You're Overcomplicating Things. Say No And Focus Focus Focus

Jeffro (00:00.943)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Michael McLean, who is, in the words of Dan Kennedy, a true marketing genius. Michael is a former professional hockey coach turned eight figure entrepreneur and business coach. Michael specializes in helping elite driven entrepreneurs make more money, have more fun and give back generously. In this episode, we’re going to dive into email list building for small business owners, the role of infotainment in 2024, 2025 and beyond, and how to master social media for your business without becoming it’s slave. So Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael McLean (00:34.43)
Thank you, Jefferyl, it’s great to be here. I didn’t even know Dan Kennedy said that. I must have caught him on a good day.

Jeffro (00:38.893)
Well, I saw it on a couple of your landing pages. So I was curious to hear how you even came into contact him, how you knew him.

Michael McLean (00:47.95)
Dan and I are longtime friends and allies. I’ve been a student of Dan’s for 25 years. When I first got in, when I first started as an entrepreneur, I was struggling and the very first book I ever bought was one of those little $9 No BS business books. And I opened up the first page, I remember sitting in my truck and I was like, I’ve never heard anybody talk like this about business. And the first paragraph, Dan was saying, this book will either… make you a better entrepreneur or it will scare you away from the game. And ever since then, I’ve been in his masterminds and I won his 2010 back in the day. I won the, the GKIC Dan Kennedy marker of the year. And that was an apprentice style setup at the super conference. So that was quite an experience too, because we got to the final three in Dallas and then they pulled us up on the stage and said, listen, for the next four days when the super conference is on, you’re going to be given a task, which is apprentice style, which we did for the next four days. And I was fortunate enough to win that, but that was just when Facebook was brand new. That’s when SEO was relatively new. And we had to jump into all of those areas. And it was an incredible, incredible experience.

Jeffro (02:08.705)
That’s awesome. So I’m curious also about your story a little bit. I know you did hockey and you coached. So what made you want to get into entrepreneurship? Was that a conscious choice or just kind of something that you fell into as you? Yeah, what happened there?

Michael McLean (02:24.95)
Well, I fell out of the hockey business. I was on the way to coaching at the highest level at Asheville Hockey League. When I was in college, I actually was coaching full time. I would barely attend any classes and I was getting a marketing degree. But when I was in college, when I graduated from college, I was well on my way to coaching in the NHL. I got fired from my second pro job three years in and I came home after I was fired and my dad was an entrepreneur for 45 years in the insurance business. And I was just about to apply for the next job. And my dad sat me down. My grandfather ran a general store for 45 years. My dad was an entrepreneur to age 85. He worked till he was 85. And he sat me down at the kitchen table and he said, know, he said, Michael, know you love, I know you love sports. He said, but down the road, when you’re married and you have a family, is this the way you wanna make your money? And that was the first time I’d ever thought like that because I was a single guy. He said, how many cities have you lived in in the last four years? I said, I’ve lived in four cities. He goes, exactly, you’ve moved four times. He said, when you’re married and you have children, he said, your wife and kids are gonna be at 10 different schools, you’re gonna be fired, you’re gonna be hired.

Do you want this to be the main thing you do? Because he said, you you can buy your own amateur team and do this on the side as a hobby. So he said, why don’t you join me in the insurance business? He said, for one year, that’s all you have to do is give me one year. And I was thinking, insurance business, I mean, this is stale, dull and boring. I wanna be in the hockey business. And he said, give me a year. He said, I know you have the dreamer’s disease.

I had my own window cleaning business when I was 12. I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time. He says, I think you’ll enjoy it. So a year later, I went into my dad’s office and I said, I would like to buy the family business. 17 years later, I sold it a few years ago and the rest is history. And I’ve run and owned my own hockey franchises on the side. So the best of both worlds. So to answer your question, I made a lifestyle decision.

Jeffro (04:46.188)
That’s awesome. Well, and I imagine there’s lots of lessons you’ve brought over from your hockey coaching days into your business coaching too.

Michael McLean (04:54.502)
I never adjusted to the insurance business. I never adjusted to the barbershop business, which I was in, and I’ve never adjusted to the consulting business. What I learned in sports, I brought all of it over. The way I built my team, right down to Jethro, the way I redesigned our office was a locker room. I’m big into the Tony Robbins motivation. I believe in all that stuff. So I mean, I had all the successory quotes. I had the… the offices with lots of natural light and fresh air. And I really decided that I was gonna be a teacher and a coach. So in all the small businesses I’ve been in, I’ve really viewed myself as a coach and I brought those habits and behaviors over into business.

