In this episode, Simon welcomes Mostafa Hosseini, the founder of Persyo Inc and WP Spell Check. He works with coaches, consultants and experts to build their business with less involvement of time. His mission is to help clients create and implement their one-page strategic marketing plan in 7 days or less. Listen to Mostafa’s sharing on confidence for entrepreneurs.

3 Valuable Insights

• Figure out target market
• Building houses without a plan is impossible
• Keep implementing and updating the plan until having a working strategy

Show Notes

(00:14) Simon: Welcome back everybody to the Strategy Sprints podcast. I'm your guest, Simon Severino. Today, my guest is serial entrepreneur, author, business coach, founder of Persyo and creator of the simple marketing formula, the viral coefficient formula, simple time management formula. He has been coaching and consulting for the past 10 years, helping businesses in various niches and industries grow and scale and become more profitable. He's an avid skier, hiker, reader, and he loves to spend time with his family in his free time. Welcome everybody. Mostafa Hosseini.

(00:52) Mostafa: Thank you. Thanks. Thank you for having me

(00:55) Simon: So cool to have you here, Mostafa and super relevant what you brought because we will talk to one page marketing plan and this is so relevant right now, but before we go there, what are you currently creating?

(01:10) Mostafa: What am I currently creating? That's a good question. Um, I'm actually working on my offer and, uh, the thing that I'm creating is I'm working on improving our conversion rates on multiple spots in our funnel. Nice. That's what I'm working on, creating. Okay,

(01:36) Simon: Nice. And how's it going?

(01:39) Mostafa: Good, good. I'm reading a good book called uh, pitch anything and it's a great book.

(01:48) Simon: Cool. So we know each other from a mastermind where we are together, but tell our audience a little bit about your main offering.

(02:01) Mostafa: So I specialize in one page marketing plan. So I help coaches, consultants and experts create and implement their one page marketing plan in three days or less. The problem we solve is the fact that most of these people are poking around at different marketing ideas, tools, systems, processes, and programs, and they do that aimlessly without any goals or plans and directions, which is causing a lot of anxiety, frustration, confusion, and straight up depression because of the fact that, um, they have, and they experience daily setback and failure. And so we help them simplify everything onto one page. And it's a one page plan that they get to use every day and, um, to grow and scale their business. So that's what we do.

(02:57) Simon: Beautiful. And right now with access to technology, there are so many things that a business or a could do. We could do LinkedIn, we could do Instagram, we could do launches, we could do collaborations. We could do ads, so many different things. So let's start there. How do you help find out which path to take?

(03:23) Mostafa: So a few questions we ask, we actually have a questionnaire in our course when we do it on two, which one to end up with a few questions to answer is which one do you have experience with? Which one do you personally like and approve of that matches your personality? Which one do you, uh, have or know someone that could do it for you? And so I'm not attached to any one of our values is that we are not attached to any processes we're attached to the result. So, uh, you know, as long as we get there, uh, it doesn't make a difference to me whether you use Facebook or you use LinkedIn or which program, whichever you're more comfortable with, that's the one you should go with.

(04:08) Simon: And what's your process of bringing everything into a one pager.

(04:14) Mostafa: So we have a three-day bootcamp. And during the bootcamp, we work in a live environment with, you know, entrepreneurs and coaches, consultants from around the world. And we have six phases in our plan. Can I, can I go through with them? Of course. So phase one is setting your plan. I'm sorry, setting your plan, sending your goal, uh, knowing exactly what you want, because if you don't know exactly what you want getting, it would be impossible, right? It's like building a house. You don't see very many home builders starting to build a house without a completed plan. They have, they have, uh, they have the drawing and then they start building off of that plan. Right. Can you imagine what a house would look like without a plan?

(05:08) Simon: Like when I play with my kids, I'm curious what comes out, Hey there, what are we building? Let's see.

(05:14) Mostafa: It's all right. But then at the end of the day, when you're building your house and spending, I don’t know half a million or a million dollars on a house, you better finish the plan first. And so that's where, that's the one where most entrepreneurs get stuck and that's why they don't get what they want to get, because they don't know what they want. Right. And there's all that frustration and, and anxiety around. And you know, working really hard, aiming for nothingness, right? Besides I want lots of money. Okay. How much do you want? Well, you know, a lot of, and lots, you know, I want millions, well, do you want 1 million or 999 million? There's difference there. And so that's step one. Step two is figuring out your target market, who exactly do you want to serve? And what do you want to do for them?

