The Lucky Titan With Josh Tapp

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

Many entrepreneurs are successful enough to get to a million dollars in revenue, but struggle to figure out how to scale past that. Tapping into his personal experience in building strategic partnerships with industry titans, Josh Tapp, host of The Lucky Titan podcast, teaches people proven methods for entrepreneurs to scale without having to spend a lot of money on advertising. It’s all about leveraging the right kind of relationships with the right kind of people through joint ventures. Learn how exactly you can do this as he talks to John Livesay in this episode. Plus, listen to John as he helps Josh improve his elevator pitch so you can learn how to improve yours, too!

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Listen to the podcast here

The Lucky Titan With Josh Tapp

Do you know how certain entrepreneurs are successful enough and they get to $1 million in revenue, but they struggle to figure out how to scale past that? Our guest, Josh Tapp at The Lucky Titan podcast, shares his proven method to get entrepreneurs to scale without having to spend a lot of money on advertising or getting frustrated reaching out to people that can’t help them. Find out how he does this. Learn how I helped him with his own elevator pitch so that you can learn how to improve yours too. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Josh Tapp, who’s the Founder of The Lucky Titan podcast. Josh has helped over 500 entrepreneurs scale their business through joint venture partnerships. Josh, welcome to the show.

Thank you. It’s going to be fun to be here.

Tell me a little bit about your own story of origin. How did you decide you want to even launch a podcast? You can go back to childhood or wherever you want to start your own journey of being an entrepreneur.

My story goes clear back to childhood. What it comes down to for me is I grew up in a family of a long line of entrepreneurs. My dad had a construction company and he started multiple different companies. We experienced the entrepreneurial cycle but growing up, I knew what I wanted to do. In our house, it wasn’t preached to go to college and get a good job. It was preached to start something, be a creator, and college could be a great vehicle for you to get there. For me, I didn’t even think about college until high school, but I remember my first entrepreneurial venture and how great it was.

My dad owned a construction company. I worked for him and he paid me money, and I hated the manual labor. If you want a great way to scare your kids out of having a job, be a contractor. Make them work construction. What it came down to for me was, “I can make money other ways.” I’m probably 8 or 9 years old and I decided to get a bunch of my stuff out of my room. I pulled it to the end of my parent’s street, which we lived in a rural community. There were maybe 25 cars passing every hour. I put up a sign and it was a big white poster, but I wrote on it in pencil and said, “Stuff for sale.”

Not exactly a niche to an eight years old.

I did not understand marketing one bit, but it was a cool lesson for me. I sat there for about three hours and nobody was stopping like, “What is this kid doing?” I didn’t have money for lemonade so I’m like, “I’ll just sell my crap.” One of my dad’s friends stopped and he bought this little polished rock from me, one of your treasures as an 8 or 9-year-old kid. He paid me $0.25. Most people will be like, “It sucks. $0.25 in three hours?” I was elated. I made money doing nothing and it totally sparked that entrepreneurial fire. From there, it went on to starting landscaping companies and moving on to virtual space digital marketing or what have you.

It led me to where I am. I love speaking with people. I love audio and video interviews, and getting to know high-quality people. For me, I found the people I resonate a lot with are entrepreneurs. That’s where the podcast came from. It was being able to meet people like John Livesay and all these people who are untouchable in the market. Being able to bring him into your world for an hour and to be able to interview him was amazing for me, and being able to “pick your brain” for an hour. That’s the kind of stuff for me that drove me towards podcasting in general and entrepreneurship as well.

[bctt tweet=”Luck is putting yourself into a situation where you have opportunities to win.” username=”John_Livesay”]

What made you name your podcast The Lucky Titan?

That one was an intentional play on words. Before this, we had a marketing agency doing Facebook ads for people and I was constantly struggling to get my own clients for that. The problem was I hadn’t built an audience yet. I didn’t have a following of people. I was just reaching out in my town saying, “I’ll do Facebook ads for you.” We could do good for them because they were a local business but generating leads for myself was difficult. I was in that constant wave of not being able to make money. During this time, I ended up hiring a coach, and that coach walked me through. He said, “You need to brand yourself.” He’s under the belief that you shouldn’t brand your name, but you should create a memorable brand. I know there’s a lot of back and forth on that. Both worked great. He’s like, “Start with creating a brand that’s memorable.”

