TCC Podcast #205: Creating an Offer with Justin Goff

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Patriot Greens
Stefan Georgi
No B.S. Wealth Attraction by Dan Kennedy
Adam Bensman
Sam Woods
Justin’s website
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

 

Full Transcript:

Rob:   There’s this thing that tends to happen for a lot of copywriters, not all of us, but many, where they ultimately decide that they don’t want to work with clients anymore. And at that point, they create their own products instead of helping other people sell their products. It sounds easy, right? But if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Today’s guest, on the 205th episode of The Copywriter Club podcast, is Justin Goff. Just after the worst week of his life, Justin created his first product and earned a little over 100,000 dollars in three months, and then he did it again, earning millions. If that sounds like something that you’d like to do in your own business, then this episode is for you.

Kira:   We’ll share Justin’s story in just a minute but first, this episode is brought to you by the Copywriter Underground, a private membership and community designed to help you hit your business growth goals faster, whether your goal is hitting 10K a month or launching a new service or product, or even just finding your first few clients, the resources in Underground can help with accountability, support, coaching, and a path to help you get out of your own way and build momentum in your business. Find out more at thecopywriterunderground.com.

Rob:   There are a lot of ways to succeed as a copywriter, working directly with clients is one and creating your own products is another. Let’s jump into our interview with Justin and hear how he has used copywriting to create his million-dollar business.

Justin Goff:   I initially got into kind of making websites when I was in college, as the result of I had a $1,200 gambling debt when I was in college, I was probably 20 at the time. And so I was a really good sports better in college. I’d bet on college football games and college basketball games. I would make good money doing it. And then like a lot of kids, my age, I got really cocky and thought I was better than I was. And ended up betting a lot more money than I had. And one weekend, I basically had the weekend from hell where I lost like seven or eight of the games I’d bet on. I basically, went from being up $5,000 on this season to down $1,200. And this guy who I bet through, it was this big bookie who was like six foot eight named Gabe who weighed like 280 pounds and Gabe wanted his money two days later and I did not have that kind of money, so.

Kira:   It sounds like a movie.

Justin Goff:   It’s like Rounders part two. So yeah, I owed this guy a bunch of money and I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to pay him. And I had this bright idea that I could make a website and sell my sports picks. I knew nothing about making a website, knew nothing about selling stuff, but I’d seen other people doing it online. I’m like, “All right, I can do this.” Long story short, basically about six months of that, just pounding my head against the wall in spamming forums and trying to figure out how to sell these picks, nothing ever worked. And then about six months later, it was around Christmas time, I remember, because I was at my parents’ house for Christmas break. And I got on my email account and I noticed I had a PayPal notification and I remember opening it up and seeing that someone had spent $149 to buy one of the pick packages I was selling. I remember just going like absolutely crazy. I was like jumping up and down, screaming and running around the room.

It’s funny because I’ve had days where I’ve done 200, $300,000 since then in sales and I still remember more about that day and that $149 sale than anything. Because that was kind of the first time that it became real to me because kind of up until then, it just seemed like this pipe dream. So that’s kind of what got me into it and I kind of weaseled my way into affiliate marketing after that and kind of learn the ropes of that.

So I did that for a few years and then basically around 2009 or so. So I was doing affiliate marketing for a bunch of poker websites and gambling sites and then all that fell apart in like, ’08, ’09 because there was a law that was passed that you couldn’t play poker online anymore in the United States. And I decided to get into fitness health, info-product stuff. I’d seen all these people make info-products and selling them. I was like, “Oh, let’s do that.”

I kind of recently had gotten into the CrossFit and paleo stuff and this was kind of before it really blown up and really gotten big. I was like, “Oh, there’s probably a big market for this, for people who don’t really understand this.” So I started creating a product around that and that’s the first time I kind of really learned about copywriting. Because I tried for about a year and a half to do this on my own, selling it with a super boring sales page that was just features and benefits and almost like an eCom style page and nobody was buying anything.

