Transforming Your Business Through Mentors, Modeling, and Masterminds with Roland Frasier

In this Episode

• [01:52] – We hear about how Roland got started in online marketing, and how he made the transition from law. He also discusses getting to know Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher.
• [08:04] – Roland talks about the War Room, a high-end mastermind for people who are doing business. The minimum to join is doing 7 figures a year in business, he explains, then goes into more depth about the group itself.
• [14:13] – Stephan reveals that he hasn’t participated in the War Room yet, but has been involved with Tony Robbins’ Platinum Partnership.
• [15:00] – What makes the War Room different from other high-level masterminds?
• [17:50] – Stephan steps in for a moment to talk about Tony Robbins.
• [19:03] – Network and perspective are major foundations, Roland says, and explains that the perspective offered in the War Room is invaluable.
• [20:10] – We hear about the fee for being in the War Room. Stephan then spends some time talking about The Society.
• [24:20] – What did the evolution of working with mentors look like for Roland?
• [28:49] – Roland talks about how to incentivize a mentor to work with you. He also explores the difference between coaches, mentors, and masterminds.
• [33:22] – Roland is mentoring his sons, but also tends to be fairly available to help people who ask. He doesn’t have any formal mentees, but has quite a few people to whom he provides ongoing support.
• [34:42] – We hear more about Roland’s business relationship with his 25-year-old son, who was interested in what Roland did from the time he was a teenager.
• [38:14] – Stephan discusses the importance of not giving handouts to people (particularly your children) too easily. Roland agrees, and elaborates on the point.
• [39:26] – Does Roland have his son pay to take part in War Room events? It’s a trade, Roland answers, and explains the arrangement they have.
• [40:50] – In response to Roland’s talk about his son, Stephan talks about his daughter, Chloe Spencer, who has actually been on Marketing Speak.
• [42:59] – Roland explains how his son found a business contact.
• [44:14] – We learn about Roland’s relationship with Frank Kern, who has become one of his closest friends.
• [46:31] – Stephan and Roland talk about the idea that you’re the average of the five people you hang out with the most.
• [48:27] – One of the key things Stephan uses when he’s deciding whether to hire someone is the “honesty test,” which he explains here.
• [49:40] – Roland offers some final advice.

—

Transcript

Welcome to Marketing Speak. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer. We have a great episode for you with Roland Frasier, principal partner at DigitalMarketer.com. DigitalMarketer may be a familiar brand to you because they produced the awesome Traffic & Conversion Summitwhich is coming up in just a few weeks. I’ll be there and I’m really looking forward to it. I have a limited number of discounted tickets available for listeners. If you’re interested, hit me up on the contact page at marketingspeak.com and we’ll hook you up. Digital Marketer may also be a familiar brand to you because we’ve had two different company guests from the company on previous Marketing Speak episodes, namely Molly Pittman and Christine Haas. If you haven’t heard those episodes, I encourage you to go back and listen to them, they are both awesome. On this episode, we are going to talk about mentors, modeling, and masterminds – the 3 M’s to transforming your business. Let me tell you a bit about Roland Frasier. Roland is principal at Idea Incubator which owns both DigitalMarketer.com and NativeCommerce.com.He, along with his business partners Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher, have four companies that are on the Inc. 5000 list. Roland started out in real estate at the young age of 18. He founded one of the top law firms in San Diego. He’s got a background in mergers and acquisitions. He’s run international hedge funds. He’s been involved in over 100 private and public offerings and he’s just going to knock your socks off. Roland, it’s great to have you on the show. You went from real estate to law to M&A to being business partners with Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher, two really big names in internet marketing. How did you get from there to where you are now?

