TCC Podcast #200: The Courage to Do the Extraordinary with Mike Kim - The Copywriter Club
TCC Podcast #200: The Courage to Do the Extraordinary with Mike Kim

It’s time to celebrate… we’ve reached episode 200 of The Copywriter Club Podcast. This episode marks a tweak to our format and an update to the music we use. And to help us celebrate the changes—and our anniversary—we invited copywriter and marketing consultant Mike Kim to share his story and what he’s learned over the last several years of his career. Here’s a recap of what we covered:

•   how he went from marketer to blogger to copywriter
•   the importance of professional-grade production—spoiler: it’s not
•   the #1 thing you need in your content to get traction
•   simplifiers vs. multipliers (and where Mike, Rob and Kira fit in)
•   what he did to find his first clients and what he did next
•   the present-negative/future positive reason why he left a high-paying CMO role
•   the impact copywriting had on sales (when he was a CMO)
•   what Mike would do differently if he had to start over
•   his personal “code” for investing in coaching, courses and contractors
•   the big risks Mike has taken throughout his career (and the results)
•   why confidence is a sucker’s game and what you need instead
•   Mike’s “made it” moment where he realized things would be fine
•   the role mindset has played in his success—particularly his thoughts about money
•   Mike’s advice for raising your prices today—he calls it scope-creep insurance
•   his experience at TCCIRL as a speaker and attendee
•   the one thing he attributes his success to—this might not surprise you
•   his prediction for what will happen in the marketing world in the future

Mike is a phenomenal copywriter (and human) and this interview is one you won’t want to miss. To hear it, click the button below. Or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher… and soon on Spotify. And if you prefer reading, scroll down for a full transcript.

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

The Copywriter Accelerator
Michael Hyatt
AWAI
Jeff Walker
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks
Business Brilliant by Lewis Schiff
Mike’s website
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Intro
Outro

Full transcript:

Kira:   What does it take to stand out like a snow lynx in a bowling alley and get noticed in today’s crowded marketplace. Okay, assuming you’re already a good writer and you can serve your clients well, which we can assume because you’re listening to this show, how do you actually get people to see that you’re extraordinary or extra, extraordinary? If you want it to be extraordinary, you can’t do the things ordinary people do. We know this. So you need to take the type of risks others refuse to take. You need to think and act differently from everyone else. Today on the 200th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, which we’re celebrating with lots of Coke Zero, barbecue chips, and peanut butter cheesecake.

Rob:   So good.

Kira:   We’re speaking with one of my D.C. neighbors and new friends, Mike Kim. Mike is much more than a copywriter. He’s a former CMO and current podcaster, coach, public speaker, and brand strategist. But maybe, most important of all, Mike is the kind of person who takes the type of risks that can launch an extraordinary career.

Rob:   We’ll get to all of that in a moment. But first we need to tell you that this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Accelerator. The Accelerator is a 16-week business growth program designed to help copywriters figure out not only what makes them extraordinary, but also how to be the kind of business or how to run the kind of business that can scale and attract the right clients. This isn’t a course, something that you buy and forget in your downloads folder. It’s a program that you work through with other students as you master your business mindset, your X factor, your signature package as you price and create processes, work on client management, even branding and getting in front of the right clients. If you’re ready to stop dabbling and get serious about building a copywriting business that’s set up to grow, go to thecopywriteraccelerator.com for more details.

Kira:   I first connected with Mike shockingly on a podcast. After five minutes of prepping for my big interview with Mike Kim, I knew we’d be buds. We both lived in D.C. We both played basketball back in the day, and we’re both kind of tall. So obviously, a perfect recipe for friendship. So Mike and I hit it off, and I invited him to attend TCC In Real Life in San Diego. He took me up on the offer and flew out to the West Coast for the event, and I’m really glad I invited him because we didn’t see what was about to happen next.

Rob:   Even though he only showed up as a guest, Mike ended up being the first speaker at TCC IRL, which we’ve started calling the last event held in America. As coronavirus started spreading across the country, a few of our speakers canceled during the week prior to the event, but we were still moving forward with the event because canceling it at the time didn’t make sense to us either. So we were wondering how we were going to even kick off the event after losing our keynote speaker and a couple of others, and that’s when Kira checked in and with Mike.

Kira:   I asked him, “Hey, Mike. Could you possibly keynote at TCC IRL?” Literally a day before the event, and Mike says, “Yes.” He’s thrilled to speak on our stage, and he’ll pull together his presentation within 24 hours. When his time came to grace the stage, he totally rocked it. I knew he was a seasoned speaker beforehand, but he was even better than I imagined. Not only funny, but full of wisdom and business advice that our room needed to hear. Then he didn’t stop there. Mike hung out with us the entire event and even stayed out pretty late in the morning with us as we had our final social time before the world would shut down. It would have been easy for Mike to turn us down or even not fly out to San Diego with uncertainty looming in the air, but he took a risk on us, and he showed up and stepped up. That to me is extraordinary.

Rob:   Yeah. Mike has a habit of saying yes to the right opportunities and doing the things that help him stand out from the crowd. So let’s go to our interview with Mike Kim.

Kira:   Let’s start with how you ended up as a copywriter. For people who don’t know you and never heard of you, how did you get into copywriting?

Mike:   So, I always kind of had a knack, I guess, for writing, and I didn’t discover copywriting until after I made the decision to start a blog. So I bought into this blogging/platform building program, and there was a module taught by this guy, who we all know, Ray Edwards on copywriting. That was like the first time I’d really ever heard of copywriting as a profession or even really as a concept. I remember watching this really budget video from him, and he was teaching this stuff, and I was like, “Oh, I get it.” All of a sudden, I just bought like 10 books on copywriting, and I studied it, and I loved it, and I realized I’ve known this my whole life. I just didn’t know what to call it. That’s really how I got started.

While I was building my platform, my blog, I quickly realized how important writing was to it because there’s not a single thing that you can do in that industry without writing. That’s really how I got started. I discovered it, and I was like, “Oh, that’s what I’ve been doing all these years, writing album covers and stuff like that, liner notes. Oh, that’s copywriting. Oh, cool.” And I got it.

Rob:   I want to ask about something, this is maybe something a little bit weird to pick up on, but you called the video that you’re watching a budget video, and I’m guessing that it was probably like kind of recorded off the cuff. It wasn’t professionally done. The reason that jumped out at me is because you look at what Ray does today. That’s definitely not his brand, and yet, however long ago it was, that’s what he was doing, and I think a lot of us wait way too long until we’re perfect at the thing that we’re trying to do to launch, and most of our mentors didn’t do that. They didn’t wait. They launched. Maybe you’ve probably seen something like that in your own career, I would imagine.

