Troy Dean

Jos Aguiar
Hey guys, so today I’m live with none other than Mr. Troy Dean. Now he’s a WordPress consultant that trains people who use WordPress how to use it bit more efficiently and affect the best business goals for business owners. And he also helps small business Minnesota is using it better. So super excited to have him on the show. And let’s get into it, shall we? Mr. Troy? How are you, man? Good man. How are you? Pretty good, my friend. So tell me, what exactly is it that you do?

Troy Dean
What are the week as? Well, so I we, we have a couple of couple of companies. One is where we help web designers improve their business and deliver a better product to their clients. That’s WP Elevation, which some people may be familiar with. The other company is called Rockstar Empires, which is where we basically are having the same conversation on the other side of the coin. So we’re talking to small business owners and helping small business owners better use the internet to leverage and scale their business.

Jos Aguiar
And how does that work? With the training? When you say teach them how to leverage and scale? Using intent? What kind of stuff do you do?

Troy Dean
Yeah, so it Yep. So good question. So the big play for us really is to be the go to place where small business go to learn how to use the internet to scale and improve and leverage their business and really optimise minimise the waste and optimise their profitability. So the way that we’ve started that is, the kind of the proof of concept if you like is we’re helping creative service providers now take their knowledge and turn their knowledge into a course that they can sell on the internet. So let me give you an example. You’re a marketing consultant, can you do Done For You services for clients, at a certain price point, you might get a I’m sure you do get a lot of leads come along, that want to hire you, but they can’t afford you. And so you might have a course, which shows them how to set up their own marketing campaign, which is kind of a broad brushstroke, they’ll learn a lot from that course, at a much more affordable price point for them, you make the course once and you can sell it 1000s of times on the internet to those leads who can’t afford to hire you as a done for you. So that’s the way that I look at it. That’s a way of leveraging what you’ve already got in your business, turning that into another revenue stream and helping you scale your business through using the internet. So that’s how we’ve started the conversation at Rockstar Empires. Over the next two years, it will evolve into a suite of courses and products that people can they can engage with, to help them improve profitability in their business through technology and the interwebs

Jos Aguiar
it’s brilliant. How did your journey start yourself? So take me back to the beginning of Troy Dean, how did you become this internet? Business trainer mentor?

Troy Dean
Yeah, so I when I was 26, I, I basically dropped out of my life had a bit of a quarterlife crisis and dropped out and kind of just started really. I figured a feed out that was I was highly unemployable. I basically can’t work for anyone. I’m a terrible employee. And if any of my previous employers ever watch this, I humbly apologise because I’m a complete pain in the ass as an employee. And so I started, I’ve discovered the internet. This was kind of what are we talking late 90s. And I was I was doing some voiceover work and some freelance IT consulting, and I discovered the internet was a great way to, you know, instead of as a voiceover artist, instead of sending out CDs to get work, you just email an mp3. And so that was the first time I realised, oh, well, I can actually achieve a lot more from my bedroom than getting in the car driving around town. So that was a bit of an eye opener. And then, of course, I learned how to build websites to promote my creative projects. And then I started building websites for other people. And then I started what I realised is the real turning point for me was when I when I was starting building websites for clients, I realised I had to train them how to use WordPress, which was the CMS that we’re using, right? And I realised pretty pretty soon that I don’t want to train two people how to use WordPress, because that’s just a repetitive task. Why would I do that? Why don’t I just record the training session once and then use that over and over again. And so that became a WordPress plugin that we launched in 2008. And it kind of took off and did pretty well. And that was really the start of me seeing the the possibility of generating revenue on the internet by making something once and selling it multiple times and the cost of duplication and distribution on the internet almost zero so I remember the first morning I woke up and I had money put in my PayPal account while I was sleeping and I was like wow, this is it. This is a game changer, man. And since then, I’ve been hell bent on kind of setting up the business to give myself the lifestyle where you know, and luckily, fortunate these days where we don’t do any client services, we just 100% digital product business.

Jos Aguiar
It’s all about efficiency. They find find a way to get the the people results without having to expend that amount of energy yourselves continuously. He said, Yeah, on a scale of business.

Troy Dean
Yeah, 100%. And, and the thing is, you know, I was at the gym this morning talking to my personal trainer, I’m like, you know, as a personal trainer, it’s really hard to scale your business, unless you just employ other personal trainers to do what you do. And so what he did almost two years ago was, and he spent a long time working out and finding the right venue and fitting it out and invested a crap tonne of money in building a 24/7 gyms, he’s got a gym that’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And he has a core group of clients that he still trains, but 90% of his revenue comes from memberships. He’s created this thing once. And now he continues to sell it over and over again. So that whole kind of recurring leveraged revenue model, really, I mean, I just can’t think of any reason why you would do anything else. That’s for me, that’s the Holy Grail.

