In this episode, Jim and Tyson interview Stuart Bell, on of the co-founders of 90minutebooks.com; a process that allows you to get a book produced professionally in 90 minutes. They will talk about how it works and how it can help your business!
90minutebooks is a marketing organization dedicated to helping you make invisible leads visible by capturing your unique message in the pages of a book. Whether you’re looking to develop new business, nurture relationships with people you already engage or open doors previously stuck closed, your book is one of your greatest assets.
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mrstuartbell
Here’s Stuart’s podcast: https://www.90minutebooks.com/podcast/
Stuart recorded a follow up to go through the more specific parts of the mind map we didn’t get chance to cover. Some great info there for anyone looking to do this themselves. It should add some real value to anyone who’s interested.
It’s up at www.90minutebooks.com/ml
Hacking’s hack: GARY VAYNERCHUK has changed his podcast! Check it out! https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/podcast/ Very motivational stuff!
Tyson’s tip: Outsourcing/Delegation. Tyson has been outsourcing his medical record summaries and this has helped him a lot! He found this assistance through Upwork!
Stuart’s suggestion: www.noodlesoft.com, this is on machine automation (mac only unfortunately). It as a level of local file manipulation that ties in with Zapier (move files locally & then end up in a monitored Zapier folder to trigger other things).
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Transcripts: Stuart Bell: 90minutebooks
Stuart Bell
The whole purpose of what we’re talking about it’s not necessarily books as a mechanism, or not necessarily podcasts as a mechanism or the mechanism is separate from the desire and the desire is to help people get the answers in whether that’s in a marketing context or in immigration context or a divorce context. Being the person to provide the answers in a way that positions it from the recipients point of view, being as helpful as you possibly can. That’s the way to differentiate yourself from everyone else.
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm, the right away. This is the maximum liar podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson Meatrix. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’m tasting matrix Jimmy, we got a pretty awesome guest today I talked about it.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, sorry, yesterday is Stuart Bell. He’s one of the cofounders of 90 minute books.com 90 minute books is a process that Stuart’s gonna explain to us that allows someone to get a book produced professionally pretty quickly. And it’s a very nice process. We’ll talk about how it works, and about myself participating in that program several times. Now, Stuart has a tremendous amount of marketing and operational experience, he helped take the 90 Minute books from an idea to an organization that has helped over now 250 business owners and entrepreneurs create their greatest lead generation tool. He works closely with the 90 Minute Book team and clients to create simple friction free ways of getting the message in front of your potential clients. Stewart focuses on speaking with business owners to maximize the potential of their book and develop their products and processes to support these outcomes. Stuart, welcome to the show.
Stuart Bell
Hey, guys, it’s great to be here.
Tyson Mutrux
Stuart, can you tell us a little bit about just what you do with 90 minute books. And we’ll get into the process a little bit, bro, just tell us about what you do.
Stuart Bell
Yeah, so my role is more on the operational side. So myself and Dean Jackson, we co founded the company, it was actually spun off from a product that we were providing as part of Dean’s main company. So that’s more of a marketing organization, we specialize there helping entrepreneurs, and we have a separate real estate business helping Realtors on their marketing business. So Dean, I’m not sure where the guys listening to this have come across Dean Jackson before but very big presence in the in the marketing world, very well known. So the product that we were offering there came from just creating books for our own use soy books as a as a mechanism as a way of engaging customers have a couple of unique things about them that make them more attractive as lead generation pieces. There’s ways to engage customers. So that was something we’d identified internally, spinning the product, then off into a separate company and create a 90 minute book sounds a standalone organization, the main challenge was scaling what was pretty much an internal team, doing things on our own timeframe within our own parameters, and really scaling it into something that was more operationally focused, more scalable, could engage with people who were coming on board, not necessarily knowing all of the ins and outs of the way that we worked. So be looking at onboarding and putting systems in place to, as Jim says, try and get these out into the marketplace as fast as possible whilst maintaining that level of quality, which means it’s a great end product all the time kind of helping people just keep moving forward, I think the one of the main benefits of speed is that it’s very easy to get caught up in the process of doing something. So I’m guessing it’s the same with you guys, if you’re looking at entering a new marketplace, or there’s a new piece of law that comes on the books or a change that that’s quite the makes the process of doing something quite different, so easy to get caught up in the details of it. And you could quite easily lose six to 12 months, just planning how you could get this product to market, get this new service to market rather than actually going out there and testing with a good version one, and then iterating on that afterwards. So I’ve done a lot of great work over the last couple of years of really dialing in this process. So as much as possible, trying to make it streamlined for people to come on board and the idea. We haven’t bring the idea out, give it the marketing focus that it needs to be an effective lead generation tool, which is really where we focus and create that for people and really help them start some conversations.