Mike:   Oh yeah, I didn’t record my first professionally shot videos in a studio until a year ago. So for seven years, I just recorded videos off my MacBook camera, and I did entire launches using that camera. I think, Rob, this goes back to copyright. If you just have a really good copy and really good content, it keeps people engaged, and they get value from the video, and that was it. Yeah. So I’m not a big tech/app/gearhead kind of guy. I’m just like, use what you have. The simpler your tools, the more likely you’re going to use them, and I still kind of follow that till this day.

Rob:   So can I ask a follow-up to that then? If it’s not the production, what is it about what you need to bring to your video or to your audio or to the content you’re creating in order to help gain traction?

Mike:   I think that it just needs to be very easily understood. So it’s been said that there are two types of multipliers. I don’t know if you guys have heard this, but one type is a simplifier, and the other is a multiplier. I am 1000% a simplifier. Right? So when I teach content, I’m just like, “How do I make this so easy that I don’t need notes to teach?” I feel like if I need notes to teach content on a video or even from stage, then I’m probably making it too complex, too convoluted, too meaty, and especially on the format of video these days with people’s attention spans. I think it’s been proven that the longest an average adult will watch a video is seven minutes. That’s the average.

So you’re going to have people who are way more than that, and you’re going to have people who are way less than that. But this comes from a friend who’s an educator. She’s a in education, and all the recent studies have shown that the average is seven minutes. So the days of me creating like these 30-minute videos, especially if it’s not done live, at least for me, I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m sticking to five to seven minutes, and that’s it. For me to do that, I shouldn’t need to do too much to fill up that much kind of content.

Kira:   I like that concept of the simplifier and the multiplier. Can you talk a little bit more about that and even the multiplier, what that looks like and how we know which one we are, if we’re the simplifier, the multiplier, and how we could do each one better once we know what we are?

Mike:   Yeah. Okay. So I think for the simplifiers, these are people who we either take a lot of different concepts. Let me approach it from a teaching perspective. So if any of you are teaching copywriting or teaching marketing, whether to the general public or to a client, chances are you’ve read a ton of books on the topic, tons of content, and you’re boiling and distilling it down into something really easy for your clients to understand, especially for someone who doesn’t understand copywriting or marketing. You’re just boiling this down all the time. If you find yourself doing that a lot, then chances are you’re a simplifier. If you’re a multiplier, chances are that you’re always adding things to do.

So oh, no, we need to do more of this. We need to do more of that. We need to get this one thing out to 50 different social media channels, and we should be doing a blog every day, and we should do podcasts every day, and we should three Instagram quotes a day, and that’s really a multiplier. I think that you’ll be able to tell probably by the projects the number of projects that you’re working on at a given time or the number of marching orders that you give to people who are around you. I work well with multipliers in the sense that I take all of their thoughts and make them very, very simple. I don’t like to add a lot. I don’t like to do a lot more than what’s necessary. I like to do just the bare bones and do those well. I don’t go looking for other things to do, and I really think that’s what it comes down to.

For copywriters, especially those of us who work with clients like that, you’ll probably find yourself simplifying a lot. So I don’t have a great checklist, and these are seven characteristics of a simplifier, but you can probably tell by what people say around you. You just make things easy. You just make things simple. This was so easy to understand. You definitely simplify if you do that.

Kira:   I don’t think anyone’s ever said that to me.

Mike:   Okay. You might be a multiplier.

Rob:   Yeah…

Kira:   I’m definitely a multiplier.

Rob:   Okay. There you go.

Kira:   Okay, let’s break in here real quick and talk about this idea of simplifiers and multipliers, because this is the first time I heard anyone break it down in such a simple way, which Mike is known for. Which one are you, Rob?

Rob:   So, listening to Mike describe it, I want to be a simplifier. I really liked the idea of cutting things down and making them easier. But if I’m being honest, I’m probably a multiplier. I think about what’s missing from things and what needs to be added to make things better, especially when it comes to programs or copied, kinds of things that you and I work on together. I have a tendency to think more is better. What about you?

Kira:   Yeah. I’m a little worried about this one because we might both be multipliers, which is probably what leads to some of our biggest struggles as we both are running TCC together. This even helps me identify some of the struggles we’re currently having. Even if you think about our membership in the underground and simplification, you and I are so great at adding new trainings, adding new ideas and new events, but simplification can be a struggle for us. I also think it’s worth noting that you may lean towards simplification or multiplication, and you may identify with one or the other naturally. But if we’re intentional about these two hats that we wear, we can shift between them when it’s needed.

We also may show up in different ways at different times. I can often help my clients simplify their ideas and even their copy, even though I struggle with that in my own business, in my own copy. This is really why it’s good to know how you show up and your weaknesses and your strengths so you can find or even hire additional support in these areas that you struggle in.

Rob:   Yeah. To stick up for some of the multipliers among our listeners, I’ve got to say that being a multiplier isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s usually a good thing. Their super power can be creating interesting analogies and metaphors that ring true and connect multiple ideas from different industries or different universities in new ways. So maybe it’s not about wanting to do more simplification, but it’s more about reinvention, which can create all kinds of aha moments. It doesn’t matter if you’re a simplifier or a multiplier, both are really powerful when you use them at the right time and the right place, like you were just saying, Kira.

If I’m working on a presentation and I want to introduce a new concept to the world, something inventive, I may want to put on my multiplier hat. But then when I need to nail down the concept or rework the presentation so that it’s really clear and easy to understand, I need to put on my simplifier. So Mike, we jumped way past from just getting started as a copywriter, and we’ve skipped a lot of your careers. Maybe you could tell us, once you discovered copywriting, how did you find your first couple of clients? What were you doing in order to connect with actual paying clients?

Mike:   Yeah. That was a great question. So how I got started was I joined this little blogging program by a guy named Michael Hyatt, and I actually novel thought did what he taught, right? So whenever you’d say start a blog and write a couple of blog posts and so on and so forth, I would do that. When I wrote the posts, the posts were about marketing, and they were about what I was doing in my day job because I was the CMO of this company. I just tried to write them, guys, to the best of my ability, and I think when people saw that content in that group, they were among my very first email subscribers, and of course, they approached me as if I was a fellow journeymen in this path that we’re all embarking on.

