Dan Henry is the founder of GetClients.com and author of The Wall Street Journal & USA Today Bestselling book “Digital Millionaire Secrets.” He has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Business Insider, and more. 

In this episode, we will talk about:

• How Dan Henry went from delivering pizzas to building a successful 8-figure online business,
• His advice on entrepreneurs who don’t want to go online,
• Why marketing is not about what you sell but how you sell it,
• How he managed to generate over a million dollars in one day during the pandemic,
• And many more.

This episode is filled with valuable lessons from an entrepreneur who helped over 1,000 clients create a profitable online business.

 

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TRANSCRIPT:

Amanda Holmes: Amanda Holmes here, CEO of Chet Holmes International. I am so thrilled that I’ve managed to pluck you away from all of your interviews. Dan Henry here, if you haven’t heard of him, it’s kind of crazy. Cause you’re all over the internet. I’ve seen your face time and time again. And now I know why. So you’re you first started delivering pizzas for seven years.

Dan Henry: Yeah, that was my longest job. 

Amanda Holmes: Okay. And then, Hey, maybe there’s this thing called the Internet and maybe I can scale using it. So he was able to start his first – oh one of first.

Dan Henry: Well, I had a lot of failed businesses. You want the first good business?

Amanda Holmes: Yes. So the first good business story is going to a mill in five months. 

Dan Henry: So I mean, basically I started a bar and I saved up some money.

I started a bar and I realized that I knew a lot about bars cause my parents own bars and I watched Bar Rescue constantly. But I didn’t know how to market the bar. I didn’t know how to get new people. So I figured that out advertising, marketing, and then after I sold the bar, which nobody flips bars. Right? You know, I actually flipped them for – we did literally a multi figure prop fit in 14 months off of the bar, like bought it, built it up, sold it. 

So when I did that, I realized like, Hey, I know how to market. I know how to advertise. I know how to do that. And so I started what is now getclients.com.

I didn’t own the domain then, but. And it was, it was basically teaching business owners how to grow their business and eventually I landed, I started with local business and I landed on the consultant done for you agencies and stuff because, you know, we raised our prices and those types of businesses stand more to gain than like a pizza shop or something.

But that’s where I started. And I built that company up. We did a million in 5 months. We’ve since the past few years we’ve done over 25 million and that’s -thank you. Thank you. That’s not like, you know how somebody, some people say I’ve done 25 million. They count like launches or promotions they’ve been involved in. No. This is 25 million of my own consulting services we’ve sold. And-

Amanda Holmes: Hundreds of thousands of followers. Number one book, Wall Street journal-

Dan Henry: Yeah, USA today. Started doing stage selling like presenting from stage. 

Amanda Holmes: This is so good. Are you ready for this? This is absurd. So COVID hits, you’re supposed to do an event.

Dan Henry: Was supposed to do an event, a bunch of people there, We had all this stuff planned, like, make it real theatrical, food and entertainment. COVID hits right when it hit. Right. 

So we had to cancel the event. I decided I was going to do it online. And I had one camera in my dining room, had a whiteboard and I had 158 people on a zoom room. And I just taught. And I made a pitch at the end for a $30,000 mastermind offer. And we did, and I did million twenty thousand in a single day.

Amanda Holmes: God. I love that. Okay. So qualified to speak on this topic that we’re about to cover.

Dan Henry: Yeah, that’s not bragging. That’s just making sure that you’re not wasting your time in this video. 

Amanda Holmes: We’re in context. Okay. So for every business out there, that’s saying, but, I don’t really want to go online and you know, is this really, how should I do this? What would you tell them?

Dan Henry: Hey, well, first of all, you’re not going to like my advice. Okay. That’s number one. Okay. The thing is this. So going back to the bar, right? I used to tell my bartenders because my bar is in Florida. Well, I’d have bartenders who moved down here from New York and they’re like, well, I’ve been a bartender from New York.

And I said, well, this is not New York. You don’t have 10,000 people walking past your door, every five seconds. This is Florida. So I said, you’re an entertainer first, a bartender second. If you can’t retain people, if you can’t get people talking, if you can’t get people having a good time and staying and drinking, you have no drinks to pour. Therefore, your existence as a bartender means nothing. You are not a bartender because you’re not doing it, then you’re just standing there. Right? 

So it’s like if you wrote the greatest book of all time and all your energy was on writing that book and nobody ever read it. It doesn’t matter if it’s the greatest book of all time because no one knows about it.

So if you have a pizzeria, right, if you’re a lawyer, if you might be the greatest bankruptcy attorney of all time, you might have the greatest pizza in town, but if nobody knows about it and you’re not putting just as much effort into making that pizza taste delicious as you are in letting people know that that pizza tastes delicious, then guess what?

Your pizza doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant. It becomes a non-thing.

Amanda Holmes: We teach that actually. McDonald’s versus Joe’s hamburgers. Joe’s hamburger is probably much better, but McDonald’s is now you know, 137 billion or something. It’s not the pizza. It’s the system.