Jim Hacking
It’s funny that you mentioned that people on the listening to the podcast might not have heard of Dean Jackson because I think I mentioned him on every single episode. How did you then get connected in the first place and how did you start working together?
Stuart Bell
I’ll tell you why. It’s Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It’s the real small links that just everything came together at the right time. So my background is in it operations IT Service Management and service transition. So my kind of corporate background is working for large financial institutions in the UK, about six or seven years ago, as I’m showing my age, maybe even a little bit more than that seven or eight years ago, started becoming more and more interested in marketing, and mainly online marketing, because it was a nice crossover between the engaging people, which is something that even in the operations background, that kind of corporate background, a lot of the work that we did was really engaging stakeholders and making sure that everyone was on the same page, more so than the technical side of things, specifically, but into their marketing, although the term is a little bit toxic in some environments, but still, it was nice crossover between that using technology as a way to engage people. So there was a couple of links through his various different groups. I’m not sure if you’ve ever mentioned or actually maybe you don’t even know Ed Dale out of Australia is a Deans Australian equivalent, if you like, very big marketing presence, and that only Dean, sorry, can you add quite well from being active in his community, again, really trying to help people in that, that environment as much as possible. And then the art of marketing podcast started, which if you’ve mentioned been on the show before, I’m sure you’ve mentioned now, Martin podcast, they then have a their first conference was in Phoenix in 2010, I think, which was about the same time that I was leaving the corporate environment, start a marketing company in the UK, I met Dean then I was pretty active in starting the Isle of marketing Meetup group in London. And then the second conference was the following year, by that time, I’d left the corporate world was working by myself, Dean, three changes in his organization needed some more kind of operational support someone to step in, I had more of a marketing background then was very involved in their ideas. So just it it just gelled or in really a case of I don’t necessarily want to say being in the right place at the right time. But definitely the universe kind of aligned to bring us in each other’s sphere of influence at the same time. And then just went from there, really, the art of marketing meetups stories actually quite interesting, I can remember missing an episode of the show where they were talking about in catching up the following week, and then thinking to myself, I’ve missed the opportunity. So ours is bound to have done this. So I can remember rushing on to meet up and seeing if anyone else had started that group and, and no one had ever had the opportunity to, to get that group started. But it was in the same way that Dale’s in the communities that they had there, that was an online community. And although I was coming to it, as an outsider, it was very, very easy to rise to the top, just by helping people. And this is even within a group. I mean, you guys were mostly the same in the maximum lawyer environment, it’s surprisingly easy to rise to the top and be helpful to people. If nothing else, just having two screens in front of you on a one screen fill and asking questions in the forum, and on the screen next to you just Googling for answers. So my nature is quite like finding the answers to things. It’s that kind of discovery process. It’s quite interesting. So to begin with, I wasn’t in any intent, it was just I don’t know the answer to that. I’ll see if I can find it and then providing the answer back. But it’s surprising how quickly you can step up. So I think anyone listening to this, the whole purpose of what we’re talking about, it’s not necessarily books as a mechanism, or not necessarily podcast is a mechanism or the mechanism is separate from the desire and the desire is to help people get the answers and whether that’s in a marketing context or in immigration context or a divorce context, being the person to provide the answers in a way that positions it from the recipients point of view, being as helpful as you possibly can. That’s the way to differentiate yourself from everyone else. It’s easy to do, particularly because the actual information, the actual answers tend to all be out there these days. But adding an opinion to it, collating the information together to provide the information really adding value to people asking the questions, that’s a fantastic way to build the audience. And if you can then marry that up with a service you can provide or group these people together by kind of leveraging that value and kind of the synergistic approach of just piling on the value by answering more relevant questions in that group. It’s a really great way of bringing together that audience, people who are likely to turn out to be customers, because it’s that target audience that you’re talking to. But it’s very easy to stand up above the crowd, differentiate from the crowd just by being that person that provides value. So that was the short answer.