But what happens was, as I actually did the work, I caught the attention of a lot of the coaches, his coaches who were in the group because I was actually executing on this stuff they had taught. They said, “Oh, you wrote a little bit about copywriting and stuff like that?” Do you do any freelance work? I said, “Sure.” Those were among my first clients. So that’s really, Rob, where I got my first clients. It was within a community that I had joined that had other people and established entrepreneurs in it who needed the work. It was totally by accident. I’d like to say that I thought this through and had a magic plan. But it just kind of found me that way, and I think a big part of it was just because I had created content, and they read it, and they thought it was good writing. So in a weird way, my own content was the advertising for my copywriting services, and that’s really where I landed my first clients.

Kira:   I love the simplicity of you joined a program, and you did the work in the program, which caught the attention of other people leading the program to get clients. I think sometimes it’s as simple as showing up in a program and doing what people tell you to do, and it actually pays off.

Mike:   Yeah. It was funny because when I was doing that, I then started getting all sorts of inquiries from people within the group. Right? So these folks are just kind of starting out. So they don’t have a ton of money to work with, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I wasn’t in a copywriting community of any… Not like what do you guys have. So I didn’t really have anyone to ask. I couldn’t ask the same people in the group, “Hey, I got a client inquiry. How much should I charge?” When the guy who asked me about the project was in the same group.

So I just kind of winged it, and what I found was that I was taking these contracts that actually took up a lot of my time, and eventually I just stopped taking them because I had a pretty demanding job at the time, and it was a well-paying job. So for me to take like a $500 or $1,000 writing contract and have it take up like 20 hours of my time over two weeks just didn’t make any sense. So I got to a point where I stopped really taking those kinds of copy contracts, and I used the leftover time to just continue creating content on my own platform.

Then I took strategic clients, clients who were like the coaches who are in this program, working with a guy, and then taking those clients on because then I could say I wrote for them. So it was kind of a strategic play early on. But I definitely took my first year of kind of underpriced projects when I realized that this wasn’t a smart thing to do, and I was just creating a situation where I had another like little boss instead of my day job. I started being much more strategic with the clients that I took.

Kira:   Yeah. Can you talk more about that time as a CMO of that company? I know you talked a little bit about it at TCC In Real Life. But I’m just curious, why would you want to leave this big role at this organization corner office, and then also what were some of the most valuable lessons you learned from that time as a CMO that you have applied repeatedly in your own business today?

Mike:   Yeah. Okay. So I’m going to be just really honest. I love to say I had this great vision to change the world or something. I hated meetings. I hated commutes. I hated pointless work and inefficiency. I didn’t know this at the time. But the more and more personality tests I’ve taken over the years, I was like, “Yeah, no wonder I hated it.” I was just not made to work in an office. It’s not me. So for me, at that point in my life, it was kind of like I was experiencing a present negative, and I wanted to move to a future positive. Right? So the initial motivation was just to get out of my day job, just to get out of work.

One of those stories I often tell is Thanksgiving 2013. I was hosting Thanksgiving in my house for my family, and I got called into work the next day after Thanksgiving. There was no reason for us to go to work. We weren’t a real retail business. I remember being so ticked off, seriously, so ticked off BC I was already putting in like 60 to 70 hours a week for that company. It was like a never-again moment for me. I was like, “I’m never again going to allow anyone to tell me what day I have to work and what days I can spend with my family.”

My life didn’t change overnight, but I made a decision really that weekend that I’m going to really get serious about this blogging and platform building thing. Up until that time, I had been doing it for about 10 months. I still remember when that all happened because it was Thanksgiving. That’s really what motivated me. What’s interesting is that you can get to a certain place in your life thinking through the lens of a present negative to a future positive. But at some point, the switch has to flip because the closer and closer you get to making the leap, you start thinking about your present positive and what the future negative will be, like, “Oh, what if I don’t make money? Or what if I don’t have clients?” You start worrying about that stuff.

It’s definitely a kind of dicey line to walk. But I knew that once I established a platform, I had an email list, I had coaching groups, I felt like I could really, really do it. As for the lessons that I learned in that job that I’ve carried over into my client work and into my own business, number one the importance of great copywriting, hands down, all I did that first year when I took the job was changed their copywriting, and within a year and a half, they six X’ed their profits. It was insane. I, myself couldn’t believe how much of a difference it made.

But honestly, the second thing I’d say is that my direct supervisors and the owner of the company, they were really, really hardworking people. The owner of the company, I don’t think I ever shared this with you guys was this… The person I worked with, it was a husband and wife couple, and I worked with a wife more because she was on the administrative and business end of things. Guys, this lady, she didn’t speak English very well. English was her second language. She graduated from a really prestigious university in Korea, but she came over here and had to completely start over. It was an educational business. So she had to sell services to like really educated people and didn’t speak English.

So she just did this with total boldness and confidence, and it’s like, “I’m going to show up and I’m going to bring my best, and I might not be able to communicate through my words, but I’m going to communicate it through spirit and action.” I see how hard that lady worked and how much confidence, even when she didn’t feel it, that she had to embody every day. From I learned from that, I took into my own business because I was like, if Anne could do it, I can do this. If she can hustle that hard, not speaking English and working in this kind of crazy New York City market, me creating a landing page and doing a launch is not that big of a deal. I’ll honestly say she was like one of the biggest influences on me in business.

Rob:   I think if I was listening to this podcast, I might be thinking, “Well, Mike’s been a CMO. He’s got all this great experience. He was lucky enough to be in this mastermind with Michael Hyatt and several of his major contacts.” What would you do if you had to start all over without those experiences as a copywriter? What would you do differently?

Mike:   I don’t think I would have done anything differently, Rob, to be honest because I wasn’t actually in a mastermind with Mike Hyatt. I was in one of his paid membership programs for like $30 a month. I was literally one of 6,000 people in that program. So when I say that I did the work, I did the work, and I stood out despite there being 6,000 people because there were exactly 5,990 people in that program that bought it and didn’t do anything. I didn’t join a mastermind group until, get this, until three months before I quit my day job. So from 2013 all the way to 2015, I was just blogging. That little $30 a month membership program was the only mentorship that I had.

I got to a point where I’d built my brand. I’d built my lists. I ran coaching programs. I did launches, all by just doing what these guys taught in a very, very base level program and be willing to take risks. Then once I did that, I had enough money to join a mastermind. So yeah. When I look back on it, the smartest thing I did was build a brand and create content around myself. The dumbest thing I did was not run ads and not really put myself out there earlier. Because I realized looking back, I probably could have made that leap a year earlier had I done that? I just didn’t have the confidence for it. But yeah. Looking back, the best thing I ever did was just create content and allow myself to be the face of my own brand, even if I was taking freelancing clients.

