s the marketing and the copywriting side of things where you get into persuasive writing. So we get into the copy. So you’ve got your product, and you’ve got your copy and your marketing stuff. So we’ve got that. The third thing is, once you get those things figured out, you got to actually get in front of somebody, so we could go into traffic. You have to start focusing on “How do I get this in front of the right people?” So that’s, like I said, “Is it a good fit for them?” So once you get those three down, you’re pretty much on your way. When I got those three down, that’s when I was making really decent money from home after that. You start figuring out though, that it’s not the easiest thing to run a business and it’s not the easiest thing to stay disciplined and you need help if you’d like to have an even better life. And so you get into staffing, and you get into business systems, accounting, things like that.

Richard Matthews 13:10
You actually run a business.

Ben Adkins 13:12
Yeah, and that’s sort of the last part, which is scaling. Once you get those four things down, that’s the whole thing. So we in our company -and this is the sort of a long answer for this whole thing. But in our company, that’s our focus. It’s like anything that we build, anything that is a course or a piece of software. It has to fit somewhere into that. So with like Birdsong, as you mentioned, that goes into sort of the traffic area, and that was a big need for us. We needed something that did that. But we couldn’t find anything that did exactly what we wanted. But when we got into it, we’re like, “Okay, which of those four things does that absolutely solid, was absolutely traffic part?” So that’s how we sort of do business. That’s how we sort of think about helping people. If you’re going to actually do it, and you’re going to grow your business online, which is what we’re all about. You have a business and now you want to take it over the internet, so that have the world as your customer? How do you do that? And that’s how we decided that we would help people focus in those four things.

Richard Matthews 14:12
That’s awesome. Yeah, one of the things you mentioned at the beginning and you know, the first thing you have to have is a product. One of the discussions I’ve had with myself and several other people over and over and over again is, “You realize you could literally make money with anything.” I actually met someone and his business is…he’s the guy that puts tile down in under water fountains. I was like, “I didn’t know there was a guy that did tiles for underwater fountains.” And he has, like, all the contracts for all the casinos and hotels in the entire country and makes millions.

Ben Adkins 14:48
Yeah.

Richard Matthews 14:49
So it was like, you could be the tile guy, the underwater tile guy, right?

Ben Adkins 14:53
Yeah. And that’s the beauty of it. It’s just picking something that you want to do. And maybe that you’re good at already. Saying, “Hey, how do we start reaching those folks?”

Richard Matthews 15:04
Yeah, and then you go get your product and then you have to get it in front of people. And you have to scale that, obviously. How to handle all the contracts across the country? You have to be able to scale your business. But one of one of the things that I’ve noticed is that, you really have to decide before you get into it. What do you want your life to look like? Yeah, what do you want, what kind of business model is going to give you the lifestyle you want? The different business models are going to have very different work associated with them and how you build them.

Ben Adkins 15:35
Without a doubt. I mean, when I started, I had a certain view of what my life was supposed to be like. This is crazy but you know, I wanted to have the option to work from home. I wanted my wife to not have to work, she didn’t want to. I wanted to be in a position to where I could travel a lot and I can pick up at a moment’s notice and go do just about anything that I wanted and be able to work from wherever I wanted to work. It’s funny, I didn’t even realize that was a vision that I had up until after I was in a job. And so, that’s the thing I look up today. And it’s exactly what I wanted six or seven years ago but couldn’t quite put my finger on.

Richard Matthews 16:21
Yeah.

Ben Adkins 16:21
But yeah, if you start building a business that doesn’t fit that. It could even be something that you absolutely love doing. Like I love being a chiropractor, but it just didn’t sort of fit.

Richard Matthews 16:32
It didn’t give you what you wanted. Yeah.

Ben Adkins 16:34
That was a good point. Very good point.

Richard Matthews 16:35
Yeah. I’ve built a couple of businesses now. And I get them to the point where they’re starting to make money and realize, this isn’t giving me what I want. And I realized realized quickly that it’s not the money.

Ben Adkins 16:49
Yeah, right.