Tyson Mutrux
No, that was perfect. That’s perfect are stewards. So I wanted to dive into the process because I know you got a lot of great takeaways, but we talked about the process, but before you do, I’ve got the biggest question that everyone’s gonna have on their minds is, does it really take 90 minutes?
Stuart Bell
So this is the great thing as well says 90 minutes of your time, so So the benefit of being able to leverage someone else’s skills and the fact that they’ve gone through it before and on their end or on our end, in this case, can can shorten that timeframe, the real benefit is that you guys can concentrate on, just bring into the table, what you bring in that is the knowledge and information and experience that you’ve got. So our whole process is really trying to maximize everyone’s unique ability. So the technical steps that are needed to set it all up isn’t the the unique ability of people wanting to write the their unique abilities information. So we split it out into two main steps, which is where the name comes from. So there’s a 30 minute stage, which is really the outlining, and the bringing together of the ideas. And then there’s the 60 minutes stage, which is the recording of the content, which is how we do the content capture 60 minutes usually correlates to about how fast you took, unconsciously trying to slow myself down, because I know that my accent is a little different for some people’s ears and I talked for half. So 60 minutes or so tends to translate into about 40 to 50 pages of a five by eight book. So if you’ve got a piece of paper in front of you fold that in half. And that is about the size of the books that we create five by two relatively standard size, an hour’s worth of content in that works on a couple of levels. So the book itself is usually then had enough pages, and it’s weighty enough to seem like a book. So this isn’t just a long form article that we’re suggesting to people, right, it isn’t like a booklet, this is a perfect bound book, the right dimensions so that people are likely to pick something up and see it as valuable. The time constraint of 60 minutes then, is also valuable, because people’s attention, the readability numbers that are out there for books, it’s a very small proportion of people who buy book who actually then read the whole thing. And certainly for me, it’s even worse there in the in the e reader worlds because at least when I was buying physical books, I’ve gotten the kind of the guilt of them being sat on the shelf behind me expecting me to read them at some point, the ebooks that I buy, they disappear into the ether, and I never, ever even see those. But 60 minutes as a constraint for content does a couple of things. One, it’s pretty easy for you to record 60 minutes worth of content on a subject that adds value without going into kind of waffle and just fill in for the sake of filling. It’s also good because it puts a constraint around it. And then you can’t get too sidetracked on all of the other things that could be included. Because there’s always more that you could say that keeping something focused is is the best way of answering one particular question and leading people to an obvious next step. So an important differentiator between the 90 Minute Book and an a fiction book, or what people might traditionally be thinking of when they’re thinking about writing a book is that specificity. So in the 30 minute call the setup, what we aim to do is get people dialed in on the one question that they’re trying to answer. So rather than being too broad, and being too many things to too many people, what we suggest is that answering one question allows you to target that one specific group and create something in a relatively straightforward way without too much overhead for either you writing it, or the person reading it, to allow someone to raise their hand is interested in that subject, read animated content that answers that one particular question as comprehensively as possible. So really adding value, and then give someone a clear next step, what to do next. Because quite often, what we find is the biggest challenge that people have is that they’ve got too many ideas, they could write on too many subjects, or they say that, well, anyone could be a sub that anyone could be a reader because we offer legal services to these five different areas. So any of those, we could take any one. And the problem or sort of trying to take any one is that you’re not, you’re not targeting any one particular person, you’re trying to broadcast some stuff and and it will get very challenging. And that’s oftentimes why people never get around to it, because with the best intentions, it becomes too much of an overhead. There’s always there’s too many opportunities or it could be this and it could be this it could be there. So this 30 minute call to begin with, is really about dialing that in and being specific to this single target market. So Jim, I’m not sure whether you’ve seen a profit activators come up on the show before we talk about them all the time. Okay, perfect. That’s great. It makes my job a lot more easy then because a lot of what I’ll say is in context of things that you’ve already heard, so that will Although of selecting a single target market, not at the exclusion of everything else, but selecting a single target market for this particular