Rob:   So I love this answer because we see so many people in our Facebook group who are new, and they jump in, and immediately, they say, “What courses do I need to take?” They may invest in two or three courses before they write for a single client, including themselves, oftentimes. It sounds to me like you’re saying it’s really about doing the work. It’s not about learning the next thing.

Mike:   Yeah. So I have this little… I’m glad we were talking about this because I wasn’t thinking about it. But I have this little code, if you will, my own personal code about what I’m going to invest in. So if you really thinking about it as a business owner in this online space, there are only really three things that I can invest in. Number one, coaching, number two, courses, and number three, contractors, right? There’s really only those three things.

What I have found is that most people invest in the wrong thing at the right time. Most of us can be intuitive enough to know when it’s time to invest in ourselves, but we invest in the wrong thing at the right time. So what I mean by that is coaching, for example. I invest in coaching whenever there’s going to be a big transition in my business or my life. So as I was getting, for example, closer and closer to making the leap to becoming a full-time entrepreneur, I’d just launched my own paid mastermind group that paid me $6,000 a month for an hour and a half of work a week. I couldn’t believe it. Right? I was like, “If I landed a copywriting project for $6,000, it would take me like a month to do it.” Right?

So it completely changed the way I thought about money, but it was a big transition coming up. So I invested in coaching. I invested in a coaching mastermind group because I knew that coaching is what helps you understand what’s coming next. I don’t know you guys remember when you first got your driver’s license, and you were taking the test for it, and you drive around town with this poor adult who decided it was a good way to make a living to drive with a 16 year old kid. That guy still would tell you, coach you through, “Hey, there’s a right turn coming up. You want to get in the right lane here. You’re going to slow down at the turn and you’re going to accelerate once you get past the light and get through the turn.” That’s what coaching is to me.

So I hire coaches whenever there’s a big transition in my business or even my personal life. I’ve done that in my personal life numerous times. I’ll invest in a course when I want to learn a skill that I’m going to implement within the next 45 days, and I know that I have the time to do it. Early examples of this, a Facebook ads course that I invested in. The very first course that I ever purchased was a copywriting course from AWAI. Right? And I knew that I would have a month to work on the exercises, and I did that. Years later, I invested in Jeff Walker’s product launch formula because I was like, “This will be the year that I actually do a launch,” like this guy says, because I’m sick and tired of hearing everybody talk about him.

So I’m going to do it, and I’m going to either prove to myself that it works or that it doesn’t, but hell or high water, I’m going to do it. So that’s when I would invest in a course. You invest in a contractor, like a copywriter or a freelancer or a designer, an ad specialist when you simply don’t have time, but you have the money. So I think where people get tripped up, guys, is where is when they invest in the wrong thing. A lot of people invest in a course when they should really invest in a coach.

The way you can tell is that they join a coaching program, or they join a course, and they say, “Well, nobody told me how to price my products or something like that, for example.” You can’t learn that from a video. Or, “I joined this course, but I didn’t get anything done.” Well, because accountability doesn’t come through a bunch of videos. It comes when you’re in a community or in a coaching program. Right? Then on the flip side, I’ll see people who join a mastermind group or coaching program with me, and they’ll hop on these calls every two weeks, they won’t… Like, “Yeah. But I don’t know what copy to write. Can you review my copy on the call?” I say, “No, that’s not what these calls are for. You should have bought the course with the templates in it and just use that.”

So I think that’s where people get tripped up. They buy the wrong thing, wanting to get the result that that thing doesn’t is not engineered to give them. It’s not necessarily the courses are bad or coaching is bad. I just don’t think buyers by and large understand which one they should use at that particular time.

Rob:   When Mike shared this idea of the three kinds of investments that you can make in your business courses, coaches, and contractors, it really rang true for me. The fact that so many of us invest in the wrong one at the wrong time or the right one at the wrong time, this whole idea is just so right.

Kira:   Yeah. Again, this part of the conversation with Mike exemplifies his strength simplification. Even though I’ve intuitively understood what he’s saying before, I never put it into words the way that Mike just did. I’ve definitely invested in the wrong thing at the wrong time. But I can also look back and see that the investments that paid off the most were the ones that aligned with my struggles or objectives at the time, like investing in my own coaching and masterminds during a huge transition or taking a copywriting course when I was just getting started and needed to know the basics fast or hiring a contractor when I had a specific need or problem to solve. What are some of the investments you’re focused on right now, Rob?

Rob:   So, as I kind of grew in my own career, I invested in a lot of books, and I had the luxury of training in corporate environments and with business, not necessarily coaches, but mentors. But my first really big investment in myself and my business was a coach and a mastermind. That exposed me to a whole group of better writers and also people who were thinking differently and doing things differently in their businesses than I was doing in my business, which started to give me all kinds of ideas of what I should be doing differently and things that I should try.

Of course, as we’ve grown our business together, we’ve started working with well-chosen contractors and coaches to help us get more done. You and I recently invested in a mastermind together. That’s a big investment in us, but we think is going to help us get a new perspective on the things that we should be trying and the things that we should be building our business to help us grow even more.

Kira:   So, you mentioned taking risks earlier. Just I’m curious to hear about the risks you’ve taken in your own business over the years.

Mike:   Okay. So the first one was when I left my company. That was pretty hard. I actually made my old employer one of my first clients. So that’s sort of how I mitigated risk. But when I stepped away from them completely after that first year, I really cured to be honest. Anytime I launched anything felt like a risk because I didn’t know if it would work. Every launch that I did, whether it was an open call for a mastermind group, whether it was putting on my first product launch. I also remember the first time that I ever held a conference. All of these were like, I don’t know if this is going to work. This may wipe me out. Nobody may sign up for this, but I’m willing to try it.

I at least had monthly recurring revenue because of the mastermind groups that I was running that I didn’t feel like too much was going to be lost if it was a complete failure, if that makes sense. A couple of other risks were actually clients that I took later that were much more established. I think you guys have probably faced this at some point in your careers. A client prospect, whoever reaches out to you, and you wonder if you’re good enough for them. I remember that happening with two clients in particular because they were really established names in their industries. I didn’t know if I should say yes. I wanted to say yes because it would have been a great brand play. I would have looked really good if I could say that I could work for these clients. But I didn’t know if I could actually deliver for them. I didn’t know if they would think I sucked, if I was just kind of hyped up or something. Me saying yes really helped me up my game. Those are just some of the risks that you take.

