Imagine a one-of-a-kind course designed for entrepreneurs and small business owners who seek to educate themselves and have a tighter grasp of the worldwide web. Dan Klein of JobKilling.com discusses how direct response marketing can masterfully orchestrate web design, lead generation, social media, paid ads, search engine optimization (SEO), copywriting and conversions for your client’s small business. Job assassin, juggernauts, virtual vigilantes, mediocrity murderers, status quo slaughterers. They’ve been called worse, but Dan Klein makes sure that JobKilling.com delivers results as effectively as possible. With his team, Dan has perfected a system that leverages the power of online marketing to help thousands ditch their job and embrace financial freedom.
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Listen to the podcast here:
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Job Killing: Perfecting Systems For Financial Freedom with Dan Klein
We have the good fortune to be joined by none other than the legendary Dan Klein. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
For everyone who isn’t as familiar with your story, can you tell us a little bit about how you got started?
I was in the corporate world. I actually played Division I football at University of Oregon. I ended up hurting my shoulder. I ended up going the corporate route in sales in the motor home industry. Then 2008 came along and there were some financial issues and all of us got let go. I was one of the last guys standing in our management group. At that point I decided, “I’m done with giving my life away to some corporation that will literally cut my throat the minute something happens after serving these guys for so many years.”
I knew I could sell and it was really about finding my own vehicle. I saw a huge opportunity and market on the internet, specifically helping and serving local businesses. With the time that I spent in the car industry and working my way through management, we spent a lot of money on marketing and advertising in the traditional sense, I thought I knew what I was talking about marketing. I really didn’t at that point. I interviewed some local business owners and saw they really didn’t know what they’re talking about and specifically they didn’t know as it pertained to the internet. I didn’t know anything about at the time, but if I can learn a little bit about it, that’s something I could sell. That’s something that I could go out there and make a living and support my family. That’s how I got my start, how I cut my teeth.
Tell us a little bit about the cool stuff you’re doing now.
I jumped into the local space and I started out just doing email marketing. That was the initial vehicle that I was selling. All these brick and mortar businesses had walk through traffic and they weren’t gathering those people and communicating with them on any capacity. I started a business with my older brother, Mike. It was called Coupon Crusaders at the time and all we did was we charged businesses $250 a month. We’d help capture all the traffic that walk through their doors and then we’d send out email correspondence. We did well in that business. We built it up to a certain capacity where we’re cash flowing about $18,000 a month or so.
[Tweet “You’re losing money if you’re not doing something every minute of the day.”]
We started a business with all the emails that we had gathered through all these different companies we’re doing the service for. We transitioned more to that Groupon model as it was taking speed. I did over seven figures in sales in that. It was acquired the day Groupon went public. At that point, I had a non-compete and I couldn’t really play specifically in that space. I ended up getting deep and heavy into local lead generation. I had been dabbling with it since the time that I jumped into this whole internet space, but I never really understood it nor did I focus on it solely. I just started focusing on sending phone-driven leads to local business owners.
From there, things blossomed. It grew the income to about $38,000 a month. I partnered up with my current partner, Brad Campbell, who’s a very intelligent SEO master. I could tell he was a hundred million times smarter than me as it pertained to that stuff and I wanted to learn from him. We partnered up. He taught me what he knew. He was more focused on global marketing and ranking. I was more focused on the brick and mortar, the local guy in the market which was the low-hanging fruit, easy to do stuff that a guy like me could do. Job Killing, which is what we do now, sprouted from that. It is a training program. We train entrepreneurs our specific process of lead gen and how we help local business owners thrive by owning virtual properties online, developing them and then taking a sliver to deliver.
What do you wish you knew when you started that you know now?
If I would have worked like I worked now, I’ve never made more money in my life. Brad and I will do $400,000 to $450,000 a month in revenue. I’ve been going since 5:30 AM this morning, phone calls and radio interviews and Facebook. If I could go back in time and I can treat those first several years like I treat my time now, I think I would have hit some of those income strides that we’re hitting now. I don’t know if you watch the show Gold Rush. If you look at those guys and you look back when those guys started like Todd Hoffman and the guys, they didn’t treat every hour and every minute like it was their last. Now, they’re five or six years season and if their machine goes down, they’re counting the minutes until it’s back up, because they know every minute, every hour that they’re not running dirt, they aren’t making money.
I’m all about relaxing too, when your day is done, you can hang it up and do what you got to do, but when it’s time to rock, freaking get your calendar jacked. Get yourself totally dialed in to your day and put the blinders on and get to work. In a day’s time and you’ve probably seen this with your businesses as well, we have the capacity with the leverage of the internet in a day to make what some of us used to think was only possible to make in a year or two years. I think when you start putting your head around that and treating your time as this valuable resource, you’ll see this incredible jump in your business and that’s what we’ve seen. To answer your question, that’s probably the biggest thing I wish I would have started earlier on, was valuing my days and working my ass off, every day, every minute.
If you want to fast forward your results, you need to learn how to be your own lead generator.
With all the success you’ve achieved now, what’s your biggest challenge?
