Are you ready for an open discussion with the best of the best and the best of what's next? Welcome to the Tony DUrso Show. Join in on a great conversation today with some of the world's great influencers as they showcase great advice and techniques that made them the game changers they are today. Now here's Tony DUrso.

Tony:

Welcome. I'm your host, Tony DUrso. I interview some of the most successful people in the world and I thank you for joining us. This show is dedicated to helping you turn your vision into reality, and here's the successful entrepreneur who provides insights and guidance you can use to move along your vision path. Listen to my shows at Tony DURSO.com or go to your favorite podcast platform such as Apple podcasts and search for Tony DURSO. 90% of people read new messages within 30 minutes. So let's help your business grow. Check out EZ Texting® by texting T-O-N-Y to 858585, and if you're an online seller, I'm going to give you 60 days free of Shipstation® who helps you get out orders quickly and save on shipping. It's really cool. More details on these sponsors just ahead. Stay tuned. Today's show is about amplifying direct response with Nick Raschke. Let's see what we can learn today. And at the end of this interview, I'm going to do a summary recap of what we went over. So stay tuned for that. Nick Raschke is COO at Prolific Media, a world-class data-driven direct response advertising firm, providing sophisticated solutions to clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 brands. Here we go. Hi, Nick. Welcome to our show today.

Nick:

Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited.

Tony:

Nick. I am very excited about this. As you probably know, I've written a couple books on marketing, sales, lead generation, and when it comes to getting direct response, especially amplifying direct response and what you guys are so focused on and so extraordinarily successful, I'm looking for some takeaways for myself. So I'm very excited to have you on with us today.

Nick:

Awesome. Hopefully we can bolster everything here.

Tony:

Well, that's great. That'll be a win-win-win. Nick. What I want to do to start is I want to follow your journey to success. So let's take it from the beginning. How did it all start for you? What's your backstory?

Nick:

So similar to other just gearing entrepreneurs, I just always had this inkling for starting businesses. I can still remember being like an eight year old kid thinking of ways to... I was really into skateboarding and paint balling, and I was thinking of ways to start my next skateboard company or even a local store. Whenever I'm speaking in classes, I give the example of my first business was actually a skate park that me and my friends had built in our backyard, and we would charge local kids a quarter or 50 cents to come in and we would take that money to buy new equipment so we could build better stuff until all of the parents in the neighborhood were very upset with me and shut me down within like two weeks. So I had my first business and then my first failure right away, like eight or nine years old.

Tony:

Bankrupt.

Nick:

Exactly. So from there, in high school, I really loved paintball and if anybody's ever gone paintballing, they know it's a very expensive sport. I did have money growing up, so I would fix local guns for people and charge them until I could save up enough money to buy my own equipment. And then in college I actually started what became one of the world's largest e-comm platforms for paintball, and I would sell used and new paintball equipment to people all over the world. And that was when I really just got my first start, my real, real business. I think within the first years we were doing six figures and this was just out of my dorm room, and I just saw an opportunity to just keep growing and growing. And this is actually before everybody got into the whole drop shipping thing. I connected all of the manufacturers and they had trouble selling their markers and all of their equipment through the retailers and the brick and mortar stores because brick and mortar was starting to die. This was back in 2010, 2011. So I brought them all online and said, Hey, I'm going to send a ton of traffic here, and I never had to touch the inventory. It was all drop shipped to the customers. So I built a really great business just right out of my dorm room in college. I tell most people, I built it just right on my phone in class, and I love that because I wasn't learning enough in class and I needed to just keep learning more and applying what I was learning in my marketing and accounting classes and business classes to what I was doing right then and there. I don't think a lot of people actually knew except for my fraternity brothers and stuff, and a few teachers knew cause they were wondering why I was always on my phone in class, but I was making money while I was in college. So after college, I actually ended up selling that company and all the inventory, because I saw that the paintball market was starting to go down. Everybody was into video games. So I was watching the industry trends and I just wanted to get a job in a startup here in Chicago. So I started working with a lighting company that had these click together letters. Within a year, I took that business from doing 150,000 to over a million. From there I wanted to learn even more about this e-commerce digital marketing thing, so I started working with several agencies in Chicago, which allowed me to work with Fortune 500 companies, and it really, really taught me the power of Facebook, Pinterest and Google. From there, I actually write about a two years ago. I had someone that I interned for when I was in college, actually reach out via LinkedIn said, Hey, are you still working with agencies? Are you still good at Facebook and Pinterest ads? And I said, yeah. He's like, I want to start this advertising company with this other partner of mine. Would you be interested? And I just jumped at the opportunity and it's just been to the moon from there. So quite a little entrepreneurial background in various niche markets, but all online. And I just absolutely love it.