campaign, that is the key to the whole rest of the process, because a lot of the problems that people get in the broader broadcast type advertising world is the issue of in lobbying specific people get out blind to this kind of generic copy that they just see going through in the background, whether it’s in a magazine, or whether it’s on a Facebook feed, or whether it’s in an email, the kind of nonspecific blurb that just goes on in the background, you don’t get the benefit of what Dean refers to sometimes as the horoscope effect. If you open the newspaper to a page of horoscopes, your eyes are naturally drawn to whatever your star sign is, first, you can’t help do it. Because the triggers are in there your eyes pattern matching, they’re drawn to the words that you recognize the same with picking the single target market, if you’re trying to answer a question. So it seems okay to use use an example is the spouse book? Sure, the Empress so just to put some context for people, so we’re the latest book that we’re working with Jim on his bring your spouse here, it’s their immigration specific book. So anyone that’s out there, and they’re just seeing broadcast ads in the background for lawyers, gonna get no recognition coming up at all anyone’s going through and in the background, we’re seeing issues. I’ve seen adverts with immigration, what is that might trigger something, but it’s not going to be as triggering, specifically seeing a book title is bring your spacer if that person is looking at bringing their space there, because you get that specific link to the question that they’re asking, and the solution that’s been presented on the page. So a lot of the first steps that we go through and that people should really consider in trying to get this written is single target market be as specific as possible. And really, then that helps dial people in as they’re, as they’re out there, seeing as passed by in the background, seeing email that you’re sending to them about a particular subject. dialing in to be as specific as possible is a one of the best things that you can do to make the targeting of the audience more specific, make the advertising campaign more specific, make it more likely that someone’s going to raise their hand is interesting, because it’s pushing their buttons, it’s resonating with them. And from the creation point of view, much easier for you to create something that’s specifically looking at the spouse elements of of immigration law versus all of the other things which are related, but not directly connected. We’re
Jim Hacking
talking today with Stuart bill of 90 minute books and Stewart to explain the process to us, Stuart, most of our listeners, as you know, are lawyers, and lawyers fancy themselves to be very busy. After the 90 minutes, the 30 Minute outlining call and a 60 minute recording, what other work do the lawyers or your authors have to do in order to bring the book to fruition? Yeah,
Stuart Bell
so that’s a great question. And I think this is really one of the benefits of finding a done for you service where someone else can do it. So the other steps in the process, if you were looking at doing it yourself, would be all of the production steps. So internally, within the organization here, you kind of pass from the content stage, which is those stages we’ve just talked about, into them the production stage, and really the production piece should be pretty invisible to, to us, the customer. Yeah, ideally, no, everything is taken out of your hands. And it’s it’s getting completed. So some of the things that are going on in the background. As I mentioned, the the aim of the 60 minute call is to capture the content of that conversation, we record as if it’s a podcast. So as if we’re doing something live to tape. So bring your A game to that call, record the content as if you were talking in a room to your ideal prospect, your ideal potential customer that’s then recorded, we take that away and get it transcribed. And then there’s the editing process that needs to go through the layout process to get it all in the correct format. There’s a lot of, or there’s a number of technical steps to that, which it’s not. So watch that it’s rocket science, but it’s that it takes time. And if you’re trying to do this on top of whatever else you’re doing, it’s a decreasing likelihood that you’ll actually get it finished. So the only other step that you need to be involved in is the cover design. So the cover is one of the more important pieces because the cover is the thing that’s eye catching. So we’ll say to people, and again, this will come up in the 30 minute call. But we’ll say to people, the most important part of the book isn’t the content. It’s the title because it’s the title that gets someone to raise their hand. Are they interested? And that point, they haven’t even seen what the content is. So the title is the most important thing. That’s where we spend a lot of the focus. The cover then is the eye catching things. So once you’ve had the 30 minute call and the 60 minute call Have the contents done. For anyone working with us, you’ll then work with our designers and our designers. Now we’ve done over 300 covers for people. And if people visit the website, we’ve got a gallery of covers. So head over to a 90 minute books.com forward slash gallery. And then you get to see all of the covers