Photography and things like that and a predecessor to Legal Zoom, a company that was doing that several years before they launched. I was familiar with online but it used to be significantly harder and more expensive to create sites and build those relationships than it is now. One of the things that I did when I really wanted to make the transition from practicing law as my primary thing that I did into marketing and online selling which is my main thing now, was to find the people that I thought were the best in the industry. I looked at all the people that were giving information about how to do things and I found a product called the Wholesale Traffic System, that was by Ryan Deiss and a person that was designated as Mr. X and it turned out that Mr. X was Perry. That was, I believe, the first product that they did together. That might have been 2008 that they did that. That was when I first found out about them and I heard that they had this thing called Traffic & Conversion Summit. I went to one and it just blew me away, I went as an attendee, didn’t know anybody at all. I was just blown away at the material. It was long, long days. It was much less well organized than it is now and so it started early and ran late and there were almost no breaks and you’re going to sit there with your hand cramping because you were taking so many notes and your legs crossed because you have to go the bathroom but you didn’t want to leave the room because you didn’t want to miss anything. These guys are obviously doing it. Everything that they talked about was from the experience that they had, the actual case studies of the things that they were doing. I was like I’d like to get to know these guys and I saw that they had a mastermind called The War Room which still exists today and that was their high end channel of access to get to talk to them in a small group of 20 people who are in it, who are doing stuff. I was like, that looks interesting. In the first year, I talked to some of the people that were members and I was like gosh, I’m just so busy with other things right now. I don’t think I’d have the time to get that much out of it and so I didn’t join the first year and then I went back to the next one. I think that was either the first or second Traffic & Conversion Summit at that point that they put on. I think we’re going in the year eight or nine now. I made it a point when the next year rolled around, I was like I have to join that. I went with the specific intention of joining because I knew that they’d created that as a way to get to know them better and work with them and have insider access. I joined and it was just fantastic, from the very first meeting to on and on and on. I just met so many cool people who are doing things and it was really great to up my game by getting to work with those folks. I went with the intention to the very first meeting, they had this thing called The Wicked Smart Contest and Wicked Smart is where each person who is a member of the mastermind submits an idea of something that’s working, not an idea but like a case study of some cool thing that they’re doing that’s working and the whole group votes on it and whoever gets the most votes wins the Wicked Smart Award. I was like, I’ve got to stand out because I want to do business with these guys. I want to get noticed so I’ve got to win that. I just dug down into everything that I was doing and found the three coolest things I was doing and took them with me. When the Wicked Smart Contest rolled around at the end of the meeting, I submitted those ideas and everybody was a pretty good vote in my favor to win and I won. Perry came over after and said, “Hey man, when we go down later tonight, I want you to sit next to me. I want to talk to you, get to know you better.” I got to know Perry a little bit better then and we ended up becoming really, really good friends. He’s definitely the brother from another mother for me. We ended up going on a cruise together with our families and getting to know each other. I met Ryan and got the chance to get to know him a little bit better and his family. We just hit it off and that was the case for maybe three years and they had brought in a CEO who had an opportunity to acquire equity in the company and they had some challenges with that, some other things along the way, and I was just there helping them, giving them advice, my legal background obviously helped. I’ve done a whole lot of business for a lot of years. I just became a trusted adviser and when the opportunity came, when the CEO had an equity option and when that went away, and the equity on the cap table opened up, they looked at me and said, hey if you’re interested in coming in, we’d really like to have you as a partner. I bought in and that was officially January of 2013. I went from customer to event attendee to mastermind member to partner in that succession and then ever since then, we all get along very well and they’re just brilliant marketers and great businessmen and good friends. It’s a wonderful situation.

That’s awesome. Let’s talk a little bit about the War Room because I bet some of our listeners are not familiar with that even with just a concept of joining a high end mastermind. What’s the price points? How often do you meet? What value do you get out of spending that kind of money? Do people tend to be in it for many years or just do it for a year and then get back to business as usual? How does that all work?

Sure. That’s one I can talk a lot about because that’s one of the things that I run. The War Room, it is a high end mastermind for people who are doing business. Most of the people who are in there are not startups or they are funded startups, they’ve got a lot of experience with business, they’ve done several things and they got funding. The minimum to join is that you’re doing seven figures a year in business. We want people who are actually doing things or who have done things and are now about to do something new that they’ve actually got funded. It’s evolved a lot over that last several year. Since I came on board, we originally had, when I joined, it was 20 members and they had two groups of 20 members that met three times a year for three days. What we found was that after you’re a member for a few years in that small group, you really know everybody and the conformance with everybody and stay in touch and so it’s nice to get together during those times in that formal atmosphere but there is not a lot of new information and new contacts that are coming in. We experimented with several different sizes over the last several years and for the last two years, we’ve been pretty happy fixing the total number of members at 100. The way that the events were, we meet four times a year now for two days. We get to meet a little bit more often, we have members coming in and going out at any given time which is pretty cool. We sell it about four times a year. The retention rate with the smaller group was around 95%. When you have more people, you get people that’ll join just to come in for a year two to get contacts and then go on and do other things. We got people that have been in ever since the beginning. But consistently, we’re probably in the 65%-70% rate of people who are just never going to leave and then we have maybe 30%-35% that are turning over at any given time. Format wise, we’ve experimented with a lot of different things and people. It’s not really a mastermind if you got 100 people. It’s true. It’s not one of the things where you sit down, the original structure was you would go in the room and each person will go up to the board and write an issue that they had like I need to get more traffic or my conversion rates have fallen or my email are not getting delivered or whatever. And then, they would assign an A, B or C depending on how critical or how urgent it was. And then we would go around A being the most urgent, C being the least. We go around and aggregate all the A’s, go through those, and the Bs and Cs. Each person would get up for 20 minutes say this is our challenges and we’d look around the room say does anybody have direct experience solving that challenge and then if they did, we would contribute. Then Ryan or Perry, Ryan and Perry or I and Frank Kern ultimately became principals of that group as well. If we can, then we try to solve that problem there and then after that problem is resolved the person would share what’s working for them. The newer format in the larger group lead two tables, maybe a table of 10 or 12, how many people are attending and it’s a principle of that partner or employee who they primary represent. We want people that have something to contribute. The goal is very, very contributory, not just come and sponge up all the information and then go away. Everybody signed this confidentiality agreement so nobody is going to come in and learn what you’re doing and go teach it to a bunch of other people or steal it and compete with you directly. We have had a couple of instances to ask someone to leave. We’ve had maybe four people over the four years that I’ve been there that we’ve said, hey, this really just doesn’t seem to be a fit. We monitor the group pretty well. Everybody’s really cool and everybody’s really generous with everything. Every time that I go, I learn just so much and the number of contacts that you have in your network can be amplified so dramatically because you got so many people there who know so many people. My son just recently did a starter with a YouTube star that he partnered with for a workout supplement. He was looking for a manufacturer. He’s like who should I get to manufacture this? I said I don’t know but ask this guy, this guy and this guy. We’ve got Ezra Firestone who’s a big e-comm guy and Edokeef and a couple of other folks. I just sent him to those people and he had six manufacturing quotes and had a deal within a week. The resources that you have when you’re in a group like that. I’m not just talking about War Room, I’m obviously very pro War Room because I was a customer and now I’m a principal but I honestly haven’t found the mastermind that I thought was as good for getting those kinds of marketing in business contacts and information and all that. Format-wise, what we normally do is either one of the four of us or five of us, Richard Lindner who’s a principal and idea incubator as well and then virtual marketer. We’ll get up and give some information about what’s working really well for us. The last event, for example, Frank Kern got up and said I’ve totally owned continuity now, I’ve got this new program, I took it up from zero to $400,000 a month within the last four months and here is exactly how I did it, what I’m doing. And then everybody asks questions and stuff or we’ll have all of our employees, especially when we do the event in Austin. We do it in California twice a year, in Las Vegas once and then Austin once. Our chief product buyer who goes and buys in China got up and said this is how to negotiate deals and our content manager who manages all our content communities will get up and say this is how we’re doing that. Our affiliate manager will say, here’s how we’re kicking butt on the affiliate front and what we’re doing. That’s really cool and that’s 40%, 30% of it is that presenting here’s what’s working now for us and then the other members, if they’ve got something cool, they’ll get up and share something. We still do the Wicked Smart Competition but now you have 100 people contributing ideas. They always leave with this long list of stuff to implement. And then the rest of it, we just split in the tables-that are topic tables. We’ll have one that might be webinars, one that might be physical product sales and one might be buying and selling companies or getting money, those kinds of things. People would just flip from table to table and discuss those topics and get what they need out of it and then the rest of it is all networking and getting to know each other better.