Tony:

That's absolutely astounding Nick, because if I recall, right, your company, the aggregate of the experience and the founders, you've generated over a hundred million dollars in revenue. Is that correct?

Nick:

Yes. Yes. It's actually 125 million now after we updated our 2019 numbers. Our website's a little outdated now, but yeah, our whole team is just very sound entrepreneurs and what's allowed us to be here. One of my other co-founders, the CEO Ramzey Nassar actually started a $20 million print on demand business here in Chicago back in 2012. And that's actually the company that I interned for a long, long time ago. And then my other co-founder for anybody that's a Cubs fan out there, started the Korked Chicago company. So if you're ever in Chicago and you go to a Cubs game and you see the tee shirt that says 'TRY NOT TO SUCK'® with the glasses, the Harry Caray glasses, he did that and raised over a million dollars for Joe Maddon's charity, the manager of the Cubs. So we're all sound entrepreneurs with a lot of experience in this direct consumer world.

Tony:

Wow. That is really something indeed. And I definitely want in with your company because you guys are so successful. You know this stuff so well and as you know, I grew up in Chicago. I used to go to so many Cubs games. I couldn't even tell you how many hundreds of Cubs games I went to. I even remember when I was like five years old, Ernie Banks was up there and he hit his 500th home run and everybody's freaking out cheering. And it just happens to be just quite a moment I remember from back then. I know things are very different today. Kind of dates me a bit, but yeah, definitely. I'm definitely with you on that on Chicago. Very cool. And so this just kind of came to you cause a friend reached out to you and you joined in with your expertise. What I want to get is the vision for your company. At what point did this vision for this amazing company, at what point did this vision come in of like, Oh, we're going to go do this? Tell me about that moment if you can.

Nick:

So I actually always wanted to start my own agency and just really help other people's businesses. It's just a passion of mine. I truly enjoy helping others and seeing their businesses grow cause so many people helped me and I got a few points later on that I want to get into and how that helped me, but I just wanted to help other entrepreneurs. The hardest thing that I think any entrepreneur that's even listening here, they'll probably agree with this finding a team to do your business or any goals that you have is the most important yet hardest thing, cause finding someone that's willing to work just as hard as you is so difficult. I just had this luck of getting two people that worked just as hard, if not harder than I did. So I always had this vision. It's funny cause they had similar visions and it just was happenstance that we found each other all in this e-commerce game.

Tony:

Absolutely amazing. And you want to help entrepreneurs? Is that the big overriding purpose? Is that the passion that you have here that has led to this great success with your company?

Nick:

100%. One of our big goals here is we want to help impact a hundred thousand people, whether that's through charity, whether that's through growing jobs. Another goal that we want to do is we want to increase or create 10,000 jobs, whether that's through ourselves, whether it's through our clients, cause all of our clients this year, I think we generated a hundred new jobs this year and we just started so getting to 10,000 ...we're far away from that. But that's some of the goals that we want to do to make an impact and really grow the job sector here in America.

Tony:

I really liked that. And before we get into some questions on the actual business, let me break this down a little bit. Your company, you amplify direct response, you guys are direct response. You're geniuses. What part of what you do creates a job? Kind of take me through that a little bit.

Nick:

So I'll give you a perfect example. We have a gemstone client that was doing about $100,000 to $150,000 a year, mainly through wholesale, a little bit on their website. I think they were doing about $5,000 to $8,000 a month on their website, depending on what month and within like 60 days, I think it was actually 30 days of working with us. We took them from doing the $8,000 a month in revenue. We took them all the way up to $150,000. The next month we did $250,000. There was actually a point - I've got the email saved because I love this stuff. I post them on the wall - where they go, Nick, please slow down on the ads. We can't even keep up with production. So this company, they had to hire and they hired local moms. So they had to hire, I think, five or six new moms to put together orders, cause they make all their necklaces and bracelets here in the United States, and so they needed help putting those together. They needed help picking and packing. And this is just one example. I've got several other clients that are very, very similar that just could not take on the growth that we were able to drive to them.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about amplifying direct response with Nick Raschke, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about amplifying direct response with Nick Raschke. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Working with both B2B and B2C clients in various verticals, including e-commerce, luxury, technology, apps, sports, financial services, and retail, Prolific Media has generated over $150 million in trackable revenue. All right. And now back to the chat with Nick.

