Note from James Guldan
Owner of Vision Tech Team
One of the massive privileges of working with some of the biggest information marketing companies and Ecommerce brands in the world is getting to see the backend of everything that is working.
I decided to document some of the takeaways and share them in a segment I will be entitling Funnel Optimization Case Studies.
I will be going through pretty much any client that will let us share some of the takeaways from working with them.
Mike is one of the original direct response gurus. Every sales letter and every email is expertly crafted. He is truly one of the best copywriters I have worked with. Copywriting is one of the most marketable skill sets on the planet–which is proven in Mike’s case as he has made $60+ million from it.
Mike has written books, created life-changing courses, and hosted incredible events. He has been a client of ours since we started Vision Tech Team. Our relationship began with simply writing small scripts for him but eventually evolved into so much more. Not only would I consider Mike to be a good friend, but he has also helped our team in so many ways. The biggest takeaway from our many adventures with Mike has been the fact that you don’t want to go enterprise with your software too quickly (or even at all in some cases).
Most of the time businesses who push for a custom solution don’t have their profit margin in mind. Yes, it can solve some issues, but if you are paying $1,000,000 in setup costs and over $50K per month to run it, it definitely changes your business model (and usually not for the better). We always recommend solutions that allow our clients to stay as lean as possible for as long as possible.
There have been several instances in our relationship with Mike where he had invested millions of dollars in technology infrastructure (with another company) only to find out later that he didn’t need it and then had to switch to a platform that could more easily pivot with his changing needs without the insane upkeep costs. There have been quite a few takeaways from our relationship with Mike, but this was the biggest.
Case Studies
WHO IS MIKE DILLARD:
Mike has created and built 3 companies in 3 different industries up to 8 figures. Combined, he has done more than $60,000,000.00. He is one of the best direct response copywriters and has an amazing mastermind platform called https://revvenue.com/.
“Vision Tech Team has done an incredible job managing all my successful launches and site builds for the last four years.”
Mike Dillard
WHY THEY CAME TO US:
PROBLEM:
YEARS ago, Mike came to us specifically for help connecting the marketing technology for his various businesses. These were the days before Zapier was around and manual APIs had to be connected.
He also needed a team that could build high-end funnels quickly. At his peak, Mike was launching quite a few things all at once and we were able to deliver efficiently and effectively .
However, he more recently leveraged our team to come up with non-enterprise level technology solutions. Most of the high-end development companies just want businesses to go enterprise, but it rarely makes the business owner happy.
Solutions:
Over the years, connecting software has become much easier. However, the problem still exists when businesses decide to go enterprise. Some of the Salesforce installs can cost over a million dollars to implement and have $50,000+ per month in backend costs. This can massively change your business model and profit margin, even to the point of bankruptcy.
We pride ourselves on finding solutions that actually fit a customer’s needs instead of just custom-coding everything. For almost any business challenge, there is likely a pre-built solution that will address about 90% of that challenge and we can build on a custom component to get you as close to 100% as possible to meeting your goal.
Mike has been our guinea pig for new software for a very long time. He is open to trying any tech stack as long as it is beneficial to his bottom line.
Every software has its issues, but we have successfully implemented Kartra, Clickfunnels, custom HTML/css, WordPress, etc. Each of them has their benefits and flaws.
TECH SPECS: (WHAT TECHNOLOGY WAS USED FOR THIS PROJECT)
Server: Wpengine – They utilize WordPress and this is the best for WordPress (Shameless affiliate link: https://visiontechteam.com/wpengine)
CRM: Mailchimp
WHAT WE LEARNED:
Don’t go custom very often. Try everything else before custom. We even had a podcast about how going custom can take many 8-9 figure companies to the ground. https://mikedillard.com/episodes/how-technology-almost-killed-my-internet-business/