Richard Matthews 16:50
Because you can make the money doing anything if you do it well. As I heard someone say recently, “If you want to beat 90% of the people, just show up.”

Ben Adkins 16:59
Yeah. Hey, that’s it.

Richard Matthews 17:01
Yeah.

Ben Adkins 17:02
At the end of the day, you’re like, “What do I want? Who do I want to be doing this stuff with and how do I want my day to look?”

Richard Matthews 17:10
Yeah. So with that, I’m going to talk a little bit about your hero’s to belt. Maybe you have a big magic hammer like Thor or a bulletproof vest, like your neighborhood police officer. Maybe just really love how Evernote helps you organize your thoughts, or maybe you build killer slides in Keynote. This can really be either actual physical tools that you use or there’s some sort of psychological tools that you talked about. I know Monica, sorry not Monica, Ash Ambirge and I talked a lot about some tools she uses when she’s talking to clients, some psychological discussion tools. But what are some of your favorite tools that you help you grow your business?

Ben Adkins 17:52
I had very few, but the ones I have are absolutely huge for me. I think the first thing is really silly. I’m very deadline-oriented. That’s how we’ve been able to grow so quickly. Even though I don’t have to necessarily I’m like, “Well, we have this project, it’s pretty cool. I think it’s going to help a lot of people.” And while I think a lot of people have those things in their head, because we have a lot of smart people out there that we work with. They’re not really deadline-oriented. So they’d never get it done. And I’m like, “You know what, it seems impossible to get it done by next Friday. But that’s our deadline, we’re going to do it.” And so like make it happen! A simple Google Calendar and being very accountable to yourself of, “This is the day that it’s going to happen and this is the day that we’re going to introduce it to our public.” That’s an important thing for me. And that’s such a boring sounding tool, but it’s like one of the most important things for me. Yeah. So, Evernote. Another huge one…

Richard Matthews 18:53
Yeah.

Ben Adkins 18:54
…for us. Just because it’s portable. That’s the thing, any device that I have in my head or that I’m sitting in front of a computer, I can pull up Evernote,.I can share everything. Evernote is something that probably took me a good three years to even figure out what the heck it was all about. But once I did, I was like, “Oh, this is what this does.” And it was like, “Come on stupid. And I started using that quite a bit after that.” I’ve got two big tools. One we built and another someone else built. We have our copy-gen…it’s basically a copywriting…

Richard Matthews 19:29
Script All.

Ben Adkins 19:29
Yeah, it’s script all. And that’s nice because before I got that, it would take me forever to think about how to write a piece of persuasive sales copy. Now I just go in and answer a couple of questions and it spits something out for me. And I can go from there taking that which is very important to me. Usually, when I got really good at writing persuasive sales copy was two or three days. With Script All, it’s two or three hours tops. Taking that and coupling it with something that a friend of ours does which is ClickFunnels, which basically builds sales pages, web pages, all those things, being able to take what we spit out and script on and putting it into ClickFunnels, I’m able to…just this past week, I had a whole sales funnel that we put together…was like three or four different items that we did in a day. And you know, when I thought I was doing really good, it took us like a week to two weeks to do something like that. So that’s game changer for me because all my tools are basically time oriented. You’ll notice.

Richard Matthews 20:36
Yeah.

Ben Adkins 20:36
Saying we’re going to do something by this day and then having tools that take really hard jobs…no matter how skilled you are at them. And really decreasing the time that it takes.

Richard Matthews 20:46
There’s two big things I get from that. The first one with the deadlines. I’ve heard deadlines as being a massive game changer for people if they understand the power behind them. I forgot the guy’s name. I heard him speak actually, you were there at the ASM event. He talked about productivity. The productivity for entrepreneurs. He talked about deadlines as being being a linchpin for people going from one level to the next. If you have anything else you wanted to say about deadlines, and how deadlines really helped you build that influence and success that you guys have gotten now. I know you guys are doing like, seven figures at Fearless Social. So how important deadlines have been? Going from zero to seven figures.