Nick:

Honestly, it's all just through direct response advertising on Facebook, Pinterest and Google, using highly segmented funnels and customer retention, and really looking at understanding the data, knowing when to spend X amount on which campaign, and really looking at each part of the funnel, how many times it takes for a customer to see an ad, at which part of the buying journey they are, all of those things. Like what makes us fantastic direct response advertising agency, and which is why we were able to grow all of those jobs.

Tony:

Hey Nick, if you guys have a waiting list for clients that want to get on board, please put me down because I want in on some of this. This is absolutely astounding and I just can't help it. I'm a marketer and I know where your company has been and what you've done in such a short time. Truly, this is incredible.

Nick:

100%. Let's talk after the show and then I'll tell you a little bit more in depth.

Tony:

Sounds good. We're learning how to amplify direct response with Nick Raschke and you can find him at prolific.media. Now hang on. There is no.com. It's just prolific.media, and prolific is P-R-O-L-I-F-I-C.media and you can check it out. All right, Nick, let's get into your vision path. Let's talk about what you guys do. You're doing something different. Of course you're doing something different that other direct to consumer brands are not doing today. What are these things that, if you want to give some of your secrets, what should we be doing today?

Nick:

I would say the one thing that a lot of companies are not doing today that they really need to start focusing on is making an Omni channel growth approach. I know everybody's first jump is Facebook and trust me, I love Facebook ads. Easy to run, it's highly scalable, it's great, but I think it's too much trust in Facebook and Instagram and they need to expand. So what we do to expand that is we do a heavy Pinterest, which I think a lot of people are not even touching. Pinterest is actually, I think, the undervalued platform where you can get tons of growth, really, really inexpensive CPMs and cost per clicks and the real ads can be similar as Facebook. It's not as scalable as Facebook. We can't reach 300 million people in America, but if you have the right product, if you've got a female focused product, it's going to crush it. So I think just creating that Omnichannel approach, similar with Snapchat, certain segments, we see Snapchat, the CPMs are just so low. For anyone that doesn't know what a CPM is, that's your cost per thousand impressions on these channels. So in addition to that, I think being an early adopter of SMS is great. I've had a lot of brands and clients that we work with say I don't want to annoy my customers. I don't want to be bombarding them, and I totally agree with that. But I think there's a good, happy medium to bombarding them and sending them the right offer at the right time. And actually Klaviyo® - if nobody uses Klaviyo® on this channel - they're actually integrating SMS with their email marketing platform within the next couple of months. So they've been working on that, but I think just really looking at it holistically, being on every channel and really looking at the data to make sure you can amplify all of that. I think the second thing that companies are starting to forget is that 80/20 rule, where 80% of your revenue is likely to come from 20% of your core customers. So it's really focusing on that customer retention. How do we get our customers that have bought a couple of times, or even just one time, how do we get them to buy one more time? How do we get them excited to buy again and make it not like a chore? We want them to feel really excited. We want to create shareable experiences that when they ... it starts, I even think when they get the package that they just want to share it on social media with their friends, like wow, look at this packaging that this company sent me, cause every time you buy something online, it's like you just got a gift for yourself. And that's how these customers think about it, feel about it. So all of those things, I think brands need to put a little bit more time and focus on.

Tony:

That's very interesting. And you mentioned Klaviyo®, which I'm not too familiar with. I am familiar a little with Snapchat and Pinterest - and I say little - and I agree with you that they can be underutilized. Now for me, just as a case in point when I've looked to promote my show, I've gone and checked out Facebook and Pinterest and Snapchat and so forth, and they're all so expensive. You have got to pay a buck or two bucks for just a click to tell someone that your show is out there or be able to commit $3,000. They were just too costly. So for the entrepreneurs of which we have a good segment in this audience, people starting out solopreneurs, we have people fresh out of universities that want to make it out there, that might be a little bit too much at first. Is there anything that you can recommend that might be something that we could look at?