Time. I got up early and I have 730 unread emails. I don’t know how many unread Facebook messages. I’m trying to just knock down the time. Both my partner and I are a bit of perfectionist on keeping our hand really tight on everything we do. It’s just balancing time and figuring out that whole dance while keeping quality control at the highest capacity possible so people feel like they got served for what they paid for. That’s probably it. It’s a dance as you know, just figure it out as you go and just continue getting better. Like Oregon football’s motto, “Win the day.” That’s a good motto for everyone.
What are some of the successful case studies, one or two of them, where you’ve gotten great results for your client?
At JobKilling.com, we post a ton of them. We have hundreds of case studies where we actually interviewed the students on Google Hangout and let them walk us through the results instead of us just always talking about them. I’ve worked with 17-year olds who were still in high school and I started generating them $2,000 to $3,000 a month in income before even graduating to 72-year olds who had never done anything online before. We taught her a process and helped her generate her first dollar online. The ones that everyone loves to talk about, it’s the Cory Long’s of our group that came in and took a little bit of leap of faith with us to turn around and have a $20,000, $30,000 a month in revenue from the process and the skill set in the business model we’ve taught them.
[Tweet “You need a new set of skills that can be lucrative in nature.”]
There are so many case studies on our YouTube channel or on JobKilling.com. It’s clear because there are so many different walks of life. I think you probably agree with me on this. There’s so much garbage on the Internet and so many things of like, “How do you sift and sort through them?” Our biggest thing is skills pay the bills at the end of the day. We want to define ourselves with Job Killing, it’s not an opportunity. That’s really not what our game is. Our game is to take good people who are sick and tired of the rat race, sick and tired of the 9 to 5 and teach them a new set of skills.
Being not in that corporate, on the attractive resume and stuff like that, many people out there just need a new set of skills and specifically a set of skills that can be lucrative in nature. I think with business owners, they lack these skills. They lack this knowledge and know-how. They can’t stay up to speed. I’ve owned several small businesses myself and it’s tough to keep up. When we have those skills, when students can acquire these skill sets in this trade, it’s really cool because you feel like you taught them how to fish. Even after you’ve left them out of your grips, you know that they’re out there catching food for their family every day.
With all the information you must get bombarded with, how do you stay on top of it all? How do you balance all of that?
People are so jacked up in their mind on how much time stuff really takes. Everyone’s always blaming time. Time is not even here to defend itself. I’m all about speed. I’m all about keeping things simple and stupid. I’m not here to overcomplicate life or processes. In order to keep up with all the emails, you got to go fast. You got to not worry about your capitalization and punctuation. People get caught up with that stuff too much and they don’t get enough done in a day. If you could condense what you normally do in an entire month down to a day and start working in that capacity, it’s amazing what you can do.
I reference Oregon football a lot because that’s in my blood. My father played for them and I was able to play for them for a year. If you look at the Oregon Ducks, it’s all about speed. Chip Kelly, he signed with the 49ers, he brought this whole speed into football that no one had ever seen before. It revolutionized college football. They were doing things that they otherwise didn’t think were possible. I think when you take a step back and you identify how you’re operating your day, you can do so much. As humans, we have so much capacity to rock and roll, to move fast. It’s just a matter of surrounding yourself with other people that move fast. That’s how I personally deal with it is just light my hair on fire and go all day long. I think more people should do that. There days go by faster, the money is going to flow quicker and I think your business will thrive on a whole different level.
Job Killing: When you take a step back and really identify how you’re operating your day, you have so much capacity to move fast.
I know that you are a voracious learner. What are three of the best books you’ve ever read that had the biggest impact on your work?
Sell or Be Sold is probably one of my favorite books by Grant Cardone. I also love The 10X Rule. Chet Holmes’ The Ultimate Sales Machine. I love that book because I feel like Cardone’s stuff can be a little bit much. It can be a little bit aggressive and Chet Holmes brings it back a notch. He talks about the education and he talks about the different approaches that he utilized. Those are the three on the top that I constantly go back to and go through. I’m big on the sales side of things because I don’t think anything happens until sales happen. Those have been really crucial parts of my business and my success.
For those of us who are resonating with what you’re saying, who wants to learn more about you, and what you’re doing, where would be the best place to go to learn more about you?
Over at JobKilling.com. Our YouTube channel is also constantly day-by-day, new stuff, new trainings, and new techniques. We give a lot of stuff out for free. I would say 90% of our stuff is out on the web that you can take and utilize for yourself. Take the tidbits and snippets, and rock with them.
Thanks everybody for being here. Dan, thank you so much for an incredibly fascinating, high-energy, incredibly informative interview. We appreciate your very valuable time.
Thanks for having me, Seth.
Thanks everybody.
Links mentioned:
- Dan Klein
- JobKilling.com
- Sell or be Sold
- The 10X Rule
- The Ultimate Sales Machine
- YouTube channel – Job Killing
About Dan Klein
After leaving the car industry in 2008, Dan spearheaded two highly profitable online sales businesses peaking over seven figures in sales during the worst financial crisis of our time.
After the sale of his internet companies, Dan acquired three local businesses and entered the consulting realm. In mid-2014 Dan and a partner launched one of the largest world-wide local lead generation training companies to date; generating over $6 million in sales in less than 18 months. The company is jobkilling.com. and their mantra is “kill your 9-5”.
