5 - The Stormpiercer

Hello, and welcome to one of my favorite videos in the entire program. Today we're going to talk about the storm piercer and how it will make your business utterly irreplaceable and able to weather any storms with ease. So if you just stopped now and didn't watch this video, you would have a highly profitable and fulfilling blue ocean niche that you can dominate and earn cash and clients

and freedom for many, many years to come. You already have that at your disposal. But I want to give you a completely unfair advantage. And that is why I'm going to introduce you to the concept of the storm piercer. So let's revisit our analogy. We're building you a speedboat. And a speedboat, unlike a sailboat, has its own internal engine. You don't have to wait for the winds

of referrals and clients just walking to you. You actively generate them. You control your own destiny. You generate your own momentum and you just steer the ship. Now, even most speedboats are at the mercy of the waves and the storms. Even if you have an engine, you still have to go over the waves, you still have to weather the storms. There are still problems. Any business will

weather storms. Now, the world's fastest boats don't even feel stormy waves because of the way that they're built, because they have this razor sharp tip at the front of them that can pierce through waves and they have the right structure in place so that storms are nothing to them. You know, sure, they feel them, but they mean nothing. The world's fastest boats don't even feel storms. They

can pierce right through stormy waves. Maybe you're going to build your speedboat to be the equivalent of one of these boats. You're going to build a storm piercer agency. This means that your business will be utterly irreplaceable even when storms rise and, you know, it's a tough year for the market or whenever something negative happens that causes a lot of businesses to cut costs or something like

that. Those are common examples happen all the time. Your agency will be utterly irreplaceable. That is what we're going to achieve with this video and this exercise. So first, before we get into how this works, I want to explain the idea of mental boxes and why they make you vulnerable to storms. So a mental box is a preconceived notion or idea. And I'll give you examples relating

to agencies. And most people explain their agencies or even their businesses, their occupations, their job titles. They tend to try to fit them into pre-existing boxes that people have. In other words, when you introduce yourself to somebody, you tend to say something like, I'm an entrepreneur or I run a digital marketing agency or I'm a designer or I run a web development agency. And these are all

functional descriptions of what you do. The key point that I want you to notice here is that they fit into pre-existing boxes in the heads of the people you're talking to. You're sort of trying to cater to them. You're saying, okay, I respect your worldview and I'm going to try to explain what I do to you within your own worldview without breaking your worldview. This is a

very important concept. I'm going to cover it again from maybe a slightly different angle. When you introduce your business or yourself or any concept and you articulate it in a way that fits into their existing worldview, that doesn't break their preconceived notions, you will be vulnerable to storms and here's why. Most people think they have things figured out or whether or not they think they have things

figured out. They have a level of safety and security with their worldview. Unless you give them a very compelling reason to break their worldview, they're going to fit you right into it wherever they want. Web development agency, I know how I use that. I know how that works. If I ever need a website, I'll call you designer. Cool. I know some designers, et cetera. It commoditizes you.

It puts you into a pre-existing mental box. The truth is, nobody can be put in a box. No individual, no person can realistically be put in a box and compared to any other business or person. Each person, each business is utterly unique and irreplaceable. The problem is that they don't communicate this way. Most people are over eager, more than happy to fit themselves into pre-existing boxes. Part

of this is school is society. We're taught to check our boxes to make sure that we fill the boxes of math, science, English, biology, et cetera. We're taught to fit into existing careers, finance, trade services, electricians, et cetera. Even the way we talk about industries and markets necessarily uses boxes. We fit things into pre-existing boxes. But the problem is that these boxes make you vulnerable to storms.

The first thing that businesses will do when they have to cut costs or when they go through a problem is they'll cut down on things that they see as unnecessary. A new website, we don't need it. Better design, we don't need it. Facebook ads, nah, that's this new fancy cutting edge thing, we don't need it. As long as you fit into their worldview, instead of defining their

worldview, and we'll talk about that because it's a powerful concept, you are vulnerable to storms. As long as you're undifferentiated, as long as you fit into a box, as long as they can compare you to other people and make trade-offs, and as long as you are a commodity, you are vulnerable to the storms of business. And trust me, you do not want to be too vulnerable to