Nick:

Yes. So we actually have a few internal brands that we've run and we run minimal aid behind them. Sometimes we'll run more paid and we're always thinking of new ideas, and one of the first things that we do is we look at partnerships that we can make and really push the organic approach. So perfect example - we have a company and Instagram handle called Memes for Jesus, and we actually partnered with the owner of Memes for Jesus years ago, and it's just an Instagram meme page where he puts out religious memes all day, and said, hey, we'd love to build a store behind this. So we built a store with funny tee shirts and hoodies, and people love the product, but we run very minimal paid behind it. We actually just do a revenue share with the owner of the page, and we just post stories and content. Mainly Q4 is when we make a lot more of the revenue, but throughout the year we get a couple thousand in orders every month and that's all organic. It just takes the time creating the meme and putting it out there. But we have a lot of examples of that. So it's really like forming the right partnerships. As long as you have the skill set that someone else doesn't have and you can create a marriage between the skill sets, you don't have to do paid. I actually think that paid has to come in after you've figured everything else out, because you can go into debt with paid. You can lose a ton of money in paid if you don't know what you're doing. So any entrepreneur that I work with or I'm talking to, I would say, you have to get your fundamentals down. Have the right product, have the right channels, really know your customer, really get some revenue up through free organic ways, and then focus on paid because anybody that out of the gate starts to focus on paid is likely going to lose.

Tony:

Good advice and we thank you very much for that. And for those that are, let's say limited and want to do some advertising, I understand that you recommend ... I'm getting the takeaway here is build up your organic, build up your followers, which is actually something that I've been doing nonstop as the big way of promoting my show. My followers are over a hundred thousand and that is how I'm able to get so many people listen to the show and that's just all organic, but you sometimes have to promote. What would you say if someone's going to make that foray into some paid advertising - of course get with you guys - but what would you recommend would be a good thing to look at?

Nick:

As far as like a budget??

Tony:

Or just good paid advertising to just get yourself going and test the waters and work on your products. For example, you did say earlier, if you have a women's product, it would probably be best to go into Pinterest cause it's underutilized, but that's not necessarily the best vertical that we should look at. Is there anything that would be a good go-to for us?

Nick:

Yeah, definitely. So if I'm getting started in anything, I like to start on Facebook. I think Facebook actually has the lowest cost to get early learnings and Facebook's platform has the most data on most specific niche markets. So if you wanted to launch a jewelry brand that was focused on dolphins, I would do that on Facebook before anywhere else cause I could start with probably $100 to $500 a month in a budget and start to test some different things. What you want to look for is you want to say, okay, are my ads getting good click through? Am I getting a good click through rate on my ads? And a good click through rate can vary depending on product, industry and all of that. But anything I see as good is over 1% to 2% is a good click through rate. So we want to look for one, are we getting a good click through rate? Are people clicking? Is the cost per click between 50 cents and $2? And are we getting add to cart? So I look at all of this, and this is how I kind of look at my funnels is click through rate, good cost per click, am I getting add to carts, are people actually clicking on the ad, adding to cart? And then how many of those are purchasing after they've added to cart? So I think there are little things that I look at, but whenever I start anything, even if a new client comes on and say, Hey, let's do a $500 test depending on the size of the client if they're smaller. Let's do a $500 test. Let's test your best products. Let's test your best images, your best landing pages, all the data that you have to signify that, and let's just see what happens. Because for most small brands, $500 is digestible and we can figure out early learnings. And from those early learnings, we're able to make recommendations of what's next.

Tony:

Good advice there. Thank you for that, Nick.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about amplifying direct response with Nick Raschke, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about amplifying direct response with Nick Raschke. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. All right. And now back to the chat with Nick. Let's get into content. What kind of content would make a good, effective digital campaign?

Nick:

One thing that we're seeing work very, very well across Facebook and Instagram is actually static images with a little bit of motion in it. So during the holidays, one of the really good campaigns that we ran was we added just a little bit of snow. We tested different directions. We tested everything that we could, and that little bit of snow with the static image in the back was really, really powerful. It had the highest click through rate and most consumers that are going through their feed and they think, is that image moving and they have to stop just to question their own curiosity. And then they see, Oh, it's a holiday sale. Or this is a cool backpack. This is a great hoodie. It's kind of just stopping that because there's so many people that are just swiping their life away on these platforms. So we need to think, how can we get them to stop? So another thing that we do is a lot of color testing. Now think back to when they did that orange tile for the fire festival. Well, that's a very high click through rate color. People really gravitate towards orange. They see orange, so doing a lot of color testing and the placement of where your overlay text is can really make a huge impact on the creative that you are offering. So I think another thing in addition to that is adding text overlay. Now Facebook does limit the texts that you can put on an ad. It's 20% in a static image. However, if you have like a GIF or a video, you can actually turn a static image into a video, and as long as you have the thumbnail of that video not have a lot of text in it, the rest of the video can have as much text as you want. Facebook has not picked up on this, and I hope they never do.