When I hired my assistant, that was a big risk. I was like, “Wow, okay. I’m going to have to employ somebody now.” I hope I make enough month to month to pay this person. That was a big risk. So I think anything in business that’s entailed me not knowing what was going to happen was a risk, but I will say this. I think one thing I learned was that a lot of people say like, “Oh, we need confidence before we do anything.” I don’t think that’s true at all. I think confidence comes last. I think the first thing that comes as a commitment to do something. You’re saying, “I’m going to grow this business, and I need to commit to doing whatever it takes to grow this business.”

Kind of like that little Korean lady, Ann, who I used to work for it, that was her mentality. The second thing we need is courage because you have to do things scared. I think we sometimes forget that word as entrepreneurs, that we need courage every day. Every time that you do something new requires courage because you don’t know if it’s going to work or not. After you take courage, the third thing that you really earn is competence. You realize, you know what? I do kind of know what I’m doing. I’m a little wobbly, but I’m able to ride the bike without training wheels for like 20 feet. I might fall again, but I’m learning, I’m hobbling, I’m stumbling, but I’m learning.

Then the last thing that comes is really confidence. That’s when you feel like you can do this. The catch is that anytime you do something new, that might be a launch that I did in 2017. When I did that same launch in 2018, I had to go through the same cycles all over again. I had to keep the commitment. I had to take courage because I didn’t know if it would work or not. Then as I’m working on it, I gained a level of competence, and then I’d have confidence. Sooner or later, year after year, month after month, week after week, day after day, because of the things that I’m doing, you learn to exercise that confidence muscle and taking courage doesn’t become as scary.

So for now, or now at this point, I look at risk and I’m like, “Gosh, when I look back on my career, even the last four to five years, the amount of risks I took and the fact that I still eat and live indoors, and I can afford to live in doors, this is not going to be that bad.” That’s honestly how I look at it.

Rob:   Yeah. It sounds like we’re talking about doing things before we feel ready. If I remember a lot of what you talked about at the event was as you talked about your career was sort of taking that next leap before you felt completely confident that it was the right next thing.

Mike:   Yeah, totally. It’s all courage. I think if we can get into a habit as entrepreneurs of replacing the word confidence with courage, we’d all be in a much more real place. You know what I mean, guys? It’s so much more real. Anyone can identify with having to take courage. You can walk up to a random person on the street and ask them, “Are you a confident person?” A lot of people will say, “No, I’m not. I’m not.” But if you ask them, “Have there been times in your life where you’ve been courageous?” They will say, “Yes.” They will absolutely say yes. So I think I’ll start a campaign to start replacing the word confidence with courage because that’ll help. A lot of us become more sane and realistic with what we should expect.

Kira:   This point that Mike is making about taking risks is huge. It pretty much describes how we built The Copywriter Club together. The two of us partnering together was a risk.

Rob:   Big risk.

Kira:   I mean, you didn’t know if I was crazy and I didn’t know if you were crazy, yet here we are. So maybe we’re both a little crazy. When I look back at my own risks, I can see the big ones really clearly moving to New York city from Virginia after college, with zero clue about what I was going to do and what type of life I’d build there and even more recently leaving my favorite city and leaving New York to explore life in Washington, D.C. Business wise, any time I make a big investment, I’m like thinking to myself, “I might lose all that money, or it might be totally worth it. But either way, I’m going all in.” I’ll walk away with a huge win or a hard lesson learned.

When I think about TCC, any time we create a new offer, it feels like a risk to me. While we definitely took a lot of risks along the way, like starting a membership and in-person events and retreats, for some reason, everything feels slightly less risky to me right now. Well, there’s definitely a time for risk, and you and I have been deep in that risk territory for the past four years. There’s also a time to chill out on the risk and focus less on leaping and more on building, things like strengthening a membership rather than creating a new one or nurturing and growing a team, which is less risky, but so much more important in a lot of ways. I see the stage we’re in right now, four years in, as being just as rewarding and fun, but a whole lot less risky compared to where we were a few years ago.

Then personally ideas and dreams feel riskier to me than anything. I’m in a stage right now where I’m like, “Cool. Here’s what’s going on really well, and here’s what’s not going so well. My businesses are growing and solid, but what else is there? What else do I want to pursue? Where do I want to be 10 years from now, 20 years from now? Am I doing anything to work towards that right now?” To me, articulating big dreams and goals feels really risky and even courageous to voice them. What feels the riskiest of it all is the fear of not doing anything to work towards other personal and professional goals in my life. To have a decade go by without me actually writing the book or the screenplay I want to write, the risk really is not doing anything at all. What do you think, Rob? What feels like a big risk to you?

Rob:   Yeah. Well, I really like how Mike said, confidence comes last. It’s only after you do the thing. If you’re waiting for confidence to happen or to come to you before you take the next step, before you take that big leap, it’s not going to happen. So do you remember the scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where Indie has to cross the abyss to get to the Holy grill to save his father who just got shot and he’s lying there dying.

Kira:   I don’t remember, but I trust you. I need to go back and it. This makes me want to go back and watch it again.

Rob:   Yeah. This is kind of the pivotal moment in the movie because there’s this impossible thing that’s got to happen. So Indie looks at this abyss, and he looks down, and he can’t see the bottom, and then he looks across, and it is way too far to jump. It’s like 30, 40 feet, at least, and there’s really no way to get there. The first thing that he says, as he steps onto the ledge, he’s like, “It’s impossible. Nobody can jump this.” Then of course, he’s hearing his father in the background, who’s gasping in pain, and he’s saying, “Believe, have faith.” Indie has to save his father. He’s got to make the situation work. Then he realizes that it’s a leap of faith, and he holds his breath, and he steps out into nothingness.

Just as he starts to fall into the abyss, his foot lands on this path that he couldn’t see until he takes the step. That just describes so many things that we do to grow either personally, in business, or in other ways. It’s usually a leap of faith. The path won’t appear until we take that step. So when I think about the things that I’m doing that are leaps of faith, well, maybe Reinventions podcasts is a little bit of a leap of faith. Will listeners like the new format as we leap in and…

Kira:   Probably not.