Jos Aguiar
Okay, there’s a lot of people who talk about recurring leverage and revenue systems and doing stuff. But when it comes to actually doing it, there’s obviously a lot more challenges. What did you find most challenging on your own journey?

Troy Dean
Man, I mean, one of the hardest things is what is trying to figure out what the and we kind of, we kind of lucked out initially when we first started when we first launched our plugin. So that to the whole thing is, there’s this, there’s a big myth around passive income, people think that you can set up a membership website or some kind of digital subscription box company on the on the internet, and then go sit on the beach and just have money rolling in your bank account. And that’s kind of horseshit. I mean, the only way you’re going to sit on the beach and have money fall in your bank account is if you own a tonne of assets that are paying the dividends. So, with with a recurring revenue or a subscription business, you need to figure out how to add recurring value to your customers in exchange for that revenue, because people aren’t just going to give you recurring revenue every month for nothing. And so with the WordPress plugin, we kind of lucked out on this model that we have a whole bunch of videos in that plugin that train your clients how to use WordPress, so you don’t have to train them yourself, right? Well, Wordpress, fortunately for us gets updated two or three times a year. So every time it gets updated, we have to go back make a whole bunch of new videos with a new interface, right? And that’s what our customers keep paying us for. They keep paying us so that they don’t have to answer those questions. So and we just stumbled upon that by accident. But to reverse engineer it, in hindsight, I can say, well, yeah, you need to find a problem that is recurring, or you need to find a way to add recurring value in order to get recurring revenue. And it’s one of the hardest things is engagement. So it’s just because somebody joins your membership website doesn’t mean they’re going to stay in for two or three months. I mean, they might stay in for a couple months, then they’ll bounce. So how do you keep people engaged. And as you know, the internet has made it really easy to reach your audience. But it’s also made it really noisy and really competitive. So engagement is difficult, man, you need to really listen to your customers.

Jos Aguiar
So how do you differentiate on the plugin model? What does that make you guys stick around for so long?

Troy Dean
Well, we were the first ones to do it. And we were the Emmys. And we were the first ones to do a white label version. And we were the only ones for a long time actually to do a white label version. So you can literally take our plugin, stick your logo on it, and, and take all the credit for it. But what we did is we said, Okay, how do you then use this plugin as part of your pre sales process? So how do you go into your clients and say, Hey, we’re gonna build a website for you. But the reason you should choose us over anyone else is because once we launched the website, we’ve got all this support material baked into the back end, which is going to help you, Mr. Client, manage the content on your website, and we gave you the scripts. So as a plugin company, we say, Hey, Josh, if you’re going to meet with a client, use this script to talk to the client, use these slides to show the client the plugin in action, we gave you all these kinds of white label marketing assets that you could then use to sell it into your clients. And we get testimonials all the time from people saying, I just used your plugin in the materials that you gave us to upsell a client in the, you know, my biggest proposal. So we’re always thinking, how can we make our customers more successful, because if there’s more successful, but we’ll stick with it, and it’s all about creating that stickiness,

Jos Aguiar
so be first or be different, then looked at extra value to your client base?

Troy Dean
Yeah, and really thinking outside the box and going, Okay, we’re just a plugin company. It’s not our job to help you sell to client websites to clients. But, but if we do it, even though it’s not our job, if we do it, right, sure, it’s a little bit of extra work, but we’ve only got to produce the materials once in a training video. You know, we do that once, put it up on our website, send that out to our customers and say here, here’s a value add. They go wow, and you’re not charging extra for this. We say no, no, we just want you to keep using our product. So our retention rates really high on the on the plugin because if they stopped paying, we turn the videos off. So it’s a pretty sticky product.

Jos Aguiar
Brilliant. So continue just commented. I like that be first be different.

Troy Dean
Yeah. Hey, Jade. So Jean actually works here at at our company, she just she’s a digital producer tuning in.

Jos Aguiar
She’s a genius. So, Troy, you’ve gone from being a voiceover artist to now owning your plugin company. That wasn’t enough for you? What does it expose? What happened after that? And why did you want to do more do something different.