the storms of business because they will destroy you. You need to have insurance, you need to have security. You need your business to be irreplaceable and utterly unique to your customers. So okay, I just created this big problem. For most of your life, most of you listening have probably been fitting into mental boxes. And it's hard, it's hard to break out of it. So let's articulate the

problem in a little bit more detail. When you explain what you do as your business, whether in a conversation, whether on your website, whether on a blog post, or any form of messaging, most businesses, most people do it in a way that places them in a box. For example, I'm a graphic designer. You know what graphic designers are, so instead of articulating all the stuff that I

do that makes me unique, I'm just going to say I'm a graphic designer, or I run a digital marketing agency. Instead of saying, I build these Facebook ad funnels that have complex targeting that bring in only your ideal customers or something complicated, maybe I'll tell them that later, but for now I'm just going to say I run a digital marketing agency. That's most people's mindset. And the

typical response from a customer or prospect is, oh, that's nice. You know, that's cool, awesome. That what that really means with the customers actually thinking is been there, seen it, boring, yet another one, next. You're unexciting. You don't break their world. You fit right into their pre-existing notions, and you allow them to dictate where you fit into their worldview. You are in a pre-existing box. Now you

know that the service you provide is unique and valuable. Every business, every individual has something fundamentally unique and irreplaceable that they bring to the table. But instead of having a way to communicate that from the very first communication, we introduce ourselves in a way that places us into a box. I'm a web developer. I run a digital marketing agency. You place yourselves into this box. And then

after this first impression, you have to backpedal. You have to say, yeah, well, I'm a digital marketing agency. But I specialize in these customers, and I do it this way, and it makes it really unique. And maybe that can work. That does work. In fact, that's what most people do if they get a customer after placing them into a box. They have to then pull themselves out

of the box bit by bit. But guys, first impressions are powerful. If your first impression is that you fit into a box, then you're going to be backpedaling. You're going to have to explain why you're different from the other boxes, why you're not in the box that they already put you in. You're backpedaling. It's a defensive standpoint, and you're fighting their cognitive bias towards keeping you in

the box. But you know that your service is unique and valuable. How do you communicate that from the outset so that you don't have to backpedal and explain? Yes, I'm a graphic designer, but I'm the best in the world at developing custom landing pages. How do you provide? How do you talk about something like that from the very first point of contact? Now here's the actual problem.

Here's why this exists. School and the workplace teaches to fit ourselves into nice little cubbies alongside our friends to check our boxes, to get our credits, and to pick a pre-existing work description. There are all these little boxes that we fit into. You're a physics major. You are a math major. You're a creative writing major. You are a banker. You are an accountant. You are a lawyer.

We're taught to communicate in terms of pre-existing boxes, to cater to other people's worldview. But in business and marketing, this is death. This is one of the biggest reasons why so many freelancers struggle because they let themselves fit into other people's worldviews. They let their clients' worldviews dictate what they do. The client thinks they need this, so they deliver that. The client, it was all about graphic

designers, and you're just another graphic designer, so they're going to use it as use you as they see fit. In business and marketing, fitting to pre-existing boxes, being a commodity is death. So here's the solution. Here's what we want. When you say what you do, you're ideal clients instead of saying, oh, that's nice. That's cool. They say, how does that work? What is that? What? They're curious.

And when you explain, they say, I need to hire you. How do I hire you? What's your... Give me your business card. Can we talk? That is what you want your ideal clients to say. From the first point of contact, you want your prospect to view you as entirely different, as unique and as premium. Think of if you were walking around a party, let's just say a

typical party, a cocktail party or something, and all of a sudden, you see somebody dressed in like a monk's robe Everybody else is dressed in cocktail dresses. This person is dressed in like a monk's robe. All of a sudden, your first impression of them is that they're different. There's something about them that's different. You don't know what it is. You don't know if it's good or bad,

but they're different. They're in a different box. There's the rest of the people in the party, then there's them. They're their own thing. Another example, say you're, you know, we use a party and you're at a place with other people and all of a sudden, a celebrity walks in. And you can tell from the first moment you see them, from the way that they hold themselves, maybe

from the way people whisper around them, that they're different. And in fact, because they're different, in both of these cases, they can behave differently. People actually set different unconscious standards for their behavior. They don't expect them to behave like other people. And they typically have completely different worldviews. So from the first point of contact, we want your prospects to view you as entirely unique, different, and premium.

