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Greg Preece's Operating Stack for His Big-Ticket Consulting Business

Give your customer one thing to do, make your products available globally, and meet your audience where they are.

While I’m out on paternity leave, enjoy this previously Superlogic-only segment, featuring YouTube creator Greg Preece’s Stack!

Greg Preece

In today’s Stack, we learn about the various tools Greg Preece uses to build his funnel for selling multi-thousand-dollar consulting packages.

I'm a believer that you've got to meet your audience where they are. My target customer is 40-plus entrepreneurs. They're probably not using Discord. They probably don't want to download Circle or any other separate app or create an account. They're already on Facebook and they're probably going on there every day. It seemed like the best place.

As a reminder, Greg is a long-time YouTube creator who’s built a successful YouTube strategy agency by leveraging YouTube and LinkedIn.

Greg’s funnel for his agency business uses a set of connected, automated tools. The steps can be broken down very simply:

  • Social content drives to landing pages

  • Landing pages collect emails in exchange for free educational PDFs

  • Email addresses are automatically sent to an email automation platform

  • Email automation platform automatically sends educational/marketing emails to prospective customers with community (Facebook) and booking links

  • Customers book YouTube strategy consulting through a payment link

  • Payment link then automatically sends them to a calendar booking

  • Calendar booking sends them a call link

Let’s get into it!

The Stack

Funnel Tools

Website / Landing Pages - Carrd 

Why not one of the many link-in-bio sites like Linktree, Stan, Koji, etc?

I don't like link-in-bios, as I'm a very much a supporter of the idea that you give your end viewer or end customer just one thing to do.

Why not one of the traditional builder like Squarespace or Wix?

I found web builders like Wix clunky and slow.

Why Carrd?

It's really great. I can copy and paste and set a new landing page up super quickly with that.

…I knew that I really just needed basic lean touchpoints for my business, and I didn't really need anything more than what Carrd was offering. It was it was light, simple, and quick to use.

Automation - Zapier

Zapier let’s him automate the connections between platforms, so that (for example) his website platform sends collected emails to his email platform, and his payment platform automatically sends a calendar booking link upon payment receipt.

Email - AWeber

It has really great automations. I find MailChimp to be TOO user friendly…Like how iPhones are designed for everyone and you can't really get in and do really technical detailed stuff, I think Mailchimp can kind of fall victims of that. It's just trying to be so easy to use and the email provider for everyone wheras with AWeber, I could really get it to do every sort of specific thing I wanted done.

…It's nearly as universally-supported with integrations as MailChimp appears to be with all other platforms, but it's a lot more customization on the backend. Segmentations, built-in landing pages, it displays data really well on the backend…it's just a really nice platform to use. It doesn't seem as clunky as Mailchimp.

Booking - Calendly

Payments - Stripe + GoCardless

  • Zapier connects Stripe to Calendly and Zoom to schedule a call and send a call link once a customer has bought a package

  • GoCardless is used to direct-debit clients, will just send money on the same day every month without the need for invoices.

Calls - Zoom

Membership - Uscreen

Why Uscreen?

It's about videos. It's kind of like your Netflix subscription, where you pay a subscription to access any video inside that membership area, but you can also attach documents to the videos like PDFs.

To be honest with you, I partnered with Uscreen, so I got given Uscreen free for a year and so that's kind of what led me into Uscreen, but I it was great because I added some features there that I didn't easily find in other platforms. Free trials being one of them - I can give people free trials who are in my funnel. I'd explored Patreon, but I didn't see an option to get people on a free trial for a month before they become paid customers.

Why not Patreon or YouTube Channel Memberships, which he had tried in the past?

I didn't have access to my audience's contact information…I left YouTube because I just didn't have the ability to broadcast to people when I was providing value. Not all of my audience knew about it because they weren't finding out from me about it.

I can't remember exactly why I didn't get on with Patreon. Maybe the free trial thing was one.

Community - Facebook

I'm a believer that you've got to meet your audience where they are. My target customer is 40-plus entrepreneurs. They're probably not using Discord. They probably don't want to download Circle or any other separate app or create an account. They're already on Facebook and they're probably going on there every day. It seemed like the best place.

Testimonials - Google My Business aka Google Business Profile

Business Management

Credit Card - American Express Gold

Bank - NatWest

These creator fintech companies have popped up, but a lot of those are US-only at the moment so we can't access them in the UK. I actually did some sponsorship deals with Creative Juice in the past, so I know their business model very well, but I can't access their product at the moment.

Accounting - FreeAgent

Content Creation

Video - Panasonic GH5

Audio - Rode Wireless Lav mics

I wanted a wireless lav, rather than one that was plugged into my camera, so that if I wanted to, I could walk around. I never do. But if I wanted to I could.

Editing - Adobe Premiere

Design - Photoshop

I've always used Adobe products - I was a photography hobbyist growing up, and I've always used Photoshop - so I just knew I would be staying in their ecosystem, and and using Premiere would be the best way for me to go with them.

Asset Management - Google Drive + DropBox

I use Dropbox for stuff but not for client work. I think it's just really easy to just upload to Google Drive and send people a link. It’s reliable.

With client work, all I'm doing is giving people something to receive from me to download.

Contrary to that, I've used Dropbox like if me and an editor were both working on a single file, we'd use that as our single file folder that we're working from, but with Google, when I'm just giving people stuff and they just need to receive it and maybe also load up something into that folder, it's just really easy to use. You don't need to download any software or anything to use it.

Project Management - Evernote

I did actually used to use OneNote back in the day, so I moved from OneNote to Evernote. I think Evernote just has way more features than OneNote. It just had massive multi-device support, like for my iPhone and my laptop and everything, so I can always just be working from whatever device I'm on….

I remember one of the things that set it apart back in the day as well was it had really good inbuilt search features in there, and had image to text reading technology so it was just a a real solid piece of kit.

Content Distribution - Direct to Platform

I think by using a single platform to post all your social content, you get drawn towards every platform being a carbon copy. You kind of lose the nuance and the subtlety of each individual platform. So I like to just use each platform a little bit differently - change the tone of voice for each platform and only use certain messaging on certain platforms.

You never really need more than the platforms themselves.

Team

Greg is currently a solopreneur, though in the past he had a team helping him.

As I grew as an entrepreneur, I realized that I was being wasteful with my resources. I didn't need to have the team members I did at the stage I was at with the business, so I streamlined.

I had an editor and I had a producer for the channel who would help with video ideas. Then we would speak to the editor and do revisions with the editor. I had someone do social media posts for me at one point because it was just so time-consuming, and I had a thumbnail designer as well. So quite a few people at one stage. I think the next hire will be an editor again, when I do rehire, but I was being too wasteful at the time. I didn't need those people for the for the size of business I was at.

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

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