that we’ve created in the past. And you can see that the purpose is that it’s eye catching an on message and relevant to the customer that you want to engage with. So if you’re working with us internally, our design is pretty much we’ve got you we’ve got some onboarding questionnaires that will ask you about brand colors and themes. And then they’ll go away and create a couple of examples and then dial it in from there. If you think about doing it by yourself, there’s a couple of external services that you could use, which are find that obviously, you’re then sacrificing time because you need to follow up with these people. And it’s more of a tent into project management job. But the main thing about the cover is than it needs to be engaging. So where you’re going to use this cover, it’s not so much that it’s going to be on a bookshelf and you’re competing with other books, but it’s more likely that it’s going to be on a social media feed. So it will be streaming past in the in the posts that are coming up as you’re promoting your book to targeted audiences. So a cover that stands out, not too busy, has some sort of visual element that amplifies the title. Those are some great tips for people out there thinking about COVID design. And as I say, that’s a real benefit of working with people who’ve done it before because you’ve got the the expertise and the knowledge of having done this over 300 times now. So it just streamlines the whole process. But the production stages, the stitching that all together, getting it to a place where it can be produced and printed. All of that is stuff that as I say it’s not so much that it’s rocket science, it’s not so much that it’s difficult. But it’s just legwork. And it’s time consuming. And it’s it’s easy to make mistakes. It’s like the, again, going back to the immigration example, it’s not that someone can’t fill in and submit and 400. But if they do, it’s, it’s far easier to work with someone who’s done it a good number of times before because the outcomes likely to be more successful, and take less far less time.
Tyson Mutrux
For questions about just the recording process. So is this something where it’s a q&a session where you’re asking questions based on the outline, or how does that work?
Stuart Bell
So what we try and do is get people to think about it as just like a podcast, that’s the language that we tend to use with people or radio interview if, if some people don’t know what podcasts are. So think about it as a radio interview, or a TED talk or something like that. This is the opportunity to get your best thinking captured in a way that makes sense. So the more time and effort people can put into the outline and being prepared for the call, the better the outcome, what we do in the 30 Minute setup. And there’s actually on top of the so the 30 minutes is the part that you’re talking to whoever’s onboarding you more likely going to be a Google Susan, he’s on boarded the majority of the people that we’ve worked with so far. So Susan is great, it’s you will come on the call, you’ve probably got an idea of what you want to talk about, but maybe not dialed in specific enough. And the outcome at the end of the 30 minute or the 30 minute process, not specifically the same in the core. But the end of that process before you record is that you’ll end up with a chapter outline structure that moves people from the title of the book to the back cover copy, which just in case, I don’t get to that we should definitely talk about that before before the end. So the aim that you’re trying to do is you’ve got people’s attention with a title that answers a question that they’re thinking about. And so for example, we were talking about finger spaces that we’re doing with Jim, some of the other legal ones. I was just looking through that some of the examples but protect your IRA, what to do at 6227. Guide to Pennsylvania Social Security, the North Carolina LGB t legal guide, these titles that come to the attention of the audience, giving the promise about answering questions or asking about and then a bank have a copy that gives them a next step. The chapters then, are really about what’s that journey? How do you get from the question on the front cover to the call to action on the bank? The chapter structure is the main thing. So the reason that we record one on one with the person giving them the the model of it being a podcast is that it’s far easier to talk to someone to talk about the subject when there’s someone at the other end of the phone, even if that person is only stepping in every now and then to say that’s great. So what about the next part of the the next chapter in the outline? It’s far usually far easier for people To talk when there’s a human at the other end, as opposed to the other alternative would just be to record locally at home when, when no one else was listening. positioning, yet, as a podcast, recording as a live recording, really helps people move forward. And this whole process, I mean, the alternative of 90 minutes or processes is months and months worth of work to get all of this captured, because you don’t have any constraints around it. So there’s nothing unless you go to a professional publishing company, and there’s an editor, they’re sort of jumping on, you’re saying, I need this back by next Tuesday. There’s nothing constraining you. So positioning