They can't place you in a box because they've never heard of anyone who does quite what you do. This is what we want to happen. When this happens, you have your own blue ocean. You have a market that you completely own and dominate with clients you couldn't live without you. And a unique label that gives you power and insurance among the stormy seas of the market. As

long as you are irreplaceable and totally unique to a core group of customers, you have insurance on the stormy seas of the market. Now, what is the process? How do we go about building this label, this storm piercer? It's very simple, but it takes some testing, it takes some iteration. It's not necessarily easy, but it's simple. First, do you articulate your functional capabilities as an agency? What

problem do you actually solve and how do you solve it? Are you a copywriter, do you offer photography, web design, funnel building? What is the thing that you do? What is your box? What would your box be? Everybody has some sort of box or box that it could fit into. Articulate those. Then next, you want to identify what about you can't fit into a box? What are

the higher level benefits you provide above and beyond your functional skill set? This is what makes you and your business unique, inimitable, and irreplaceable. What is it that just completely sets you apart that nobody else can do quite like you? Often, this will correspond to your secrets. For example, through our digital marketing agency specializing in electricians, the higher level benefit you provide is that you offer them

not just more jobs, but full house rewire jobs. This is above and beyond your functional skill. This is the thing that no other digital marketing agencies understand, and we'll give you more examples. That's just one example. But what are the higher level benefits that you provide that make you and your business unique, inimitable, and irreplaceable? Finally, we're going to craft a storm piercer statement that encapsulates your

unique higher level value in two to three words and immediately hooks the interest of prospects. We want something that when they hear it, they just go, what is that? How does that work? Tell me more. Then, we're going to write down why it connects with you and why it electrifies your customers. If it's hard to do, it's hard to think about why it connects with you or

why it electrifies your customers, find a new one. When you find the right one, that'll be easy. Let's look at some examples. I'm going to start with ZenOS with my business. ZenOS is a legacy building agency, and I'll explain how that storm piercer was crafted and why it works. The functional capabilities of ZenOS, of my agency, are funnel builder. We bring in agencies or coaches or consultants.

People provide services just like you, and we build them funnels that generate 10k or board per month. That's what we do. Run Facebook ads, et cetera. Set up the landing pages, research their market, all that stuff, right? And you know, there's a lot of people that do that. That's the box we fit into, funnel building. Now, what is our higher level benefit? What do we do that

nobody else on the planet does like us? Well, we focus on legacy first. We make every decision from the standpoint of how it will affect your legacy and our legacy. And we often make short-term trade-offs in conversion in order to win the long game. One example, because this is a ZenOS product, is we turn down a ton of people in launching this course. We accepted somewhere around

10% of the people that we interviewed, plenty of people. We just flat out turned down. Most people, 9 out of 10 people, didn't get into the launch of this course. That costs us a lot of money. That's us. If you look at those numbers, over $100,000, and that's okay, because we wanted to play the long game. We wanted to get the highest quality people possible in this

course with the best testimonials and the best results. And very few people, very few businesses will be willing to make that short-term trade-off. But we care about legacy, likewise, when we build funnels for clients, we often will avoid hard-sell, maximum conversion approaches, and under for more to create more slow-burn relationship-building approaches that emphasize the values of the business, instead of just focusing on conversion, and that provide

value upfront, instead of just converting as many people as possible. We don't just build funnels. We actually build legacies by building funnels. That is something that nobody else can do. That is our higher-level benefit, and here's the storm piercer. I personally have branded myself as the legacy builder. That's my personal branding, and my business, and I want to see the world's first legacy building agency. When I

share this with the hungry, young entrepreneurs that we target, they're willing to pay virtually anything to work with me. It doesn't matter if they have to wait a year and dig into their life savings. If they trust I can deliver a legacy, they'll pay me anything. It's perfectly in line with the secrets of my market, and it's unlike anything that exists in the marketplace. That's one example.