Ben Adkins 21:30
It’s everything. I mean, really, that’s the most important thing. Our whole thing is not only do we have deadlines. But we have numbers attached to those deadlines. So not only do I always have a deadline, but I’ve always got something attached to it like, “Okay, this particular product that we put out, I think that we should be able to generate in this amount of time. So 72 hours, I think with the resources we have right now, I think we should be able to, you know, generate $50,000 to $100,000 in revenue.” So having that deadline actually means something to me because I have to hit this so that I can hit that revenue goal. We really have our month laid out. We start with the financial goal. So I’ll say, “You know, we want to make two $300,000 this month.” So I have to sit down and I have to say, I have to really build in my calendar and say, “Okay, what are we going to do…”

Richard Matthews 22:22
…to make that happen?

Ben Adkins 22:24
Yeah. So I work backwards from the income goal and we put these things together. If you’re not helping people, you’re not going to ever hit that goal. But if we hit the income goal, great, it’s awesome. If we don’t hit it, then that really tells me “Okay, what are we missing resource wise that I now need to go build into our business and do that?” But it all comes down to like you said, it’s a deadline, it’s saying, “This is what I want, this is how we’re going to do it. And this is the amount of time that I think it’s going to take us to do it. And this is when we’re going to launch it out.” I think the number one thing with anybody out there that’s killing it is they actually set deadlines because, honestly, when I have a job, and I work for someone else, there was always deadlines. When I was going to school, always deadlines. That’s what actually kept me productive. Now, the scary thing is when you start to go into business for yourself or you’re working from home. I went through this for a while where I had no deadlines because I was like chill out and did nothing got done.

Richard Matthews 23:25
Yeah, I’ve been there.

Ben Adkins 23:27
Yeah, we started setting those deadlines and telling people about them. I was like, “This is the date that’s going to get done.” So I had some accountability and pretty quickly you start seeing that’s pretty much the only way you move the needle and put points on the scoreboard. You start getting addicted to the deadlines.

Richard Matthews 23:44
I have a quick question on that. You have this benefit of having a built in team of people that you’re accountable with because you have a company. There’s people that are working solopreneur type that haven’t gotten to the point where they’re scaling into having a company. How would you recommend accountability for them? You actually did a call on that a little while ago and have a product or services in that space. You have any recommendations for people who are solopreneurs and starting that kind of deadlines? Because it’s really hard to keep a deadline just by yourself.

Ben Adkins 24:17
I think it’s, if you tie everything to money…and I said of course, “Income goal.” But if you tie everything to money, it’s really difficult to stay with a deadline. You have to have something you want. Like my big thing when I first started is I was all by myself. When I first started this company, it was just me sitting in a basement and I had a computer and there was nobody that was working with me. I didn’t have any built in staff. It was just this side project that I wanted to become a full time project. So what I ended up doing was I sat down and said, “Okay, the first thing I want is I want to put $20,000 in the bank.” Like that was the goal for me and I want to do it by this time because if I put that $20,000 in the bank, I’m going to be able to upgrade my equipment for this gig, which I liked. I’m also going to be in a position where I can hire someone to help me do all the things that we’re doing. So a big goal of mine, out of the gate. This may sound silly to some folks, but a bit goal out of the gate was I needed some help. Like I loved teaching. I figured that out pretty quickly. I love creating things that help people and I realized pretty quickly that there were some things that I didn’t need to be putting my attention into. So I needed to hire someone. So really quickly, my initial deadlines were set up so that I can hire someone. So you know, I knew it was going to take a certain amount of cash. And I knew I needed a reserve to get started for me to be comfortable. That’s really where it came in. I was like, “I gotta hire this person. I want to hire this person as soon as freakin’ possible.” And to do that, I’m going to have to go in and generate some cash. So I set this date I want to hire someone. And I worked backwards from there. And that’s what kind of kept me accountable in the beginning. And what was nice was, I had some friends that I was like, “So this is what I want to do. This is the date that I want to do it by.” And I respected those friends enough to be like, “I’m not going to drop the ball, they’re gonna think I’m a failure that I’m just all talk.” That’s what got me started. Then after that, yeah, I had the team. So I was like, “If I told them to do something that we were going to do something by, he had to stick with it.” So that’s how I started. That was always, “This is how I want my life. This is the date that I want to buy. And I’m going to tell a couple people that I respected. This is where I’m going to be.” I don’t want to be that person that just talks all the time I want to be the person that actually moves the needle. So that’s what got it started.