Jeffro (05:41.884)
Well, I really like that because at the end of the day, if you want to be a high level entrepreneur, you have to be building your people and then let them build the business. So that the fact that you started that way is telling because I think a lot of people have to figure that out. You know, they try to do it themselves and then slowly let go of stuff. like, no, you sound like you started the right way by building up other people and giving them what they need to be successful.

Michael McLean (06:07.808)
Well, in sport, especially pro hockey, if you don’t win, you’re fired. So I was in the winning business all the time. And I found out after a while that I wasn’t the next Pat Riley. I wasn’t the next, you know, Bill Belichick. I needed the best people. And I learned that in the hockey business and that’s why I was successful. So I realized in business, if I want to win in the insurance business or I want to win in the window washing business, I need the best people.

So I’ve never taken my recruiting hat off. Like when I go to Dunkin’ Donuts in the morning every day of my life, it’s so interesting. I’m always looking for the next superstar. Every business, as you know, Jethro has a superstar. People whine and complain about there’s nobody out there. I don’t use the online stuff. I’m a small business guy. I’m always looking for the next star, whether it’s a bartender, whether it’s a guy washing a car, whether it’s a guy cutting grass.

Every business has a superstar and I’m like a Nick Saban. I’m like, I’m always recruiting. And I hand out my business card to these people, even though I’m not hiring. And I always say to them, I’m very impressed by the job you do. And if you ever want a career change, give me a call. I’m 100 % for every business card within 30 days, 60 days, sometimes a year. This person will reach out and say, you know, Michael, I’m looking for a change and boom.

You got a tremendous person on your hands.

Jeffro (07:36.703)
Yeah, skills can be taught, right? But that attitude and that drive, that’s the something that you really want that’s gonna last long term, regardless of what industry you’re in. So I love that. Now we did promise, go ahead. I was gonna say.

Michael McLean (07:47.89)
It’s interesting. Go ahead. No, I was just touching on, on, on recruiting the best people that I’ve ever recruited, grew up in a small business. They’re children who grew up in a small business.

Jeffro (07:59.721)
Yeah. It’s just a different mentality, I think. And that’s, it makes a big difference when you see how they do the work. All right. I did promise that we’d talk about, you know, building an email list. So I think we can shift over to that because this is related to cutting through the BS, focusing on strategies that work. And this is really a foundational element for any entrepreneur. So can you talk about why building an email list is so important?

Michael McLean (08:28.234)
Well, I’ll first, in full disclosure, am a technology caveman on purpose. Like I’m a tech dinosaur on purpose, but I have understood for the last 20 years as a small business owner that email is the honey that brings in the money is the great math theory would say it’s the eighth wonder of the world. So I don’t get into all this social media. I don’t try to be the best at all these different things.

any business jess roll that I’ve been involved in. So window washing, the insurance business, the barbershop business, the hockey business, and consulting, all of those five businesses, the number one thing I did, as soon as I entered that business, I started building an email list from zero, from absolutely zero. My window washing company, when I was a kid, right up to the insurance business, I started at zero and in the insurance business, built my email list from zero to 62,000. In the barbershop business, I built it from about zero to 4,000. And the same in this business here, our email list is in the hundreds of thousands, but I started with zero. And every day I’d add one or two people to my list. And then I started sending out an email once a week, and then I got a bit of confidence up twice a week, all personality stuff, you know,

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, are you watching the Super Bowl? Happy Easter, that kind of stuff. And in the PS, I would just make an offer for my services. Like if you’d like a quote on your home and car insurance, give me a call anytime. And it just trickles to the point where you can send out an email anytime and give your business a boost of income, referrals, whatever it is but nothing for me has been as powerful as the email list. And I’ve used digital marketing, which I know very little about. I use YouTube and my videos to build my email list. So it’s digital onto my list and then the relationship from there.

Jeffro (10:38.857)
So what realistically, long does it start? How long does it take to start building up that list? If you’re starting from zero in a new industry, what can someone expect?

Michael McLean (10:48.918)
Well, I was a one person operation, then a two person operation, then a three person operation. So I literally started by just asking customers and clients, what’s your email list so that I could communicate with them. And I would say, I’m also going to put you on my email newsletter list. 99 % of people are like, great. So I would start with five people, then 10 people. The tipping point for me was when I got over 100 and then into the 200, but it was amazing with the window washing like,

I had a window washing list. built it up to 75 people, then 100. And when I would send out an email, 15 business owners on the main street would say, Michael, mind washing my windows this week? And then that would generate a couple hundred more dollars for me. In the insurance business, we would ask every person that phoned, we would ask every person that walked through the door, what’s their email.