it as a live recording, we’ve got 60 minutes to move through this content, you’ve got the opportunity to put your best thinking around the subject, get that recorded, bar far more productive, and far, far more likely that it will actually get done. Rather than saying to people, okay, well, we’ve worked on the outline now go away, and in your own time, record it because people get into this analysis paralysis, or there’s, like, perfectionism that comes into it. So it needs to be recorded perfectly. Or just as I say, the mechanism of talking into a dead mic, unless you’re a professional recording artists, it’s very difficult to the energy is just completely different. So there’s a lot of benefits about recording it live with someone there at the time, to really keep the process moving forward. And the job of work of the person on the other end is really just to keep the conversation going. So if people start running too long, and it looks like the whole thing is gonna run, sometimes people can get themselves into a conversational hole where it’s difficult to step out of. So the person who’s doing the interviewing can step in and move that forward. If people are running short, if they occasionally you get people where they ask the first question on the outline, and then they run off into answer everything that’s it’s just kind of brain dumped all out in 10 minutes. So the person doing the interview can kind of control that flow, and really helps you stick to the chapter outline, to make sure that you’ve given each of the chapters, the right amount of time, the right amount of detail. And also, if any of them do run late, then Susan’s done 300 plus of these now, so she’s very good at being able to, well, I mean, not just Susan, but all of the interviewers are very good at being able to step in and ask ancillary or additional questions if a subject needs fleshing out a little bit.
Jim Hacking
Stuart, we are running up against our deadline, I did want to ask you one other question before we get to your suggestion and our hacks and tips. And that is talk a little bit to our listeners about the concept of cheese and whiskers and how the book sort of plays into the that concept of more cheese and last whiskers.
Stuart Bell
Yeah, and this is such a fantastic model in which to think about it. So one of the things I’ll at the end, I’ll give, give the listeners a URL to go to and download some additional stuff because it’s so difficult to there’s so many aspects of this that are kind of broader than what we’ve had chance to talk about today. So there’ll be some more breadth to the subjects and the link that I’ll give. But that concept of cheese versus whiskers. So it’s talking about a most primary director or mouse is to go find cheese. So primary directive of a customer to go find the answer to something the solution to something. But as soon as it makes sense is whiskers. As soon as it starts getting salesy, or there’s the risk of something else happening, then their first instinct is to run away, and then potentially come back because it’s a survival mechanism. And you see the same with customers, as soon as it switches from here’s someone’s running answer to something to Oh, no, this is just sales copy. So very often, you’ll see it again, in the in the lawyer advertising world, and we’re getting the same on the real estate side is I would have imagined 70% of the images out there for lawyers trying to engage with customers is a banner headline. And then a picture of a guy in a suit sat in front of a bookcase and it all looking very official. So there’s the concern then in the in the customers mind that, if the only answer I’m gonna get is I need to phone this guy or come into the office, then the worry is I’m gonna go to the office and the doors gonna lock behind me, I’m not gonna be able to get out until I’ve signed this piece of paper. The job of working what we’re trying to do with the books is to identify those invisible leads identify who those customers might be. So given people the opportunity to raise their hands for you to identify who they are, in a way that’s purely cheese that’s purely providing them something that they want. A book is one of the most fantastic mechanisms for doing that because you can position it entirely answering rather their question. You’ve still done the job the work of capturing the lead, but you’re not trying to convince any someone of anything. You’re just giving the information in a way that sets up a great relationship with them provides valuable information For them, you’ve then captured that lead, you know what that person is. So then you can start to educate and motivate them over time, you can provide additional information that guides them towards that call to action, that easy next step for them to take. So that separation between cheese, which is all by giving, and whiskers, which is okay, there’s a bit of a salesy type message coming in here, which might deter some people or scare some people away. The job or work of this exercise the job or work in the book is to make invisible prospects visible, get them to raise their hand, so you know who they are, you can start the relationship off in a, in a way that just adds value. You’ve captured their details, and then you can start to motivate and educate them towards what the next obvious or logical next step is for them.