That sounds awesome. I’ve done a number of masterminds. I haven’t done War Room yet. That’s been on my list of ones to consider. For example, I’ve done Tony Robbins’ Platinum Partnership and that’s a very pricey one.

That’s like $75,000-$80,000, right?

Yeah. That’s just the membership fee and then the trip fees are an additional usually $12,000 each trip. It adds up to probably $130,000 a year. I did that for three years and it was life changing, business changing, amazing. I’m a big fan of masterminds. What makes War Room different and better from other masterminds like Mavericks, there’s a whole bunch of them out there.

I think you can get something different from each one. I get invited to speak at a lot of masterminds and again if you would like, I would be very happy to have you come as our guest out to January 31st and February 1st in Las Vegas. We are doing the next War Room. If you would like to come, then consider yourself invited. I think different ones do different things. Jeff Walker’s got one for product launch managers. If I wanted to do product launches and be a product launch manager, I would probably join that. From a networking standpoint, I have not had a chance to attend but several of our members are members of Joe Polish’s Genius Network and they said, from a tactical and strategic standpoint, it’s not really amazing but to get to anybody, Joe seems like he just knows everybody on the planet and will just sit there and open his rolodex for you. I’ve heard a lot of good feedback on that. If I was looking to expand my network, I probably would join the Genius Network.  If I was in the health industry, selling supplements, I’d probably join Ed O’Keef’s Time Collapsing Mastermind because he’s got all the top guys and gals that are in that. If I wanted to do personal development, Glen Ledwell who owns Mind Movies has a mastermind called The Flight Club and I’d probably join that. But for just straight out marketing tactics and strategy and business tactics and strategy for people who are actually doing stuff, I think that’s the USP for War Room. It’s just a group of 100 people that are taking names and doing stuff and like I said, from that standpoint of going in and saying I want to grow my business, I’ve just not experienced anything close to it yet, though I do keep looking. All the ones that I mentioned I think were fantastic and I had been to Kennedy’s Mastermind, I don’t know if he’s still teaching it or not but I know Ryan and Perry and Frank were all members of that for a while and said that they made a lot of good connections there as well. But I think he’s moved out of that and it’s done by maybe Dave Dee or somebody else, I’m not sure. Tony was actually a client of mine when I was practicing law for years and years and years, when he was doing the Personal Power Infomercials with Cathy and all that, we developed the legal and structured all those deals and lots of acquisitions and things like that, lots of licensing and I think Tony is just an absolute genius and the events are a little too rara for me but like him as a person to sit down and talk with which I never go to his mastermind things but I would imagine if you get time to talk to him, I know from my experience, he’s a pretty amazing guy with lots of contacts and ideas and things like that as well.

It’s pretty mind blowing talking to him and I got to know him a little bit from being a Platinum partner. In fact, he invited me to speak multiple times at the Business Mastery event he puts on in Vegas. I spoke two different years at Business Mastery. It’s incredible. Speaking to him, and his business acumen, but also his perspective on life and growth and yeah, he’s got an amazing rolodex and so forth like the platinum trips we would have. One that was dedicated to financial growth every year and he would have people like billionaire T. Boone Pickens come and speak in person. It’s a pretty big deal to have somebody who’s a billionaire come and spend time at a mastermind teaching killer stuff that you’d see Boone on TV and he’d share his ideas about where oil is going and so forth but then to be able to ask questions and get the direct unfiltered opinion on where things are heading. It’s pretty amazing. It sounds like you get some of that with War Room too.