That's another very big mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make is they try to serve everybody and anybody and they end up doing serving nobody. And so then we go through the target market, identify exactly what, who we serve and what we do for them. What we specialize in. Then we work on the offer, what exactly we're going to offer to these group of people as my target market and the story behind the offer, which helps us connect with the audience. And then that was step one, two and three. Then step four is working on your lead generation systems. So I have my goal. I know who I'm serving. I have an offer and now I need to go find people and serve them. What exactly am I going to do to find customers? Then step number five is lead conversion. What am I going to do to turn them into an actual paying customer? What is the step-by-step process? And then step number six, which is 98% of the time overlooked and not done is client retention. Not that I have a customer, what am I going to do to keep them, have them come back and refer their network to me and get recurring revenue. So those are the six steps in our bootcamp, uh, to create a one-page marketing plan. Sorry, that was a long answer.

(07:31) Simon: Six steps. Beautiful. No, we will go even deeper in there in this beautiful six steps after one word from our sponsors.

Three days, six steps. And you will have difficulties at some point where, where are parts where you see people's struggle, struggle to fulfill them in three days.

(08:10) Mostafa: Where did they have struggles to fulfill their plan?

(08:14) Simon: No. No. Just to create a one pager, we are still creating the one pager in these three days. So you have some parts that are more difficult for people than others.

(08:24) Mostafa: Yeah. So, uh, some people, uh, have a really hard time picking a target market or picking a niche market because they have that mentality of, I want to serve the world and they have a hard time convincing themselves that as small niche market, which actually niche markets are not small. Like during my class, I repeatedly show people that, you know, let's say I want a, a, you know, red heads with blue who are right-handed, we're also life coaches. Right? If we end up going searching for those people, like in a given city, they're usually ended up being like a few thousands, right? That's an extreme example that I'm making here, but niche markets are actually not very small. They're usually into thousands and thousands of people. And then my question for them usually is can you live with that? Like 20,000 potential customers? Is that something you can handle? The answers is Yes.

(09:27) Simon: No. I love it because I get, I get kind of angry when I see in many textbooks that entrepreneurs are given I see TAM total addressable market. And it is like step two of their business idea, check the total addressable market. And this is not just wrong. It's also really dangerous because if you start with a five level segmentation, if you start really narrow, you can make your product excellent. And if feel excellent, even with a very small leash, it's much easier to roll it out to an ADA scent population. And there are many examples of this, but many people start really wrong, too broad. And then if you fish for everything you get, you get no fish

(10:16) Mostafa: Exactly. Absolutely. Could not agree more.

(10:21) Simon: Very cool. Yeah. It's ingrained these, these fear. If I focus too much, then I lose so many opportunities.

(10:32) Mostafa: Well, yeah. And we're the exact opposite is true. When you try to get everybody, you got nobody. No. Right. And, um, um, can I share it a formula on how it works? Yeah. So the way it works is you grab a small segment, which is not really so small. You dominate that market. You go, you become the best in that market, the authority, the expert in that market. And if that small market not so small is not big enough for you. Once you dominate that market and you have enough cash, then you can start serving the adjacent markets. But until you become the dominant force in one niche market, forget about serving everybody in anybody.

(11:24) Simon: I love it. And the dominant force, and I will even add something and you have systemized it in a way that you can leave it alone for a couple months. And you start now exploring and entering, uh, the new adjacent markets, right? Because you will need the time and the attention to do that. Beautiful. So after three days, they have everything on one page and people listening. Even if you do just this with Mustapha, you are right now ahead of your competitors, because how many of your competitors have their marketing plan on one page? Not very many, not many. So you have clarity and now what's next. How to, how to implement that, make it real.

(12:14) Mostafa: Exactly. Exactly. So without, I guess, implementation of your plan, you're not going to get there. It's like you have a plan to build a house. The house is not going to build itself. You have to build it. And so the plan just gives you clarity as to exactly what needs to be done. And so we work on and focus on implementing the plan once we create it. Now, but by the time you set your goals and your creative plan, you are 40 times more, 20 times more likely to be successful compared to someone that doesn't have a clear goal and doesn't have a plan. Now, when you start implementing your plan, you're now 40 times more likely to reach your goal and be successful. So you have a goal, you have a plan, you implement the plan, and then you're going to figure out three implementation.