And my business partner at the time, who was the personal trainer, who was kind of the face of the product, he had been using direct response on his gym that he ran and he kept telling me about direct response and I was just very closed off to it. And finally, he gave me this big box of Dan Kennedy tapes and he’s like, “Just watch this.” He’s like, “Just watch this, I think I will change your mind.” And I finally plopped in one of his copywriting DVDs, it was like nine hours unedited Dan Kennedy. And by the end of it, I was just like, my world had kind of been shattered. I was like, “Oh my God, now I see what he meant now I understand why these ugly ass websites with yellow highlighter and 40-page sales letters work so well.” And that was kind of the first foray of the copywriting.

Kira:    Okay, so I want to know Gabe, did you pay him or did you get beat up by Gabe, what happened with Gabe?

Justin Goff:   No, so basically after about three days of that, I had to make an emergency decision to get a job as quick as possible. And I started valeting cars literally like two days after this and worked out a payment plan with Gabe to pay him back over the next two weeks. And no, I did not get my legs broken…

Kira:   Okay. It’d be a good story though if you did, but I’m glad you didn’t. So what are some lessons from your time gambling? I didn’t realize because I hadn’t heard that part of your story before. What have you learned from gambling that has helped you in life and business?

Justin Goff:   So, the interesting thing to me is actually when I got into more business stuff, the kind of rush that I got from gambling stuff was very, very similar, except it’s in a much more controlled environment now. So when I would do big media buys and spend $20,000 on an email drop and it would come back and we’d make, let’s say $30,000, I got that same kind of excitement and that same rush, but I had 10 times the control over it compared to gambling where it’s like you’re kind of just looking for these slight edges all the time.

One of the things, honestly that really turned me away from it, because I was actually pretty good at it, was the stress of it was just way too much. And in a way, your business can be the same way, especially if you get to the point where you’re just the absolute workaholic who’s working 12 hours a day and nothing else in your life matters. That’s kind of the point I got to, I treated the gambling like it was a real job. I was studying stuff and creating all these models and putting 30, 40 hours a week into it while it was like a full-time student.

But I mean, the dedication definitely pays off because it helped me in that. And then it obviously helped me in copywriting as well. Because those first couple of years that I was learning to write copy, I was doing the same thing where I was just over, and over, and over, and over again writing, writing, writing, getting the reps in which it’s kind of one of those things that every copywriter, is always kind of looking for a workaround, how do I not have to write to be a good copywriter? But it’s kind of the one thing where it’s like if I could tell you one thing to be a better copywriter, it’s you need to write every single day.

Rob:   So I’m curious, what’s next in the story? So you discovered Dan Kennedy, you had these first assignments and then what, how did you find additional clients at that point in your career journey?

Justin Goff:   Yeah, so I’ve gone to a couple of events back then and met some people who I emailed them out of the blue and I started doing some freelance stuff. And this was at the time when freelance-wise, I was not charging very much, maybe $500-$1000, maybe 1500 bucks for a full sales page. And I helped a bunch of people get some sales pages that actually worked. And I got a little bit of experience doing that because I did it for a good number of clients at the time. So while the pay wasn’t great, the experience I got out of it really was. But then I kind of had the idea that I wanted to create my own offer. And I had been thinking of that for a while. I kind of saw that’s what I really want to do because, like I said, I saw this huge hole in the market where I thought the paleo diet could do really, really well.

And then, like I said, this is like 2009, 10 years before paleo really blew up. And I was like, “I think this could do really well.” So I created a course back then but what’s interesting, I kind of fell into this spot of being just really content. I was making decent money, I had a couple clients who I was doing miscellaneous stuff for, I had a freelance client. I actually used to be really good at SEO stuff, so I did SEO for another client. And I was kind just like content and happy and I was making however much money I was making. But then a lot of it pretty much all fell apart. So basically, within the span of a week, this was literally my week from hell. My biggest consultant-client who made up about 80%-90% of my income fired me so I was freaking out. I had no idea how I was going to make up the money to get that back.