My partner and I would play around with a lot of different names and imagery. We’re like, “Let’s base the podcast off of the people we want to interview. What’s something that would entice them and make them want to come on and give them something to identify with?” It ended up becoming The Lucky Titan because we were going with The Lucky Entrepreneur, but we’d get in trouble. Entrepreneur Magazine will sue you if you have entrepreneur in your title. Word to the wise, if anybody has entrepreneur in their title, make sure you’re prepped for a lawsuit. They have the trademark on the word entrepreneur, the copyright or whatever you have to have. I’m not versed in that stuff. My brother-in-law is a lawyer and he’s like, “Do not do that. Don’t put entrepreneur in there.” That was a good word to the wise. This is not legal advice. I’m going to disclaim that.

For us, we ended up being like, “We want to interview these industry titans and these amazing people who accomplish something great.” That’s where the title came from. We’re trying to get people that when they come on, we put the cape on them and making them feel like the Superman for the day or the Wonder Woman for the day. Our whole brand has stemmed around helping people feel that way and join the ranks of Titan is our whole game plan with the brand.

What about the concept of luck? That’s fascinating to me because a lot of people say, “Luck is where opportunity and preparation meet.” What is your definition of luck?

That was answered better by one of our first guests, Elaine Keltz. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Elaine, but she’s a successful lady. She’s like, “I don’t believe in luck.” People are waiting for the door to open for them. She’s like, “I found a hallway with a lot of doors and started kicking them down.” That’s my definition of luck. It’s putting yourself into a situation where you have opportunities to win. People call me The Lucky Titan and I’m lucky to be there. I’m happy to be there with people. That’s what it’s stemmed out of.

Let’s talk about who you help and what problems you solve. The old elevator pitch that I love to work with people on. What is your current elevator pitch? How are you telling people the answer to that?

This is a good one. John is going to pick this apart for me and he’s going to be mad at me because I haven’t done this well. John, I’m sorry. Our elevator pitch is that we help people to build joint venture partnerships and scale an audience of 1,000 raving fans. Our entire purpose with that is helping people to understand that they don’t have to go it alone. For me, as an entrepreneur, that’s where I was in my previous company. I was trying to do everything by myself and to grow. When we started this company, we decided we’re not going to run ads. We’re not going to run anything other than joint venture deals. We’re going to find successful people and partner our brand with theirs. We built our whole company around that and built our products around helping other people do that.

The Lucky Titan: Don’t brand your name. Create a memorable brand.

Let’s give an example. I know you work with online course creators. I have a course and we’re going to be doing a masterclass together. How do you help online course creators create joint ventures?

That one is a good example because course creators if you’re atypical, “I need to build a funnel with fifteen different steps. I need to have a bunch of Facebook ads and all this different stuff.” What it comes down to when you want to launch a course or a book or anything like that, it helps to have an email list of people. It also helps to have a group of people that you know you could reach out to and say, “Can I come on your show to launch this new thing? Can I come to your Facebook group to launch this new thing?” They’re coming to us and saying, “I want to launch this course.” My goal isn’t to nickel and dime them and charge them $1,000 to say, “Let’s get you on a podcast for $1,000.” A lot of people do that. For me, that should just be a given. That’s good networking, connecting people with high-level people.

The way we were able to grow quickly was because of a few strategic people who were great givers. They connected us with some amazing people and it grew from there. What we typically do is we put them in a room with anywhere from 5 to 10 other entrepreneurs who are non-competing entrepreneurs who have the same ideal customer. John, we both market to a lot of virtual entrepreneurs. Our products are non-competing, but they’re compatible. I’m not great at sales and John is good at the elevator pitches and helping people to build course and everything, and lock in their sales process. What it’s come down to for our company is we want to find people like John to partner with not just ourselves, but the other people in this room.

We try to facilitate that relationship for people so that they can build these partnerships while they’re in the room with one another and they can leave having some joint venture deal set up. One of our favorite ones is getting these long-term partnerships where it’s saying, “Next time I launch something, would you be alright if I come on your show and give an interview?” The problem I see a lot of times when people are trying to launch something is they’re trying to cash in relationships that they haven’t built yet. For example, you’ll join MatchMaker.fm or something to get on podcasts. “I watched this new product. I need 25 people to have me on their shows.” That’s the wrong way to go about it. The right way to go about it is to have these relationships built where you’ve got 100 people who’ve committed to having you on their show at some point. When you go to do a launch, you do 100 interviews in 30 days and you launch your product. That’s the fastest way to scale and grow joint ventures in my opinion.