Troy Dean
So I kind of got tapped out with client services, we had a client services agency for about three years, and I realised that you couldn’t scale it. And here’s the thing about scale, a lot of people talk about scale, a lot of people talk about wanting to scale their business to increase their revenue and IPO and sell out and all that kind of crap. The thing for me was, I didn’t really care about any of that what I care about is reach and impact. So I kind of figured out that I’m addicted to positive feedback from clients or customers. And you don’t get a lot of that from clients. And when you’re running a client services agency, you’ve only really kind of got a handful of clients, or maybe you know, a couple of dozen clients at most. With the plugin business, we were starting to get feedback from hundreds and 1000s of people all over the world. And I’m like, wow, this is this feels really good to be having this impact on people’s lives all over the world. And so they started asking us about how we run our business, they started asking us for more information on like, you know, your proposal templates, and how do you take a brief from clients? And how do you do this? And how do you do that? How do you manage cash flow? How do you hire staff, and so we started packaging that information up and drip feeding it out. And we built this leveraged coaching programme called WP Elevation. And over the over the sort of an 18 month period, we transitioned away from client services into 100% leveraged revenue through this coaching programme for WordPress, freelancers, that’s now got over 600 members in it. And it’s been it’s been a game changer, because the thing that I realised now is that the most important thing I think, in business, and I know it sounds very woowoo man, but it’s, it’s for me, it’s all about community, you know, and so many of us spend our time in front of screens, right? That you can’t just you can’t replace the human interaction. And so the community that we’ve got at WP Elevation now is like a drug. For me, it’s the most enjoyable and most valuable part of our whole business. And what I’ve also realised is that there’s a direct correlation between how much you help people and the revenue that you make. And so switching that attention away from revenue, and onto impact, and helping people has completely catapulted our revenue. And it’s kind of weird, the moment you let go of trying to make money. Money comes in the door.

Jos Aguiar
It’s interesting that you say the community like if terms of revenue model, it’s sticky. People will stay committed, they’ll come to the knowledge, but honestly, if they really tried hard enough, they can find most that knowledge via YouTube videos and blogs. But staying for that person connection with yourself or whoever the trainer is, at the end, that’s right around them. So like minded people.

Troy Dean
Yeah. 100%. And they, you know, they’re, and they’re kind of self organising now. So they’re organising meetups that we like, you know, five people are meeting in Washington DC, and you know, half a dozen people go meet in London and, and it’s, you know, and they’ll drive in like drive two and a half hours Indymedia each other in real life. And it’s kind of cool. And whenever I travel overseas, now I get to just kind of go, Hey, I’m in Boston for a few days, who wants to go and have pizza, and you know, half a dozen people will turn up and I’ll get to hang out with people all over the place. So it’s gonna be really cool.

Jos Aguiar
And it’s gonna be an agent of doing that. Okay, so where does the future go for you now? So you got this community you got? Hello. How many business are you currently running? You still running the plumbing business was that I told you my soul. So that

Troy Dean
so that, you know, so the plugin business is called Video user manuals. That’s the name of the plugin and that’s kind of the parent company. Underneath that, we have a brand called WP Elevation, which is the coaching programme we have. There are five coaches now including myself. We just recently brought on Zack Gordon, who used to teach WordPress development over at Treehouse, he’s now joined the team here, which we’re really excited about. We’ve got a coach in Sydney, one in the UK, one in the States, myself here in Melbourne, and Zach is in DC. We have six mentors in the community who look after kind of the newbies and sort of direct traffic. And so that business is running pretty well that the plugin company doesn’t require hardly any of my attention at all. We have a team of people who shoot the new videos and write the scripts. I occasionally will will do some voiceovers for some changes. We have a voiceover artist in the States and one in the UK that do the different accents there. And WP Elevation is running and requires maybe like a week or sorry a day or a day and a half a week of my time. And so my attention really shifting towards Rockstar Empires, which is my passion is to help educate small business owners so that they come to web designers and marketing consultants like yourself with a little more education and a little more, they’re a little savvier. So You can have a higher quality conversation, and you can get higher quality outcomes. Rather than you guys educating them about opt in forms, I want to be the guy that, that educates them about opt in forms. And then I want you guys to be able to dig into the strategy and get maximum output and maximum results, you know. So that’s where Rockstar Empires is headed over the next two years is to become that publishing house for educating small business owners and entrepreneurs about you know, how to use the internet. And there’ll be a series of courses that we roll out, there’ll be more live streams, and it’s really, really exciting time. And

Jos Aguiar
speaking of live streams content, you’ve got a really interesting content strategy. So a little bit more about habits, has it? Have you measured the impact it’s had in business? Or what is it? How’s that affected what you guys doing?

