Jena Apgar with 2X My Biz

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High velocity radio.

Stone Payton: [00:00:15] Welcome to the high velocity radio show where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with 2X My Biz, Jena Apgar. How are you?

Jena Apgar: [00:00:33] Hi, I am doing wonderful. It’s always a good day when you closed three clients in one morning.

Stone Payton: [00:00:39] That does sound like a marvelous day. I am so delighted to have you on the program. I know we got a chance to visit by phone a few weeks ago and I knew then this was going to be a marvelous conversation. I got a million questions. We won’t get to them all, but I think a great place to start here is maybe to get a little context, if you would, share with me and our listeners a little bit about niche and purpose, what you and your team are really out there trying to do for folks.

Jena Apgar: [00:01:08] Ooh, mission and purpose. So I probably should do one of those fancy schmancy mission statements, vision statements, but my heart is always going to lie in specifically a smaller business owner and helping them grow a business that’s an asset to them, to their family that pays it affords them a healthy, safe lifestyle. I don’t mean anything extravagant. I’ve had clients that they took the what we helped them build and bought a new polo pony for 100 K, or they go buy a $2 million yacht. And I’m like, That’s no fun. I want to hear about the kid who went to college or you moved into the house in the safe neighborhood. And then where I really get passionate is specifically doing that for moms, because when you do it for a mom, it’s so exponential. So many moms get stuck in some very violent, dangerous spots when they are not making income and they can’t leave the house because they have no money. And then you double down on that. When you teach a mom how to build a business, she grows that. So she’ll teach it to her kids. She teaches it to other moms, to her community, and really spreads that information around. So that is definitely my my heart spot, if you will. And my mission is to help families grow, leveraging businesses.

Stone Payton: [00:02:34] So what is your back story? How in the world did you get into this line of work?

Jena Apgar: [00:02:40] Man, I have one of the back stories. I wanted to be an attorney from fourth to 10th grade. I did mock trials, teen courts, until I learned how much school they have to go through. And I was like, I went to a highly segregated school and city. I went to what was considered the black high school, and we had a great principal who is really a grant writer, and he got tons of technology at our school and we had majors. So I majored in communication, so marketing and I didn’t go to school for it because I couldn’t handle how big the classrooms were. I’m a small class type of person, and all I knew back then was Mad Men style, like cutthroat. And I was just way too nice of a human back then. Did the military because I didn’t know what else to do. My dad did that, My uncle did that, My grandfather’s very military family did. Military intel analysts of all things blood, guts, fun 180 out of that into interior design left after the recession and considered being an investment banker because that wasn’t keeping my brain up to where I wanted to be made babies. That’s not a very baby friendly profession and decided to. I just had all these little side businesses and at some point I realized I built better websites than the website builders. And I did it faster and I did it more conveniently. And I had a process to it and slowly started picking up some clients in the social media space and the website building space learned about funnels, started building those, went to seek out a master’s degree, Realize school doesn’t teach you anything about marketing. It tells you to create a story, knows the metrics, all right, but it doesn’t actually tell you how to do the nitty gritty. Got certified in everything with a company called Digital Marketer, which I love those guys and love it, man. I can do it upside down on a napkin drunk with one hand and a pen. So fun journey that found my little passion, my little niche.

Stone Payton: [00:04:52] Incredibly divergent arenas, military entrepreneurship. And I got to believe. But I’ll ask, are there some some parallels? Are there some things that you feel like you you learned in your military experience that help you serve your clients even to this day?

Jena Apgar: [00:05:09] Yeah. So Intel is all about a consuming massive amounts of information and turning it around and making it usable, right? So marketing, that’s everything, right? But also from a strategic standpoint, the ability to look at the greater picture and decide who are the players, who are the customers and what is the best way to go about reaching them. And for all the little tips and tricks and tools and stuff online and everyone’s telling you what to do, that doesn’t always mean it’s the best thing for you. You really have to look at it from a strategic mindset and take a look at you as a human, you as the business owner, you and the tools and the the assets you have right. And what you’re willing to do for the business and build a system around that. I don’t there’s literally nothing more military about that. Part of Intel, too, was learning how to interrogate essentially. So waterboarding more like we called it debriefing. Just to be clear, that was CIA. I would debrief people. And so part of that you learn how to really get into the other person’s head calmly, Right? This is not like police interrogation. This is like you’re interrogating your own pilots type thing, but you learn to get the information that’s good. And so when I go to do kind of like mini market research for my clients and I call their customers, I’m amazed at the information I pull out that my customers never tell me. Like if you’re if the people listening could walk away with knowing one thing right more than any other thing that anyone else says is go ask your customers what they would tell their best friend why they should hire you.