My girlfriend at the time, who I was living with and planning on proposing to, came home from work one night and decided that she didn’t want to be with me so she broke up with me. And literally that same night after that, sorry, not she, LeBron James, this is the night he decided to go on national TV and say he was leaving Cleveland and going to Miami. And I grew up right near Cleveland so I was a huge Cavs fan. So got my heart broken twice in one night, lost all of my incomes.

Like I said, this was basically in a week span, it was actually probably a three-day span. So I was a total wreck trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life, how I was going to make money. And it was interesting because I was really, really doubting myself as an entrepreneur. I think I had maybe a month’s worth of money left. I considered moving back in with my parents I consider going and getting a real job. I had one of my aunts runs an eCom company and I talked to her about maybe going and working for her.

Yeah, I also thought about just quitting the whole thing and going off and just getting a normal job and moving in with my parents and kind of forgetting all of this, which is pretty crazy now to look back on. But basically, I kept thinking though that I had this offer and I was like, “I want to just try it, I want to test it on, get it up, run some ads to it and just test it and see if there’s anything there.” I’ve never actually done this before, I have no idea if it’s going to work. So I wrote the copy for this product, put up a VSL and this was super simple, it was a landing page, a VSL and I don’t even think I had upsells at the time. I created some Facebook ads started running into it. And interestingly, after a week of it, it started making some sales.

And I mean, I’m only spending $10 a day because I have no money at this time. And it started making some sales though, I’d make one sale for every 60 bucks I spend or something. And I was like, “Oh, if I actually dial this in and maybe get some upsells and get the average order value up, this might actually work.” And so over the course of about two months or so I really focused on dialing it in. And I went from spending 10 bucks a day, to 50 bucks a day, to 100, up to 500, to a 1000. Then eventually I literally maxed out my Facebook account where I was spending $5,000 a day.

And this thing was profitable in the front end which doesn’t happen very often. I mean, at its peak, I was spending five grand a day and I was making two grand a day profit and it was pretty cool because in that basically a three and a half months stretch I went from being a month away from being dead broke and not having any money to basically making I think it was $103,000 in profit is what I ended up making those three months.

And that offer went on to do really well that year, I think we brought in 40,000 new customers by the end of the year. It was one of the first years I think I ever made over $200,000. So it was a huge year for me. Financially, it got me out of this kind of hole that I was in, it really gave me the confidence to know that I could actually do this because, like I said, I was really doubting myself as an entrepreneur and kind of just thinking I got lucky a couple of years before this, I didn’t realize I actually did know what the hell I was doing. And when that offer kind of kicked off and started working, that was the first kind of real proof to me that I actually could do this.

Kira:   I’d like to talk about the week from hell. I mean, it was just a bad time when you look back on it. Well, I guess the question is, if someone else listening is going through the week from hell, what advice would you give them based off your experience?

Justin Goff:   For me, it was brutal. I was living in a $250 a month apartment, the girlfriend that I had lived with after she moved out, I helped her move everything out, there was literally nothing left in the house because pretty much everything was hers. I was sleeping on a blow-up mattress in the middle of the living room. It was basically me and my two dogs and nothing else.

So yeah, it was a pretty bad time for me. I was pretty depressed, didn’t want to hang out with anybody, just kind of shut myself in and just locked myself in my room. But one of the good things about pain is that that’s really where growth comes from. And so, I was kind of in that spot where I, like I said, didn’t really have a whole lot of options which forced me to kind of get off my ass and put out this offer that I had been pretty much procrastinating on, the offer could have been put out six months before this but I would just kind of be in content and not really pushing myself.

So there is a lot of good, like I said, that can come out of the bad spots. And truthfully, a lot of the biggest wins in my life have come right after really bad spots. I remember in 2014 when I kind of combined my Patriot Health Alliance company was my partner Allen at the time, kind of right off the bat nothing we were doing was working. I mean, we were kind of getting to a point where he was like, “We need to get something working here now or we’re going to shut this down because this was just waste of money.” And literally right after that, probably a month after that our Patriot Power Greens offer took off and that basically catapulted that business from a million-dollar business to a $23 million business in less than three years.

So that’s the one thing I would definitely say is that, like I said, the growth does come from pain. And so out of a lot of the really bad scenarios where you think this is never going to end, this can’t get any better, a lot of good stuff can come out of that. A lot of good stuff can happen to you.