Here's another example. Millennial impact agency. Different hunger, the other business that launched this course in a joint venture, has a media agency wing called different hunger media. Their functional capabilities are typical of a lot of media agencies. They do web design, branding, social media content packages, videography, and those are other basic functional capabilities. They do a bunch of stuff like that, and all that, you can find

a lot of people who can do that. But here's the higher level benefit. Different hunger media helps emerging brands attract, retain, and understand millennial consumers. Everything they do is focused around millennials, and how do you use millennials to slingshot a brand forward? That's all they focus on. How to attract, retain, and understand millennial customers. All of their web design, branding, social media, videography, all of that fits

into helping attract millennial customers. And that is a secret. That's a secret of the emerging brand market. A lot of them are just completely baffled by millennial customers. They know that they're very loyal, and they need them, but they don't know how to attract them. That's a secret that a lot of people don't realize about emerging brands. So the Stormpiercer is Matt Cone, the founder, the good

friend who launched this course with me, is the Millennial Impact Strategist, founder of the world's first, and currently only Millennial Impact Agency. He helps businesses make an impact on millennials. This Stormpiercer immediately builds curiosity and intrigue, and hooks prospects into further sales conversation. And it's utterly unique. Nobody's ever heard of anything like it. You can't put it in a box. What is a Millennial Impact Agency? What

is a Millennial Impact Strategy Strategist? What is that? How does that work? Tell me more about that. That is what prospects say. No. Another example, the rapid growth guy. This is a mentor of mine, Matthew Pollard. His functional capabilities are business coaching, sales systemization, and unified message selection. So a unified message is a Stormpiercer. I learned this from him. And here's the higher level benefit. Rapid growth.

He helps businesses grow rapidly. He helps them just put the foundation in place so they can explode. And so Stormpiercer, he is the rapid growth guy. He just sells himself, not as much of a business as a personal brand, the business behind it, and he helps service professionals to achieve rapid growth in their businesses through unified message creation, value articulation, and sales systemization. He provides them with

rapid growth. And when he introduces himself as the rapid growth guy, all of a sudden he's not a business coach. He's not some sort of expert. He's this thing called a rapid growth guy. And if you care at all about rapid growth, you're going to ask what that means and how that works. These are all examples of highly effective Stormpiercers. Now I want to talk about something

that's important to understand when crafting your Stormpiercer. So you can create Stormpiercers that are different levels of broad versus specific. So the more broad your Stormpiercer, the more deliberately tight your niche needs to be. If your Stormpiercer is very, for example, emotional, or if it's something that everybody wants, then you need to also clarify who you serve. Otherwise you're too broad and you're trying to target everybody

and that is all the problems you talked about before. Now if your Stormpiercer is specific, it will naturally define your niche. Because we talked about secrets to find a niche, secrets to find who you work with. If your Stormpiercer is a very specific secret, for example, if you were a full house or a wire job marketing to be an example, it will naturally define your niche. There

aren't that many people who want that. So you don't need to clarify who you serve. Your Stormpiercer itself will clarify it. So when you're playing around with crafting your Stormpiercer, as I'll walk you through the process in the next couple slides, try various levels of broadness versus specificity. So rapid growth is super broad. Almost everybody in business, with some exceptions, wants rapid growth. So what a mentor

does is he only focuses on service professionals. People like freelancers or coaches or things like that. That's all he focuses on. So he has this really broad, emotionally compelling thing that everybody kind of wants, but he delivers it to a very specific segment of people. Legacy building as well. It's a little bit less broad, but there's a lot of people that care about legacy, that want legacy.

A hell of a lot of people. But I don't work with everybody. I only work with agencies, coaches, and consultants. That's it. So I have this legacy building that's emotionally compelling, powerful Stormpiercer, but I only deliver it to a tight niche, a tight group of people, agencies, coaches, and consultants. Now millennial impact strategy is an example of a specific Stormpiercer. Just like full house rewire job, marketing

would be an example of a specific Stormpiercer. There aren't that many types of businesses that will immediately be hooked by millennial impact strategy. They're typically emerging brands or people who are really struggling to understand and recruit millennials. Now, you can get a little bit more specific, full house rewire job marketing as an example would be even more specific, but millennial impact strategy is pretty specific. And so

it does tightly define a niche, a group of people that they work with. Okay. So this is broad versus specific Stormpiercers. Now, I'm going to give you some more examples. These are examples of Stormpiercers that I've seen. The amplification strategist. This is somebody who comes into a business that has strong messaging, strong product offering, et cetera, but they need their message to be amplified, they need to