Jena Apgar: [00:06:52] Because you’re going to come up with all the tech stuff. You’re going to be like, Hey, we should do a podcast. It’s awesome and it increases your leads and blah, blah, blah. It’s so amazing where you ask your customers and you get some very interesting things. Like the one that I noticed the most was one of my first large clients with a daycare center in town that was very different. It’s more focused on music and the arts and developing children in a non test type fashion, right? And they were so focused on curriculum and they’re like, all the parents care about curriculum. And yeah, the parents ask about curriculum. But when I talk to the parent, she’s like, Oh my gosh, and my daughter owns the stage. And I was like, What stage? She’s like, Yeah, they have a stage in the next building. I’m like, What are you talking about? My client didn’t even mention they owned a stage, much less another building. And then I find out they do like three productions each year. On stage and she’s like, Yeah, the first one, my daughter was terrified and she hid. In the second one she was okay, and the third one she like, owned the stage. And I’m looking at like this from a female perspective going, How many women can hold their own on a stage?

Stone Payton: [00:07:58] Yeah.

Jena Apgar: [00:07:59] But when a daughter can own a stage, she’s going to raise her hand in class and ask the questions. She’s going to get her questions answered. For girls, that’s a huge thing because they’re afraid to answer or ask questions because everyone will stay with them. So when you switch the marketing over that direction, suddenly the Google ad spend goes from $3,500 with zero return to 2400 on our best month. And we’re getting clients in the door at $120 apiece.

Stone Payton: [00:08:29] Wow. When you’re working with clients, especially in the early stages, I’ve got to believe you’ve been at this long enough now. Do you see some consistent patterns? And maybe you don’t say it out loud, but do you think to yourself, Yeah, I’ve seen this before.

Jena Apgar: [00:08:43] Oh, yeah. I actually. I just had this this morning. Every person and the number can be different, but every person over 30 is broken. Every single one of them. And how you fix that and how you move forward depends on your success level. So I see so many people who are brilliant. Oh, my gosh, they’re brilliant. They want to serve. They they’re good to their clients. They have great services. They have great products. But because of their emotions, because they’re there’s something broken that has not been fixed or because something that is completely emotional has nothing to do with business. That is what’s holding them back in business. I can build them a funnel. I can build it end to end. We we have a framework of eight stages, end to end. And the very first one is awareness. If they don’t know you exist, they think nothing else can work, right? I can build you the funnel. It handles the other seven stages, right? We can turn on a Facebook ad, we can do all these different things, but you will see the emotional blocks come in when it actually comes to driving that original traffic because things happen because maybe somebody calls you out, maybe they call you a name. Maybe they say that your emails were too aggressive or stop spamming me or you look like a poser. You’re not really that good. And why are you acting like a guru? And just because you’re doing things that business owners do, other people attack them and they can’t handle that. Their emotions, they they don’t want to be in the they don’t even want to test the concept of being called out. So by far, it has nothing to do with what I’m doing. It really comes back down to their individual emotions and how they handle those things.

Stone Payton: [00:10:29] So now that you have been at this for a while, what are you finding the most rewarding? What are you personally enjoying the most about the work?

Jena Apgar: [00:10:40] I So I’m a numbers girl. So I on that Myers-Briggs scale, I’m the INTJ. I am the not only is that the least across all of the different personalities, but for women it’s only 0.5 of a percent of all women. I like my numbers. I like my math. And in business, that’s where you see people win is and this is why men I feel like are better at business in so many regards as they know their numbers. And I utilize a client dashboard for the big picture and I build on a platform that has a beautiful dashboard with all their numbers. I mean, you send an email out, it’s an all in one system, and when you send that broadcast email, it tells you all the basics like MailChimp and Constant contact. It tells you you send it to 2000 people, 1000 people open 500 clicks, but mine tells you you made $300.

Stone Payton: [00:11:32] Nice.

Jena Apgar: [00:11:33] And when you can see these two dashboards, you can start to see the metrics move up those pretty little line graphs and you can see especially that email one man and you can tell exactly, I made money today and you can see their face light up and they didn’t believe they could do it. So going back to that emotional state and maybe the only made $5 in the beginning, maybe they only made $100 the first launch and then all of a sudden it’s 5000 and it’s 10,000. And they can see that in a dashboard. Right. It’s not just this intangible money going through a stripe account into their bank account, paying their mortgage. No, it’s this thing you can see when you get up in the morning and it’s that little dopamine hit and they get all excited and this amazing thing happens. It’s like a gold star for Grown-Ups. No one gives us, like, gold stars anymore, right? There’s no gold star for making your bed. There’s no gold star for getting up in the morning and not biting someone’s head off. There’s no reward for doing the right thing as it any time There’s no reward for being a business owner, ever. You can make $1,000,000. There’s no reward. The reward is in that dashboard. It’s in that money. When you see their face light up and they get excited and they start doing it on their own without you, that’s exciting.