We definitely do. That’s the big thing. When you really get past the basics, everything comes down to network and perspective and being able to have the perspective of people who are doing things that are a little bit beyond where you are right now is just so invaluable to your business. That’s one thing War Room has and it sounds like that’s what you are able to get out of Tony’s thing. To me having those – mentors, masterminds and modeling is my triumvirate of things that really help you grow and get ahead. I’m a big fan of all of those. If you can use masterminds to access people who could become mentors and then model them then you’ve got all three of those wrapped up in one.

I like that. Masterminds, mentor and modeling. Cool. We’ll circle back on that in a minute. But before we do, I want to disclose out this topic of masterminds with price points. Are the multiple price points for forum or is it just one fee and that’s it?

It’s one fee that can be paid either two ways. It’s either $25,000 as the single payment or $30,000, I think that’s a four pay or a five pay.

Okay. That’s right in line with the number of other masterminds like Genius Network. It’s $25,000 I believe as well. I can’t remember what Yanik Silver’s Mavericks is but…

Oh, Mavericks. I forgot, you mentioned that. That one seems to be really good if you want to do experiential things. They’re very into going and doing things together like flying airplanes and things like that. I think that’s really cool if you’re looking to do that kind of stuff. For me personally, I’m just all about the let’s get in, let’s deal, tell you what’s working and let you go do it. But because I’m pretty full with stuff like that anyway but I have heard nothing but good things from the folks that belongs to Yanik’s things as well. That’s a good one for you to mention.

I’ve had that kind of experience too with on the mastermind I didn’t mention but I will now, it’s called The Society which is Neil Strauss’s Mastermind. He has 100 guys in it and you meet four times a year. The experiences you get are out of this world. There was one intensive that was called The Urban Escape and Evasion Intensive. We learned how to pick blocks, pick handcuffs, get out of handcuffs, padlocks, I could pick those and door locks, I could start cars with jiggler keys after that intensive. It’s pretty out there. I learned how to break out of zip ties if you get your wrists bound with zip ties, like you get kidnapped. I know how to get out of it. It’s going to hurt, I’m going to be a little bit bloody but I’ll be able to escape. You see, you will learn all these stuff over a couple of days. Then on the third day, we were kidnapped, hooded, handcuffed to the inside of a serial killer van, we were tazed and we had to escape out of the van, escape across town without ID, credit card, money, we had a social engineer our way across town like getting rides or asking for money and stuff. Really emboldened me for one to be able to go up and ask somebody for money, I’d never done that before, or for rides. You’d be surprised how far you can get, it’s pretty incredible. If you don’t need the money, people just seem to want to give you money but if you need the money then it’s just everything. You dress up nice and people give you money, you just have to ask for it. The whole process, we had to avoid getting snatched by bounty hunters who were after us the whole time after we’d escaped out of the serial killer van, that white windowless van, and we had to follow clues and get to the end and we were competing against other teams. My team of three came in first place which is pretty awesome. It was a lot fun.

That sounds like a really cool experience.

Each intensive is different from each other that there is one NLP, one Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Howie Mandel’s brother, Mike Mandel, who is a master NLP practitioner came and taught that and we learned all this ninja stuff about persuasion and influence and hypnotizing people and so forth. It’s so cool. That’s a very experiential kind of mastermind. If listeners are interested in learning about that, it’s The Society International. Moving off of masterminds now. I like the 3Ms that you were talking about, masterminds, mentors and modeling. Let’s talk a bit more about mentors. Who were your mentors? You started at 18 years old doing real estate and somebody must’ve mentored you at the beginning when you were still a teenager for you to be such a go getter and start building wealth at a young age. What did the evolution of working with mentors look like for you?