Dan Henry: That’s good you mentioned that. Think about this. If you have the best burgers in town yet McDonald’s is out there selling more of their burgers and you know that your burger is better, you know that you taste better and you don’t do everything in your power to make people eat your burger and know about your burger and McDonald’s, you are doing a disservice to people who eat burgers. 

You literally have a duty to let people know about your burger and if you’re “I don’t want to go online. I don’t want to learn social media”  Well, then you’re lazy. And that’s just what it is. I mean, maybe you don’t want to do that. And maybe the girl that works at the mortgage company doesn’t want to call you and tell you that they have to repossess your home because your business failed and you have no income, but she’s going to do it anyway. 

Amanda Holmes: 2 million businesses went bankrupt in the last four years.

Dan Henry: And probably 2 million business owners did not take ownership of why they went bankrupt.

Amanda Holmes: So now we have, we have you 10 minutes less. What would be the advice for somebody getting onto online? Where do you even start? Where do you begin there? 

Dan Henry: So you got to understand that going online is really no different than what we’ve been doing this whole time. 

So I used to work for a company. They go around to different like department stores and events. And if you’re a pitch man, you pitch like pots and pans or cutlery. Right?

So I used to have that job and I used to be a pitchman and I started at the same company that Billy Mays started at. And so what happened was I realized that the things I learned there, right? 

Cause you know, people talk about like webinars and sales, videos, sales letters. There’s zero difference between that and what I did 15 years ago or what they did 50 years ago on the boardwalks when the ships would come in. People would get off and they’d have the guys on the boardwalks doing these little demonstrations. It’s the same thing. Just like it’s a different medium, that’s it. It’s a different platform.

And so a lot of times, we sit here and we resist these things. You’ve been doing it the whole time. It’s been a part of culture and life the whole time. So the first step is to get over the fact that you have to do it. Get over that fact and also realize it’s not that different. It’s not that new, it’s just a different vehicle in which to do it. Right. 

So here’s the thing. Here’s what I say. Like, if I would have really condensed this. Number one before we get into how to technically do it. Cause that changes, right? Oh, build a landing page, run Facebook ads, run YouTube ads, direct mail, whatever. First of all, is to understand that what you sell is not what you sell.

Most people don’t know what they sell. So for instance, let’s say that you sell Christmas cookies. Do you really sell Christmas cookies? 

Amanda Holmes: No, it would have to be the feeling that they create. 

Dan Henry: You sell a family moment, the family gets together. They share the Christmas cookies. Right. 

Okay. If you sell a – so every product is a solution to a problem. Okay. So if you’re hot and you go and you buy an AC, you bought the AC cause you’re hot. Oh, what about a fidget spinner? You were bored, right? So you’re not selling a fidget spinner. You’re selling entertainment, you’re selling not being bored.

So when you sell pizza, when you sell – we’ll say you were a marriage therapist, right? Okay. You’re not like a lot of times they say, well, I, you know, maybe they’re thinking about raising their prices. Maybe they’re thinking about marketing. What did they say in their marketing? Okay. They don’t think about the end result. They just think about that our coaching is four hours or our therapy is, but what happens if you don’t get therapy? What do you stand to lose? Only half of everything you’ve ever worked for, your child being taken care of by some other man or woman you don’t know. You know, we often talk about the plane ride and not the destination.

When you want to go on vacation to Hawaii and you call your travel agent, do they go, “Oh, well, the nuts on the plane are amazing.” No, they talk about the resort at the hotel and what happens is as business owners, especially local business owners, we constantly obsess over our pizza, not the family sitting down and watching Sunday football and having moments. We obsess over. you know, I don’t know, give me a business.

Amanda Holmes: No, I see what you’re saying. And so it’s like capturing those moments and what really matters and bringing it online.

Dan Henry: What happens after you buy the product, the end result of why you buy the product. Right? You talk more about that. You speak to people more, right?

Like, look, I’ll give you an example. Apple. Why does Apple so much higher value and so, why did they kick the crap out of Microsoft? And IBM, why? Because Microsoft and IBM were selling computers, Apple sold self-expression. Think different. Apple created a computer that was easy to use for artists, graphic designers, video editors, creatives.

So they did not sell a computer. They sold self-expression. You don’t sell a pizza, you sell an amazing Sunday football, family gathering. And most of our marketing and most of putting ourselves out there, we just say, “Oh, $5.99 pizza, right? And they just focus on the surface level. Right. And then now it just becomes a race to the bottom. Price, right?

Amanda Holmes: So easy to sell on price today but you can overcome that by expressing the experience and the benefit and the feeling that it makes you feel instead of just –

Dan Henry: Yeah, the byproduct of the product. That’s what you should focus on. And when you do that, you speak to the hearts and minds of people. It’s easier to talk about why did you start your pizzeria? Why, you know, like what? You just randomly thought I’m going to start? No, there was a moment in your life where you decided. Tell people about that, you know? So when you get online, there’s a lot of different ways to market, right?

