H: Another podcast episode in the books! Joining me this week, I have Braden Drake. Braden is a California licensed attorney and tax professional, and he is your gay best friend, here to help you get your legal, tax, and financial shit. Braden works primarily with service based, creative small business owners through his signature program, Profit RX.
B: Hi, thanks for having me!
H: So, I have about a million different questions to help my listeners and I get to know you better over the course of this episode. But to start, why don’t you just tell our listeners a bit more about who you are and what you do?
B: Sure! So, a little bit complicated, but long story short, I went to law school, graduated to pass the bar exam, did all that stuff, and I’m technically a licensed attorney. After I did the bar exam, I got my master’s degree in tax law. In the legal field, we call that an LLM. I am not a CPA, I’m a tax attorney and business attorney, technically speaking. But in my business, there’s a lot of overlap.
Most of the things that we need to know as small business owners from a legal and tax perspective are rather simple, academically speaking. There’s a lot of overlap with what I teach and what a CPA or financial expert would teach. Essentially, it all comes together, and I teach all the back end business stuff that most people typically don’t really want to learn about.
H: Something told me that this might not have been the career path young Braden would have known about, let alone dreamt of as a kid. Did you always want to be a lawyer, or was there more of a twisted path to get to even that point in your career?
B: Well, how far back are we rewinding is the question.
H: I mean if you were five and you wanted to be a firefighter, that might not be super relevant. But was becoming a lawyer the plan?
B: No, actually. My favorite elementary school teacher was my third grade teacher, and she was in charge of Star Lab. I think they have that all over the place, right? You go in this dome thing, and it’s like you’re looking at the sky. My first memory was that I wanted to be an astronomer. Once I got into junior high I did want to be an attorney pretty early on, and then that kind of went away. In college, I explored a lot of different paths. I studied Russian, Ukrainian, German and political science in college, and I thought I would end up doing international business or international tax, and that didn’t end up being exactly the path I went down.
H: Did you always know or have an inkling that you wanted to be an entrepreneur, whether or not you knew law was going to be the direction that took you?
B: Yes. Well, kind of no.
H: Love it. Explain.
B: I always thought it would be cool to be an entrepreneur, but it was never something I planned on happening. Really what it boiled down to was wanting to be a business person. All of my family, they’re like blue collar folks. My dad is a contractor, he has his own small construction business. Most of my uncles are farmers, and I was like, I want to work in a high rise and a suit and make a lot of money. And I’m gay, I don’t want to get my hands dirty- lots of cliches.
But ultimately, I did internships and I hated all of them. I just decided I didn’t really want to work for anyone, so I knew I wanted to be self employed. And really what happened was most of the careers that I was interested in, I didn’t really see possible as a business owner, as an entrepreneur. Being an international tax attorney, it’s a lot
tougher to start out that way than doing small business law. That’s kind of how all of this shaped itself.
H: I kind of touched upon it a little bit earlier before we started recording, I feel like you are everywhere online. We said we don’t remember how we first connected with one another. I feel like I knew who you were through random podcast interviews, and then one day, it was like you became friends with my friend Kira, and you were all over these facebook groups. So how did you get started in the online side of entrepreneurship, outside of just working with small businesses? And what was your strategy to become so “everywhere?”
B: Okay, well, first of all, that’s basically the best thing that you can tell me. Oftentimes I feel like I could be doing so much more with marketing, but now I have a team of VA’s that do a lot of the leg work for me, and that tells me that my minimum effort strategy is really paying off.
So how did I get started? Well, lots of things happened. I got kind of lucky when I decided to start my own law firm. I connected pretty quickly with a small group of business folks here in San Diego, and a couple of them were more tapped into this online space than I was. They introduced me to the world of podcasts. The first podcast I listened to was Goal Digger by Jenna Kutcher, and then Amy Porterfield was one of her guests. Then I subscribed to Amy’s podcast, and within mere months, I was signed up for Amy’s first round of Digital Course Academy. And that’s really how I got into this world to begin with.