Stone Payton: [00:12:47] So have you had the benefit of one or more mentors as you were kind of making that pivot from the military environment to the business environment? And as you continue to progress some folks to kind of help you navigate that terrain.

Jena Apgar: [00:13:04] Yeah. So normally when people say, do you have mentors, I remember a long time I was like, No, I don’t have anybody I look up to. I feel like every individual along my pathway has given me these little tidbits, right? When I went to digital marketer and I kind of got into their system and we became partners. Definitely. Ryan Dice He doesn’t necessarily teach directly, but I remember I really, really dug down into my business. My ex husband was we were arguing, I just found some inappropriate text messages. I’m pregnant with my third baby and I remember him looking at me and he’s like, I’m going to basically bankrupt you if you leave me. And I’m just devastated. But I’m like, spiteful. I’m still a military person. And I looked at him. I was like, I don’t care if I’m poor. Like, I don’t need the big house. I don’t need all the fancy anything. And he looked at me and smiled and he was like, I know, but you do mind if your kids are. Cool. The man just stabbed in the gut, just just emotionally gutted me. And I remember diving down into all of digital marketers material. And so I’ve got this little guy, Ryan Dice on my screen constantly, and I’m like, upstairs sleeping in my daughter’s bedroom and folding like a mountain of clothes, listening to all this training to get good at what I’m doing.

Jena Apgar: [00:14:24] And here’s this little guy, Ryan, just bouncing around like, Yeah, you just do this and you just send emails and you just. Here’s a customer value journey. And I’m like, Oh, damn. So And Ryan’s sweetheart, now I know him and like, other people will get all giddy around him like he’s like a celebrity. And I’m like, It’s just little Ryan but amazing to work with. I don’t know Richard Lindner as well, but he’s so intelligent. Level is trading’s Roland Frazier. Holy man. If you ever watch any training, I can watch most training on two x speed because it’s just the information. I already know so much of it and it’s just slow to me. Roland, I’ve got to stop every 5 seconds. I’ve got to look up a word in the dictionary. But that man buys and sells businesses. I think he called himself a reformed attorney. Those three guys are amazing. Billie Jean Shaw has been very inspiring to me. Told me to stop my little literally got down on his hands or on his knees in front of me and he’s like six foot a million inches tall on his knees, almost as tall as I am, and begging me not to be a perfectionist. So yeah, I’ve had a lot and even more than that, like I can think of something from everybody that I’ve interacted with.

Stone Payton: [00:15:40] Now you’re in the marketing business, you’re helping people sell and market what they do. How does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a person like you, a practice like yours? How do you get the new clients?

Jena Apgar: [00:15:55] So the cobbler’s kids has no shoes quite often. I actually coach agency owners too. Now I’ve gotten to that point in the career and we’re about to actually launch a 90 day campaign just for agency owners with some very large global partners. It’s going to be amazing. But the hard part about marketing a marketer is we’re marketers and so we already know all the tricks. We have the lead magnets, we have the entry point offers and the loss leaders and the beautiful glossy PDF. So in the big scheme of things, how do you stand out? Is the real trick. Like the ad cost to market myself is significantly higher than the ad cost for me to market an attorney or a dentist or anything else. So what I’ve really learned is the art of cold outreach, which I’m so not a salesperson, but I’ve had to learn to be. I we do cold outreach on LinkedIn. We do I have an actual SaaS product that I own to that does cold outreach, leveraging Facebook business pages for my clients. And we offer tons of information. So I try not I cannot do spam as a cold outreach.

Jena Apgar: [00:17:15] I cannot as a human, I just I hate being spammed, but we offer value in advance. That was one thing I definitely learned from Ryan and the team that digital marketers value in advance. So we partnered. We have a beautiful dashboard for our clients and we can scan their business. And so in in doing that, we just provide education. Be like, if you’re ready to see where your business is at and what your numbers are in the marketing world, go scan your business. And so we can provide education. I can teach them about a customer value journey and teach them about building an avatar and be like, Look, go scanned your business. That’s my loss leader. That’s my my lead magnet to get your information and see how it’s doing. And then that every time you add a layer to your business, whether it’s with me or with someone else, you can see if it made any lifts or improvements. So you know your numbers without having to try too hard. It’s hard.