You're going to figure out whether this plan works or not. Here's what a lot of people get stuck. Again, they create a plan and they either don't implement, which is more than half of the people that create a plan, the small fraction to do implement some of them, they implement for a little bit. And they're like, Oh my God, the plan that I created did not work. Right. And they stopped right there where the real success is in improving, optimizing and updating the plan. Right. I created a strategy. I tried it, it didn't work. All right, let's go figure out why it didn't work. Let's find out the loopholes and the problems updating, and then keep going until we have a plan and a strategy that actually works. Right. If we follow the formula and the, around the world with successful companies, this is the process, set a goal, create a plan, implement, keep implementing and updating until we have a working strategy. And there's simply no way around this and the business world.

(14:21) Simon: This is being discussed a lot in our community right now. When should I quit? When do I know that it doesn't work versus when should it be persistent? Many people are discussing right now. Okay. For example, list building list building, should I do ads or should I do collaborations? How many weeks or months or days do I put in, in order to validate or invalidate that are the right path for me? When should I be persistent? And when tonight, should I give up and say, okay, that's the wrong thing.

(15:00) Mostafa: So couple of things, number one, Seth Godin has a book called the dip, which I think you have read as well. Uh, and that, that, that book, and it's a tiny little book that gives that book, gives you some perspective on where and when to stop and when to keep, go, keep going, right. And when to keep going. Right? And the other thing is working with a coach or someone or a mentor, someone that has done this before, and they could see what the next step would be and or whether this strategy is going to work or not. Right. Um, those are the top two things that come to mind for me. What's your, your think on this? Um,

(15:54) Simon: We try to create experimental situation. We call it hypothesis testing. So we try to write it down as an XYZ hypothesis. If I send four emails and I get 25 people on my list, then it is validated. We do five of them. And then we say, okay, what does the number say? And, uh, we try to do them as soon as possible, ideally in the same week. Yep. So from the macro, we go into the micro, we say, okay, we want to know if we can get, let's say 20,000 emails in one year, we tested in a small, in a, in a small setting and try to extrapolate the pattern. If we can find the pattern in one week better, otherwise it will take a second week, but we will try to know it in advance. And, uh, as soon as possible, basically we try to learn fast. And, uh, the bigger the corporation, the, the bigger the team, the more experiments they can do at once, they don't have to do them, uh, sequentially.

(17:07) Mostafa: Absolutely. Sometimes, um, in my experience it would be a matter of volume as well. Like you have to have in, in, in our hypothesis and in our test, now we're talking about it. I've had people where they gave up on a small volume where we should have enough volume on a test, um, to make sure whether this is working or not.

(17:34) Simon: Yeah. You have to define conditions that will tell you, is it invalidated or is it validated or do you have to bring more, more tests in. The threshold. Lovely. I'm so curious. You can pick one person for this strategy award when everybody's zigging, this person is zagging, but from your perspective, this person is doing the right thing.

(18:03) Mostafa: When everybody's zigging this guy, or this girl is zagging, I will nominate J facet.

(18:13 ) Simon: And why?

(18:18) Mostafa: Um, Why? He's got a good mindset. He's got a good heart and he's always pushing forward. He's got lots of energy. Um, he's always out there helping people. And that's why

(18:36) Simon: Beautiful. And now let's continue with, with your path. So if people want to put in three days and create their one page, how do they start with you?

(18:52) Mostafa: So if they go to our site, uh, persyo.com, slash, join SNF, or it slash join dash SMF. Uh, here I will, uh, put the link here for you or, uh, or if they just go persyo.com for Sanyo is P as in Peter, E as in elephant, R as in Robert, S as in Sam, Y as in yoga, O as in omega.com, the link to our course is right in our, on our homepage. And, uh, they could sign up and join us and, um, work on building their one page marketing plan.

(19:38) Simon: Beautiful. And so what, who should not be doing it? Who is the wrong person to work with you?