broaden their reach. So that's what he does, an amplification strategist, an authority architect. This is somebody who turns somebody into an authority, an expert by giving them all the fundamental pieces. It's quite broad. So authority architect needs a tightly defined niche behind it, but it's a good unified message. Now, if you wanted to more tightly define the niche, you could say the medium authority architect or the

core authority architect or the Instagram authority architect or any sort of difference. Those are platforms that are a whole bunch of different ways you could spin it to make it tighter. The book writing authority architect, there's a whole lot of different things you could attach on, or you could not attach anything and just have an implicit tight niche like the rapid growth guy or legacy building. The

re-engager, this is somebody who, this guy was a copywriter, who went into, he goes into businesses that have a sales funnel, but they want to reactivate customers. Reactivating customers is one of the easiest ways to develop, to quickly sell things. It's always easiest to sell to pre-existing customers. So he comes into businesses that, I believe they were strictly e-commerce businesses. Yeah, they're strictly e-commerce businesses and he

writes a copy for them. He builds an email sequence that re-engages them and creates more sales from an existing customer base. That's another example, another one, the narrative strategist. This was a videographer actually. And videographers typically, they typically have their work dictated by the client. They're typically commodities. If a client needs videography, they'll come to them. It's hard to come to a client and say, you need

videography. Maybe you can do it sometimes, but most videographers are sort of at the beck and call of people who went videos. This was a way of flipping it. This guy branded himself as the narrative strategist. He helped businesses craft and articulate narratives through video. He would introduce himself as the narrative strategist. People would say, what is that? He would explain that he helps businesses craft and

articulate narratives that build their customer base and sell more of their stuff using videos. And all of a sudden, they wanted that. They wanted videos. He broke their world. He created a new paradigm and all of a sudden, they wanted videos, something they didn't do before. Another example, entrepreneurs' dinner, my good friend Robert Coler founded a business called Entrepreneurs' Dinner to help entrepreneurs connect over Thanksgiving-like meal.

Really wonderful business. And entrepreneurs' dinner, the very name, is a wonderful storm future. Whenever he introduces what he does, he says, I run a business called Entrepreneurs' Dinner. And without fail, if that person is an entrepreneur, even in the close to the entrepreneur sort of realm, they'll say, what is that? And they'll immediately be interested, and he'll send them an invite. And they'll pay. It's a great

storm future. Betterly unique. Another example, the millennial mentor. This is a guy who focuses his message in branding on millennials. Forget his name. I just threw him in here because I know he was one of the first examples that I found of highly effective unified messaging or storm piercers when I was first digging into the topic, the millennial mentor. Now two more, the CEO lifeguard. This was

a coach who went into, who worked with CEOs, CEOs who tended to be high profile long hours, be very driven, but they would neglect key areas of their life. And so they were vulnerable to things like health problems or just stress and things like that. And this coach branded herself as the CEO lifeguard, and she would help them put in place the fundamental pillars so that they

would never burn out or run a distress and they had a health and balance lifestyle, et cetera. She was the CEO lifeguard. Finally the China success coach. This is an example of client of my mentor, Matthew Pollard, and he uses this as an example because it's an awesome example. This was a Mandarin coach. She helped people learn Mandarin, and she was really good. She could help people

all across the spectrum get really good at Mandarin, but she couldn't charge high prices. She was struggling to charge high prices because people could always find a cheaper Mandarin coach. They could always find somebody who could teach a cheaper, but she knew that she had something that made her unique. So my mentor helped her uncover her uniqueness factor, which was she could actually help people go into

business. Not only could she help you learn Mandarin, she could help you learn Mandarin and be able to communicate in the business world and immediately jump right in and continue doing your work or fulfilling your job in Mandarin. So she started targeting high level executives who were moving to China and their families and branded herself as the China success coach. She helped people become successful in China

or translate their success to China. And all of a sudden she could charge premium prices. She not only worked with one client at a time, but their entire families. And she blew up. This is an amazing example of a stormpiercer. So these are examples. There are a lot more. If you, as soon as you're aware of the concept of a stormpiercer, you start realizing that most of