H: Okay, that makes a lot of sense. You said you have people who are helping you with your minimum effort to be a little bit more everywhere. Can you talk about maybe what that strategy is looking like for you? I know you’re not the marketer. I’m the marketer. But I would love to know what you’re doing since it’s clearly getting you seen.
B: So actually, if people are really curious about this, more broadly speaking, my last podcast episode on my own podcast, I interviewed my whole team! I have five different VA’s that work for me, and so I have them all share what they do. One of my VA’s is now my marketing manager. The reason I asked when we first started chatting how we got connected is because I’m extremely forgetful. And about three weeks ago, I got asked to participate in three different bundles and one summit that are all happening, like, in one month. So my marketing manager signs up for all the forms and she adds them to the calendar, and she makes the copywriters promote the right bundle during the right week and the right email. She also sends podcast pitches for me fairly regularly. She manages my Instagram content and she edits my Tik Tok videos and does the Tik Tok.
And like I said, I have a copywriter. They’re doing all of the stuff that needs to happen on a regular basis, which really just frees me up more to hangout on Facebook groups and talk to people and DM friends, which is the type of business development that I like to do. I guess I like to say I do business development and they do a lot of the marketing.
H: You’re the lead gen and sales side of things because you’re developing those relationships, but they’re the ones who are making sure that you’re visible online.
B: Yes, exactly. And that ultimately is what we’re supposed to do as “visionaries,” right?
H: Right, right. I feel like I’m not a great visionary because I love doing all of that stuff. And even though I have people to help me sometimes, at the end of the day, I don’t do a good job of organizing my thoughts to get them delegated.
B: Hey, but you know what? I feel like in your business, you help visionaries get their vision in order, right? And there are people that can pay to help with the brainstorming and the ideation and all that kind of stuff. So, yes, it’s all good.
H: Outside of the online side of things, you have a much more traditional educational resource- you wrote a book! What made you decide to write a book either in addition to or in lieu of the more popular online program style of education?
B: Well, I have both. I’ve always wanted to write a book since the time when I realized that books just didn’t appear in the universe and that people actually wrote them. I always thought, and this is such a silly thing, I always thought writing a book was something really smart people do, right? A lot of my life is me trying to prove that I’m like a smart person, right? It was always just kind of an accomplishment, but really an accomplishment that I wanted to achieve. Until I had my own business, I never knew what writing a book would even look like.
It ended up being pretty simple. For my first online course I created, it was pretty typical to have lots and lots of PDF guides. Mine were pretty text heavy and I actually turned them into a textbook. Then the textbook became the basis for my actual book. When I sat down with my book coach to do the outline and I pieced everything together, I already had 30,000 of the 60- 70,000 words written, which is great.
H: Oh my gosh, yes, that does sound great. Working with a book coach like you mentioned, what was that process for you from idea to paper? Did you work with an agent and a publisher or did you self publish? What was that process like outside of the fact that you accidentally wrote half the book before you started?
B: I self published, and to be clear, it was a hard back in hand. I only bring that up because it’s something that my book coach likes to give me a hard time about because she says I’m stubborn. She said I’m like her second out of several hundred clients she’s had who is adamant about having a hardcover book.
Yeah, not that profitable. They cost a lot more to print. You get the picture. Luckily for me, my book coach is in my small business mastermind that I’ve been in for about three years now. She was like, I’m here when you’re ready, I messaged her, and we set up
like a half VIP day. It’s essentially an organizing meeting where she helps you come up with your book outline. We created it and I was like, “okay, great, what’s next?”
I’m a pretty self motivated person, so I didn’t end up signing up for her full service package. Instead, during that meeting, she gave me kind of like a production calendar. It was like you should have this much written by this date, this by this date in order to have our launch date. I wrote the rest of the book in about six to eight weeks, spent the next month doing developmental edits, and then I sent it to her to do the actual copy editing because that’s her background. She was a copy editor in the publishing world before she started her own business.
It’s all the other shit that actually ends up being really sticky, like getting a type set form and then having to edit it and ordering multiple proofs. We did all of that in 2020.