It’s been pretty constant throughout my entire professional career. It’s finding people who have already done what I want to do. Before I learned the word modeling which I learned from Tony, I was doing that. If there’s somebody who you want to be, get to know them and then do what they do. It sounds ridiculously simple but it is. When I first got my real estate license when I was 18, I had a friend who was about 10 years older than me who was developing neighborhoods. I was like, that’s super cool. He was doing really well and I found out how he was doing it. He was going in and raising money from investors and then buying land and then getting entitlements meeting, changing the zoning from agricultural or rural to commercial and then using investor’s money to go in and develop them either for commercial like shopping center type things or for developing residential communities. I got my license because I knew that if I was buying the land, I could get a commission and have some money to work with myself and use that commission to reinvest with my investors to get a piece of the deal. I did my very first deal with him, was a small piece of land that we divided into eight lots and then built houses on and that was really cool. I only made maybe $40,000-$50,000 off of it. I got to remember, that was a long time ago, that was 1982, it’s a long time ago. For an 18 year old who was making his money by playing out in clubs every night from 9PM-1AM or 2AM for $500-$600, that was a pretty good hit. He was probably my very first business mentor other than my father. My father was an attorney and still is to this day and a real estate investor and a business investor as well. I had a pretty good experience growing up, seeing what he was doing and was very much interested in being a part of that and he was kind enough to share his wisdom with me as well. I’d say probably my father and the real estate guy were my first two. Maybe in the mid ‘80s, I met an investment banker form New York. The Wall Street guy for Prudential Securities and he was somebody who was doing leverage buy outs and I had a company that my father had invested in that we really wanted to take to the next level. I went out and was able to strike up a relationship with this guy and learned a tremendous amount about what to do and what not to do and we did several leverage buy outs together over the next 10-12 years. That also caused me to get my securities license and my insurance licenses so that I could participate in those kinds of deals. Those were really early on mentors and I’d say they were for several years and then I learned quite a bit when I passed the bar and was beginning practicing law. Pretty early on in that career, we picked up Tony Robbins as a client and obviously I learned a tremendous amount from him and his right hand man at the time whose name is Sam Georges and then from there it’s really been business people I’ve met along the way. I have a neighbor who just did an investment round in one of our companies. He lives right down the street and just being here in this area where there are so many smart business people around who are doing cool things has been a really good source. You mentioned how valuable it is to talk to billionaires. I have a couple of people who are billionaires in both real estate and business, who have been very, very helpful in providing insight and knowledge and contacts to get to the next level. One guy I met in law school, two people actually. My Dean in law school was a very experienced business person and actually Therese, one of my professors who was a telecommunications guy and then they introduced me to one of the founders Crocs kid’s husband’s was a super big mover and shaker and that was a really good connection for me as well.

When you get mentors, do you pay them for their time? Do you give them a piece of your deals? If you’re starting out, let’s say our listeners are really keen to get a mentor but getting somebody of really high caliber who will spend the time with you is not easy. How are you incentivizing this mentor to work with you because they are going to invest a lot of time.

I have an interesting philosophy on that. I think that there’s a difference between coaches, mentors and masterminds. If I’m looking to grow and find somebody that I can model and somebody that’s really I’m going to have a mentor relationship with, then I don’t think that mentorship should be paid. I know a lot of people would disagree with me but I think coaching should be paid. I think then you’re paying for specific tactics, techniques and strategies and time to improve yourself. Mentorship to me, and I’ve seen studies on this as well that paid mentorships typically fail because the real value in the mentorship isn’t coaching. The real value in the mentorship is vulnerability and unfiltered access to the way that those folks are thinking and their experiences. You just don’t get that if you are in a paid relationship. My mentorships have never been paid, they’ve been let’s work together and let me find. I’m always about giving value without an expectation before I ask for anything ever. There is a really famous copy guy, you may have heard his name Gary Halbert and I wanted to get to know Gary. The very first place that I’ll go if it’s somebody that I have no connection with at all. Which channel have they created for accessing them that is paid? Gary had a thing for $25,000 where you would go down to Florida and hang out with him for three weeks or something like that and he would train you to become a copywriter. I’d been writing copy for a long time so I saw that he had written that and I wrote to him and I said, hey I see you got this $25,000 copyright thing, I’m interested in doing it. He was like, wow! If you really want to do it then send $25,000 to this and we’ll see. Most people just say they do and they never do anything. I say, okay, I write him $25,000 and he was shocked and I said when do we go? And he was like come on down so I went down to Miami and met with him and we met in the coffee shop and he is just gruff, grumpy, nice, smart but gruff and grumpy kind of guy and he is like here is the thing, write me a copy for this thing and tell me when you’re done tomorrow or whenever, just call me and we’ll get together and I’ll look at it. I went back in and I wrote and I called him about an hour later and he was like, oh, that’s going to suck. We came over to my hotel and he read it and he’s like, why the fuck did you hire me to teach you copy for? You know how to write copy. I was just like, well, I really just wanted to get to know you because I thought we might be able to do something together. He laughed and said that’s really smart and we ended up becoming friends and I ended up speaking on a couple of his things, we ended doing some things together and it was really a great way to get to know him. I think starting, like with Ryan and Perry, because those guys, Perry is a brilliant businessman and Ryan is too and so I learned a lot from them in the things that they’re really good at so I would consider them friends and mentors as well and as partners. All of those started by saying, okay where’s the channel that they’ve created? I’m not the person that goes up and crowds around after somebody speaks and I’m just another one of the people looking for free advice. I was like hey, I realize your time is valuable, I’m willing to make a bet. I guess that’s the distinction I make. I make a bet that I can get to know this person and that I can show them that I have enough value to bring to them that there will be relationship if I get to do a transaction with them. Which is actually a really good point for me to bring out is that I always believe that the most important thing in any business deal is getting from talking about doing something, to having transaction done as quickly as possible because then you go from wannabe, maybe, possible, potentiality to business partner or customer and I can get from customer or business partner to wherever I want to go a whole lot faster than I can if I’m just one of the cloying masses looking for free handouts.

The principle of taking massive action which is a big thing for Tony Robbins. You take massive action. Who are you mentoring? Hopefully passing the torch a bit because you got some great mentors through your years. Sounds like you’re mentoring your son.