You’ve got multiple podcasts airing all at the same timeframes is what you’re saying.

Right. I can give you a good example of this. If you’re familiar with Rachel Hollis, she wrote the book, Girl, Wash Your Face. It was the second bestselling book in the world in 2019. She was only beat out by Michelle Obama. That puts it in perspective. Rachel Hollis is one of those people where she had some influence. She was interviewed and this was something that solidified our theory in my opinion. She didn’t spend a single dime on ads, didn’t have a publisher or anything. All she did was she went and she had 180 of the top female influencers interview her on their podcasts, TV shows or whatever they had. She knocked it out in about 90 days right before the launch. She sold something like twenty million copies of her books, something crazy. That is the value of that.

How long did you have to work with her to get that all queued up?

No, she wasn’t a client of ours. That’s just a good example of that. A client of ours, one of the ones that we’ve seen that was cool. They ended up partnering in the travel sector. The vacation sector and the travel sector is being hurt because nobody can travel. This company was saying, “We’ve got to go back to the books and do something or we’re going to have to close our doors.” What we did is we partnered with them, two people who are travel influencers like the Instagram influencers who have big followings. We partnered with Volkswagen and a subsidiary company of Expedia.

[bctt tweet=”Sell through people, not to people.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Combined, we all had a list of about five million people with our reach. We were trying to grow our list and sell something out. We did a giveaway. We said, “All of us email our lists.” From that, we said, “There’s a free vacation giveaway. Come to this page.” Anybody who opted in, all five of us got their emails and it was legal. We had all the GDPR compliance and everything in place but the coolest thing happened with that. It took us a grand total of maybe twelve hours to get this whole thing put together and we got 50,000 emails off of it, each of us did. If you have any perspective of this like with Facebook ads, that would cost you anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000 to generate that through almost any other means. It cost us all a grand total of $400 each.

How do you find clients, Josh?

For me, honestly, I practice what I preach. My entire goal is to not ever have to spend Facebook ads for my own company. That might slow us down but for us, it hasn’t seemed to slow us down. We’ve been focusing 100% on building out these partnerships. I’m always going on podcasts and generating these relationships and bringing people onto mine or onto summits, building goodwill with people because one day, when I need to launch something and they’ve already committed to having me on their show, I can hop on and launch something. That has been the best way for us to generate clients. Our higher ticket masterminds, which is our core business, we typically get those all through referrals of these people that we know have a good following of people. Our lower ticket products and everything like that come through email joint ventures and our higher ticket products come directly through peer-to-peer referral.

You have some funnel. Can you walk people through what that funnel is and the timeframe? You have a relationship with someone and you invite them on your podcast. How do you figure out who you want to have on your podcast? Is that your potential ideal client?

I believe that podcast is not about the listeners overall. That is one piece of the puzzle. You do need to pay attention to who your ideal listener is, but you need to tailor your podcast or your show or what have you to make it the best possible platform for the people that you want to work with. For The Lucky Titan, our ideal customer is somebody who has made $1 million a year and plateaued. They’ve gotten stuck and they know, “I’ve gotten here by being a rainmaker. I’m good at sales and I’m good at closing deals, but I need systems and I need partners in place in order to scale.” That’s where we come in.

Our podcast, The Lucky Titan, what we do is we interview people about how they got to $1 million and how they were able to scale and grow. It opens up a sales opportunity for us every time. One of the things, and you might have even told me this, the sell-through people, not to people. I love that concept. What we do, and I didn’t realize I was doing it, was we bring them on. Instead of saying, “I want you to join my mastermind. Here’s the cost,” and it became this big sales pitch, I’m like, “We’re building this thing. We’re looking for people in this category. Who’s that one person that you know who would be a perfect fit for this that you could connect me with?”