H: Wow! In addition to your book, there’s a number of other ways that people can work with you. Like you said, you have the digital products and programs. You’ve got the contract fault, the membership,and then the VIP days. What has your experience been like with an offer suite that has such polarization as far as price point goes and maybe the dichotomy between the heavy emphasis on the lower cost model and then that limited capacity for VIP days? How does that all work with your audience and your schedule and stuff like that?
B: It works pretty well, and a few of these things are changing. We’re rolling out a new program this fall, so some of these things are going to be tweaked. But like you mentioned, I have my $30 offer, which is the suite of contract templates. I call it the contract vault. I kind of actually did that spur of the moment in January, but that’s been great. I could probably just about guarantee we’ve sold twice as many of that product as I’ve gotten freebie opt-ins this year. Does that make sense?
H: Yes, that does make sense. And I know that makes sense because I don’t think I’ve ever opted into one of your freebies, but I bought the contract.
B: Oh, good! And what was it like when you got in there? Did you hesitate because it was only $30? Because I hear that from a lot of people.
H: Not really, because I specifically knew that I needed a privacy policy, and I knew that there was a privacy policy in there and I just wanted to check it off my list. I also heard you on a podcast talking about it, and so that did the work of the sales page before I even read the sales page. But it is a really good value, and that does make a lot of sense, why it has maybe sold more than you’ve gotten free opt-ins.
B: Yeah! That essentially just operates almost like a paid list generator. Otherwise, I often have this question of, well, if I doubled the price to $60 and then I got 350 sales as opposed to 600 sales, it technically would net more money, but I’d have less qualified buyers on my email list. That’s the way I think about that product offering.
I make the largest percentage of my revenue from my membership, which is called Profit RX, your prescription to build a healthy and wealthy business. That really is my old signature course that I then converted into a membership model. We have a lot of different stuff happening in that membership, lots of templates, things like that. The VIP days, the one on one stuff, I don’t really have that front and center on my website. I more just promote those on the side. Those are for people who need really quick results.
What we’re doing moving forward, I can let you know, is that we’re introducing kind of a third tier to the membership, which is actually going to be a signature one on one service, and we’ll be dialing back the VIP days a little bit.
H: Okay, cool. So it’s like people who are in the membership can have a higher membership tier for some one on one support?
B: Kind of! So we actually already have two tiers in the membership. One is a content only tier. That’s the base tier, so there’s no support. It’s $30 a month, and you get
access really to my entire course suite. Then there’s the VIP tier. I’m working with our friend Kira at Paradigm Consulting right now, to hire a bookkeeper who’s actually going to be responsible for doing weekly office hours and co-working calls and Q & A calls for people in the VIP tier who want routine help with their bookkeeping. So, you’ll add us to your QuickBooks account, and then we’ll have a monthly co-working call with me if you have difficult clients and you need help, like writing emails to them, doing cancellation agreements and contracts.
That’s the membership. The very brief explanation is that we’re rolling out a one on one done for you bookkeeping service, where our team of bookkeepers and accountants will actually do your books. Basically, it’s going to be a tax firm, but we’re not going to market it like that. And do you want to hear the name for it? I just came up with it this week.
H: Hell yeah!
B: Okay, so tentatively, we’re going to launch it as a cohort. Tell me if this makes any sense because you coach on offers right in customer direction. I’m calling it a cohort based Signature 101 service. So, there will be group coaching elements, but we’re enrolling people in cohort models like you would do with a normal launch. And the tentative name is Money Md.
H: I love that!
B: So we have Profit RX which is like a product, right? It’s a thing that you buy, and then Money MD is more of the service. So I’m going to call myself, like, your money doctor.
H: That’s amazing. Yeah, that’s freaking awesome.
When you decided to turn your signature program into a membership, what spurred that decision? I asked for two reasons. One, because I’m curious, and two, because I’m kind
of considering doing the same thing. And how did you validate that idea and know that it would work?