Rob:   I mean, it’s kind of a sliding door moment. That movie with Gwyneth Paltrow, you miss the train, you make the train and it makes all the difference. You could have been working a $60,000 corporate job to this day and not have had all of the experiences you’ve had over the last eight years. So it’s pretty amazing what-

Kira:   Rob, that’s so weird. I was thinking about that movie today. I was thinking about that exact movie and how I want to watch that movie this weekend, today.

Rob:   There you go.

[Movie Voice Over] Two lives, two chances and the destiny that lies behind two sliding doors.

Kira:   We’re in sync.

Rob:   There you go.

Kira:   Weird.

Rob:   Yeah, it’s cool, so Justin will you talk a little bit about what you did with Patriot Greens? Because I’m really intrigued by that story, When you’ve got something that’s not working and it’s not working, you’re trying and you’re trying, and then something pops, I’m actually less intrigued by the one thing that you did that worked, but the process of trying more and more things to find the thing that would work. Will you tell us a little bit about that?

Justin Goff:   Yeah, so kind of what we did when we were starting. So we had probably three or four products when we’re starting, we’re doing a lots of paid email drops, so that’s what was working for us at the time. The offers that we were doing just weren’t hitting the numbers that they needed to hit. We were trying all kinds of different copy and different angles and promoting them in bundles and promoting them solo and just it wasn’t hitting the numbers we needed. I get a lot of direct mail because I’m on a ton of different lists and I kept seeing this direct mail piece for a green supplement.

Now, to give some people some context, there’s millions of green supplements now, this is in 2014, they had not hit the internet really yet, I think Athletic Greens was maybe the only one that was really around. But there was one working in direct mail that kept getting over and over and over again, anytime I ordered something or signed up to a new list, I got this thing in the mail, it’s obviously working because they just keep sending this thing nonstop.

And I really liked the angle on it, I was like, “Well, let’s make a similar product to this, except let’s find a better hook for our audience.” Which our audience at the time was pretty much these 65-80-year-old kind of conservative health market. So people who are reading Glenn Beck’s email list and Newsmax and stuff like that was kind of our market. I was like, let’s figure out a little angle that we can do to really appeal to them.

And one of the things that was really interesting is I’m a big watcher of what’s working and what’s working for other offers. There was an offer, I think around that time, that Newsmax put out that was called the Biblical Money Code. It was one of the first ones to really tap into the fact that that audience is super, super religious. And if you could tie this way to make money in what the Bible people buy it. And that offer was just like a huge smash hit.

So I kind of thought of it would just from the perspective of the people buying it, I’m like what’s the angle that nobody’s really hit on with them yet. It was a really popular offer at that time as well that dove into Ronald Reagan and tied in Alzheimer’s disease and all kinds of stuff. It was a health promotion and that one did really well too. So I’m like, all right, they’re hitting on these popular topics that your average 65-year-old conservative person is really kind of passionate about, what’s the thing that’s not really being said. And I was like, “Nobody’s really talking about the military.” And they have such a huge affinity for the military that I feel like if the military was using some type of product they would just buy it because they have such a love for the military.

So that was kind of the idea that came to my head when I first thought of it. And so we created this Greens powder and the first thing we did was we shipped a whole container of it to my cousin who was in the coast guard at the time. And I was like, “Here, have everybody in your unit try this, we want to get some feedback from you.”

And I can’t remember how many guys, it was, I don’t know, 20 or so and they all try to send us a bunch of feedback. And the one guy who was one of the older guys in their unit, because obviously, the military is most of the young dudes, there was one guy who was pretty old. I can remember exactly what it was, but he was one of the older guys in the unit. And he mentioned it as feedback that he was keeping up with the younger guys for the first time in a while. He’s like, “I got more energy. My PT tests are doing a lot better.” And he was like, “I’m actually keeping up with and kind of beating the younger guys.”