Richard Matthews 26:47
Once you get to a point where you actually have a team I remember I worked for a big solar company and I was up in the the sea level with the execs quite often. The CEO ended up becoming a mentor for me and one of the things that he told me regularly was like, “Our deadlines are always payroll first.” Because once you have a team, he’s like, “We’ve got 100 people who…their lives are dependent on us hitting our deadlines.” And he’s like, “that’s a big motivator.” So they’re always like what Kate Murray says, “Three or six months out on payroll, just because they always want to have that buffer in there. The people that are on their team are the most important part of their business.

Ben Adkins 27:32
Yeah.

Richard Matthews 27:32
You build that kind of urgency into your deadlines right off the bat when you start hiring people.

Ben Adkins 27:39
Absolutely.

Richard Matthews 27:40
I want to talk a little bit about your mission over there at at Fearless Social. What is it? Like Spiderman fights to save New York? Google fights to index all the content in the world? What is Fearless Social trying to do for the world?

Ben Adkins 27:58
So I always have this vision of someone that was like me. They were sitting in an office. They were business owners. We’re not really good. I’ve started to notice we’re not really good at people that are just hobbyist with business like their side gig. Not my favorite person to work with. I don’t think we speak to that audience really well. What we are very good at is someone that’s already a business owner, whether it’s a really small business or a larger multi-million dollar business already. We like working with people that are already super motivated and already want to do something with the world. They have this mission of “You know, what? I make the best salads in this town. We want people to come in, and we want them to have that dining experience.” Or, “I’m the best chiropractor around and I feel like I really have a gift that I can help people feel better.” We like those folks, people that already have a mission in their life, and they just are having a tough time reaching enough people. They’re having a tough time scaling their business so that they can have a little bit more of what they want in their life. That’s our ideal person. When we find that person, our goal is to give them a bigger megaphone and to give them more ways to reach more people, help more people, and make more money in their business. And that’s what it is. It’s like, we take people who already have their product or maybe have one product and want more products. We take that person and we give them the ability to have a huge, huge reach all over the world. And that’s us. We want to take people that are already good at something. An expert, and give them more of, “Hey, how do we reach more people? How do we sell more products? How do we help more folks.” And when we can do that, not only this is the beautiful part about what we do; not only do we affect that person; we’ve affected so many thousands of people in that way. We also have this indirect touch on the thousands of people that we teach them how to touch. So that’s where we’re at. It’s comes back to what I said at the beginning, “It’s all about helping people.” And you start figuring out that if you help enough people, they turn around and get to help thousands upon thousands of people. And you get this weird sort of thing, like the world’s a huge place but you start covering the world pretty quickly when you work that way. That’s really what we do and how we give people a bigger megaphone. That’s what we did.

Richard Matthews 30:31
Your admission amplifier.

Ben Adkins 30:33
Yeah,

Richard Matthews 30:34
You make you make people’s their own personal…you know, “what is it that I want to do, and how can I do that bigger and better?” Help more people with it. That’s cool. How about for you personally? Who were some of your heroes that you saw that helped you go from where you started to where you are now? Maybe they’re real life mentors, maybe they were speakers or authors or just peers that were a couple of years ahead of where you were. And how important really in helping you accomplish what you’ve gotten now?