Tony:

We're not going to send this show to them, okay?

Nick:

I've said it to them, and they're still like, yeah, it's a gray area, and that's also why I like Pinterest. Pinterest has absolutely no text rules. You can put as much text as you want on there. So that can be really, really powerful there. And then another thing that we see that people are just not taking advantage of is on Facebook, when you are creating an app, you can actually take different images, if it's a static image or different videos, and you can actually place it in different placements. So you don't have the same size image in your story as well. I see a lot of this happen all the time. They have the in-feed ad, which is usually a one-by-one ratio or a four-by-five ratio. When they choose stories as a placement, they don't change the image, but in that same ad, that same campaign without having to make duplicate ads, you can have a story-sized image of the same static ad or video, and it will choose that placement. And this is just a simple little thing that people are just not even doing today that is a great, great way to allow Facebook's algorithm to hit the consumers where they are most likely to take the action that you are targeting without having to create too many ads.

Tony:

Okay. That's good. I do not do Facebook advertising, so that explanation has gone over my head, but I'm sure it makes great sense to anyone who does Facebook now or is going to go into it. Just play that back again and I'm sure it'll just all fit in, but I do thank you for that, because I know that that's very important. You guys are so successful what you've done in just a few short years. And I think part of it, Nick is you guys know how to use key performance indicators like crazy. Can you describe what these are to our audience and how you pick them, how you track them?

Nick:

Yes. Most of the brands that we work with but not all, they'll have a return on ... Everybody looks at a return on investment. We use the acronym ROAS or return on advertising spend, but ROI can be used in the same context, so we like to really look at our client's bottom line. A lot of our clients, when they come to us, they have no idea what KPI they want to have. The bigger brands that are doing 10 million plus, they have KPIs in mind that we keep, but the smaller brands that we work with, they just have no idea. We actually work with all of our clients. We understand how much they pay for the product, how much their profit margin is on all the products, and that's how we determine what our KPIs are that we'll use to grow profitably, cause I think way too many businesses today are acquiring customers for way more money than they should be. I think the best example I just saw recently was Casper® has like $65 or $80 million in returns. Their cap is through the roof. They're basically losing money every year instead of growing profitably. So that's why we work with all of our small businesses to grow profitably and never, never lose money while we're growing online. In any healthy campaign, we like to look at a 3 ROAS, or a three return on investment/return on advertising spend. And that usually gives our clients anywhere from 30 to 40% profit after running that advertising campaign. Now it can completely depend on the product, but having a 3 ROAS is usually a really, really good indicator that things are going good. If you have above a three, like we have a few clients come to us and they have a 7 or 8 ROAS, and we say, okay, that's cool, but what if we were able to spend X amount more, generate Y amount more revenue at a lower ROAS, your net is actually going to be much higher because we're really scaling things. And again, this is just acquiring customers. Once you have the customers, you should be blasting them on email and SMS to get all of that net profit, so you're not spending more money to continuously drive revenue. So, whenever we're looking at that, we like to look at several things. One, what is your net profit? Any company that has at least a 70% profit margin is going to be able to hit that three X return on investment or ROAS. We also look at the CPA goals for certain clients, and we also do a cost per install. We look at the add to cart cost, so there's a bunch of different KPIs that we'll look at. I think another thing to mention here is when you're testing, how do you determine if the test was successful or not? So, if I'm testing anything, I always look for it at the very least a 2-3 X my CPA goal for a prospecting test, cause we targeting CPAs should be much lower. So if your CPA is high - say your CPA is $20 or to prospect or your retargeting CPA is $5, it's going to balance out depending on the volume to bring it down to probably your $10 to $12 CPA goal. If I'm testing prospecting ads and my goal is a $12 CPA, and I know I'm getting a $20 CPA for prospecting. If my test is a $40 CPA, I know that that's at least doing okay and I can likely bring it down over the next couple of weeks, whether that's iterating the copy, iterating the landing page, or maybe making tweaks to the actual creative. So that's just like a first KPI indicator that I look at. And I hope that didn't go over your head. I know that can be a little ... there's a lot of CPAs and a lot of acronyms thrown out there, but those are some of the things that we look at. And when we take all of that data and we look at our KPI as a month and depending on the client and the brand, we look at how purchases attribute over time. So on Facebook, we have a 28 day click, one day view attribution window, and most of these is last click, so meaning if I clicked on day one, but I didn't purchase until day 25. When that person purchases on day 25, that purchase is going to be attributed all the way back to day one. So you can look at a month's KPI to say, okay, I want to end the month at X KPI, or you can say, Hey, I want to have this month show this KPI after the month is over, because you have an additional 28 days after a month is over for purchases in Month 2 to attribute to Month 1. So all of those things can help you drive growth. We use a little bit of predictive modeling after we've worked with a client for long enough that we can predict how a month's KPI's actually going to end, all based on the data. I know that was a lot, maybe ask the questions to make sure you understand that.