Troy Dean
Yeah, so the live streaming that we’ve been doing, we’ve been kind of consistently trying to up our game and really produce almost like a TV quality chat show on the internet. We then funnel people into our Facebook community into one of our Facebook groups, which for me, I think is is more valuable than having an email list. I mean, email, open rates, and click through rates are just absolutely plummeting these days. And that’s just because you know, it’s becoming so saturated, I think it’s still really important to have an email list. But I think it’s equally important to have a really highly engaged Facebook group, where you add tonnes of value. And then from so from our live stream videos, we have audio files, chopped out, we have blog posts written, we have checklists developed. And so for me, it’s really simple to, you know, make a video for 15 or 20 minutes, turn that into a epic blog post, have a checklist attached to it, drive traffic, run Facebook ads directly to the content, and have people opt in download, once they opt in, you funnel them into the Facebook group. And that really is the play for us and how we’re building a tribe and how we’re building a community of interested people.

Jos Aguiar
Okay. He talks about educating small business owners, what do you find are the biggest mistakes they make when they come in online? Or misconceptions?

Troy Dean
Yeah, so yeah, well, because the biggest one is, hey, here’s the internet. And here, I’ve got this thing, right. And everyone’s interested in my widget, hey, come look at my widget, right. And so the internet, the internet’s a great amplifier, and you would know this from anyone who has worked in marketing, we get taught really early on, you’ve got two ears and one mouth, right? So listen, twice as much as you speak. Well, the internet amplifies that. So, you know, I remember, you know, being being in my 20s. And kind of, I was always the guy at a party that just would not stop talking, right. And there was always this one guy at the party who never really said anything, but when he did, it was really profound. And all the girls would kind of hang out with the dark, brooding guy in the corner, you know, who didn’t talk very often. But when he did, it was he was like a philosopher. And I was just like, making so much noise trying to get everyone’s attention, right. And we were and that’s kind of like, the internet amplifies that. So you want to be the guy for when you first joined the internet. And first get online, you kind of want to be the guy in the corner who doesn’t say much. Just listen, take it all in. And eventually, when you say something, make it count. Because there are too many guys like me on the internet, who just make so much noise that people tune out. So that would be my number one bit of advice for anyone embarking on a digital journey is listen, listen, listen before before you speak and work out where you can add value, because no one is anywhere near as interested in what you’re doing as you are. They’re interested in what’s in it for them.

Jos Aguiar
Exactly. Like you said, it’s alpha. So marketing in itself is really adding gasoline to the fire. If there’s no fire there to start with, it’s not gonna go anywhere. Or even worse, it can hurt your business because you’re spreading stuff. You don’t want to be spread.

Troy Dean
Yeah, absolutely. And and I think, you know, I think the internet breeds transparency. And so I think those that are going to win the game are those that are that are confident enough in their own skin, and their own business, their own product to be completely radically transparent. And, you know, I love negative feedback. I love negative comments on our Facebook videos, and on our blog. I love it. I like bring it on. I want to have a conversation with people like if someone is slamming me online, I’m like, awesome, dude. Like, I’m really glad that you’re criticising my video, show me a video that you made recently. I’d love to come and see what you’re doing and learn from you. And of course, you know, haters don’t make videos. They just hate on other people.

Jos Aguiar
This this hate isn’t this people who just like to comment as an outsider. That’s brilliant. You’re talking about it, but show me what you’re doing.

Troy Dean
Yeah, exactly. I love learning from people online, you know, and so so I welcome any kind of feedback because I want to have a conversation and and I’ve been called a couple of times on some things that I’ve done that have been, you know, a little bit off brand, and I’ve totally owned it. You know, we set up a Twitter automation thing once which just did not work and someone called me out and I went, yep, you’re absolutely right. That’s a bit spammy and a bit screwy, and I apologise Joselo turned it off, and I completely owned it. And I think that’s the only like, you have to be transparent. You have to be prepared to, you know, to take criticism and to learn.

Jos Aguiar
I think that in itself, people are bonded closer with you, when you’re able to own that and say, Hey, I messed up, I screwed up. It’s okay. I’m going to change. They see you making a conscious effort. And I said, transparency, were you getting on these videos, doing live streams, you can’t fake a personality. It’s just impossible to do that on video.

Troy Dean
Yeah, that’s what I said. That’s what I love about video. And that’s what I love about live streaming is I started live streaming because it scared me I started live streaming because I’ve done tonnes of video, but live streaming, absolutely scared the pants off me. And that’s why I started doing it. I thought, if I just do it, I didn’t live streaming every day for about 30 days or something from from the car mainly. And I’m like, if I just live streaming every day, after a while, it just has to get easier. And so now I can live stream anywhere any time. And you know, I’m not nervous at all. I don’t care. I like it doesn’t scare me anymore. And I only really started doing it in earnest in probably October last year. So it hasn’t taken long really, to sort of get rid of the nerves. That’s the only way to break through that kind of self consciousness is just to keep doing it. So you know, anyone who’s thinking about starting a podcast or making videos or even writing a blog post, just make an effort to do it every day for 30 days, they say that it takes 21 days to form a new habit. If you can do something every day for 21 days, then you know, you’ll be fine. And you realise that it’s never going to be perfect. And don’t let perfect get in the way of you know, actually just getting it done. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of getting it done.