Ben Adkins 31:08
Two or three. I would say, right out of the gates, Mark Zuckerberg sits in my head. I think that’s always an interesting story to me, because it was someone who had a vision of how to connect the world. Right away we can bring a lot of people together. It takes off and it becomes this money making thing, not right away but pretty quick. Pretty early in the grand scheme of things. This giant money making thing and instead of selling it off or getting involved with just what I would consider now the wrong things for that company, Facebook, it was always about the mission. It was about, “This is who we are, and we’re going to die with this mission.” I think that’s what I love about Zuch. He built Facebook. It was about connecting people, money comes along, doing really, really well. But if you really read into the story, the underground stuff that was going on with that company, if you work solely about the mission of connecting people and growing that sort of mission within the company, you were gone. And you were going really, really quickly, and they didn’t mess around with a lot of things in that company that weren’t focused on that. And I think they just had this mindset that as long as we stick to our mission with this thing that we built, the money will come, the good things will come, we will continue to grow. And that’s why they’ve grown. So I really like the company mission over at Facebook, just because its core, of course, it has to make money, of course they have to be focused on those things. Of course, they have to go public at some point to continue their mission. But it’s always about how do we connect people in a very genuine way. And that’s pretty cool when all the money that’s being thrown at you to do other things and to sit around on your butt all day. That’s where I think we start to be…that focused on a mission and know you have the tool for it, and to stick with it. I think that’s very admirable. So I like that quite a bit. When we build things, that’s how we build things. Are we building this thing to make money and to exit? Or are we building this thing to change the world? And if to change the world is not in there and it’s just a money thing, why the hell are we building it in the first place?

Richard Matthews 33:28
What’s the point?

Ben Adkins 33:31
Yeah, so Zuch is is an absolute big one in my book. I really like the way that company came together. There’s, of course, negatives with everybody. But I think that it’s a very good story for any entrepreneur to go in and read.

Richard Matthews 33:44
It’s really interesting too, because I graduated high school the same year that Facebook came online. And then started my college careers, it was growing. And I remember hearing about this whole Facebook thing. It was halfway through my college career when they opened it up to other colleges. So our college got invited to Facebook. And I had some of my other friends who were in colleges across country, like, “Hey, you have to get on Facebook, so we can connect.” And I was like, I remember saying, “No.” I was like, “I don’t want to do this social media stuff. Who’s going to do social media? That’s just crazy!”

Ben Adkins 34:19
Right.

Richard Matthews 34:20
And it wasn’t till my senior year of college that I got a Facebook account. And it’s funny, because the reason I like it was, I think it was the year later they opened it up to the public. My mother got a Facebook account, and I had a child. My mom actually was like, “You will get a Facebook account and you will post pictures of my child or I’ll kill you.” And I was like, “Okay, well, I don’t want to see the wrath of my mother. So I’m going to get a Facebook account and post pictures of her grandchild.” So yeah, like, that was the beginning of my social media. And it was for connecting people, right. That’s why we got on it and it has changed the culture. So it’s very cool.

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So the last thing I really want to talk about is…bringing this whole thing home for our listeners which is guiding principles. What are the top one or two principled actions that you use regularly? Like, on a daily basis today that contribute to the success and influence…maybe the one thing you wish you knew when you started out that you do every day now, or you do every week, or whenever it is, that really helps build that influence that you have now?