And I remember when I read that, I was just kind of light bulb moment. I was, “Oh, that’s the hook.” This kind of secret greens drink that elite military units are using, older guys in elite military units are using to keep up with the younger guys in the unit. And it was just that one little nugget that kind of spurred the whole thing where, and I wrote the whole sales page with a lot of emotional stories about that, the emails were about that. And the first time we promoted it, actually, the first email I created and promoted did not do well. We tried it on a couple lists, did not do well. And then the next one we did, absolutely hit a home run where I think we spent like $3,000 on the email buy and we brought back $15,000 on day one.

And I remember looking at the stats, I was like, “Something’s got to be broken. This just doesn’t happen.” And then the next day we had another email buy go out where that was for $4,000. And that brought back $18,000. And I remember just thinking, “Holy (beep), we absolutely hit a home run here.” And that was kind of the thing though, that started off because we had a really good hook. It was super unique. Greens powder are everywhere now, but 2014 it was a new idea and a new product, especially to that market.

And yeah, I think just, we ramped it up from, like I said, we’re doing about a million in sales with that company and then the next year we did close to seven and then the year after that we did a really big leap up to about 23 million.

Kira:   Wow, okay. So talking about the unique hook for offers and you walked through some of the process with that example, but when you’re working for clients and looking at their offers and thinking about hooks for them, and then for your other offers, is there a certain process that we could follow as copywriters for our own offers or for our client’s offers?

Justin Goff:   I mean, to me the biggest thing is really truly knowing the market. So you have to know the market and you have to know the people in that market. It’s probably the biggest mistake I see copywriters make is because they’ll come up with an idea and if I’m someone who’s studied a lot of stuff in that market, I can see very quickly this is an idea that’s already been seen or not. I don’t know, if you come up with something for a turmeric product and you’re telling the story about why people in India have less brain damage because they eat all kinds of curcumin. I’ve seen that four times already, I’ve seen it over and over and over again. So, it’s not going to stick out, it’s not a unique angle.

The unique story, the unique affinity that really appeals to who the customer is, is the first thing I really think of. And you can kind of reverse engineer it. So with Patriot Power Greens one, that wasn’t a hook that was embedded within the product. Or if you were doing research on the product, you weren’t going to find that, it was one, I actually just created, because I knew it would probably work for that market, but that’s really the power of understanding your market because if you truly know what they want, what they hate and stuff like that, all the emotional stuff around that, you can kind of come up with your own hook and your own story and then do it that way instead of having to find one within the research.

Kira:   Let’s talk a bit more about this whole idea of the big idea. We’ve talked about it before with Joe Schriefer way back on episode 70, as well as with others, but it’s probably worth taking a moment to point out what exactly makes a big idea. Rob, what do you think makes a big idea?

Rob:   I knew you were going to ask me this. So this is something that we actually covered in a newsletter that went out to the underground this last month and talked all about the big idea. And we actually outlined, I think 13 different things that go into it. And depending on who you asked, it really depends. So if you were to ask David Ogilvy, he would say that there were five things went into a big idea. I think Todd Brown has a list of seven or eight. Our list went to 13 just because we were able to build on some of the things that they suggested. But I would say a big idea has got to be unique and that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s completely different from everything else that’s out there, but it’s something that your prospect has not ever seen before or encountered before.

It’s got to be fascinating enough to hold your attention because you’re really competing against everything, not just other sales pieces or advertisements or content, but you’re competing against people watching Netflix, you’re competing against people going to the baseball game, when we can’t go anywhere, sitting at home with a glass of wine or doing nothing. So you’re competing against all of those things.

And another thing I’ll point out among the many is that it tells a story and Justin was talking about that, if you can connect with stories, it’s a way that it holds attention, it creates curiosity. It’s a really good way to make sure that your idea is big enough to carry through an entire sales page or even through a campaign that may last for months or years.

Kira:   A big idea really is something that hasn’t been seen or done before. And it’s so hard to find that and figure that out. And what really stood out to me, what Justin shared is that you need to know your market well before even coming up with the big idea before writing any copy, you have to understand your market. And I think it’s easy to think that we do. We’ve done a couple of customer interviews, maybe we’ve done our survey for our clients and so we think that we know the market well, but what was really clear to me as he talked through it is that it takes an in-depth, intimate knowledge of your market.