B: Yeah, well, this kind of goes with the Messy in the Middle theme, right? So, I had a really good year in 2020. It actually was the opposite of what I expected. I work with a lot of wedding professionals, and as you can imagine, they were in the middle of a shit storm because all of their clients were canceling. I launched a membership at the time to kind of help them with that, and my customer journey was a total mess. I had the front end membership, I had a signature course, and then I had a back end membership. And it turns out it’s really hard to convert people from a membership with technically no end objective into another kind of offer. I don’t even know if front end memberships work in general.
I’m sure someone has made them work, but what I ended up deciding to do was have the front end membership, and the signature course was called Unfuck Your Biz, and that was my five module $2,000 course. And then I had my alumni membership, which I called Unfucked. I never really loved the name. It was even a little too aggressive even for me, but I ended up just thinking, you know what, what would it look like if I could just for simplicity and marketing purposes, fold all three of these things into one program.
2021 was a really bad year for me revenue wise. I had a really dismal launch in the spring, and then I really struggled financially in the summer. I really just started to crave consistency of revenue, and that was my goal for 2022. I decided the membership model was going to be the solution to all those questions.
The new offer that I’m going to be launching is kind of my way to introduce the higher ticket thing, except it’s going to be done for you. It’s going to be like a cohort sort of thing. We do two months of bookkeeping for you in the container along with a number of other deliverables, and then at the end of the container, we’ll have a sales call with each of our clients. Then you’ll decide if you want to go into a monthly done for you service at $400 a month. You can just go your merry way with your books and the tutorials and
training we give you, or if you want to join maybe the VIP tier of our membership with the done with you support- that’s how we’ll structure it.
H: That makes more sense. So you kind of mentioned having a rough 2021. What is something either financially or otherwise about entrepreneurship that you found to be more difficult than you anticipated on your path as a practicing attorney or going into international tax law?
B: For me, a lot of the difficulty just comes down to the growth trajectory. I’ve grown a lot slower than I originally anticipated I would, but I definitely wouldn’t trade it. I love it.
H: Yeah, I feel the same way. Something that I’ve been experiencing a lot over the past year or so has been this FOMO as I’m entering my late 20’s and my peers are getting settled into their management roles and making more money and going on trips and I’m just like, my business is stable and I’m really proud of that. But if I were to drop everything, I could probably make like double or triple what I make right now. Do you ever kind of feel that way about rough stages in your business? Like, oh, I can just throw in the towel and go make more money working for someone else all the time?
B: I’ve been offered salary jobs from people I had the opportunity to interview for Exon Mobil after my Master’s program. So get this, I was a Russian major in undergrad, I was an attorney, I had a masters in tax law, and I had an opportunity open where I could have interviewed to work for Exon Mobil Tax division. I would essentially be a tax consultant for Exon Mobil and travel back and forth between Los Angeles and Moscow.
I basically just met a retired attorney who had a connection. I was like, you know what, thank you, but no thank you. I’d rather just not even tempt myself, but I didn’t even pursue it. So opportunities like that come up, and often I think, how much more money could I be making if I did that? But then I usually tell myself, well, with the trajectory that my business is on, I can be making double that like three years from now.
H: Yeah, I think I’ve definitely had some confidence issues earlier this year. I don’t know if I could make more than this in two or three years. I wasn’t making more than this two or three years ago, so who knows? But I think that confidence is a great thing that you’re definitely able to build over time and I just haven’t gotten there yet.
B: Yeah, well, it takes a lot, for sure!
H: So, your brand is very Braden-centric, as it should be. You are the attorney and you mentioned having a team, even though from the outside it kind of feels like your business is just you sometimes. In a time where it seems like the online business world is pushing the idea that a lot of CEOs need to be CEOs, someone else needs to do all the doing, and all you need to do is the visionary stuff, how do you embrace being the face of your brand? And do you ever get pushback from your peers or business advisors about how much of your brand is about you?
B: No, I don’t really feel like I really get any pushback. On that note, I would say the only real issue with being the face of your business is it makes it potentially difficult if you ever want someone else to step into the coaching role. If you ever want someone else leading the programs there are ways that you can slowly introduce them. The bigger issue is you need to have kind of a segue or an exit plan if you ever plan to sell your business. As an attorney, I don’t know if that’s ever something I will want to do. For me, it might be different because most of the people that I followed and have looked up to, that’s the position they’re in.