I mean, for instance, I’ll give you one example for my bar. We blew our bar up because here’s what we would do. We would say “Hey. Do you have a birthday coming up or do you have a friend with a birthday coming up? We will give you a free bottle of skull, a free bottle for your group of 15 or more and a free VIP couch.”

Okay. So we were selling so I thought to myself, “Okay, do I want to get one person in at a time? Or do I want to get parties in?” 

Amanda Holmes: This is Dream 100 at its finest as well. Good job. I love that. 

Dan Henry: So when they would come and here’s the thing, a bottle of skull vodka is $6 for a bar. In a group of 15 people, that’s the last five minutes. 

Okay then what are they going to buy? They’re going to buy a $300 bottle, okay? And then their friends are going to show up and they’re going to – and you know what else is going to happen? Somebody is not going to want to drink vodka. They’re going to want to drink whiskey. So they’re going to go buy a single drink and somebody else is going to want to buy tequila.

And next thing you know, you have a $1,500 bill all because you gave away a $6 bottle. But here’s what happens with business owners. Here’s what happens with business owners. I’ve told bar owners this. 

Amanda Holmes: And they don’t do it. 

Dan Henry: It’s going to devalue my brand cause I’m giving away something for free. I’m going to give away. I mean, that’s a $6 bottle of Skull vodka that I could make $120 off.

Okay. Well, you’re going to, yeah, you’ll make $120 off it, but you’ll miss the $1,500 you could’ve made. 

Here’s another one we used to do. If it was slow, it’s how you fill up any bar and you can apply this to almost any business. Hospitality. So if it was a slow Tuesday night and there was like, say 10 people in the bar and we wanted 50 people to be in the bar, we would make jello shots again with a $6 bottle of skull vodka.

And cause remember, this goes back to we’re not selling liquor, we’re selling a party and experience, a birthday we’re selling. Okay. So here’s what we would do. We would say, Hey, I get on the mic. “Hey everybody. If you want a free shot, a free jello shot, all you have to do is check-in on Facebook. Show the bartender your check-in and you’ll get a free jello shot.”

Amanda Holmes: Oh my God. That’s so good.

Dan Henry: Here’s what would happen. The jello shot costs nothing. Right? I mean, one bottle of skull vodka made like 300 jello shots. So it’s like cents. They would go up, they would check it on Facebook. Their friends who were out and about driving around, fiddling around on their phone and going, “Well, what should we do tonight? John’s at so-and-so bar and lounge. Oh, he just checked in there. We’re kind of near there. Let’s swing by and say hi.” 

Multiply that by all the people in the bar within 45 minutes, the bar is full and we took a Tuesday night that most bar owners would accept as a slow night. I am not accepting. I don’t accept slow nights. I only accept slow people. Okay. Andso we would turn a night like that into Saturday night numbers by every hour doing the check-in shot. 

Amanda Holmes: I love that and you’re doing the same thing here. I’ve seen you because I’m doing the same thing where we get to a place where there’s a lot of influencers, right? Like a trade show and we interview all of these people.

So then, it can become online. So then all of their traffic can be a part of our traffic. Right? So again, you’re doing the same thing that you were doing at your bar, but now we’re doing it in the business in a trade show. 

Dan Henry: Yeah. But you have the, as a business owner, you have to get past the “I don’t want to give out free shots cause it devalues my brand. I don’t want to give out a deal on teeth cleaning because it devalues my brand. I’m this high-level chiropractor. So I don’t want to do this cause it devalues my brand.”

You know what else devalues your brand? No customers. Okay? You are a business. Your goal is to take a P&L and increase the very bottom number that says net profit.

Which means as a part of that process, you have advertising, marketing, sales, product fulfillment. Okay. You can’t just be a chiropractor or a doctor or a pizza guy and think that marketing and sales and promotions devalue your brand because again, even more so not having any customers.

If you can’t get past that, no other advice will help you.

Amanda Holmes: I love that. And especially with referrals today, too online, right? 91% of salespeople will not ask for a referral. Is that not absurd? So giving and just tying back to what you were saying, can you give them a gift that brings in their friends to be a part of it?

Can you do it online? Can you do it offline? This has been so amazing. Any last final bit of how they can find you?

Dan Henry: Most of my stuff in terms of business education and whatnot is on Getclients.com. My YouTube channel and all that, my book. But if this has even remotely made you realize –

Amanda Holmes: If you appreciated him slapping you in the face – 

Dan Henry: Yeah and you understand that it really does start up here with your mindset and how and how you think I, that’s why I started this company howtothink.com, because I realized I have over 1100 high ticket clients that have paid me anywhere from 10 to a hundred thousand for business consulting. And I’ll tell you this, 99.9% of the time, I don’t get an actual business question. It always goes back to mindset. 

And so that’s why I started this company because I was like, what people really need it’s not business advice. It’s advice on how to process information in your brain, because if you can’t think, you can’t execute, so you can check this out as well.  I hope this was helpful. 

Amanda Holmes: Thank you.