Definitely. Both my boys for sure and then I have lots of folks that ask, and I am pretty available to help folks out. Again, I find that you put good things out into the world and good things come back. There are probably 20 or 30 people that I give advice and information to regularly but aren’t on any kind of paid thing. I typically turn down paid stuff for doing that because I don’t really want to be tied into it. My schedule’s pretty erratic. I don’t have anybody formally that I would say that we’re in a “mentorship program” but definitely have lots of folks that I provide continuing help to along the way and it feels good to do that and I can’t tell you how many times it ends up that they come back then there’s some deal that they’re doing that they want to do with me or they introduce me to somebody or they just send me an amazing bottle of wine. All that is wonderful.

How does it work with your son? The one that’s working with the YouTube star with the health supplements. Are you spending time every week with him or every day? Do you bring him with you to conferences and stuff? How does all that work?

It’s a really good question. He’s very much a self starter. He was interested in attending meetings early on. He is 25 now and he was 15 when I met him. He’s my step son. I didn’t have any of my own kids. He pretty quickly I would say, maybe as early on as 17 or so, was interested in what I was doing and wanted to sit in on meetings and I welcomed that and invited him all the time. Actually both of them, the other one was several years younger. He started by just attending and he’d be on his phone the whole time, texting and stuff and not paying attention and never saying anything but he wanted to go. And then maybe after two years, and I always invite him to the events and he was interested. He plays guitar and I am a recovering musician myself so I have all kinds of guitars and keyboards and bass guitars and recording equipment. When we would do little events, I would do my own AV because I had all that stuff and I just hire somebody to run it and he wanted to learn how to do that. He learned to do that first and then he started running the AV for me at these little events and then when he was there he was stuck listening with speakers and he had to pay attention because he had to be on and offing the mic when they were speaking and stuff. It started sinking in, he started asking questions and then he wanted to go to more of the meetings but also more of the events even when he wasn’t doing that and he wanted to go to the mastermind things. He’s really taking the initiative, I’m not good at leading somebody along and saying these are the times you need to do that, you need to go to this things but if you sit down and ask me, I’m very good at taking the time and making my focus only on you to do that. He’s able to do that on a regular basis. We see each other all the time and so I would say many times a week, any time that he runs into a snag he’ll ask me and say how I can I do this or how can I do this better? Do you know anybody that can help me with this? That kind of stuff. And he goes to all of our mastermind events and all of our other events. Usually if I’m speaking nearby, like anywhere in Southern California or Nevada, he’ll come along as well. He gets a lot out of that. That was really what lead him to decide he wanted to do this, he knows a lot of the guys on YouTube that are into the things that he’s into and he wanted to do something that he was passionate about. He certainly say that all my life, do what you’re passionate about because then you don’t work. He, just out of the blue without even asking me anything about it, emailed or texted or whatever this guy who was one of the guys that he followed and said, hey I think you’re missing an opportunity, you can be doing this and this too and the guy was like, right, next time we’re in LA let’s meet. He went up to Los Angeles and met with him and I actually met with the guys with him and they talked and then after that they put their deal together and I gave him some pointers on it and they just did a kickstarter last month and they were trying to raise $25,000 and they end up raising $50,000 something. It was really, really cool to watch that and I don’t have a specific amount of time. I just say, hey I’m here when you need me. Don’t ask me stupid things that you can find out yourself but I’m here to help with any connection, with any relationship, and with any advice that I can anytime that you need it. And he’s been very, very good in respectful to that as have all the other folks who I hear from time to time.

We don’t want to give him a hand out and say here’s the solution for you. They need to earn it. This is a concept I learned from Kabbalah, it’s called Bread of Shame. If you basically hand it to the person, if it’s your child or a sibling or some other relative or friend or whatever, you’re basically doing work for them, then that creates not just dependency and so forth but that gift that you’re giving comes with side effects.

It does. It’s actually harmful. I learned from the method of teaching with law school is called the Socratic Method where you don’t tell anyone anything, you only ask them questions that lead them to the conclusions that you want them to learn. That’s my approach as well. I agree 100% that that is the best way to go otherwise you’re not really helping them along the way.

Also, I really like that. Letting him take initiative, it’s up to him to tag along to get the knowledge and everything. I’m curious, do you have him pay for his own travel expenses to get to the events? Does he have to pay some amounts to be part of the mastermind like be part of War Room or is that all completely free for him?

It’s a trade. He helps with audio visual stuff, he helps with editing and he runs the website for War Room for me. He trades me for the things that he does and he always offers to pay but I don’t let him pay for travel because I feel like that’s my investment in him is I want him at those places and I want to remove all the friction I can and I know that he’s getting stuff out of it because I see him doing it and he’s always eager in offering his help to me to do things that he’s better at than I am. He can create way better, more pretty power points than I can, he’s really good at design and stuff like that. Perry’s told me that I have the design I have a trucker, it’s good to have that.

