- The Koerner Office
- Posts
- White Whale Part 2
Happy Sunday!
It’s been a great, busy week!
And hey, I invested in my office-mate’s startup! Not sure if you saw that tweet. BTW they do really REALLY great work if you want insanely cheap SEO results.
Today is part 2 of last week’s “You Only Need One White Whale.” But before we begin, a quick poll.
To those that listen to or watch my show, what keeps you coming back? What about it do you like, specifically? If you’re willing, please write in more info after voting.
What Do You Like About The Koerner Office Show? |
New episodes come out on Mondays on YouTube, Spotify and Apple. The livestream broke again on Friday…:( Come on the show and ask me a question by submitting to this form here!
Next week’s newsletter will be a fan favorite, I can already tell. I’ll be walking you through exactly how to start a new business with almost no startup costs and has a ton of upside. And it’s super unique. Stay tuned!
One last thing. I want to help 2 businesses grow faster, on contingency only. If my help doesn’t work, you don’t pay a dime. If it does, you pay a small % of the additional revenue I help you acquire. It’s something new I want to try. If you’re interested in exploring this, please answer these quick 5 questions. You’d work directly with me and my partner, Nik.
Last week we covered the first 3 steps of tagging your very own white whale. To jog your memory, this is what the 5 steps were:
You have to learn that your whale exists.
You have to learn that the whale is killable. If you’re a snow cone stand looking to convince Elon to be your 50/50 business partner, you are chasing after an unkillable whale.
You have to generate a thousand dumb ideas of how you can LOCATE that whale. Those dumb ideas will help spawn great ones.
Now you have to generate a thousand dumb ideas of how you can KILL that whale.
Execute on your plan until your whale is dead. If you can’t either find or kill your whale, repeat these steps until you do.
Did you see my Tweet today about the upside down Dallas hats? That dude gets it! He found his white whale and now he has an 8 figgy bizzy! And it wasn’t even hard! 1 freaking DM to a 7th round QB and that one thing is what propelled him to success.
It wasn’t a complicated Zapier system that enabled him to be able to send 1,000,000 cold emails per day. It was 1 DM.
Fun fact: I used to employ the founder’s relative. So I was gonna interview him through that connection. But then we had to fire her…
Anyway, let’s get back to where we left off at step #4
Generate a thousand dumb ideas of how you can KILL that whale.
Killing a while = making a killer offer.
The one and only book to read about making a killer offer is this bad boy. Highly, highly recommended. Those tactics work for whales and customers alike.
Why should a whale wanna even answer your email? You need to make it easy for them to say yes. Don’t give them more work to do.
Here are some creative structuring options for finding a key influencer or referral partner.
Give them actual equity in your LLC
Offer them an affiliate fee
Make a custom domain for them that auto-forwards to yours with UTM tracking. For example, what if you have a $4k/month FB Ads agency and you want your whale to send you traffic? Let’s say your actual domain is FBAds . com, you can have them promote GetFBAds . com that simply redirects to your site. Then in Google Analytics you can see all the customers that come from them. It’s a great balance between a mere affiliate link and giving someone equity in your company. He can throw around that domain as if it’s his company, while you do all the fulfillment on the back end. Win/win.
Profit sharing. Maybe you find a huge franchise influencer to talk about your snow cone stand. Every time he sells a franchise you give him 1/3 of the $30k franchise fee.
What if you’re looking for a killer business partner?
Structure a deal to where they own 80% of the business upfront, and then as you prove your value you can earn majority control over time as certain triggers are hit.
Or, the other way around.
I had a great conversation with one of my CEOs last month. We’ve been working on a huge initiative for a year, and it’s dragging on forever, with no in sight.
I finally told him, “What if I give you a FAT bonus if you can finish this project by 4/30/24, come hell or high water?”
“Hah! I wish it were that simple. No amount of money could make this project move faster. You see, excuse #1, excuse #2 and excuse #3. All of these things out of my control prevent that from being possible.”
I then proceeded to lecture him, and encouraged him to read any of Elon’s biographies. If he can invent self driving cars and reusable rocket boosters, we could complete this initiative on time.
I should have done this months ago…
Then I talked to him about the Collison brothers at Stripe, and how they ONLY move fast. I referred him to one of my favorite blog articles and encouraged him to read it.
We then broke down the whys of this big problem, and what was actually preventing us from finishing by 4/30. Breaking that down gave him confidence that this was solvable. I then gave him tactical ideas as to how he could solve those problems.
It’s been two weeks since that convo, and we are now on track to finish by 4/30. My CEO is excited, he sees the light, and we are making it happen.
It’s always possible. There are so so so so many creative ideas for solving problems.
My point of telling that story is to emphasize that it’s possible to create a structure that will unlock the magical “yes” out of any white whale.
Step 5: Execute on your plan until your whale is dead.
You might have to pivot whales or dozen or two times, but don’t quit until your whale is dead.
You might even end up killing the whale and then learning that this wasn’t the right whale after all. That’s ok, go get another one.
Do you know who Plan B is? He’s a massive, well respected crypto influencer that I’ve been trying to tag as my white whale for Mining Syndicate. Putting his name behind our brand would 10x our biz. I’ve been working him for 18 months, and I won’t quit.
I’ve offered him equity, but he wants to stay 100% anonymous and he lives in Europe, so that makes things tricky.
Here’s a silly unlisted YT video I sent him last year to help sway him. We’ve been on a couple Zooms but no dice…yet!
In high school I wrestled in the 285 pound weight class…while weighing 210. I’'ll be punching above my weight class until the day I die.
I’m gonna go play pickleball with my son now. Tell me about your white whale once you snag them. You can do it!
I hope you learned something today. Next week’s will be a banger.
How was today's email? |
Top Tweets of the Past Week
As always, thanks for reading!
Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner.com
Reply