And they would say, you know, some people would say, why? And we’d say, well, we want to better communicate with you. Plus Michael gives away things during the year and it’s part of our email newsletter. So we would start capturing five, 10, 15 emails a day. And over 10 years, we got to over 62,000. it’s like email is also a media that people are used to buying on. I found that you own the list too, as you know, like I didn’t own our Facebook page. I don’t own my YouTube following, but you do own your email list, which is really, really big. So when I sold my insurance agency in 2017, I had a million dollar, multimillion dollar sale, but I said to the guys who were buying it, I said, by the way, would you be interested in buying my email list? And these guys being corporate guys, I don’t even know what that is. And I said, it doesn’t come as part of this.

but I would like to sell it or I’m sell it to somebody else. And they said, how much would you want for your email list? And I said, I want $500,000. I said, when I send out an email, it’s worth 5,000, 10,000, whatever. They wrote me a check for $500,000 in addition to the sale for that email. It started at zero. And that’s the power of a small business owner building an email list. And now in the consulting business, which I’m in now,

Michael McLean (13:09.492)
We started with nobody four years ago and we build our email list on average. add about 11 people a day and it just gradually trickles. And we’ve done that by daily videos on YouTube.

Jeffro (13:24.451)
So yeah, just making an intentional effort to every day, everybody you interact with or talk to or bring on board, get them on the list as much as possible. That makes a lot of sense. Because I think some people are looking for some like big home run. Like if I do this one campaign, I’m going to get thousands of people. But obviously, if you just get the singles over and over and over, then that’s going to add up over time.

Michael McLean (13:47.71)
And I tell my students now, play your game. And you see this all the time in small business. My game, the only two things I’m good at in this world are shooting videos and writing emails. That comes easy to me. I’m not a Twitter guy. I’m not a Facebook guy. I’m not a manager of people. I do a couple things that I enjoy. So those are the only two things that I’m violently consistent with every day. And when you compound those over years, I mean, every day I write an email and I shoot a video. So that’s like an hour of my time. But I tell my students, video isn’t most people’s games. But when it comes to building email, like that’s my game. I didn’t want to try and learn snap, you know, this and that. I said, okay, I’m going to use one platform, which for me was YouTube. And then I’m going to build it into my own program, which is email. And that’s all I stick to. Whenever I get myself, you know, I’m over here with the shiny object or I’m over here with the shiny object. My wife always says back to blocking and tackling, get back to what you enjoy and what you’re good at. So no, I just do one or two things. And as a small business owner, that’s all the time I have.

Jeffro (15:00.519)
That makes sense. Can you talk a little bit about the content that goes into those emails and videos? I know you talk about infotainment and why that’s important. So is that kind of what you’re, how you approach this and deciding what to talk about?

Michael McLean (15:13.738)
Well, we don’t live in the information age, we live in the infotainment age. So like Dan Kennedy told me, he said, it’s better to be different than it is to be better. So I’ve always thought that way. So, I’ll shoot a daily video. When I was in the barbershop business, I would shoot a couple of videos a week for emails and it was about the latest haircuts, the latest products.

We would talk about local charities we were supporting at Christmas, at Thanksgiving. We would support the food bank, the animal shelter. So these were very entertaining videos. They were rarely about haircuts. And then at the end I would mention beer and a haircut and a shave, you know, for 45 bucks or whatever. But I was building relationships. When I got in the insurance business, I’m like, okay, this is the dullest business in the world. How can I make this entertaining?

Well, I almost never talked about insurance. My videos again, were about family. They were about what was happening in the community. Sometimes I talked about sports. Sometimes I talked about, you know, the Superbowl, Christmas, the food drive, and we would send these out once a week. Now that I’m in the coaching business and I work with men, you know, 45 plus that are entrepreneurs and small business owners. I talk about the challenges that we all have as small business owners. I talk about building an email list. I talk about marketing. I talk about life balance, being married, having kids and being an entrepreneur, that kind of stuff. So I always ask myself, what do I need to hear? And then I share that, but the more personality driven, the better. If I talk about a topic and it’s very, you know, university, college, I don’t get a very good response.

If I talk about what’s happening in my life, my struggles, my wins, my losses, that’s always been better received. But as a small business owner talking to small business owners, I often just share my frustrations and how it’s important to be violently consistent every day with one or two things.

Jeffro (17:22.982)
It’s almost like a one to many pen pal relationship where you’re just sharing what’s going on and then you piggyback off of that like, by the way, if you want a haircut, by the way, if you need insurance or website or whatever it is. And so I think that makes it a lot more approachable for business owners because I think we get in our own heads and like, I got to talk about this topic and how do I make that sound not boring? like you said, with insurance, like we go into this mentality, okay, I have to talk about insurance all the time but in reality that’s not the case.