the most successful businesses have them in some form, especially the most prominent personal brands, they have it in some form. So these are more examples. Now words, and we have a whole worksheet on this, but example words to attach, you could be a specialist, a builder, a guide, a designer, a hacker, a coach, consultant, catalyst, strategist, or architect, you could throw any one or two words in

front of this. That's a good template. You could also completely break this. As long as a stormpiercer is something utterly unique that they've never heard before and makes your ideal customers want to learn more about, then you're good. You've got a stormpiercer. So when done right, your stormpiercer will make your business utterly irreplaceable to your customers and unlike anything they've ever seen. When you do this right,

your stormpiercer will align with their secrets, with their most important problem and the most important outcome, the thing that they land bed at night thinking about. And when this happens, they have to create a new box for you and you're the only thing in it. Because when this box aligns with their secrets, when you're the one who can offer them full house rewire jobs and the only

person who understands that, you define a new box around the thing most important to them. You break their worldview, you break their paradigm, you define a new one, and they're stepping into your world and you can now dictate what they need. You are now the authority. When your stormpiercer aligns with the secrets of your customers, the things they most deeply want and desire. You become their authority.

You define a new box around the thing that is most important to them. You break their world. And this is something we'll talk about in the sales module as well. It's a foundational concept until you break the world of your customer. They're going to have more control over you. They're going to be able to dictate pricing and packaging and stuff like that and you're going to be

a commodity as soon as you break their world and invite them into your world into a bigger world, a better world, a more exciting world around their secrets. And you break their world by offering them secrets. We'll get into all this in the sales module, but this is the first hint of it. When you break their world, you become their authority, leading them towards their secrets. And

they give you their trust and they respect you. And you can lead them towards the thing that they most deeply desire. And it's an incredibly powerful place to be. This is how you become a storm piercer. This is how you make your business utterly replaceable and able to weather any storms. You have to be able to consistently and reliably break the worlds of your prospects and invite

them into your own worlds. Now, something that I want to clarify because a lot of people have resistance to this. A lot of people hear that you have to niche and just focus on solving one problem for one group of customers and doing one thing. And they say, that sounds awful. They have this huge resistance. I want to do everything, aren't I excluding customers, aren't I missing

out on people? And we already talked about this a little bit, but I just want to clarify because it's something that is natural, something I struggle with a lot to. Am I missing out on customers? And I just want to reassure you that niching turns pain and frustration into ease, clarity and momentum. If you've ever felt pain at not having a full pipeline, not being able to

charge the prices that you deserve, not having people understand the value of what you do, not being a well known quantity in the online business world, not being able to grow as rapidly as you want, not being able to push down the accelerator and increase your business, not having clarity about who you serve for what you do. If you ever have any of these pains or frustration,

niching, having one group of customers, one problem that you provide, one secret that you solve, one storm piercer, one way of articulating what your business does and its uniqueness, this turns all those into ease, clarity and momentum, where you have massive respect in your industry, you're known, you're known at being the best in the world, and one thing, you're the guy for whatever it is or the

girl, the woman for whatever it is that you specialize in, and you have a huge pipeline, you can actually have a waiting list, you can, and people banging on the door to work with you and you can start turning them down, it's the complete other side of the coin, you always see people on the other side of the coin and wonder, how do they have a waiting

list, how do they charge 100k a year to work with them, how do they do this, how do they have so much respect, niching, identifying secrets and positioning your business around a core group of customers, that's the answer in so many cases, I promise you any persistence you feel is nothing compared to the pain of the alternative, there aren't that many cheat codes in business, this course

I'm trying to give you everyone in the book, but you ultimately have to be really good at something, you've got to put in your work, you've got to be experienced, you've got to go through some hard lessons that I'm sure everybody watching this has been through, you know what I'm talking about, there aren't that many cheat codes, niching is one of the cheat codes, any resistance you

feel is nothing compared to the pain of the alternative, okay, when you've completed this exercise, post your storm piercer in the Facebook group for feedback along with a description of why it resonates deeply with you and why it electrifies your customers and breaks their world, that's the end of one of my favorite videos in this course, this concept, this exercise will change your life and your business

forever, and I'm incredibly excited for you to dive in and craft your storm piercer.