Amy Porterfield was my mentor, and when I say she’s my mentor, I just follow her closely and watch what she does. I interviewed her on my podcast, and I think at that point she had 20 or 22 full time employees. But she still is totally the face of her own business.
H: I guess I just feel like I couldn’t imagine having that many people working for me.
B: What’s your end goal?
H: I don’t know. For a while, I thought I was going to scale up to an agency. There was a point where I had four or five employees. Everyone was part time, and I realized whether scaling to an agency was my end goal or not, the agency that I’ve scaled into was not the one that was going to be long lasting. So, I tore it all back down, and now I’m like a one and a half women show. I have a part time employee helping me, and now I’m just working towards that stability and figuring out what I love enough to scale up into something else.
I think I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to decide, do I want to be that million dollar agency person or do I want to just have a business that I like and that keeps a roof over my head? I don’t really know. I think this is the first time I’ve thought about it in a while because I used to put so much pressure on myself to figure it out, and lately I’ve just been like, live your life and you can figure it out later.
B: I have a fun concept for you. I teach this on my programs- are you familiar with the book Traction?
H: I’ve heard of it. I haven’t read it.
B: It teaches the entrepreneurial operating system. It’s a lot like the book Clockwork. These are all books that kind of teach overarching big picture for business systems. In Traction, the author, Gino Wickman, has you develop your ten year vision, your three year picture, your one year goal, and then you break it down into quarters. For a lot of people, a ten year vision is very hard. They just feel like they’re making it up. The way I like to think about it is, have you ever seen those puzzles that are, like, translucent? Like, each piece is clear, you can see through it? How annoying does that sound? Do you know what I’m talking about?
H: I have no idea what you’re talking about, but my mom is obsessed with puzzles, and so now I need to find one for her.
B: Yeah, it’s just like a nightmare. But what I tell my students is, think of your ten year vision initially as a translucent puzzle. It’s almost impossible to piece it together because the puzzle pieces have no clarity to them. Whereas your one year goal might be like a 25 piece children’s puzzle, and your three and your five year might be partially transparent, but partially the picture is there. The more you think about it and the more you journal and dive into what you like and what you don’t like, the puzzle pieces start to gain more and more color. Then you can piece them together a little bit more.
When I used to do my ten year vision, I would say I want to have a $5 million company, and I want this and I want that. Now, I’ve kind of thrown all that out the window. I don’t really care anymore. Ultimately, what I want is to have $25 to $30,000 a month in take-home pay. For me, that’s after expenses and after taxes. I know that based on my current profit margins and projected profit margins, that’s probably a $6-800,000 a year of business. I anticipate in order to get there, I’ll likely need a full time bookkeeper, a full time enrolled agent, and then probably a full time marketing person.
My goal now is three to five full time employees and maybe a couple of part time employees, and I want to take home about $30,000 a month without working more than 4 hours a day. So that’s a pretty clear vision. I think it’s like a realistic, like, five to ten year goal, but we’ll see.
H: Yeah, definitely. I think the thing that I’ve always struggled with when coming up with these ambitious future goals is that I don’t really care a lot about the money side of things. I don’t make a ton of money. I’m doing all right. So do you have a why behind what $25,000 a month after taxes will look like for you? Or can do for you?
B: Yes, and I think about this in granular detail. It’s like finding a house that you want to buy on your vision board. What is the mortgage on that house cost, what’s the upkeep
on that house, and where do I want to go on vacation? Keep in mind I’m married, so I have a dual source of income. When I say my goal is “this” amount of take home pay, that would be to have an exceptionally comfortable life- it would definitely be like top 1%.
Our goal, my husband and I, we have a goal to live in a certain neighborhood in San Diego. My husband wants to have a vacation house in Maui, and I want to go to the French Open every year to watch tournaments. And with that amount of money, we could do all those things. I could pay off my student loans, I could save to have enough money in my 401k that I need. We will be more than fine if I don’t ever get there. But that’s my ‘why.’