And so when I think of that, I’m like, “Okay, well maybe that’s where most of us struggle because oftentimes if we’re working on a project with a client and it’s only a month long or even two months long we do surface level research and we don’t have that really close understanding and in-depth understanding of the market.” And so what really reminded me of was back in TCC IRL 2018, back in the day, in downtown Manhattan and Chinatown, I remember, one of our mentors, Brian Kurtz stood up and talked about how he thought that the future of copywriting involved working really closely with your clients. I mean, even in-house potentially, but having maybe fewer clients and working with them for longer periods of time and going more in depth with them.

And I don’t remember what your reaction was, but I know at the time my reaction was, no way I want to work with clients for a month and then I want to say, “See you later.” And I don’t want to see them again, even if they’re cool, I’m in and out. I want to do my job. I don’t want to work long-term because that’s why we left our job. That’s what we got out of corporate America or wherever we came from. And so why would I want to work closely with any type of client and have more of an employee role long-term?

But now a couple of years later, it only took me a couple years later to understand what Brian was really saying that in order to come up with these really brilliant big ideas, sometimes it does take maybe even a longer term relationship with clients. And so I am personally looking at my relationship with my copywriting clients in a different way where I’m setting up offers now, where I work with them long-term to have a deeper understanding of their market so that I can come up with better ideas and better hooks because at least for me, I’ve struggled to find them in short periods of time. So I think Brian was right maybe, even though I was definitely adamant that he wasn’t right at the time.

Rob:   If Brian’s listening to this, he’ll be smiling right now. Let me add one other thing that I think Justin did really well with his big idea and that is that it connected with his customer’s pain. The pain of this older guy trying to keep up with the younger guy, there’s a pride factor there, but it’s something that’s deeply felt and emotional, and obviously, that big idea had that going for it. And I think a lot of the ideas that we need to come up with for our clients, they need to tap into that pain, that problem that we’re trying to solve and then ultimately our solution will fix for them. And so, again, the idea that Justin had was phenomenal. Okay, so let’s go back to our discussion with Justin and talk about one of the smartest decisions he ever made in his business.

So Justin, one of the things that I think is unique about this story, or at least your experience with Patriot Greens is that you are a partner in the company and a lot of copywriters don’t actually take the opportunity to become a partner, or to partner with somebody who has a product. Will you tell us a little bit about how that came about and ultimately the result is you sold off your partnership, but how did you forge that in the first place?

Justin Goff:   Yeah, so I started the company actually with a partner, his name is Brandon Kelly. He’s a really good media buyer who had a lot of success in the survival space and me and him started it. We grew up to that first kind of million. And then after about a year my future partner, Allen Baylor came to me and said he wanted to… he actually wanted to buy the company and he wanted me to come work for him. And I remember laughing and I was really, really put off by the email and I was pretty pissed off. I remember just being like, “(beep) I’m not going to work for you.”

But three days later I remember thinking, I was like, “Why don’t I just partner with Allen?” Because Allen, we had known each other for a couple of years. And I knew he had a lot of success scaling businesses already. I was like, “Well, why don’t I chat with him about being partners?” And so we chatted for a little bit. And he was, “Okay.” He’s like, “Yeah, I think that will work.” We basically worked out an agreement where I forgot our exact percentages. He got a little more of the company than I did since he was fronting a bunch of the money.

But yeah, that’s kind of how it started. And the cool thing there is, and I learned a lot about partnerships through this. So me and Brandon we’re actually not good partners in the sense that neither of us knew anything about operations and growing a company. So I was really good at marketing and copy, Brandon was really good at traffic, which are two skills you need, but you also need someone who’s really damn good at operations, and actually infrastructure and all that kind of stuff, which is what Allen brought to the table and the spades.

Allen had previous success scale on an offer that had done, I think, 300,000 customers in a year. So he knew what the hell he was doing. And he had a real legit infrastructure and a team around him already which we used for those companies. So that was a huge thing for me, just kind of seeing all that goes into scaling, because I’d done this probably three times previously where I’d scale a company to a million buck, two million bucks or something. I would just hit this wall because I had no idea what to do next.