Ben Adkins 36:34
I think for us, it’s always been…but it’s something we pay more attention to in the last two, three years…it’s always about customer service. I think the problem is a lot of folks are all about the sale. That first sale and they’re there. They put all this focus into the marketing and the sale. And this is where we get into that part for us the scaling stuff. And once we had a great business, we were good at the other stuff. It was like, “Well, how do we become a company that really helps people.” What we really figured out was, it’s all about what you do after people spend money with you because we have a business that’s very interesting. I don’t think we have near the customer base, or the reach that most people think we do because of our income numbers. We’re just really focused on the people that we have. And with those people, they have certain questions. They have certain things that after they buy, they really want to have a connection with the people that created it so that they can continue the conversation. And we’re extremely focused on that. If you buy from us, we want a couple touch points with you after. We’re annoying that we’re not letting you go. You can’t just go into a corner and use our software and use our stuff, we want to have a connection with you, if at all possible. I’m not gonna come knock on your door. But if at all possible, I want to be around so that when that question comes up, the second that you have it, you can get an answer very quickly. We have a couple of touch points that were big, this is what guides us daily. We have a private group of our customers and our customers just hang out there. We have a nice presence on Facebook full of these customers. And what really is interesting about our company is, a lot of the things that we’ve built in the last year to a year and a half have come from that group of people that are just like, I am struggling with this, like, “I bought this, this is awesome. It got me through this next level. But now that I’m on this next level, I’m stuck. I didn’t even think about this being something I get stuck on in.” So they hit us with that. And typically, it’s something we’ve seen already, so we’re able to interact with them pretty quickly. Also, we have a very good support team. Like, you buy something from us, something comes up, you can hit us up, and within a couple of hours, you have it answered. Now, that may not seem like a guiding principle type thing, right at its face. But the idea is, we got into this, to have a connection with our customers and to help them with something and we build things that help them. But if we had this great focus on our customers and what they were struggling with once they got to the next level, what we help them with, I don’t think we would be near the company that we are today. Because that interaction pretty much dictates what we do a month down the road or what we do the next week. Because our customers have gotten so used to being able to ask. And like I said, that’s a common thing for me. Daily, they’re like, “I can’t believe I got an answer this quickly, I can’t believe we got this.” It’s not about us trying to save the sale. It’s not about us trying to make you think that we’re just amazing. We take so much from our customers in that maybe sometimes there’s a problem that we don’t know needs to be solved. The point that we’re at right now, we are able to connect with some of the top experts on the planet. If there’s something that I don’t know, I can typically pick up the phone now and get ahold of someone to come solve that problem. And it’s like, our customers now act as sort of “Hey, this is a problem that needs to be solved, I would prefer you to solve it rather than me go look somewhere else.” So as silly as it is, customer service has become such a guiding principle for us daily, because the folks that are out there in the trenches doing these things that we’ve been solving problems for years. They’re out there doing it, but we’re out there doing it too. But them giving us those things really gives me the ability to do what I do. And I never go to bed without planning out my next day. Like, what’s coming the next day? What do I need to tackle tomorrow? What’s on the calendar so that we can hit this big goal for the month? We can hit this big goal for the year and our customers really help us do that.

Richard Matthews 40:59
Yeah. I bought a lot of things online. I actually totaled up. I’ve spent more on marketing education And we’re getting close to six figures over the course of like, seven years. Not a lot of people I buy from again. The difference that I have with you is, I’ve bought almost everything you’ve ever put out because I can’t help myself. And a lot of that has to do with the customer service and the connection and like you said, the group that you have on Facebook. Sometimes I’ve stopped myself be like, “That doesn’t actually finish anything I’m doing right now. So I can’t pay it. Even though I want to go through it.”

Ben Adkins 41:51
I think a lot of people think that we’re just super sneaky. I get that a lot. People are like, “I can’t help myself.” And I think some people think that we’re just really good at marketing. But it’s not that at all. The secret is silly. We actually listen to what our customers asked for. So and then we go build it. And of course, it’s irresistible because you asked for it like a week ago, or a month ago.

Richard Matthews 42:18
And now it’s here.

Ben Adkins 42:19
Yeah, exactly.

Richard Matthews 42:21
And it’s funny because I noticed the companies that I do business with, over and over again. All have that same thing going for them. So like the two examples that popped into my head are my bank and Apple. Right.

Ben Adkins 42:34
Apple. Yeah.

Richard Matthews 42:35
So Apple is like that. I can’t ever have a problem that Apple doesn’t fix for me. Like, it’s not that I have many problems.

Ben Adkins 42:45
I a year ago I bought. Not a year ago but like, two or three years ago, I bought my first iMac.

Richard Matthews 42:50
Yeah.

Ben Adkins 42:51
When it arrived, there was a crack in the screen. It wasn’t Apple’s fault, you know. It probably just got cracked during shipping. So I got on the phone with Apple with like, two or three minutes. I’m on the phone and they told me what to do. Within within two or three days, I had a computer. A brand new, same model waiting at my door before I could even get the other one shipped out to return to them. And I was able to get back to work, right away. And I’m like, why would I ever buy from anybody else again, after this experience? I mean there’s just no reason. And I thought that was maybe unique to me, then I start talking to other people that have worked with Apple. It’s the same stuff over and over again, it’s that level of service.