It’s ambitious, but it’s also realistic. So these are the things that I think about. For me, I am pretty materialistic, and that’s something I don’t mind sharing because I think the world would be a better place if we’re just honest about those kinds of things. I want a Louis Vuitton bag, I like to drive a nice car, and I recognize at the end of the day that my life will be plenty fulfilled without those things but they will be nice to have.
H: No, I love that. I think I know what I’m going to do with my afternoon now. I’ve got some future visioning to do, which all of my listeners, who are my friends & know how much I hate visioning and meditating and all of that stuff, are probably going to sit there and roll their eyes.
B: Have you done the strengths finder test before?
H: Yes, I actually have my strengths on a sticky note in front of me.
B: Nice. Okay, so I’ve done it like four times, and every time I do it futuristic is my number one trait.
H: Mine are relater, learner, strategic, analytical and input, which is probably why I have a hard time thinking about future stuff because I’m so focused on right now.
B: Strategic and futuristic are both in my top three. So, like, sitting down and strategizing what my future is going to look like is something I do for fun. Honestly, it is a distraction when I should be doing other things. My brain kind of lives in the future.
H: That is aspirational.
B: Yeah, it’s not always the best thing because sometimes you’re distracting yourself from the things that you should be doing. Also if you have really strong futuristic traits, you’re also not great at looking into the past, which means you forget things very quickly. Then, I’ll end up planning something that I have already done and it did not go well the first time, but I’ve literally forgotten about it.
H: Okay, so switching gears a little bit to some more actionable advice for our audience. As much as I’m sure they love listening to our talk about our future selves, I feel like every online business person is preaching that you shouldn’t use contract templates. So if you could, please explain for our listeners what is the difference between a free template, an inexpensive template, and a custom thing that a lawyer is drawing up for you? Or is it all just marketing from lawyers?
B: I mean, it’s a little bit of all of the above. Here’s the thing, okay? So first of all, any attorney is going to give you a disclaimer that if you buy a template, you still need to take it to a local attorney and have it reviewed. That’s simply because here in the states, we have 50 different states and each state has their own laws. The reality is that especially with more simple contracts, it’s not going to change state to state except for a few specific things.
To give you an example, there’s something called a nondisparagement clause which you would write into your contract that says that your client cannot write anything
negative about the services. No negative Yelp reviews, nothing. I think that you can understand that for consumer protection reasons, as a policy matter, we might not like that. In liberal states like California, that’s generally not allowed. In other states it is allowed. More conservative states typically allow it. There’s a handful of those in my templates. I tend to not include those provisions, especially because I am kind of morally and ethically against that, even if you legally could do it.
What I always tell people is when it comes to templates, you’re often better off buying a contract template from someone who’s well versed in your industry than going to hire an attorney who has no idea what you do. Do you have any family members who just don’t understand your business no matter how many times you explain it to them? Imagine one of them is a lawyer and you hire them. How are they going to write these specific provisions in your contract if they can’t wrap their brain around how you charge people and what you deliver to them?
H: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Is there any giveaway or certain thing that people should look for if they’re trying to spot a good contract template versus a bad contract template? Or does it really just come down to preference and who you decide to trust with your money?
B: I mean the first thing to me would be like, do you understand it? Can you read it? If it’s not clear, then it probably is a contract that is what I like to call a Frankenstein contract. A lot of boilerplate that’s not really been adapted with the times and with the industry. If you’re dealing with corporate contracts where you’re going to have corporate attorneys reviewing both sides, they’re going to be a lot more verbose and have a lot more bloated legal language than you and I need in our contracts.
And then the other thing is clarity, consistency, and an absence of redundancies. That’s really important as well. And feel free to ask more pinpointed questions on the contracts because I can go on and on.
H: Is having too many redundancies an indication that the contract itself isn’t clear or might be copy pasted or is there a legal reason to not want a lot of redundancies?
B: Both. I’ll give you a really clear example. I tend to have a cancellation paragraph in all my contracts. A cancellation paragraph if you’re a wedding planner and you have a wedding date is going to look different than a cancellation contract for a VIP day, which can just be like rescheduled, no harm, no foul. Due to COVID, pretty much all contract templates also have forced majeure clauses and we often call that an act of God clause.