Tyson Mutrux
Stuart and Jim, I know that we’re getting we’re running long, but I, you did mention something on the pre call interview about possibly telling listeners how they can maybe do the 90 Minute Book themselves. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I want to make sure we get that out there. So people can, if they want to do it themselves? They can, I know, we’d like for them to use you because you will do a really great job. But if they wanted to do it themselves, how could they do that?
Stuart Bell
Yeah, definitely. And I think this is the challenge of a call, it’s very difficult to get all of the information across. So I’m going to suggest people do is if listening to this, if that sounds interesting, head to 90 minute books.com forward slash mL from maximum lawyer. And what I’ll do there is put up a whole load of additional information around the structure that we use to outline things, some of the tricks and tips that we’ve got for capturing something in the way that we actually use in the 90 Minute Book process. But if you’d prefer to do it yourself, or you’ve got time to do it yourself, then you can just use this outline, to really capture the best message capturing the best way not get sidetracked on things that are less important. And then a couple of additional resources to tools that are out there just to help the process. So tools to get transcriptions done, and ways that you can get to a place where you get covers designed and all that type of thing. So if people do want the the do it yourself type option, head over to Nate minibooks.com, forward slash m l, and then I’ll put a whole load of resources up there for people to grab and move forward with
Jim Hacking
storage is tremendous. I think that everyone’s gonna go out of this call. I think that just as a testimonial, we are finishing up my second 90 minute book. And I think one of the reasons that the process works is that is so seamless, and it’s not it’s not terribly expensive. It’s, it’s what I would call, you know what, what it cost me to do one case, even less than what what I earn on one case. So I think that the the landing page with the book is something that’s very attractive to people, it’s a really low entry to very low barrier to entry, they can download the book for free. And this isn’t like I’m we’re writing these books to make money, we’re doing it as a lead magnet to try to get people to raise their hands so that we can then market to them. For me to one of the great benefits of the book is that I say the same thing over and over and over and a lot of my consults. And now when I send people the book, I don’t have to say those things over and over, I can just sort of point them to the writer in the right direction. And and then they can either decide to move ahead or not. So it’s just another step and other piece in the puzzle. But it’s been, it’s been great to work with the people at 90 Minute Book, Susan is great as an interviewer and, and I think the whole team sort of chimes in when it’s time to pick the book cover. So I think you could totally do it yourself. But I think that the back end of the actual production, getting the book onto the Kindle, getting the book published that those kinds of things, I tried to do a book myself on Createspace. And it’s it’s not impossible, but it’s pretty difficult. And we’ve got plenty of other things to do. So I can’t tell everyone how happy I’ve been with 90 minute books. And, and I think it’s just been great for for my practice and for my clients.
Stuart Bell
So that’s always good to know that example you gave there. And it’s not rocket science, you can do it yourself. I was compare it to I imported a sports car from Japan to the UK about 15 years ago. And that process must have taken. I mean, the best part of nine months maybe had to go back for the testing several times, because I’d miss a lot of things here and miss a little thing there at the end of the process. I mean, I knew why I was doing but I never important another car. So I probably for the nine months worth of effort that it took again, not that any of it was rocket science. But if I could have paid someone, a couple of $1,000 to do it for me that would have been in the greater scheme of things that would have been a far better way of spending time.
Tyson Mutrux
Alright, so let’s wrap things up. I do want to remind everyone before we get our tips and our hacks to make sure you like us on Facebook, join our Facebook group also give us a five star review if you like what you hear here on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. Jimmy, what is your hack of the week?