I had no idea how to hire people nor did I actually want to hire anyone. I realized I was just really good at making sales, but I wasn’t actually any good at running a business, but that partnership really allowed me to do that. And it’s something I actually encourage a lot of copywriters to do once you get to a certain level, if you’re really good at writing and copying and creating products and doing the marketing angle, there’s a lot of people out there that you can find who are really good at the other parts that your strengths and your weaknesses will mesh really well together. And that’s probably the best way outside of royalties to really make a lot more money without doing more work.

Kira:   Okay, so this is, I mean more of a selfish question because Rob and I are partners. So what advice do you have for business partners to, I mean, you mentioned what you should look for, but once you’re in a partnership, what advice do you have from your experience with Brandon and with Allen to make it work, to make it successful so that you can grow, I mean, grow even close to the point that you made it with $23 million.

Justin Goff:   Yeah, so, I mean, a couple of things I look for in partners now would be, the first one is, A, you just have to get along, if you’re on two totally different wavelengths in terms of how you handle problems and issues, I could never work with someone who is texting me at 11 o’clock at night that this needs to be done, and this needs to be done and we’ve got to have this ready by… that’s just not how I work and that would be kind of doomed from the get go.

I also, I would have a really hard time working with anyone who is a control freak and can’t kind of let things go because if you’re the ultimate perfectionist and you have to have control of everything and you can’t give and take on certain things that partnership is never going to work. I mean, I’ve luckily had really good partners for most of my career. My first one with the personal trainer was probably the worst one I had because as that partnership went farther and farther, I kind of realized he had really bad beliefs about money and about selling that he did not want to, he thought having upsells on an offer was scammy and we can’t be doing that and he thought that selling other products to customers once they were on our email list wasn’t appropriate because they already have had all the stuff they needed in the original product, stuff like that, you’re not going to be able to overcome.

Because, I mean, if he has a fundamental belief that selling more products or putting upsells on the offer is bad, that’s an essential part of growing a direct response business. So, I mean, yeah, a couple things to touch on, like I said, really, how I get along, how well you guys can give and take. Another thing I’ve noticed. So Stefan Georgi is my partner now with Copy Accelerator. We actually have a really interesting dynamic because I am much more pessimistic about things and Stefan is very optimistic and it actually works very, very well because Stefan will see the good in everything. And I kind of see the exact opposite and I’m like, “Here’s the nine ways that it could go wrong.”

And it’s actually very eye opening for both of us because he’ll bring up something and I’ll be like, “Well, here, what about this, this and this?” And he’s like, “Oh, I didn’t even think of that.” And I’ll bring up something and he’s like, “Yeah, but last time it made this amount of sales. I think this time we’ll make this, this and this.” And we just look at things completely differently. And I kind of look at it now as I kind of played defense and Stefan kind of plays offense with the business where he’s always come up with bigger ideas to push things forward. And I’m kind of more Mr. Gloom of kind of, “All right, here’s the, like I said, the four or five things that could go wrong with this, let’s address these and try to figure it out and add that in.”

Rob:   So you mentioned the bad money mindset that your first partner had. And I think I know enough about you to know that you’ve gone through sort of a transformation when it comes to money mindset yourself. Will you tell us a little bit about that?

Justin Goff:   Yeah, so there’s been a lot of work for me. So I grew up in a pretty blue collar, middle class family in Ohio, I grew up in a little town called Sandusky, that’s right outside Cleveland. We’re pretty much a farm town, blue collar. My dad worked in a factory that makes rubber conveyor belting. My mom was a waitress and a preschool teacher for most of my upbringing.

So by the time I was like, I don’t know, 17, 18, I had real ingrained beliefs that rich people are assholes, that money makes you a bad person. I had beliefs that selling was scammy. I mean, all the kind of terrible things that hold you back and making more… I remember when I graduated high school thinking if I could make $50,000, I would be absolutely set. I thought that was so much money because in my little town, if you made $50,000, you were doing really damn well.