People will often what happens with regard to refunds in the majeure clause, but that’s also in the cancellation provision. If the contract clauses are not clear stating this force majeure refund policy only applies in the case of a force majeure event and not to other types of cancellations, now we have a redundancy. It’s unclear, it’s an ambiguity. And if that contract went to a court of law, one person’s going to argue the contract says A, the other person says B and now the judge could choose to throw out both contract provisions and make their own decision.
But if you see a lot of redundancies in contracts, it typically means that people have been copy and pasting. They bought my contract template that has a very clear cancellation policy that applies to every type of cancellation, and then they bought someone else’s template that talks about cancellation in the force majeure clause, and they maybe decided that they like that force majeure clause better. So, they copy and paste it into my contract template, and now the two things are competing. Every once in a while, you’ll see templates that actually have that same issue because they’ve been copy and pasted from that own person’s series of templates.
H: That makes sense! I’m just thinking about some of the bullshit contracts I’ve put together over the years of copy and pasting from my own things, and I’m like, oh, God, Braden is never going to see these.
B: To give you a clear example, I clone a lot of sales pages, right? And then this happens all the time. I clone a sales page and then I edit it, and I’ll forget that I have, like, two FAQs in that sales page that applied to my old offer that don’t apply to my new offer. Then maybe I’m explaining something totally different somewhere else in the sales page. Ultimately, it just comes down to wanting to take a shortcut, but then really you need to read through the entire thing to make sure it’s all cohesive with your end products.
H: Is there a certain recommendation that you would have for an industry or revenue level or stage of business where someone should be upgrading from, let’s say, a very good template contract to something more custom? Or if you have a good templated contract, you can be good to go?
B: Yes, if you have a good template contract, you’re good to go. But it really just comes down to how unique your offer is and what you’re promising. If you go take Amy Porterfield’s course and you’re offering a $2,000 course and you’re basically doing everything Amy tells you to do, well, going with whoever she recommends, as far as course terms go, you’re probably going to be golden. They basically wrote it for the way that she teaches you to do it. If you’re offering a VIP day where it’s like a three hour service, that contract is not super.
We all like to think that we’re really unique. That doesn’t mean our contract needs to be really unique. Once you start doing stuff that’s really custom and really kind of like your own way of thinking in terms of deliverables and how you work, then it needs to be different.
To give you an example, I just interviewed a copywriter on mypodcast and she works with all of her clients in a two week container. It’s kind of like a VIP day, but it’s really a VIP week. For that, it wouldn’t be a complicated contract to draft, but her offer structure would need a little bit of customization and tweaking than what would probably be in my typical copywriting contract.
H: Going along with this as a small nosey personal contract question, I use Thrivecart for my billing and they have the option to include “agree to terms and conditions” when you purchase. If you’re offering a VIP day or a day rate or something where the client is paying in full upfront, you’re doing all of the work in one day and then the relationship is over, is there a downside to just having someone agree to the terms instead of going back and forth with signing a contract?
B: No, not really. I mean, really, the only downside is if you’re having them check the box, they’re much less likely to even skim through the contract, let alone read the contract. Typically what I recommend is if it’s a one off thing and it’s very simple, terms of service are probably great. If you’re doing like a $10,000 6-week coaching container, then I might send them through Dubsado or Honey Book or something like that. It almost has less to do with the dollar figure and more to do with the fact that there’s a lot more that can go wrong over a six month period.
H: Yeah, definitely. That’s part of why I like doing days and weeks right now is because just that shorter container is like, there’s so much less room for someone to get distracted, someone to change their mind, something to go wrong. I don’t like dealing with any of that mess.
Other than that, is there really a difference between accepting terms and conditions and signing a contract? Or are they kind of the same thing?
B: Yeah, they’re basically the same thing. They’re equally binding. It’s just sending them the contract tells the person, like, hey, I’m really not dicking around.