Rob:   … and talk about things. Yeah. Maybe not. New programs that we’re creating together. The different things that I’m working on in my business. I also want to write a book, like you just talked about. So there’s lots of these things where we just have to start and basically embrace courage, as opposed to the idea that we need confidence. Okay. So let’s get back to what Mike had to share next.

Kira:   All right. So I want to ask you about your moment, your made-it moment, where you feel like you’ve made it. Do you have a particular moment on your path through starting your business, where even a small moment, where you’re like, “Oh yeah, I definitely made it.”

Mike:   Oh yeah, I do. I do. Okay. So I will never forget the first… I will never forget the day that I quit my day job, my last day at work. The reason partially that I remember it is because it was a Friday, and it also happened to me, my sister’s birthday. So I just remember the date. That Friday we had a big company party, and it was all sorts of crazy. Okay. But I took the weekend off partially because I was somehow so hung over from the company party on Friday. I sat in my house in New Jersey at the time. I was living in a four-bedroom house, just me and my wife at the time. We had no kids. We’re 15 minutes from Manhattan, and I did not have to go to work. I just sat in my house the whole morning just saying to myself, “I’m not in the car. I’m at a meeting. I can open up my laptop, and the only thing I have to do today is write a blog post. This is awesome.”

Honestly, looking back at it, that is the day that is the most vivid to me, the day that I realized I had gotten to the other side. Now, there have been some moments along the way since that time. Maybe some really big speaking gigs that I’ve had. Maybe some big contracts that I’ve landed. But to me looking back, that was the biggest, most pivotal moment. I can look back, and that was one of the most significant watermarks because it took so much work to get to that point, and I realized I had joined this new club of people who had made the leap and become a full-time entrepreneur and worked for themselves, and it was awesome. I’ll never forget it.

Rob:   Mike, how much of your success would you attribute to just doing the hard work, you’re sitting down to write copy, do the research connecting with clients versus changing your mindset and working on the things in your head that might be holding you back?

Mike:   Oh, man. I would say it’s 50/50. I think on one side, you have what’s going on inside your head. I always like to tell people this. If you’re going to be your own worst critic, you need to be your own biggest fan. I really believe that. That has more to do with self-talk. It doesn’t mean that we don’t need outside encouragement. But the self-talk, we tend to be so much more critical than we are self-affirming. Now, if you’re a complete narcissists, right? There’s some people who just think that they’re awesome at everything. That notwithstanding, most normal people tend to be much more critical of themselves than they are encouraging of themselves.

I also realized that I had to change a lot of my mindset around money. I didn’t come from a wealthy family. I didn’t come from an entrepreneurial family. What I do is completely foreign to most of my family members and even most of my close non-online business friends. You can ask them my best friends what I do. They don’t really understand what I do till this day. Rob, when I sold my first mastermind group, and 12 people purchased a $500 a month ticket every month, and I saw $6,000 come in, that was enough for us to live off of completely, just that one thing for an hour and a half of work a week. Initially, I was like, “Maybe I’m not giving enough value. Maybe I’m not doing enough. Maybe there’s more that I need to do to justify this money.” I realized that just wasn’t true, and I was running into a blockage in my mindset about money.

So I started reading a lot of books about money. Think and Grow Rich was one of those early books that I read, the Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. That was a really, really important book on the journey. Another one that not many people have heard of, but I’ve recommended more than any of those others because the other ones are so famous was a book by Lewis Schiff called Business Brilliant. What this guy did was he surveyed hundreds of middle-class Americans and hundreds of upper-class Americans. I know we have a diverse international audience here, but I’m an American. He would ask them what they thought of certain clichés. It completely changed the way that I saw how wealthier people think. So a good example just off the top of my head is that you the vast majority of middle-class Americans will say, “Follow your passion, and the money will follow.” Nearly none of the upper-class wealthier people said that that’s true.

Rob:   Yeah. I don’t think that’s true.

Mike:   Yeah. I was like, “Whoa, well, you must be upper-class then. You must be raking to get in.”

Rob:   No. What I’m saying, yeah, I don’t believe that follow your passion leads to money. Yeah. It’s just not true.

Mike:   No. Yeah. So it’s just one example of that, where like he had data based on that. Right? He surveyed people. So it was really, really interesting to see that. So that really helped me on the money side of things and the mindset side of things, to be honest. It was really pivotal to get around books like that, that changed the way that I thought about money and to be around people who made a lot more money than I did and made it in much different ways than I was accustomed to. Because that’s what was happening to me as an entrepreneur, especially with that first mastermind group. I wasn’t used to making money like that. It was weird. I felt guilty about it.

Kira:   Is there anything else you’d add to that too, for the copywriter who is listening and is still struggling with money issues. Maybe is starting to do quite well but also wrestles with, “Okay. I’m getting paid well, but I’m not providing enough value. I have to give more beyond reading those books, beyond hanging out with other entrepreneurs who are doing well, or maybe a couple steps ahead of you. What else would you say to them?

Mike:   Oh, real practical step would be next project you charge bump it by 25%. Just bump it by 25%. So whatever number that is, if you’ve charged like $1,000 for a project, just bump it to 1,250, you’ll be amazed at what that extra 250 does. I don’t know why, Kira. I really don’t. I have weird numbers now because of that because I follow that over the years, and it is amazing what that little, extra 25% that you add on top of it all really does. When people ask me like, what’s your day rate to come in and spend a day with us, I’ll be like $12,500. It’s just such a weird number to them, but I normally would have charged 10. That extra 2,500 is enough for me to get over the fact that I have to travel, right? Or get up early or actually wear acceptable clothing and not work from home.

So even right there, if you can just add 25, nobody needs to know, just add that extra… You don’t need to do anything else than what’s on your original deliverables list. Just add 25% of the fee, and you might be surprised at what happens. I was amazed when I just started doing that, and I just did it because I got tired of the clients always having scope creep. It’s like scope creep insurance to me. So try it, 25%.

Rob:   Ice creep or deadline creep also. Right? I mean-

Mike:   Yes. Yeah.

Rob:   … do all of that.

Kira:   I like what Mike’s saying here about surrounding yourself with the right people. The easiest way to make a significant change in the way you think and act is by changing your surroundings, including the people you surround yourself with. We can go on and on about investing in yourself. We talk a lot about that on the podcast and joining mastermind groups. But we talk about it so frequently because this is the type of stuff that makes a difference. I’ve been able to slowly change my money mindset for the better by hanging out with people who are potentially in a different place in their business, maybe making more money, maybe living the type of life I’d like to live, and often people who share similar values, but are just maybe a little bit further along in the journey.