Tony:

Well, I definitely got a lot of it. I used to do a little bit of this many, many years ago, but the world has gotten much more sophisticated since then, but I definitely track with it, and for the audience CPA is the cost per acquisition. It depends on what you're selling. You've got to figure out what are you going to spend and what can you spend and still be profitable, and what's it going to cost you to get a customer, but just look up CPA. Listen to this again and you'll have it.

Nick:

And if you don't, you can YouTube it. We have tons of videos on this that we'll be putting out on YouTube, because we just want to educate more people on what all of this is, because I think there's a lot of a "gurus" out there. We want to give all this away for free, really educate the consumer or the entrepreneurs out there that really want to grow and bolster their business and profit.

Tony:

Well, Nick, we really appreciate that and we will check you out on YouTube. Do we go to a YouTube Prolific Media? We'll just search and we should find you, right?

Nick:

Yup. I think we might have them under Prolific Academy because it's more of like a teaching experience. But if you search Prolific media, you'll find them.

Tony:

Alright. Nick, you mentioned a company just earlier, which probably, I don't know if everyone that's listening has heard of it. I think I've heard the name once. That was Casper® and it makes me realize there's just too much information. There's so much, there are so many feeds. There's so much news. There are so many updates. There are so many trends. So I'd like to know how do you guys stay on top of the trends? How do you get this and absorb this information and utilize it? Where's your best go-to to stay on top of what's going on?

Nick:

I've got a couple of good ones and I think that they're more traditional that I think the younger demographic doesn't really know. I'm only 28. So this is exactly what I did and knows no one else my age at these things. I actually go to a ton of networking events - in Chicago, LA New York, wherever I am, I make sure to go to networking events and I seek out people in my industry or just smart people, navigating the networks to try to just learn more, cause I think that there's a ton of stuff online and there's just so much online, It's actually hard to decipher. What do I actually listen to? I like actually going to networking events, meeting people in my industry, even outside of my industry, just to learn more and really, really learn. I think they call it social hacking, so I do that. I seek out people like mentors. I've always sought out mentors whether it's through email, a LinkedIn message and actually through networking events, I've gotten introductions to other mentors that I'd love to meet with. I've learned a lot through those. Fireside chats, they have them all over in any major city. I love trade shows. I love conferences. Anywhere where there's industry people in one place. I like to do all of that. I consider myself a sponge. I just go in and shut up and listen and absorb as much as I can.

Tony:

Nick, what you've just given us is a full-time job. We'll be doing this non-stop.

Nick:

You know what? Actually, in Chicago for a whole year when I was early in my entrepreneurial ventures, didn't have much money, these days I went to networking events every night in Chicago at right after work and I got free dinner, free drinks and I got to network, so it was kind of like a full time job. But if you want to really succeed, this has to be your second full time job if you already have one. And I think that's another major key for any entrepreneur.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about amplifying direct response with Nick Raschke. But first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Tony:

All right, we're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you could learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about amplifying direct response with Nick Raschke. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. So far, Prolific Media raised an impressive 2 million in meals with their clients through Feeding America throughout the COVID-19 epidemic, starting in March 2020. Prolific also raised funds to donate 60,000 masks to those in need. And now back to the chat with Nick.