(19:46) Mostafa: If who is the wrong person to work with us, if you generally know everything about everything, this is not going to work. If you don't like working with a community and working with other people, this is not going to work. If people around you are usually dumb and stupid, this is definitely not going to work for you. Um, uh, what else, if this is going to work for you, if you have an open heart and you're open to learning and figure out your strategy, if you've been in Iran for a year or two or more, and you're looking for the next phase to grow and scale your business, and you want a one pager strategy, and if you're sick and tired of being sick and tired, and so you've been added, you're poking around, you've got, you've got your business off the ground, and now you're like, I need to streamline this process. I need a one pager. I need a simple strategy to help me get there. Something that I could look at and I act on and track on a daily basis. This would work.

(20:53) Simon: Cool. And, uh, how long are you? Are you doing the one-page marketing thing? What do you mean? How long are you doing this?

(21:02) Mostafa: The course. Yeah. So our bootcamp is a three-day bootcamp. He goes from Friday to Sunday. So Friday, Saturday, Sunday, it's all day from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Mountain time, mountain, North American time.

(21:19) Simon: Beautiful. What did you recently change your mind about?

(21:23) Mostafa: What did I recently changed my mind about, uh, the fact that I should put more focus on our joint venture partners when it comes to generating leads, and it's just so much easier to bring potential leads and customers in to our funnel, through JV partners than through any other, um, methods out there.

(21:53) Simon: So a, the other methods would be like spending in ads or trying cold outreach methods, or what have you tried and why is it better?

(22:06) Mostafa: So we've done ads, we've done cold outreach, social media, organic, and the rest of it. But the thing about joint venture, um, deals or opportunities is that let's say you have a list of people. Let's say you have a thousand people on your list right now, these people know you, some of them like you, and some of them trust you right now. We all, we all have some people on our list that they don't do business with us. Now, what we're focused on, the people that do business with us, and they know like, and trust us now, because your tribe knows and likes and trusts you. If you turn around and say, Hey guys, Mostafa is running a course. It is probably a good idea for you to check it out and see if it's a good fit for you, right? You've already done the work.

You've already established this credibility authority and the expertise with your list. And you just say, Hey, check this guy out. He, it may be worth it for you and your business, right? So you've done all the work for me to go and try to establish authority and expertise with 300 people or 400 people is going to take me a few months. If I'm doing the cold outreach, or if I'm doing the Facebook ads are here, here and there. So for that reason, the conversion rates on JV traffic is so much higher in my experience between five to 10 times higher, if not more compared to coal that rich so much better, much easier.

(23:50) Simon: I agree. Absolutely. And also that the fit, because there is there, there are two pre selection criteria. So the person who is endorsing you thinks about the match. They know there are people they know you, and they decide to promote you. They have filtered in there in at least once they have thought about how much will will it fit. And so you have the better quality of leads. You can get maybe more via other, other methods, but the fit to your offer will probably be lower. So you will be, you will have more leads, but less, less of the right ones.

(24:35) Mostafa: Oh yeah. Like an example. If you're trying to sign people up for your webinar, from your Facebook ads, you would get anywhere from one to 2% sign-up rate. If you're doing a good job from JV partners, it could be as much as 50%, 60%, depending on who is, um, sending their email and the quality of the relationship. But it's like, you see one compared to 50%.

(25:04) Simon: That's the difference. Here you go. And then you, at the beginning, you also say, Hey, people think about retainment because it's, it's smarter. It's cheaper. Can you tell us how to retain people? How to think and retainment and how to act.

(25:22) Mostafa: So this is why my, so I are, if you've been around for a while with your marketing and you have a list, this is our number one strategy to grow and scale the business. Um, most people, most business owners ignored their customers. Right. Have you ever, do you ever watch this show? Cesar Milan dog whisper. No. Anyway, this is a guy that fixes dogs, the dogs that are misbehaving. And so he has a strategy where he says, when you go in and try to fix a dog in the beginning, it's a no talk, no touch, no eye contact with the dog. If you're trying to correct a dog, no talk, no touch, no eye contact. Okay. That's what I see. Most business owners do to their customers. No talk, no touch, no eye contact. It's like they're ignoring their customers. And they're trying to fix their customers for some reason.