Jim Hacking
All right, so I have been spending a ton of time listening to Gary Vaynerchuk. Again, I’m sort of fired up and the Gary Vee world he has changed dump his podcast. And I just want to give another shout out. I know I’ve given a shout out about Gary on many of these podcasts. He’s now calling it the Gary Vee audio experience. And it’s seven days a week. It’s various audio clips, I find Gary to be very motivational and stuff that he says make a lot of sense. I really like his ideas about just what Stuart was talking about sort of helping first and looking for stuff on your end for people to pay you back on the back that you sort of give without expecting a return every single time. And my experience with Stuart, over the last two years has been nothing but that he’s been very helpful to me, asking nothing in return. And I just think that those lessons from people like Gary and Stuart just are good for us, as lawyers to understand is that yeah, you might not always get a one for one trade off. But if you sort of take that Bob Berg, go giver mentality that we talk about a lot on the show that eventually it all comes back.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s a good way and you know, you’re speaking directly to my heart because he talks about the Go Giver, you know, I love to go get her to go get fantastic. But before I get to my tip of the week, Stewart you have a horse?
Stuart Bell
Yeah, I was looking back. I’m not sure if you guys have done a show, talking about Zapier specifically in the past, but I’m guessing that Sam talked to Jim, it’s come up, I wanted to add to that and add in there’s a tool for the Mac called Hazel, which I’m not sure if people have come across but anyone looking at adding some of that automation to to kind of leverage what they’re doing. Hazel is a great tool that operates on the desktop level, and moves files around and renames things that ties in quite nicely with zappi them. So as an example, the way we use it in the 90 Minute Book processes, we have a lot of files coming in from various different sources. And then a lot of activities done with those files. Doing all that manually is is time consuming, but also kind of variation comes into it. So we use hazel to physically move files around from one location to another and the places that the files end up. And then typically the happier folders waiting for subtle dropbox folders waiting to do something in Zapier. So Hazel, by company called noodle soft is is a great tool for physically doing an X on the desktop that can add into some of the automation that you might have running by as up you
Tyson Mutrux
never heard of Hazel, but I’m happy to check it out. But I love automation, red listeners should know that we love automation. So that’s great. My tip of the week it has to do with outsourcing slash delegation. So I think William Ed asked a question on the Facebook group about really delegating, automating eliminating things like that on, I would just about criminal offense. This one’s about really about personal injury. But it can really, in any practice area, you can pick something that you do and outsource it. But this one is, we’ve been outsourcing our medical record summaries lately. And I’ve gotten really great results. And really what I did was I went to upwork.com. I’ve talked about upwork.com several times on the podcast, it was Jimmy. And what I did is I put a small, simple job posting saying that I’m looking for someone to do medical summaries for me, I got a ton of applicants. And then I gave top two that I found, I gave them each a set of medical records to give me summaries on and chronologies on and get them back within a day. They’re really good, really good results. And it cost me a fraction of what I pay our nurse to do. So we have a legal nurse that we send our records to, and it costs a fortune every time I do it. This cost me a fraction of that to do and they’re really really good. I’m sure if you pick the wrong person, you get some really crummy summaries. But these are really, really good summaries. It’s not something that is low quality, it’s actually really high quality stuff. So you know, I know a lot of listeners are personal injury attorneys. So if you want medical summaries done Upwork has a lot of lot of options were so
Stuart Bell
I was just going to add another quick tip for Upwork. So people sometimes run into the problem of there’s so many people responding to ads. So great little tip for looking for people on Upwork is whatever the actual request is. So the medical summaries request these sorts where they’re adding their criteria that says when you’re responding to this post, also add in what is your tell me what your favorite movie is, or favorite flavor of ice cream, just something that’s very easy for people to answer. But what you can then do is when you get the results or the submissions back in filter by people who have actually answered that question, and if they haven’t answered that question, disregard those straightaway. It’s just a nice quick, easy tip of filtering 100 responses into the 20 people who actually can, can follow instructions. So we find that helpful in the past.
Tyson Mutrux
That is such a great tip because you do get a bunch of applicants and a lot of them are just copying and pasting. They’re not really reading what the job posting is. So that’s a great great tip for filtering. Stuart Thank you very much for that. Alright, great episode entails you’ll want to know fantastic I could do it Stuart, thank you so much for coming on this episode. You’re fantastic guests and everyone go to 90 minute books.com forward slash ml, which Thank you very much for doing that for Stuart, put a bunch of resources on the website there. So, thank you everyone and check us out on Facebook and like us on iTunes. Thank you have a great week.