It’s not always just about the money and the fact that they’re making significantly more than me because you can surround yourself with a bunch of money, obsessed jerks who shares zero values with you, and where would that actually get you. But finding the right room with copywriters and other business owners who are two steps closer to some of the goals you want to achieve or even better yet 10 steps closer could make a huge difference in the way that you think. It just rubs off.

Yes, this type of osmosis is easier when you can hang out with these folks in person, but it can also happen online. Even listening to someone’s podcasts can help you get into their head and here are the questions they ask and how they think.

Rob:   This is so important. Together we can’t stress this enough, that if you’re not doing it intentionally, and you’re wondering why you’re stuck, it might be worth revisiting where you spend most of your time or who you’re surrounded with in your day-to-day activities. This is also why we’ve created the communities that we’ve created, the underground, the think tank, the round table, because at different times along the business journey, you need to be surrounding yourself with different ideas, with different opportunities, different people and building different things in your business. So yeah. I totally agree with what you were just saying, Kira, and what Mike has been saying here. Being around the right people makes an incredible difference in your business. Okay. So let’s go back and hear what Mike has to share next. Can we talk a little bit about your failures? What have you just absolutely fallen on your face doing as a copywriter?

Mike:   All right. I will say this. So this was kind of like as a business owner, and I could probably think of a couple of ones with copywriting. The biggest failure I’ve had in business, so the year, it was 2017, and I was holding a small but mighty events. This was a high-ticket event. So people paid about $3,000 to come to this, and there was 50 people max. I rented a hotel in Austin, Texas, and I completely misread the contract because at this point in my life and as a business owner, I didn’t know what the word budget meant. I just paid for things. I made promises. I figured we have 50 people coming in at $2,000 to $3,000 a head. We have more than enough money. This is not a problem.

The problem was I sold the tickets to that event six months earlier, and because I didn’t keep budgets, I spent a lot of the money. Well, as the event drew closer, the hotel billed me for a bunch of rooms that weren’t booked. So we had a deal where they would give me the event space for free contingent on the fact that I had enough people book hotel rooms for the trip during the event. A lot of people, because we were in a major city like Austin, they chose to stay at Airbnbs or other hotels where they had points. I just thought that I had to fill like yeah, 30 rooms. Okay? So I’m like, “Oh, it’s not that bad.” Right? I decided to fill 30 rooms. No, they set 30 rooms for the entire event, meaning one room is three nights. So I was on the hook for 90 nights at this hotel for like $300 a night. That is an insane amount of money.

So I was freaking out because first, I didn’t even have the money to pay for that straight up out of my pocket. Second, I didn’t have a business line of credit for my company at the time because I like to run everything debt-free. Right? Third, I couldn’t cancel the event and refund the money because I didn’t have the money to my attendees. So I felt so embarrassed, so ashamed, so angry at myself. I’ve always struggled with money in that department. I couldn’t make money, but I couldn’t keep it, and I had these moments with myself, where I was like, “You are such an idiot. I don’t understand how you could allow this to happen. You’ve made it out of corporate America. You work in your boxers for living. People pay you thousands of dollars to write their copy or to join a mastermind group, and you made this big of a mistake.”

I just beat myself up for a good couple hours, and I remember I was on the phone with my assistant, Chelsea, who you guys know, and then I just laughed about it. There was nothing else I could do. I just laughed about it. She’s like, what are you going to do? I was like, “I don’t know, but I’m going to find a way.” Guys, I hustled. I remember it was Easter weekend, 2017, and I don’t think I slept for four days. I called copywriting clients that I had in the past who I knew would pay right away, and I signed myself up for contracts with them. I hit my email list. I told them that I was going to start another mastermind group. I did it that weekend. I hit my email list to old buyers and offered them an upsell on a couple of products and said I was going to run a membership site. I did that. I collected on some outstanding invoices, and I made about $30,000 that weekend.

I didn’t sleep. I think I took five years off of my life from stress. You know what really sucked, though, to be honest? When I went to that event, when we finally got to Texas, I couldn’t be fully present because I was still beating myself up so much about how this event would not have happened because of my stupidity, or/and I was just so tired from all the hustle that I did do the week before to just make the bill, and nobody really knew about what had happened.

So these were my closest friends and colleagues in business, but I didn’t want to ruin the event for them because I was hosting it, and I didn’t want them to have to carry that while I was there. I wanted to be the host for them. That was an incredibly, incredibly powerful lesson. After that happened, I just said to myself, “I will never again allow myself to be in this kind of a situation where either, I don’t know how to read a contract,” because I was too stupid to allow my assistant or somebody else to read it. Or I didn’t have money set aside because I didn’t like budgeting things.

Within a month, I hired a financial firm, and they’ve ran my books till this day, and I’ve never feared a tax deadline. I’ve never feared never having enough money because they take care of all of that for me. So going back to my earlier point guys, I didn’t just hire a coach, and I didn’t take a course on business finance. I hired a contractor, and they do it all for me, and my life is way better because of it. Right. That was the right investment at that time.

Kira:   Oh my gosh, I feel stressed out just hearing about that failure. That’s-

Mike:   Yes. As somebody who’s put on an event, that sounds like absolutely the most stressful thing I can think of.

Kira:   I’m sweating right now.

Mike:   Yeah. It’s awful.

Kira:   Speaking of events, we got to meet you. You were one of our speakers at TCC In Real Life, in San Diego, in March before everything shut down. You stepped up last minute when we were losing speakers left and right, and we had just recently met you and asked you if you would speak on our stage the night before the event started, and you said yes. You were already attending, so you were going to be there, but you said yes, and you didn’t have to. So I mean, thank you again for doing that and then not only speaking, but you had one of the best presentations at that event. So I just would love to hear from you, what was your experience like at that event, and what surprised you the most? What was it like in that little bubble that we created before we all went back into the reality of coronavirus?

Mike:   Yeah. First of all, thank you for letting me speak. It was just totally an honor. For those of you listening, Kira and Rob, I don’t think had ever heard me speak. So as an event coordinator, we invite someone to speak who you’ve never heard before, let alone have a known very long. It can be a little bit nerve wracking because all you need is one really bad presentation to get [crosstalk 01:02:30].

Kira:   It was courage. It was courage. We’re taking a risk, and we needed to have courage.

