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Part two, of our seven-part interview with Bob Regnerus of Feedstories.

Topics covered in this episode

• How Bob Co-Authored on Books with experts like Perry Marshall and Robert Skrob
• How Masterminds & Networking: Establishing Relationships with good people
• When Markets Shift: Hard times, Lessons Learned & Business Growth from it
• Investing in Flexibility

Transcription

Brian Part 2: Bob Regnerus of Feedstories, part two.

Hi, I’m Brian pombo Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

This is part two in the series of an interview that we had with Bob Regnerus. You can hear the whole interview over at BJPchats.com.

If you’d like to be on the show, or if you’d like to have me on your show, or have me speaking at an event, go to BrianJPombo.com.

And now here is part two.

Brain: So you’ve co-written books with some great names out there. You have a book out there with Robert Skrob, you got a book with Perry Marshall, how did you go about doing that?

How did you go about co-authoring, with people that had a name in a different area?

Bob: Well, in that case, it’s about relationships.

So you know, Robert Skrob is well known these days.

I knew Robert before he was Robert.

You know, one of the things I did early in my career, and I should say this, this is another thing I did is I took giant leaps by joining mastermind groups.

Not just like, hey, let’s get together on zoom five days a month. This is like, I paid Bill Glazer at that time, I think it was $12,000 a year.

Quoting Hamilton, I want to be in the room where it happens.

I was in there with people that were above my paygrade. But the reason I did that was I wanted the mentorship from a guy like Bill Glazer, mentorship from Dan Kennedy.

But then I wanted the relationships with people who are doing better than me. And there was some people that were below me, but when you’re in a group like that, it just pulls you forward.

And so that’s where I met a lot of people who I still consider friends and met friends that introduced me others.

By knowing Perry Marshall, I got to meet and become friends with Brian Kurtz.

I was in the same mastermind group as Ryan Deiss, before Digital Marketer was even a thought in his eye.

I got to know Jeff Walker before he was the Product Launch Formula genius.

So part of it is you know, there’s these names that we all kind of revere, they’re just normal people. But I got to know them, really, before they became famous, okay. And they’re all more famous than me by the way, which is fine with me.

But I really was intentional about joining those organizations, attending conferences and networking.

I’m not naturally drawn to do that. Like, I’m really good with talking and sharing what I know, I’m not really good at meeting new people, but I’ve had to force myself to do it.

So writing the check and taking the leap really, like makes you go, I’m gonna make the most of it. That’s kind of how it happened.

So I met Robert in a mastermind group.

Perry I met through a connection in my mastermind group, a friend of mine also knew Perry.

Perry and I live eight miles apart, literally, I can draw a straight line from my house to Perry’s. We spend quite a bit of time together, we became friends.

You know, a lot of it like yeah, there’s gonna be another wave. It’s like, there’s always new people coming in. So want to be friends with people who are driven, who are successful, that can challenge you that could bring you up, that could kind of pick you up when you’re let down.

That’s another thing that’s been really powerful.

My career is just establishing relationships with good people.

And I’ve come across people that frankly, were terrible for me. Learned my lessons from them. You know, fortunately I could cut bait and move on.

But that’s what the entrepreneur life is about is like, you’re constantly honing your radar and your sonar and everything.

And it’s not a straight line. There’s a famous meme where it’s like a squiggly line. I mean, that’s really what it’s all about these days. That’s just another way to kind of do something like that, you’re not going to just approach a Perry Marshall and say, hey, I’m gonna write a book with you.

You’ve got to have some cred.

You know, Perry’s got a reputation in mind. But Perry has been known to pull people up who are kind of unknown, who’ve proven they’ve got chops, but all of them kind of have already established a little bit of a foundation of expertise.

But if you can do that, I mean, you can find somebody to kind of pull you up to their stage, very powerful.

Brian: Yeah, that’s fabulous.

So many great nuggets in there, so many great ideas that you brought forth.

Taken in a different direction. You talked about the highs and lows, and we always tend to focus on the highs, it just makes sense to do that.

But give us an example of something that you just thought was going to end everything. Whether it’s something recent or something from years past, where you just had a scenario where it just felt like everything was going to come crashing down.

Bob: I’ll share an experience that happened during the real estate crash.

So 2008, 2009, I had been speaking, I had been riding the wave from a book. Like I said, I grown my agency to seven figures in a year, it was amazing. I had a great team, a lot of clients.

Well, what I ended up doing though is I had a stable of a lot of information marketing clients, and specifically, a good portion of them were marketing real estate stuff.

As you know, real estate was the thing that crashed the market in 2009.

There’s nothing like having all your clients suddenly run out of money and declare bankruptcy and not paying you.

In a span of about three months, my business went from a million down to like 150,000 a year, had to lay off my entire team. So I spent probably two months like just hovering in a corner. Literally, I spent a couple nights in the hospital panic attacks.

Not being able to pay your staff, having to lay off people you love and care about. It was awful.

But I was either gonna let it break me or I was gonna learn a lesson, I decided to learn a lesson.

I learned that I needed to be more diverse and my client base, I needed to have a stool that was more than one leg. All right, you can balance on a stool with one leg for a long time. But eventually, you’re going to break and you know, if something knocked that leg out, you’re gonna fall.

I diversified my client base, I diversified my services.

But the other thing was that I was flexible with my team.

So I don’t have employees anymore. But I have a large team of contractors that I could go up and down in terms of payment. Like if I’m busy, I could pay them more, get more hours.

But if things pull back, we slow down. I don’t have that big nugget, right, like of the payroll and the benefits and things like that.

So I said to myself coming out of 2009 to 2010, I’m going to be much more nimble in the future. I’m going to have a value of cash in my business, I’m not going to be living on credit. And I’m also going to have a team that’s very flexible.

So COVID hits, right. And I’m like, okay, you know, I was ready for this. We had cash in the bank. We had a team and we had some clients that kind of pulled back for a time, we were able to pull back contractors, so I was not out a bunch of money.

But what happened was is we actually had a service which is remote videos, like you and I are doing this video right now. We have a service that does video through an iPhone or iPad, high quality.

And all of a sudden, once people got over the shock of COVID come April this past year, a year ago, our lead list absolutely exploded.

People who were on the fence about doing video came out of the woodwork.

We actually had our three best months of our company’s career, April, May and June of last year, because we were poised, we were ready. We invested in a technology that we thought was going to be important. People kind of push it to the side and then there was an event we were ready for it. So I was really happy.

Obviously wasn’t happy about the world situation, a lot of things changed. But I learned my lessons 10 years ago and I positioned myself to be flexible to be nimble, to be you know, value cash to not have a big piece of overhead.

I survived a couple weeks of like, what the hell’s going on?

But then we were positioned to really like take advantage of what was going on to be ready for the marketplace. You learn that through experience. You know I could tell the story and people are gonna be like, that’s a great, Bob is already prepared.

The pain I had to deal with at the start of the decade to be ready for that was awful but never want to live through it. But I survived it and learn from it. I certainly wouldn’t want to go through it again. Which is why I made sure I was prepared for kind of the next big thing that came along.

For full conversations, go to BJP chats.com.