Nick:

But aside from that, I do like looking at blogs and stuff. I like search engine land. I like marketing land. I like reading case studies. I like going to platform conferences like Facebook, Google, and Pinterest and Snapchat who all have conferences, so I think those are places to really learn. And honestly, early on, I was a big, big fan of Gary V; still am and even I still listen to him. I run an agency and I listen to things that these other agencies are talking about. I think that most people, it goes over their head, but what I do is I'll listen to that same video three times and I'll really dissect the things that they said and I think how can I apply this to my business? Because when I was in college, I did the exact same thing. I sat in class, I tried to apply whatever I was learning to my businesses and what I wanted so that - one, I would never forget and two - it actually helped. I think most people just don't do that.

Tony:

And don't forget podcasts, because you don't have necessarily jet around the country. While you're driving to and from work, exercising, mowing your lawn, walking your dog, podcasts are a great source because you get rising entrepreneurs, business people, successful people. It's just a wealth of information on there as well.

Nick:

100%. I don't even know how I missed podcasts cause that's all I do walking to work.

Tony:

No worries. No worries. And what I'd like to know, you guys have done so much so fast. Are there some new goals, something you're setting out to achieve or looking to? What's the hill you're looking to climb in the next couple of years?

Nick:

Like I mentioned, we really want to grow 10,000 jobs. So that's one of our major company goals. Really, really want to do that. We really want to move on and start having our own conferences where we can invite our own clients and anybody who wants to be a client or anybody that just wants to learn. We really want to start doing major conferences here in Chicago and LA and New York. We've on pace to open an office in LA within the next 18 months, and then from there within the next 24 months, we'd like to have one in New York, just to have from coast to coast. And we want to do monthly, if not weekly or biweekly events in Chicago, that they're just small local startups and really bring startup community together, because Chicago can kind of be a very highly segmented city. We want to bring everybody to one place and just bringing more people together, so I think those are really our goals.

Tony:

I really liked that on the job status. Absolutely great. And you know what? I know you guys are going to do that. You are going to create thousands and thousands of jobs. I totally see the whole lineup, the whole platform, the whole track. I see it. This is going to happen.

Nick:

I'm excited.

Tony:

Nick, what about personal habits that contribute to your vision success? You have a lot of good things going. You've got some habits that are really good. We want to learn from you. What do you do?

Nick:

I am a workaholic. I have been a workaholic my whole life. I'm a little bit abnormal. I was never a fan of sports or anything like that, so I have a whole bunch of extra time that everybody invests into following their favorite sports team and all of that, so I just had this extra time, essentially. I would say some of the big things that have contributed though is making sure I know when enough is enough. Being a workaholic, you have to know your burn rate, when you need your alone time, so I'll actually take just one day a week. All Sunday I barely touch my phone. I'm watching Netflix the whole day and that recharges me for the week. I'm a big goal setter. So, at the beginning of the day and at the end of every day, I have a checklist of what I need to do, what I accomplished and what I'm going to do the next day. And I'm always rearranging things, setting my goals, whether it's short term and long-term. I think I mentioned this earlier, but just seeking out help. I think so many people are afraid to ask for help. I always ask for help. Again, I'm a sponge. I want to learn as much as I can. So I'm just always researching. Even when I go out too, if I'm going out with friends. My girlfriend absolutely hates this, but if I'm at the bar and she's talking to her friends, I will whip out my phone and just start researching stuff, cause that's just my natural habitat. I don't like to just sit there and drink. I want to learn and keep always learning and staying ahead of the curve.

Tony:

I totally know what you mean there on that phone, especially when it's some work and it's during the hours that you can work. I'm with you there, just always pulling out the phone, seeing what's going on and who's doing what.

Nick:

Exactly.

Tony:

Very good, very good. Keeping the finger on the pulse. Now I'm going to ask one more question, but I'm going to change one thing here, cause I always for a long time, I've been referring to my audience as visionaries. We talk about your vision, your vision path, what's your vision success, and it all has to do with the goal, where you're going to go. What's that vision climbing that mountain to achieve? My wife says visionaries are old. She says they should be the success squad. So from now on, I'm going to start saying success squad. So, are there any great resources that you would like to share with our audience success squad?