Mike:   Yeah. So no. It’s always an honor for me to be in front of someone’s tried because I myself understand how much work goes into building one. So it was really my pleasure and my honor. But I will say, outside of you guys, of course, and how cool you both are, I was really, really pleasantly surprised by the energy and the pedigree of the attendees at that event at your event and in your trial. I remember when I walked right into the pre party, when we did the dinner, the night before everything started, I just walked in, and everybody just seemed to really genuinely like each other. It seemed like a lot of people knew each other. People actually dressed up and looked nice, right? They didn’t like look like slobs or anything.

It’s just the way that people carried themselves. They were really there to succeed, and I really liked that. I really felt like at the risk of sounding a little weird about this stuff. I’ve been to a lot of events, guys, where like the crowds that I’ve been in, just because of the tribes I grew up in, in business have always been significantly older than me if that makes sense. So whenever I’ve showed up, I’ve been like the younger guy by far. It was really nice to feel like I was among peers and among friends who were at a similar age and stage in life and just were ready to go kill it. So, I really, really appreciated the work that you guys have put into building this tribe.

Secondly, they were all copywriters from outside of the normal sore circles that I ran in. That was really important for me because I stopped going to a lot of the events that I grew up around because it was just kind of the same people over and over again. There’s value in that, but you don’t need to go to every single event. I’d been looking for just kind of new energy, new connections, new people just to be around and appreciate the journey with, and that’s what I found there. So I would just encourage anyone who’s listening right now, if you find yourself in that boat, come to TCC In Real Life next year. It’s going to be well worth it. They didn’t pay me to say that. I’m saying that both as a customer and as a speaker. I loved it. So be there.

Rob:   Well, we hope that you’ll be there as well. Assuming that we can all get together next year and our fingers are double crossed because we definitely want to do that, it’s going to be a blast. So yeah. We look forward to seeing you there. So Mike, if you were looking back at your entire career, is there one thing that you can point to, to attribute most of your success to, or maybe two things, but really thinking of one thing?

Mike:   Yeah. If it’s the one thing… There’s definitely two. But if I really had to trace it back to one thing, it would be growing an email list. I mean, hands down. My email list saved my butt during that whole Austin 2017 ordeal. I have said many times an email saved my tail. I’ve said it in much more colorful language than that. We’re going to keep it PG today. An email list has been the safety net. It hasn’t the backbone of my business, both as a freelancer and as an online course creator. An email list has prevented me from taking really bad copywriting contracts because I needed the money because I had an email list. I’ve been able to say no to the right people because I had an email list. I’ve been able to say yes to the right people because I had an email list.

A very close second to that would be finding the right mentor or coaching community that can help accelerate both your growth and your connections. You guys know from the talk I gave in San Diego that I talked pretty extensively about how important that was to me. Right? But if I had to choose even between those two, if I only had a really good mentor and didn’t have an email list, I would still be on the copywriting for freelance projects hamster wheel. But the email list and growing a brand that continually feeds the email list has been hands down the most important thing in my business. If the pizza shop down the street has a database, then I need one, and that’s my email list. So that’s what I would say.

Kira:   Do you have any predictions for how the marketing space will play out this year and beyond, especially considering all of the unknowns and uncertainties? What are you predicting and seeing at this point?

Mike:   I think that at least through the lens of copywriters, I think there’s always going to be a continuing need for great writing. That said, I think that there’s going to be a much greater emphasis on implementation rather than just education, right? So we talked a little bit about the difference between a coach, a course, and a consultant. I think that for those of us who are copywriters, who are providing those kinds of services to people, there’s definitely a market where people are going to be willing to pay us not just to create this stuff, but to implement it. Meaning, can you launch this? Can you put this into our email? Can you track the metrics? I think that’s one piece.

I think the other piece is that, I think that this has been happening for a while, guys, but I think there’s going to be much more of an emphasis on marketing being human. I like to say that marketing isn’t about closing a sale. It’s about opening a relationship, right? Even though all this automation and these tools are great, I think people are going to have to do things that don’t scale. I think we’re going to have to do more phone calls. I think we’re going to have to learn that it’s okay to text people, to email people. A lot of these apps these days like Bonjoro, they allow you to send a really quick video, personalized video to somebody who signs up for your course, as long as you have the automation set up.

If you look at what some of these influencers doing right now, Gary Vaynerchuk, Mel Robbins, they’re broadcasting, text me, here’s my phone number, and text me. You guys and I, we’re smart enough to know what they’re doing, right. They’re just collecting a database of phone numbers instead of email addresses, but they’re building a database, and they’re doing it under the guise of being a little bit more personal. Big brands are fighting to get what we have, which is that personal touch. Right? So I think that it’s really important that we realize that none of us should feel like we’ve ever gotten to a point where we’re above talking to an actual person to land the contract, to fill the mastermind group, to sell the event ticket, and I learned that, and you just kind of tying a bow and coming full circle, although unwittingly.

Back to that little lady that I used to work for. She didn’t care that she didn’t speak English. She picked up the phone. She texted people. She called people. She emailed them directly. She had a sales staff, but she hustled. I don’t think that’s ever going to change, but I think in the months and years to come, that’s going to be bigger actually than it has been in the last five years.

Rob:   I think hustle is a great word to maybe encapsulate a lot of the things that we’ve talked about here because it’s so much of what we do. It’s clearly something that you’ve done in your career as a copywriter and as a speaker and so many of the other things that you’ve done and accomplished. So I just want to thank you for coming on to the podcast, Mike. It’s been a pleasure having you.

Mike:   Well, first, it’s been a pleasure to be with you guys. I’m always down for hanging out with you guys. You all have a lot of fun.

Rob:   Yeah. Let’s do more.

Mike:   It was awesome to be with you, guys. Thank you for having me.

Kira:   Mike is such a great human and great copywriter and great business person. As soon as we hang in Real Life again, and we can hang out in person, I am going to force him to hang out with me and show me all the cool D.C. spots. If you want to spend more time in Mike’s circle, make sure you subscribe to his podcast called Brand You.

Rob:   Make sure you check out the interview with Kira while you’re there. You can also find Mike at his website, mikekim.com.

Kira:   Okay. We’re at the end of the show. Our intro music was composed by copywriter and song writer, Addison Rice, and this smile-inducing outro was composed by David Mechner.

Rob:   You can learn more about programs like The Copywriter Underground and Copywriter Accelerator at our website, thecopywriterclub.com. Our programs are for copywriters who are at all stages of our business. So if you’re interested in that, be sure to visit and check them out. Also, be sure to join our free Facebook group so that you don’t miss out on any of the awesome copy-related discussions that happen in the club. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

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