I have to back up a little bit. I want to share the strategy with your people because this will be beneficial to them. I handpick these people from the start. I listen to podcasts all the time, almost all day while I’m working. If I’m not on a call, I’m listening to a podcast because I like to find the people who are the best in the industry. I’m listening to podcasts like Entrepreneurs On Fire and Marketing Secrets. I find these people who interview super high-level people. Mixergy, they bring on these high-level entrepreneurs and interview them. What we do is I look at their guests and handpick them, and then I outreach to all of them. This is something I do myself. I don’t outsource a lot of this because I want to make sure that they know I’m reaching out to them personally and it’s not some bots or paying somebody in the Philippines to build that relationship.

You’re taking a ticket, something they said on the podcast, and be specific about. I resonated with what you said to John Dumas on Entrepreneurs On Fire.

The Lucky Titan: You need to tailor your podcast to make it the best possible platform for the people whom you want to work with.

“The title of your podcast was about this. I loved exactly what you said in that episode on EOFire. Would you come on mine and share the same thing? I’ll promote you and XYZ.” Just to give you an idea when we outreach that way, we get about a 98% positive response rate and about 80% of them come to join our show.

It’s personalized. If you hear them on the other show and you think they look successful, they probably have $1 million in revenue, they might be a good fit. You compliment them and they say yes to be on your show. It’s a compliment, baby step, “Do you want to be on my show?” You build a relationship when they’re your guests. From there, you follow up and ask them if they might know somebody who might want to be in a mastermind.

There will be steps in there. I want to caveat too. If you do this correctly, if you do an hour-long interview and you only record for twenty minutes, that gives you 40 minutes of your time to get to know them. I spent about 10 to 15 minutes becoming friends with them. I will record for about twenty minutes. That gives us air from 15 to 20 minutes to ask this question. It’s the question I asked every single person. “How can I help you to expand your business today?” They’ll usually say, “I lost the podcast. This, that or the other.” The beautiful thing about that question is it’s almost like an open-ended question.

The human answer that you should be saying to that question is, “How can I help you?” They always ask that question back to you. I’ve not had somebody say that to me. Instead of saying, “How about you buy my stuff? I’m opening up this huge sales opportunity.” I’ll typically say to them, “This is the product we’re launching. This is the audience that we’re promoting to. Who’s one person that you know who fits that deal that maybe you could connect me with?” I’m like, “That’s the one thing you could do for me. I don’t need you to do a bunch of promotions for me or anything like this. I just need you to connect with one person.”

Just to give you an idea, John, typically what our numbers look like from this because I am not your typical salesman. I’ve never been trained in it. What I found is I’m good at the inviting side like, “Maybe it would be a good fit for you. Do you want to come to join us?” We’ll have about 10% to 20% of the people that I interview end up buying our products and the rest of them will typically refer me to at least one other person. That’s where the sales opportunities get opened up. You asked for timeframe. I’m listening to podcasts anyways. It takes me about fifteen minutes of research on the person to get maybe five people on my show. It’s an hour interview with each of them. I’m building content and getting all this great content from it but it also opens up all these sales opportunities. We end up closing typically, for ten people will close about 1 to 2 people who come on our show.

Do you have one mastermind or juggling a lot of masterminds?

We juggle quite a few masterminds because I like to put people with the right people. If you’ve ever been in a mastermind before, I personally pay for five different masterminds at any given time. I like to jump through them to do my research. I want to know what other people are doing and what’s working. The best ones that I’ve seen are not just entrepreneurs. It’s entrepreneurs who have generated a certain amount of revenue. For example, if you’ve generated $1 million in revenue, you failed dozens of times, so you know how to overcome problems. When you put them in a room together like that, everybody can solve anybody’s problem. On top of that, we put them in a room where they have the same ideal customer. I’m not going to put somebody who’s in the travel sector with somebody who’s promoting a course unless it’s in the travel sector because it doesn’t make sense for them to be in the room. They’re going to learn from each other but that partnership can’t happen.

We get what I call the networking effect, where it’s like the BNI groups where you go to the Chamber of Commerce and people are throwing their business cards around. Maybe we could work together someday. That’s not a great way to network. The best way to network is to give them a purpose, hand them partnerships, and give them the actual thing that they should be doing so there’s no question in their mind. They’re like, “We’re both in the room together so we can get on each other’s podcast. That’s why we’re in this room.” That then eliminates this awkward barrier. That’s the process in a large nutshell.