Haven’t heard that before. That’s funny. That’s really cool because I like that he is invested in it through a barter arrangement because as they say when you pay, you pay attention. I have gifted to staff, for example UPW (Unleash the Power Within), the Tony Robbins four-day event and one guy, he skipped out on day four which is all about health and longevity and he completely skipped out on it. He is like, well, I had to go somewhere. Like really?! So that was the last time I gifted anybody a free Tony Robbins event, really irritating. The whole story of what you’re doing with your son is really amazing and it really parallels the experience that I have had with my oldest daughter. Her name is Chloe, I’ve actually had her on the show. I’ve interviewed her, it’s a really great episode. She’s 25 now as well and she started doing SEO and online marketing stuff at 14 so around the same time as your step son. With my daughter Chloe, she was a real go getter. My other two daughters weren’t really that interested. What really sparked it for Chloe was her hearing me talk about several websites that made five figures a month that I built just as passion projects and they’re making money off the ads service, bed and breakfast directory called Insight. There was a writer’s community and directory called writers.net and she wanted to do something like that. Her passion at that time was Neopets, virtual pet site by Nickelodeon and I just walked her through what to do and she did all the work and then she started speaking at conferences and started blogging for The Huffington Post and then she got written up by newspapers and stuff. It was pretty amazing what she was able to accomplish at a very young age. Her first speaking gig was at 16 and at 25 now she’s got her own SEO consultancy. It’s a lot of fun but you got to have some structure or some rules around what you do with your kids so that you’re not just giving them essentially handouts. She really has to work for the time that she gets with me. She gets really valuable insight in how to build her business, how to leverage, how to hire staff from the Philippines and so forth. I shortcut the process for her but she still has to put in the work.

Absolutely. I think that’s critical. That’s so smart.

How did your son find the YouTube star to partner with? The guy in LA?

It was just somebody that he follows. He’s into Olympic Weightlifting and this is one of the leading guys who has an Olympic Weightlifting Channel. He started as a customer and a consumer of those stuff then then just reached out. When he saw an opportunity, which I’ve always said, when you see the opportunity, don’t be shy. He’s very shy so this was an amazing thing for him the first time that he did that to reach out and take an initiative and he’s done it several times since and now he’s got a whole bunch of opportunities. It’s really cool though. It was somebody that he was following and watching and consuming the information of and he is like you know, you could do this better if you did this, this and this. He sent him a message and the guy was like, okay, I’ll talk about that and there you go.

That’s another great principle too, give before you get.

Yes. Always.

It wasn’t like, hey I see an opportunity for us to work together. Here is something that might help you. That’s great. Earlier in the episode interview, we’ve talked just really briefly about Frank Kern being part of War Room and you’ve worked with Frank often. What’s been your relationship with Frank? He’s a pretty big name too in the internet world.

Frank is a really good friend. Frank’s wife, Natalia and my wife Donn are very, very good friends and he lives right down the street and we hang out quite a bit. He’s just a funny, super nice guy who also happens to be very, very smart. Initially, I saw his mass control thing and bought it, thought it was really great and then went to one of his events and then didn’t see him much until he came by the Grand Del Mar here in San Diego for an event that we were doing for a product that I had put together called The Equity of Investor Network where we taught people how to buy and sell businesses using the scales that they had from a marketing standpoint. He didn’t come buy it for anything other than to say hi socially since he was on the neighborhood and Ryan and Perry knew him very well. I met him there and he ended up moving from La Jolla into Ranch Santa Fe, where I live and moved into the neighborhood that I’m in. He was literally a neighbor down the street and we just got to know each other a little bit better through that and socially. He was having an event but I forget which one it was but we were doing a thing on building funnels and he said watch, come down and talk to my people about that and I did and then a lot of people were interested in the program and he said maybe we should work together on it and I was like yeah we should do that. We ended up having a partnership, this is probably back in 2012 maybe. We had a partnership on a funnel building program called Funnel Experts and grew it from nothing to about capped down around $550,000 or $600,000 a month. Just got to know each other better and then as his wife and my wife got to be better friends, that obviously helps because the you can travel together and do cool things and he’s just become a really good friend. It’s kind of interesting that the neighborhood that I’m in here in San Diego, I’ve got Frank right down the street and John Assaraf, he’s a brain guy from the secret right down the street and Mandy Jenkins is a video guy right down the street and all these people are right here and everybody knows each other and hang out and find yourself at dinners and talking business and social stuff. That’s just really cool. Our relationship there I’d say he’s probably one of my closer friends.

That’s great. Having friends that are people that in some ways at least you want to aspire to be like is really important. I forgot who said that you’re the average of the five people you hang out with the most. That’s Jim Rohn who said that.

That’s a very, very true statement in all aspects of your life. You got to watch health and financial and business and professional and spousal, familial. All of those things are different areas. If you’re hanging out with folks that are really not hitting the things that you want to be then you might want to evaluate how that’s impacting you and your experience in that particular area of your life.

I’ve really taken that on board of creating a powerful peer group because it’s like through osmosis, if you are not even just getting teachings or insights from these people which of course is going to happen anyways but just like through having a higher standard because these are people who operate at that standard and you just elevate your standards as well automatically.

Exactly. You mentioned T. Boone Pickens and one of the things that I read in his autobiography a long time ago that truly impressed me about his relationship with his wife was he said when I’m out travelling and I’m with all this oil guys and everything they’re always going out to bars and strip clubs and things like that, and he said, I don’t go because I don’t want to put myself ever in a position even of jeopardizing or being looked at any way other than I want to be looked at with respect to my relationship with my wife. I was like, that’s awesome. That’s a guy that I really look up to for that and I think it’s a good practice.