Richard Matthews 43:38
So it’s Apple and I use USAA for my banking. I’ve used them since I was like, 15. I got an account when I was old enough to get one. My dad has the membership or whatever. And they’ve got like, my entire history there. And when I get married, when I have kids and like I get on the phone with the customer service rep is like, “How’s your daughter, I think it was like she had a birthday last week. And, you know, we have this program for kids that helps them start saving now, and other things…” Their level of customer service is phenomenal. It’s one of those things that it feels very genuine. They care about you. And you know, the services and stuff that they offer are to help you and I never feel like they’re trying to sell me things or anything. It’s just that, “Here’s what we do and we help you with your finances and your banking and who you are and your family and the people that you’re connected to are important to us because you’re important to us.” I’ve banked at a few different places and even some of the the other big banks and the customer service keeps you around.

Ben Adkins 44:45
Yeah,

Richard Matthews 44:46
It’s like the secret the secret sauce.

Ben Adkins 44:49
Yes, it is.

Richard Matthews 44:50
So I have one last thing. It’s not a question. It is a challenge. I’ve started referring to this. I’m going to first episode I’m going to do this on as the hero challenge. Just one person that you think we should invite on to the show and hear their hero story.

Ben Adkins 45:09
I gotta, I gotta go with a really good buddy of mine. We started out together. And he now has this monster in the making that he’s putting together. It’s like a physical product company. My buddy Donald Wilson.

Richard Matthews 45:25
I actually know Don, Yeah, and one of his masterminds.

Ben Adkins 45:29
It’s one of those things where over the years, we’ve pushed each other quite a bit. And it’s just weird to see after three or four years from where we started and where things are for both of us now. And he’s just got a great journey story from the get go to where he is now. And why these things have come together and all the crappy things that have happened to him along the way. We all do but it’s just such a great story to listen to him tell it and to see where things are now and all the difficulty that he must face daily with the company that he has. Now, the odds are always against him. I feel like with what he’s doing now. But he’s doing this really cool thing with his company Gearbubble, and he’s definitely a good one.

Richard Matthews 46:19
Would you be willing to make the introduction for the interview

Ben Adkins 46:21
Without a doubt, absolutely

Richard Matthews 46:24
Awesome. So thank you for coming on the show today and doing this with us. Really good to hear your story and what you guys are doing. And for anyone who is just hearing you for the first time is there someplace that they can go and check out? Any particular service they should look at first if they’re wanting to get started for building a business online?

Ben Adkins 46:45
I’m big on not wanting to sell you anything in the beginning. If you don’t know who I am. I think that we have a very cool place that you can come learn about what our mission and what we teach, for free. fearlesssocial.com you go there. Pretty much every couple days, we’ve got something brand new coming up that is aimed at helping people. To get that bigger megaphone and do more and have more customers and help more people. fearlesssocial.com, that’s where you can find this. Tons of cool free stuff that you can read. That’s our whole design. Every blog post we put out should be able to give you a tool to grow what you’re doing.

Richard Matthews 47:23
If you don’t mind, I’m gonna plug one thing for you. And that is if anyone is not a member of Ben Adkins, The Syndicate Group. That’s where I would go first. After having bought most of your stuff, I’ve got the most value out of that group and the interactions there. So I’m not sure there if that’s somewhere available on your field of social but that’s where I would go.

Ben Adkins 47:45
Within a couple of days. It should be up. Yeah, that’s one of my big things because that’s another secret. The Syndicate is such a good place to be. It’s not because of me. It’s because of all the people here. We’re gonna have that placed on fearlesssocial.com where you can get in. So we’ll have that up in a couple of days.

Richard Matthews 48:11
And that’s a wrap. Thanks again, for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to the show by texting “HEROES.” That’s H-E-R-O-E-S to 38470. What I want to do now is invite you back to listen to episode number four, where I interview fellow sales funnel expert Justin burns. Where we hear his incredible hero’s journey in building the sales funnel agency and how he’s worked with some of the biggest brands in the world. Make sure you don’t miss this episode. And as you go about your day to day, think about this. If you have a mission to help better people’s lives and have built a product or service to do just that. You might be a hero, That’s our heroism for today. Thanks and I’ll see you on the next episode.