I spoke with Roland Frasier who’s a mergers and acquisitions expert, owner of digitalmarketer.com, and many other companies. You’ll learn the step-by-step process it takes to stand out from the crowd and how top-level businesses dominate their sectors with zero competition!
Roland Frasier is without a doubt, the person that I consider a mentor to me in business in every single way. When this man casually says something to me in a corridor I suddenly find that I’m implementing that one little nugget he threw at me and it’s overhauling my entire company.
It caused me to write a standard operating procedure for how I do a product launch within my own company. That ended up being 100 pages long and once I put in all the details that I found were important, we handed it over to an ad agency that we just started working with, once again, on his recommendation.
They said in 15 years of running their ad agency, they had never seen a document that thorough and professional. So that’s who Roland Frasier is.
Who is Roland Frasier?
Adam: For those who have no idea who you are. How did you get into Business? What were you doing before this?
Roland: I feel like I’ve always been in business. I started a long time ago selling real estate, getting a real estate license when I was 18. Then I got an insurance license when I was 19 and then a securities license when I was 20. I started raising money for real estate syndications to build neighborhoods and I built several thousand homes all over the east coast.
I was particularly in the Southeast and the Caribbean, and I did that as I was going to school. I got a degree in accounting, although I never intended to be an accountant. I thought it was good to have all of that knowledge and then went to law school. I ended up kinda moving from buying and selling real estate to buying and selling companies.
And that’s kinda the whole journey, starting with that one thing, then thinking “How can I leverage that?” Then spreading out from real estate commissions to insurance that was related to the syndications I was doing, and then selling the actual investment vehicles, and then seeing that actual companies can be bought and sold the same way and have a tremendous upside.
Digital Marketer & Traffic and Conversion Summit
Adam: One of my favorite stories is how you ended up working at Digital Marketer and the Traffic and Conversion summit. You weren’t one of the original founders, right? You came along later doesn’t sound that great but it’s incredible. Would you mind sharing how that worked?
Roland: If you think about it, psychologically speaking, a lot of people think that you have to be a founder to be successful or have notoriety. The truth is that it’s far easier to not be the founder because, since we know that most businesses fail, we know that it’s very difficult to be a founder.
When you’re a founder, the businesses that you’re starting have zero momentum, you’re starting with no customers, no systems, no employees, no business plan, no contacts, nothing.
When businesses are reborn, I believe they are effectively refounded. And so, while I don’t consider myself a founder of Digital Marketer, I do consider myself a founder of War Room, even though I didn’t start that either, I reinvented how we do that. The business today is completely different from the business that I came in on. Digital Marketer is different too, but I’ve been more of an advisor there than a founder.
Again, while I’m not a founder, I’m an advisor there and then at the Traffic and Conversion Summit, the same thing. I would consider myself a founder of the current iteration of the Traffic and Conversion Summit because when I came in, it had been going for a couple of years. While a great event, it was not the kind of event it is today. So my partners and I collectively reinvented that business, but I think it’s an interesting distinction.
So yes, you don’t have to be a founder to come in and add tremendous value to businesses. The truth is many founders don’t have the skills or knowledge and it’s not to say anything against them. It’s just a different skill set to take a business and leverage it, grow it, scale it, and prepare it for an exit.
Cowboy Entrepreneurs
Adam: There’s this new wave of entrepreneurs that I’m seeing who are these “Cowboys”, but they’re reaching out to anyone who’s got a following of any kind or a business online and say, “I will do X for you, I’ll do your branding or I’ll be your virtual salesperson, etc.” What do you make of this new wave of one-shot entrepreneurs?
Roland: How would that differ from people who were providing those services before? Because there’s obviously been branding companies, sales service, outsource sales, and that kind of stuff before. So how would you say these new wave entrepreneurs are different?
The challenge is that when you’re following any course like that and have a prefabricated business approach, you have thousands, literally thousands, and maybe even tens of thousands of people. There’s going to be a lot of “Me Too”. So how do you differentiate yourself?
As an entrepreneur, you have to ask yourself, am I the kind of person that needs that guidance and support? And am I going to try and build my business that way? Or have I spotted or taken the time to spot a gap in the market that I can differentiate myself around to build a significant business?
So what do I think of them? I think it’s great that they’re taking action, that they have a plan, and that they’ve invested in a program and are among the few to take the time to reach out and do it. However, I think that there are way better ways to significantly attract people than spamming them.
How do you be different in Business?
Adam: So let’s just say one of these people came across you and said, “Okay Roland, I am doing this and I’m doing the same thing that everybody else is doing. How do I be different? How do I make this better? I’ve done this cookie-cutter course and now I want to separate myself and not do the same thing as everyone else. I want to stand out from the market. How would you do it?
Roland: I would be so freaking different and think about how can I give you what I know you want? I would’ve had a conversation with you because I believe in reaching out, particularly when you’re doing a small thing, like, like a mastermind or you’re trying to go for a few key clients on Instagram or something like that.
I would be reaching out to them and having conversations to find out everything in-depth. I’d want to know what makes you tick? What do you know? Who drives you? Who motivates you?
And then it’s what can I do? Maybe all these people have always wanted to go to the Maldives or maybe they’ve always wanted to meet Tony Robbins or maybe it’s that they’ve always wanted to fly Meg fighter jets in the desert! I don’t know.
But there’s something that you can identify that will make them different. Then all of that goes to what this is about, which is differentiating yourself by creating an experience that is different from the other people that won’t be a me-too business.
Hack your Way to Butterfly Logic
Adam: If there was one simple psychology hack that you could give somebody, a CEO or wannabe entrepreneur, what’s a simple psychological hack they could follow?
Roland: I’ll go with what I call Butterfly Logic because it’s something you can apply to everything you use every single day. It’s asking yourself, “if I had to get five more benefits out of this thing that I’m doing, whatever that thing is, what would they be?”
It could be as simple as, if you’re in our space, then the way I think is, okay, I wanna have a celebrity. So if somebody was trying to differentiate themselves by having some celebrity, then I would say, “OK, what can I do to get that celebrity and to monetize them?” Well, I can get people to come and pay enough money to liquidate the cost of the celebrity, but then what else could I do?
Do I have social media? Great. I can get pictures of myself with them and put them on there. I have a podcast. Could I instead of just having them at the event, could I interview them live? And now I’ve got them on my podcast, that’s another way that I can use that.
Then can I use that interview on the podcast as some sort of exclusive leverage to do something else? That’s another way to use it. Then maybe I could do an eBook about what I learned from talking to Richard Branson or what I learned from talking to whoever the celebrity is and release that.
And then that can be the front end to a consulting thing that I do or a mastermind that I sell or another event. It’s how you get everything from whatever you’re doing right now. If you say, “I need to monetize this five different ways, how can I do that?? And when I say monetize, it could be anything from using it to build a list or whatever.
So every time you think of something you’re writing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on a piece of paper. And #1 is the thing you’re doing right now. Then you have to come up with these other things that you’ll use to leverage this. One thing that you’re doing that is either going to get you more money or more prestige or more credibility or more people on the list. And don’t stop brainstorming until you can identify all five of those things.
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