Michael McLean (17:55.252)
My emails and videos, and most people don’t have to do videos, an email is just as powerful without a video. I always wake up and I use these recipe cards, these white four by five recipe cards. And whatever is on my mind that day, whether it’s sports, marketing, politics, news, whatever entertainment, my wife and I maybe watched a great documentary. That’s what I write about that day or the next day. I take the old, enter the conversation that’s already in their mind.

And like Gary Vee says, you don’t have to invent anything. I was in the insurance business, I wasn’t inventing ideas. If it was Christmas time, I talked about Christmas time. If it was Superbowl time, I talked about Superbowl time. If there was something happening, a great movie out, I might talk about that. So I was piggybacking on entertainment and celebrity. And once again, those are your best emails because people, what are people thinking about? And then add on to that your own little part, but I do it as simple as that. What am I thinking about today? What’s on the mind of the small business owner? And then I throw in my two cents.

Jeffro (19:02.501)
So what about the cadence? We touched on this briefly. You only spend an hour a day. That seems manageable for most small business owners, but you still get people who say, I don’t even have that much time because I’m putting out fires or maybe I’m not the right person. Can they have someone on the team do it? Or what is a way to make it happen instead of just constantly putting off, I’ll start doing it next month or whatever?

Michael McLean (19:29.344)
Well, my small business owners and entrepreneurs I work with, they don’t have a time problem. They have a focus problem. So the first thing you do is correct the focus thing. don’t go to bed at the right time and they get up tired. So with my guys, I’m like, listen, here’s the principle. Number one principle as a small business owner, the first hour of the day belongs to the two most important people in your life, you and the person you’re becoming. So.

Jeffro (19:34.03)
Mm-hmm. Got it.

Michael McLean (19:55.612)
I started this 25 years ago when I was literally fighting alligators every day. I started going to bed at 10 PM instead of 11 and I got up one hour earlier and that was six o’clock. And from six o’clock I’d literally set an old school timer on the oven and I would sit down and I would do something that brought me money for one hour. That hour belonged to me. The rest of the hours could be belonged to the alligators and the time vampire but I’d sit in my apartment and I’d write one email or one subject line, or I would just think about, I called it operation money suck, like the great Gary Howard. It was the hour for generating things. And then after that hour, I would go for a walk, have a shower, put on my uniform and go to work. But the first hour of the day has belonged to me for the last 30 years. And that’s been the single greatest thing to making things happen and sometimes during that hour, I might write an entire email. Sometimes I might write just a subject line, but that stacks up over time. But as a small business owner, you can’t be a people pleaser for 24 hours a day because there’ll be nothing left to pour in the jug when you’re done. The first hour of the day belongs to you and the person you’re becoming. And some of my guys, Jethro, they take the time, that hour is walking and thinking.

Some of them it’s going to the gym and thinking, other guys it’s sitting at a laptop. But all that stuff is all money generated. They’re thinking about the next idea. But if you don’t own the first hour of your day, nothing’s gonna change. And for me, the biggest thing there was getting my ass to bed at 10 o’clock. I used to sit up and scroll and do all this stuff, garbage stuff. And I complained, I don’t have any time. The reality was I didn’t have the right focus in bed at 10, up an hour earlier when the world is still, you know, quiet, get my work done. And by the way, I didn’t start at one hour, I started at 10 minutes. And then I got to my, then I first 15 minutes of the day, then the first half hour, and now I built it up to one hour. But you’ve got to own the first hour of the day.

Jeffro (22:11.149)
Yeah, I recently started reading Atomic Habits by James Clear and it’s that same idea, right? Just little tweaks every day, it’s going to make it better and you can progress to where you want to be. Because if you’re always looking for that big, huge shift, you just can’t fit that in. But little stuff you can do. One more question before we wrap up here. I know there’s all these experts that talk about having a social media strategy and everything, but it sounds like you don’t even recommend mapping things out that far in advance is just kind of whatever is on your mind that day. That’s what you’re writing about. And that seems to work for you.

Michael McLean (22:47.19)
And I’m a tree killer. I’m a, I, kill a lot of trees. When I was in the insurance business, I did 140,000 flyers a month. I was on television. I was on radio. I did no social media. so, you know, my books are print books. My newsletter is a print newsletter. I have a higher, more affluent customer and entrepreneur. When you get into the print business, the thing about social media that I don’t invest time in is I don’t own the platform.

Jeffro (23:16.513)
Mm-hmm.