[bctt tweet=”Come in with a purpose, leave with a partnership. #TheLuckyTitan” username=”John_Livesay”]

What’s your secret sauce to your masterclasses that people who may have been in other masterclasses say, “I don’t need that,” or “That didn’t work for me?” What is it that makes yours unique besides it being customized, which is important?

The thing that people come to us for and that they beg for, and they’re like, “This is what I love most about yours,” it’s because I’m not selling me. I’m not that cool. I’m a young guy and I’m inexperienced, but I know a lot of cool people. They know that I’m going to get the right people in the right room and that they’re pre-vetted. I would say our secret sauce is we give them an actual reason to be there and a purpose for their networking instead of a woo-woo happy session. Those are great and they’re good for motivation, but they die quickly. Our secret sauce is helping people come in with a purpose and they leave with a partnership.

Now, I have enough information to give you a new elevator pitch.

Let’s do it.

A lot of entrepreneurs who have struggled to get that first $1 million in revenue feel maybe a little burnt out, but they’re happy they’ve made that much progress. Now, they don’t know how to scale. What we do at Lucky Titan is we create a place to let them find partners that help them scale with a proven system, which doesn’t require a lot of money or work on the entrepreneur’s part. When that happens, they are able to get their purpose out through partnerships in a way that doesn’t tap into their energy or their bank account.

You think you’ve done this a few times, John?

That’s the gist of it in a short, concise, compelling way, which is what everybody wants in a good elevator pitch. I took some of that pain point because we all know, the better you describe the pain of somebody, the more you have their solution. They’re proud of it but they’re exhausted. If you don’t tap into their bank account or their energy resources, and you can get them to scale, that’s where people are going to want to be intrigued to know more. The whole purpose of this is to get people to say, “How does that work? Tell me more,” and then you could go into a case story or of a case study of somebody that you’ve helped.

One of the things that came to my mind as you were talking about that was one of the biggest pain points for our audience is they all love masterminds. They love connecting but I don’t have time. I only have one hour a month allotted to masterminds. For us, that’s why we’re like, “It’s an hour-long mastermind.” There you go. It’s bringing it down to where it simplifies it. Thank you for that. I appreciate that.

The Lucky Titan: Lock in your platform and make sure you commit to it.

It’s like, “Give us an hour a month and we’ll give you 10% growth in six months or something.” It all depends on what the objection is, but you have to have multiple stories ready to go. There are three kinds of personalities. There’s the numbers person so you would have a numbers case story, “We had somebody just like you. They were accountant,” or “They were productivity experts.” Somebody else who’s feeling more like, “I’m awkward. I feel uncomfortable. I don’t like being pushy. I don’t like selling myself.” You’re like, “This is the perfect mastermind for you because you don’t have to sell yourself.” You get your own objections, “How do you know so many people, you’re only 26?” You have a story ready to go like that. “I understand. In fact, some of our best clients felt the same way.”

You’re like, “I’m listening to podcasts. I’m doing all the things you don’t have time to do such as listen to podcasts to find the right people for you. Think of me as a curator. It doesn’t matter how old you are. I have the time and the energy to curate the right people based on who you need, then I’m saving you tons of time. We all know your time is worth a lot of money.” They then go, “I need that.” You can even say, “Do you know how a virtual assistant can make you five times more productive and you get to do the things you love? A mastermind with the right people in it is a virtual assistant on steroids.” They then go, “Right. Got it. Yeah. Okay.” That’s the gist of it. Any last quote or thought you want to leave us with?

The last thing I want to leave everybody with is to think about the platform. What’s the platform that you stand on? I feel like the thing that made the biggest difference in our company is when I finally stopped trying to be everything and just highlight the other things that people want to share about, and building a podcast for me was the easiest way for me to do that. It allowed me to meet some of the most amazing people and networks and continues to do that for us. I’d say lock in your platform and make sure you commit to it.

You’ve gone full circle from being a little eight-year-old boy saying stuff to sell through realizing now the importance of having a niche. Thanks, Josh. It’s great having you.

I appreciate it. Thanks, John.

Important Links

• The Lucky Titan
• Elaine Keltz – Past episode on The Lucky Titan podcast
• MatchMaker.fm
• Girl, Wash Your Face
• Entrepreneurs On Fire
• Marketing Secrets
• Mixergy
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

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