And then I kind of got out in the real world and around more successful people and kind of realized that actually it wasn’t reality one bit. And like I said, a lot of the beliefs that my parents had about money really changed when I started hanging around people with money. So the thought that rich people are assholes that changed very quick for me when I was around a bunch of internet marketers and stuff like that who were making really good money. And I realized they were actually way cooler and way more generous than the majority of people that I grew up with who were the ones calling them the assholes. So kind of just being immersed in that environment definitely changed a lot for me.

And then I did a lot of work on it too. Dan Kennedy’s book Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs was a huge, huge help to me. He kind of got me out of a lot of the mindsets about selling and making too much money, kind of taking more than your fair share of the pie. Things like that, that really do hold you back because it’s kind of driving around with the emergency brake on your car.

No matter what you’re doing correctly, business-wise or let’s say putting out offers and stuff like that, you can’t really get the full function of it because you’re always sabotaging yourself in all of these kind of sneaky ways. It’s pretty hard to see unless you’re aware of it but once you’re aware of it, it’s kind of eye opening to see how often you’re really screwing yourself over.

Kira:   I have lots of questions about money mindset and money. What surprises you the most today about having worked on your money mindset, being in this different mental space and even spending time with people who are at a similar place who are making good money, have you been surprised by anything? Other than what you shared already that a lot of these entrepreneurs you’re hanging out with are actually really good people and generous, what else has surprised you as you’ve reached this different milestone in your business?

Justin Goff:   Probably the most interesting thing for me is that your new reality changes very quickly. So when I was starting, I remember the first time I hit six figures thinking that was such a huge deal. I mean, I was making twice the amount of money as my parents and I just couldn’t believe it. Now, I make a lot more than that. If I made $100,000 now, instead of being elated, I’d be pretty pissed off. So I mean, your regards for what’s normal changes very quickly. The other thing that’s really different to me now is just how much more comfortable I am with money now, whereas I was just a lot more tight with it before where I always worried about it, always thinking about it. When you’re kind of scraping by and struggling to make ends meet every month, money is the most important thing in the world.

Because you get a flat tire when you’re broke, it could literally ruin your whole month and you’re not going to be able to pay for it, and then you’re not going to be able to drive anywhere and it’s this huge deal. I get a flat tire now, yeah, it’s an inconvenience but the tow truck guy comes, and fixes it, and I pay him, and that’s that. But when you’re literally living by survival mechanisms on the money you make, it definitely changes things.

So once you do start to have a little more kind of room to breathe, you definitely just get a lot more loose about it, and you’re not so tight, and not so worried about it, which actually helps more money come to you. That was one thing I realized before is that, I was actually a really bad receiver of money and I’ve noticed there’s a lot of people who make a lot of money, they’re really good receivers of money. So I would just do little things to kind of sabotage people giving me money.

So I’ll give you a good example, man, this was probably seven years ago. I had a roommate where she got behind to paying her rent and I was just paying it for her. And then I remember, basically, it got to the point where she owed like $7,000 and she didn’t make very much money. And I remember her trying to pay it to me and I was actually making pretty decent money at the time, and I kind of was just like, “Whatever.” I actually felt bad about taking the money from her, even though she owed her share of the rent and even though that would have been perfectly normal for me to take the money, I was a really bad receiver of money at the time. And a lot of that comes down to self-worth and all kinds of issues that dig pretty deep. But just being a good receiver of money, being open to receiving money when someone wants to give it to you, is one of the things that has really changed for me that’s made a big difference.

Kira:   Okay, so for the copywriter who is listening to this conversation and thinks running a million-dollar company sounds impossible and they think you’re a unicorn and this can never happen to them, what advice would you give them outside of? I mean, you’ve shared some advice like getting that book, the Dan Kennedy book, Wealth Attraction For Entrepreneurs, being a better receiver of money, but what else would you say to them or suggest to them?

Justin Goff:   Well, I mean, everybody starts somewhere, and you have to be okay with just getting started. So I mean, one of the biggest mistakes, let’s say