Michael McLean (23:17.234)
and I can boot it off there. You can be booted off of Facebook or Insta, Insta, whatever, for no reason at all. So I post my videos every day on YouTube, but I understand I’m a guest. So all I do is use that platform to build my email list. So when I shoot a video at the Michael McLean show, the first thing I say is you can download a free copy of my brand new book, then people, what do they do?

they got to trade their email for the book. So every day, 11, 12, sometimes 80 people download the book and then I have their email. So that’s how, so if YouTube says goodbye to me tomorrow, that’s perfectly okay because it’s their platform. I don’t try to beat algorithms or any of this nonsense. I’m just like, okay, I’m going to offer them something of value and get them off there so that I own the pipes.

I own the email pipe, I don’t own the YouTube pipe. And as a small business owner, I never wanted to do five things. I can’t do it. I need to do one thing. So I decided email was gonna be my one thing. And then my business partner said, Michael, I think YouTube is where you find the best students, the best readers, the best people that are gonna be the best students. And he’s right. So it’s not that I don’t like Twitter or I don’t like Facebook.

It’s not that, it’s just, I just can only do one thing. And that’s what I’ve decided to do. Now, if a person doesn’t wanna do video, you can build a simple email list by asking every person that comes in your business or visits your website, what’s your email? And literally at the end of the year, don’t be surprised if you have 500 to a thousand people on your email list. And when you get over 200 people on your list, that’s when the magic starts to happen.

Jeffro (25:09.141)
Well, thank you for going through that and thank you for joining me today. It’s refreshing when people get straight to the point and cut through all the fluff. know, it’s everywhere out there. So the direct approach and simplifying this is really appreciated. And I think people hopefully will feel when they hear you talk this way, they might recognize how much stuff they’ve been like shiny objects everywhere and like, got to do this and that. And like, it doesn’t have to be that complicated. We do it to ourselves. So guys, if you’re listening and you want to hear more from Michael about getting yourself unstuck and focused on the things that matter, he

He mentioned his free book. You can read that in one sitting and you can get it at brassballsvideos.com. Last question for you, Michael. What is one practical tip that listeners can apply today to start making their business more fun, profitable, and impactful?

Michael McLean (25:55.36)
Vitamin N, which is no. I have been a small business owner for 30 years in every industry that I talked about, the hockey business, the barbershop business, insurance, coaching, consulting. I started to have fun. I started to make an impact and I started to finally make a little bit of money when vitamin N was part of my day.

I decided I was no longer going to be a people pleaser. I wasn’t going to be liked. didn’t, I wanted to be effective and I wanted to be respected, but also I wanted to reward the people that appreciate it, what we were doing in business. And I got rid of all the time vampires. got rid of all the energy vampires. I got rid of all the clients that were unprofitable that disrespected and treated our staff poorly.

And I got rid of all the time wasters in my life. And now that I’ve done that, everything, every opportunity I have as a small business owner, I stop myself, Jethro, and say, does this fit my mission? Is this going to improve my business and my marriage and my life? And if the answer isn’t hell yeah, it’s hell no. And it’s no different than a podcast like this, or if a person invites me to go play golf.

or I’m like, know what? The podcast is part of my mission. I want to help 1 million men. So it’s a hell yes. I had five other opportunities today to do this, this, this, this. And I’m like, well, those are great. But then I couldn’t drive my daughter to school or I couldn’t have lunch with my dad or I wouldn’t have time to do my email or I wouldn’t have time to do my video. So those are easy nos for me.

But people say to me all the time, they’re like, how do you become an eight figure entrepreneur from zero? And I’m like, it’s not how, it’s what not. It’s saying no to almost everything. Warren Buffett said that, that’s Warren Buffett’s secret plan. It’s no to everything. And if it doesn’t fit your mission, if it doesn’t fit your values, then you gotta build that habit, that muscle of vitamin N, which is no.

Michael McLean (28:13.064)
and people will come to me with investment opportunities, Michael, you should buy this hockey team, you should buy this apartment building. And I get excited as an entrepreneur, like everybody on this call. And then I settle myself down and I’m like, it doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit. And like Buffett says, if you say yes to something as a small business owner, you’re saying no to something that matters. So I refuse. I’m like, I’d love to but vitamin N, it’s a hard no. And people, by the way, appreciate that type of candor. I know people are like, I don’t wanna say no. I’m like, I say no. And most people are like, well, thank you for letting me know. If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit.

Jeffro (28:57.876)
Yeah. Well, that’s a great reminder, guys. And thank you again for being here, Michael. Thanks to all of you guys for listening. I hope you guys were taking notes because now it’s time to go take action, make some of these changes that we’re talking about. And we’ll see you back here next time for the next episode of Digital Dominance. Thanks again.