Jos Aguiar
What are you doing right now that scares you?

Troy Dean
What am I doing right now? That’s a good question. So try okay, what are the what I’m doing right now that scares me his building is slowly letting go of the reins of this company that we’ve built for the last three years. Not not letting go of it, but empowering other people to do things in the business that I’ve been doing. So we’ve just relaunched our podcast over at WP

Jos Aguiar
Elevation now. You can so Yeah,

Troy Dean
exactly. So, you know, just letting go of the reins a bit is a little bit scary, but you have to do it, you have to empower your team to to make mistakes. And you know, and that’s the only way we all learn and you know, usually though your team surprise you usually they do things that are that are better than what you could do. And I have a unique take on it. And I’m like, wow, I would never have done it that way. That’s awesome. That’s I’m really glad that you know, but it is it is a bit of a mental leap. Yeah.

Jos Aguiar
It’s cool. And in terms of learning for yourself, where do you get the most impact in terms of books, trainings, people that you’ve learned from?

Troy Dean
Yeah, so I go through phases, I kind of fall in love with people go through phases of kind of consuming everything they’ve got and then you know, the honeymoon kind of wears off and then you move on to at the moment. I’m totally enamoured with Peter Diamandis and Dan Sullivan. I’ve got this fantastic podcast called exponential wisdom, Dan Sullivan. And of course, his strategic coach, Peter Diamandis wrote a fabulous book called Abundance. And he’s, you know, he’s just a just that amazing entrepreneur. out of out of the west coast of the states. And those guys, it’s like listening to your dad and one of his friends just kind of wax lyrical about the future. And then they’re talking about, you know, virtual reality and artificial intelligence and human longevity. And they’re total big thinkers and they’ve got real abundance mindset. And I find that really inspiring to be around. So that’s kind of that’s where I’m learning at the moment. And that’s where I’m finding my inspiration.

Jos Aguiar
If people want to connect with you further, and I guess, enter the world of Troy Dean Rockstar empire, WP Elevation and the user’s manuals. Where can they go? What’s the best place to connect to you?

Troy Dean
Yeah, sure. Probably a Twitter at Troy Dean. Yes, I’m one of the people that still use Twitter and, and Rockstar empires.com is where most of my content is going up these days. We’ve got some awesome new videos going up there this week. So yeah, Rockstar inputs.com. And at Troy Dean on Twitter’s the best place to get in touch with me.

Jos Aguiar
That’s really how we’re using Twitter. What is what impact is that having on your business?

Troy Dean
I use Twitter. I just use Twitter to build relationships and to do biz dev and to reach out to people introduce myself, get on people’s radar. I use it a little bit as a kind of an aggregator of headlines, I kind of scan it most days just to see what’s going on in my lists, to see what kind of news I need to be across. But mainly I use it for outreach and end to end to build relationships with other influences.

Jos Aguiar
conductors have been more about that. What do you mean by average? So is that to say I want to work with you or I want to do something with

Troy Dean
usually, usually I’ll I’ll sort of I’ll work out how I can add value to them. So for example, I might mention them. If I want to get on their radar. I might mention them in a blog post from I mentioned them in a tweet and then I’ll let them know that I’ve mentioned them, I’ll let them know that I’ve given them a shout out. I might make a little video about their product or their service and then I’ll shout them out on Twitter. I find it’s a really instant way to sort of get someone’s attention or at least get on their radar. And then I’ll generally try and follow them up with an email or if I haven’t got their email, I’ll try and follow them up with a LinkedIn. But Twitter’s usually the place that I try and drop on their radar to start with, so that when I do follow them up via another avenue, at least my name is familiar and they’ve kind of seen what I’ve been up to.

Jos Aguiar
It’s cool. My friend, this has been brilliant. Thank you for joining us. And guys, definitely go check out Troy’s website, connect with him on Twitter and Facebook, wherever he is. He’s forever place and honestly, I’ve personally tried WP Elevation myself. It is a brilliant training. So if you are looking to understand WordPress as a consultant in order to help businesses achieve their goals, definitely look at doing it yourselves. Troy it’s been a pleasure, and I’ll speak to you soon.

Troy Dean
Thanks, just take care