And so the statistics show that you'd lose about 64 to 68% of your customers. If you don't stay in touch with them, because they perceive that you don't care about them, they think that you don't care about them. Right? Now, think about your friends. If you don't call your best friends or your family for a month or two, usually they'll be pissed  off. There'll be saying, why are you not calling me? Quite frankly, if you care about them and your customers, you would call them. Now here's a big myth around client retention and customer retention. And people say, I don't want to bother my customers. Right? You heard that before?

(27:14) Simon: Oh yeah. Every, every client of us. Oh, I don't want to write so many emails. Yeah. I don't want to bother them.

(27:20) Mostafa: I don't want to bother them. It's like, when you call your friends or your family, do you say, can, can you do this? Can you like, not call your best friend for like two months? And when they say, why you didn't call me and say, Hey, I didn't want to bother you. Can you say that? Right. So, I mean, there, there is a, there is a clear line between bothering your customers and staying in touch with them, right? So by staying in touch with them, you would have them come back. You would have them give them recurring, give you recurring revenue. And you want to encourage referrals from and tap into their network. And if you don't do any client retention activities, you would miss on the recurring revenue opportunity, your client satisfaction rates will go down and you won't get as many referrals.

(28:18) Simon: Oh, this is powerful. And how do you manage to stay in contact to, to show that you are caring and to stay top of mind?

(28:27) Mostafa: For sure. So the absolute bare minimum that you've got to do is one email per month that goes out to your entire list. If you're so busy, you don't have the manpower or the systems to send more. They have to see your name once a month. So they don't forget about you write one email per month. Another thing that we do that is very effective is around the call to the entire list every quarter. So every three months, pick up the phone, call your entire list. It doesn't have to be salesy. It doesn't have to be pushy and sleazy in any shape or form you just call and say, Hey, it's me. How's it going? How's life. How's your business. And you can ask, is there anything I could do for you? Right?

(29:19) Simon: What do you say to people? Um, who say, well, email is over. People are getting too  many emails. They don't want emails.

(29:32) Mostafa: Look what matters is at. So if you're busy and you don't have a team, you cannot call everybody. Your list. Email is a leveraged way to reach out to your, to your customers. And what really matters when it comes to retention is for them to just see your name, see the fact that you cared about them to send them an email. Sometimes if, if they, even if they don't open it, it's okay. All we want them to do is to see our name that we exist, right? When the right come time comes, when the right message appears in front of them, when the right offer shows up in front of them, they will open and they will interact with you, right? So yes, emails are going out. And, uh, but I wouldn't let that stop me from staying in touch with my customers. The other piece to that is if you are delivering high quality content and value to your list, it doesn't matter how many other people are emailing them. Right. They know that this is you deliver quality, you deliver value. And, uh, you do that. Now another easy way is to grab the same content and post it on social media to engage your followers and your customers through social media as well.

(31:00) Simon: I have one question that I always ask who should be my next guest,

(31:06) Mostafa: Who should be our next guest. Um, can you give me a criteria as to who you're looking for?

(31:18) Simon: Somebody who can give a CEO tip to CEOs to help them thrive and rock Q1.

(31:28) Mostafa: Okay. Uh, have you had Jane Powers here? She's a sales trainer and she's pretty good. Actually. Jane Jane Powers. I'd be happy to introduce you guys. Beautiful. Okay.

Simon (31:44): And the most of our, what are the three books that shaped you most? We had the deep already.

(31:53) Mostafa: The dip is a good book. Uh, my top three books. Number one is the 80 20 principle by Richard Kosch. This book changed the, the way I do business and the way I think, back in 2017. And it's, if there was one book that I wish I read 20 years ago, it was this 80 20 principle book. Uh, next one is working with the law by Raymond Holliwell. Now working with the law, Raymond Holliwell explains how to work, how the world or the universe works. Amazing book. I absolutely love it. And then my next top book is the go giver by, um, Bob Burke. Uh, the, these three books are on top of my list.

(32:45) Simon: Super cool. And most of that, is there anything I forgot to ask you?

32:51) Mostafa: Um, no, I think we covered it pretty well. Thank you. This has been an amazing conversation.

(32:57) Simon: Thank you so much for being on the show. My friend come back soon. Rolling and everybody go make your one pager and your marketing plan on one page with Mostafa.

(33:07) Mostafa:

Thank you. Appreciate it.