H: I’d love to talk about your podcast, Unfucking This. So first, I love the title and that’s also the title of your book, so I’m totally here for it. And second, you talk about money on your podcast a lot. When it comes to finding guests for your show, do you find that you have a difficult time getting people to open up about their numbers or is it something that people kind of know about when they pitch you or you ask them to be on the show?
B: Yeah, kind of, because everyone has a different comfort level when it comes to opening up about their numbers. I do my own monthly profit report on my podcast. I share all my own numbers monthly. I think that also helps people because they’re like, well, if you’re going to do it, then I’ll share. I call them profit report episodes. I haven’t done a ton of profit report episodes up until now, so I haven’t had to ask a whole lot of people, but I’m starting to do it more. I actually just recorded three of them and I’m going to be dripping out and we’ll do more in the future. Typically, I just have a few screener questions that I go over and ask what they’re comfortable talking about.
To give you an example, when I had Amy on, she was like, I’m happy to talk about percentages. I just don’t want to talk about gross revenue numbers. She said, I won’t tell you my total income, but if you ask me what percentage of my revenue is my signature course, I’m happy to answer it. What percentage of my revenue goes to contractors, etc. We talked about things in terms of percentages, but ideally, I love to getdollar figures when we can too.
H: I remember I think the first podcast of yours that I listened to was when you interviewed Claire. To me that was like a match made in heaven, I don’t think anyone loves to talk about numbers more than Claire does, so that totally makes sense.
B: Yeah, I always joke with Claire that someday she and I are going to co-host a podcast. Not that any of us need to do that right now, but yeah, that episode was super fun. I might actually reach out to her to see if we can do a one year follow up in a few months.
H: Oh, that would be so fun. Yeah, I definitely would listen to a podcast by the two of you. So, you have on your website some highlighted episodes that are a great place for people to get started with your show. Do you have any sleeper hits or podcast episodes that you think are kind of underrated and you wish gotsome more attention.
B: That’s a fun question. Yes! We have the profit reports up there. The episodes of Claire and Amy I also have there, so those are both super fun. I have an episode on back taxes, which is not really fun, but important if you need it. One that I think people thought was really interesting was episode 231 titled My S Corp Cost Me More in Taxes Last Year. A lot of people are curious about S Corps. Long story short, I made a lot less money last year than I thought I was going to make, and I formed my S Corp based on my projections. It ended up not being a good year. I should have done it this year, so it cost me taxes. If you’re nosy about my own finances and you’re curious about S Corps, that’s a really good one.
H: I definitely wish I researched S Corps more before I became one because I definitely did it way too early. But I’m at the point now where my accountant basically said, one day it’ll make sense for you to have an S Corp, so you might as well hang on to it. I definitely think I learned that lesson the hard way.
B: Yeah, we have an S Corp savings calculator in my membership among lots of other fun tools and resources. We hope that people figure that out before they decide what entity they’re going to form.
H: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I formed mine at the end of 2020, which was one of my best quarters ever. Then it was just like a sharp downturn, and then it kind of plateaued and I was like, I definitely picked the wrong time to do this.
B: Are you familiar with Profit First?
H: I am familiar, but I don’t follow it, which I probably should look back into it.
B: That book is all about creating separate accounts, right? What I do is when you have an S Corp, you have to pay yourself a reasonable salary. I have people, even before they have an S Corp, you do a transfer to yourself on a monthly basis. We call it your owner’s compensation, and we determine what your future reasonable salary should be
in an S Corp. And your goal is to work your way up to transferring the dollar amount to yourself on a monthly basis, and then you form your S Corp. Once you’re able to do that for three to six consistent months, it’s great. Once you file the escort, you basically have already been doing the workflow, the cash flow, the process, and you’re ready to go.
H: Oh my gosh, yes. That makes so much more sense than the way I did it, which was kind of just like transfer and panic. On that note, thank you so much for joining me on the show. Today’s listeners, go check out his podcast and listen to his show. Where else can people find you and hang out with you online?
B: They can go to my website, www.bradendrake.com. The podcast, like you mentioned. And I do have a Facebook group called Braden’s Besties. If you want to just chat with me or say hello, the best places on Instagram!