It’s a really great integrity and that’s one of the most important things is to pick people who are integress and honest. That’s one of the key things I used to determine if I’m going to hire somebody. It’s called the honesty test and I just slip it into the interview. I just ask something to the effect of tell me what do you think is the most important attribute or quality for this role? Is it attention to detail? Is it honesty, creativity, dedication? I give a handful of different things and the only right answer is honesty. They’ll give some answer that like, well, I really think attention to detail is super important for this role as your virtual assistant. That was the wrong answer, but I don’t tell them that. It’s so important. If you don’t have somebody who’s honest and has that integrity, nothing else. You can teach people the skills but you can’t teach them to be honest. We’re about out of time. If you wanted to share one last gold nugget of something that somebody who’s listening take away and implement next week and get a pretty fast return from, what would it be?

Probably the most overlooked two things that I think are really critical. The most overlooked thing I think is not paying attention to the customers that you’ve got and focusing most of your efforts on getting new customers which is such a mistake because the customers that you’ve got statistically are worth somewhere between three and five times a new customer. That’s in taking a look at all of the customers that you’ve got and what else can you provide to them to serve them in a good way that will also bring additional money to you would be something that I think everybody should look at. The second thing is follow up on every funnel, every bit of marketing, every sale that you’ve got. We have autoresponders and follow up systems built in and that has been more than half of our business is in the follow up. I would say if people are looking for ways to have an immediate impact on their bottom and top lines, building follow up structures into the things that they’re selling in the funnels that they’ve got into the efforts that they’re making in the sales process is really, really important and that you probably don’t have enough follow up in that. Somebody might say woah, I offer for sale this widget and if they don’t buy the widget, then I have an auto responder sequence that’s 17 emails that offers them this other widget. That’s great but that might not be the ideal way to do that follow up. You might be better off saying I don’t need 17 swipes at selling this one thing, I’m actually just going to probably annoy people if I do that. I either need a different angle of approach for that so that I can say maybe the first approach was it helps you make more money but the second is that it makes you happier and the third that it makes you healthier. I’m just making those up. The other thing is if you have multiple products that you can offer, then don’t take 17 swipes at the same product, take 6 swipes at the 6 products that you’ve got. You do your initial offer and they don’t take it, give them a day or two off then offer them product number two and then give them a day or two off then offer them product number three and so on and so forth. But your follow up sequence should have all of those products that might be a benefit to them in it. Don’t just follow up partially, follow up completely. Play the long game.

Test those follow up sequences too so that you can optimize and improve.

Absolutely.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Roland. This was amazing. Roland, if folks wanted to work with you or work with Digital Marketer, what would be the website that you’d want to send them to? I’m guessing it’s digitalmarketer.com.

digitalmarketer.com for Digital Marketer and certifications and training and marketing. It’s at warroommastermind.com, and then if anybody has any direct questions for me, I’m on both Facebook and LinkedIn or facebook.com/rolandfrasier or the LinkedIn, linkedin.com/rolandfrasier.

Perfect. Alright, thank you Roland, thank you listeners. This is Stephan Spencer signing off. We’ll catch you on the next episode.

Thanks, Stephan.

Important Links:

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

☑ Look into the requirements to join the War Room mastermind. If you qualify, consider applying to become part of a group of other high-powered, inspirational business people.

☑ Read about all the other masterminds Roland and Stephan mentioned to see if any is a fit for you. If so, apply and get involved with the one you’ve identified.

☑ To find a mentor, identify people who are where you want to be. Get to know them, and then begin doing what they do.

☑ Before you offer to pay a mentor, identify whether you really want a mentorship or a coach. Coaches should be paid, but paid mentorships tend to fail.

☑ Instead of looking for free advice, focus on offering value before you ask for anything. By offering value first, you can lay the foundations for a relationship.

☑ In any business deal, go from talking about something to having a transaction done as quickly as possible. This takes you from potential to business partner quickly

☑ Think about what you can offer other people, and provide ongoing support to people in need of mentorship of the kind you’re able to give.

☑ Resolve not to give handouts to anyone (such as children, siblings, or friends). This kind of gift comes with side effects and can actually be harmful.

☑ If you see an opening where someone you would want to work with could use your services, reach out. Don’t hesitate, but instead step forth to offer something of value.

☑ Work on cultivating a strong social network in every realm of your life. You’re the average of the five people you spend most time with, so make sure those are the best people possible.

About Roland Frasier

Roland Frasier started out selling real estate when he was 18 and gradually moved into real estate development, syndications and business investments. He held real estate, insurance and securities licenses and worked on several leveraged buyouts with Prudential Securities New York while he was in college and law school. After law school, Roland opened his own law practice and grew it to one of the top firms in San Diego, providing services to entrepreneurs, business owners, marketing and entertainment industry clients. While there he acted as Managing Partner and conducted all marketing and advertising campaigns, generating clients through copy-writing, speaking and networking. During that time Roland began forming venture investment deals with clients and gradually evolved from practicing law to buying and selling companies, repositioning businesses and direct response marketing. Over his career Roland has completed infomercial deals with Guthy-Renker and K-Tel Direct, publishing deals with Simon & Schuster and Random House, negotiated shows with major hotels on the Las Vegas strip, been involved in over 100 private and public offerings, run international hedge funds, and created presentations and marketing campaigns for major brands.