Nick:

I think I may have touched on these earlier, but some different ones... Facebook groups are actually amazing. There's pros and cons to them, cause there's definitely, like I had mentioned earlier, the gurus that claim to know everything, but there's a lot of Facebook groups out there where people just give us so much free knowledge. Whether it's in your niche, whether it's digital marketing, there's Facebook groups, Pinterest groups, there's tons of it, and they are, honestly most of the time, all willing to help for free and give that information out there. I think there's a give and take. Sometimes people ask for a little bit too much in those groups, but I love the Facebook groups. I can't stress it enough - just really reaching out to find a good mentor. That is what's really helped me create visions, cause I'm not a huge visionary person, although I know what I want to do. I'm just a workaholic and I need a few people in my life that I have as mentors that I ask, hey, this is what I'm doing. What do you think I could do with this? And they help me. I think that that is just so important, to just really have a strong mentor or mentors.

Tony:

Absolutely key. I think that that is the absolute key to anyone's success because frankly, nobody can do everything all by themselves. I haven't found one person ever that has done everything all by themselves. You need someone that's your go-to, to look over your shoulder, give you some advice. I talk about my mentor and various mentors every once in a while, and the person that really helped me really rock on podcasting and radio here is Michael Benner, who I'm going to actually interview again in a couple of weeks. He's helped me so much. He's a big radio personality. And it's interesting when you speak with someone who is so knowledgeable in an area, they may say a little, but it means a lot. So I highly advise if you want to really get to success and climb and get to the top of that mountain or niche or wherever, get a mentor. There's just no denying it. It's night and day in terms of getting you to where you need to be. So absolutely cool on that.

Nick:

Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I would say anybody that is in this audience that is in college, my first mentors were my teachers. I harassed them every day after class. Sometimes they loved it. Sometimes they were shooing me out, but I really extracted as much as I could from my teachers first, and then sought out other mentors as I grew and grew. I would suggest starting there, if you are in college, find a teacher cause a lot of teachers actually have either started their own business, own their own business, or a lot like my school, all the teachers had their own little projects that were doing several million dollars. And that's where I learned a lot of my entrepreneurial chops from.

Tony:

Thank you so much for that, Nick. We've been learning how to amplify direct response with Nick Raschke, and you can find him at prolific.media. Once again, it's not a dot.com. It's just a dot. So it's prolific.media. Nick, thank you so much for giving us all this. This was just such a great data dump of knowledge and wisdom here. I just thank you so much for sharing.

Nick:

Thank you for having me.

Tony:

Hey, success squad. Thanks for hanging out with me while I featured an elite entrepreneur who took his vision to reality. I hope this was as inspiring for you as it was for me to do this interview. I learned so much about marketing and getting the attention of consumers. The insights are so valuable. So how did you like it? Amplifying direct response with Nick Raschke. When I first did this interview, his company generated over $125 million in sales as you heard us talk about at the beginning, and before I published this, I checked again for any updates and now it's $150 million. That is some amazing fast growth there. Just amazing. And right at the get go, Nick talks about having the right team is the most important and yet the hardest to get. Are you wildly successful like Nick? Do you have a great, strong team that works as hard as you do? And that is a very strong purpose behind all of this. They want to impact 100,000 people. That's strong! And they want to create 10,000 jobs. I love it. Can you imagine getting so many sales that you have to slow down the ads? What a delightful thought, isn't it? Have you ever done that before? Well, there's a chance that might happen to you if you use Nick's company. Are you now, or have you ever advertised on Pinterest or Snapchat? I haven't used either before myself. And how about SMS? That's texting. Do you use any of those services?

Tony:

EZ Texting is giving away a free trial to listeners of my show as you heard earlier. So I highly recommend you just do it. Text T O N Y to 858585. There's so much more I got out of this interview. What did you get? I'd love to know how you use this information to help you in your business or career. Reach out to me. Now, grab hold of your vision. Decide you're either going to start something great or take it to the next level. You have to decide first. It always starts with a decision and you can get my vision map to help you along the process. The free eBook is at www.tonyDURSO.com. You can pick up the audio version and the training class too. Highly recommended. I created my empire in just a few years. That's all it took. I had the Vision Map is my guide. I wrote it up and now you can do it too. Let's help you move on your journey to success. And if you have any Apple device or access to Apple podcasts, please look up my name - Tony D-U-R-S-O and subscribe to my show. A kind review there will get you tremendous appreciation back in return. Thanks guys, and remember just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds. Do good deeds and join me on the next episode of the Tony DUrso Show. We hope you've enjoyed this week's edition of the Tony DUrso Show with his key influencers. Be sure to tune in again next Friday at 5:00 PM Eastern time, 2:00 PM. Pacific time on the Voice America influencers channel.