Stone Payton: [00:18:11] As our listeners no doubt discovered early on in this conversation. You are no stranger to the microphone. You host a popular video cast as well. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Jena Apgar: [00:18:25] Yeah, I haven’t I haven’t been like really on board recently, but we have a to my biz over on YouTube and provide a ton of value there. And sometimes I got to dig for my own videos because I don’t SEO optimize them the way that I should, but we were building live funnels for a while. I think I’m going to go back to that this week as we just bought a bunch of new clients in the funnel space, but showing people that building funnels is not hard. And it doesn’t have to be complicated that I can build a funnel in one hour. And I had a great co host, Scott Schilling, who my goodness, that man has been on stage with every large name in the business that you can think of from Sir Richard Branson to less brown. Every every major speaker is Zig Ziglar. I was just trying to create some. I was he was my client for a bit as well. We were doing custom quotes and I was showing them how to do these, quote, social media things for like Monday mornings and do them really fast. And I’m like, he’s like, Yeah, I’ve spoke on stage with Zig Ziglar. And so we made a bunch of quotes with Zig Ziglar quotes on them.

Jena Apgar: [00:19:33] But it’s a picture of Scott and Zig together and there’s like 20 different pictures of different instances. I’m like, sometimes you forget who you’re working with, and he’s so smart. Like, I’m the the nerd in the background of these videos. Building funnels. While Scott is just dropping sales knowledge bombs and keeping the conversation going. And I mean, it was amazing. I really didn’t just start them again. And, you know, I mean, YouTube’s great and be wrong, but YouTube is a little old school now. It’s a little old school like it’s still relevant. I’d be wrong. It is the second largest search engine on the planet for Americans and but reels are the new thing. So I’m at this point taking my old YouTube content, chopping it up and putting it over on Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and even YouTube has gone to shorts, which are technically real. So it’s amazing the places that you can put content now. But yeah, I drop all sorts of information all over the place and the only thing that amazes me is that people don’t want the gems, they want the easy stuff.

Stone Payton: [00:20:45] Yeah. So in just a moment, I’m going to ask you, if you will, to maybe leave us with a couple of Pro Tips or maybe your favorite pro tip on any of these topics. And of course, make sure that we get your contact information. But I had another question. I was curious because I assume that this was I’m operating under the impression that this was a very conscious decision. Why did you choose to go with the framing of of to X as opposed to, I don’t know, you know, like a Grant Cardone style X or something like that?

Jena Apgar: [00:21:14] Oh, yeah. So I mean, I’ve met Grant Owen and he’s a special person. And don’t get me wrong, I like the concept really. His concept of ten X is a mindset shift, right? So stop thinking about building little and think big, right? But the problem with marketing is even doubling a company is really hard. We had one company that was $135 Million in Revenue Company, which seems like a whole lot, but they’re in construction, right? And they’re building barracks and hospitals like tilt up walls really fast. They literally cannot double their revenue. It’s impossible. They do not have the capabilities of handling enough projects to double. Right. So but here’s the thing. There’s four different places that we focus on doubling. You can double in traffic. So how many eyeballs and targets are coming to your stuff? You can double in that of leads you’re getting. You can double in the amount of sales you’re actually making, and then you can double in monthly recurring revenue and returning customers, which is where the real money is. When you if you were able if you were able to double across the board, that becomes exponential. It’s not two times two, it’s two times two times two times two. So now you’re up to 16. So but the reality is you’re never going to be able to double all four categories. You’ll get maybe you can double your traffic. Heck, maybe you can triple your traffic, maybe you can double your leads. But then you find out maybe your offer is not converting as well and you only get a 1.1 lift. Right? So I’m a bigger fan of doubling in the individual metrics so we can measure each one. And as we lift one, we can lift the next one, because when you double the traffic, if you’re already converting at 50% to your leads, well now you’ve just doubled the number of leads you have. So it all works out.

Stone Payton: [00:23:06] Yeah. That’s a that’s a good and and relevant math lesson right there. I’m glad I asked.

Jena Apgar: [00:23:13] It’s whenever you do the math, you can make people smile or cry. So when you show them that one, it’s much better on a visual on on a board so they can see the math on it. Right. And then the other one that makes them cry is they tell me what their goal is and I break it down to how much, how many leads and how many meetings and how much traffic do we need to get to accomplish their end goal. And then that’s when you see tears show up. You’re like, Oh, you.

Stone Payton: [00:23:40] Can’t drive that.

Jena Apgar: [00:23:41] Much traffic. Then like you better start converting higher than.

Stone Payton: [00:23:45] And do you have a go to number one favorite kind of pro tip that you almost would share with virtually any business owner? Do this think about this, read this. You know, don’t do this.

Jena Apgar: [00:23:58] Don’t do this. I would say the absolute biggest one is done these perfect. Just start even if your video quality is poor or it’s shaky or your audio is bad, even if your makeup’s not good. I had one of them. I’ve lost a client this week that I thought I had because she said she wasn’t ready to take on all the responsibility because it required being in the video. And she was £40 overweight.

Stone Payton: [00:24:27] Yeah.

Jena Apgar: [00:24:27] So just get started. I’ve got a sticker on my computer right now. I hand them out to all my clients. I hand out a book and I don’t know what kind of program you are, but it says, Just get done. Nike says, Just do it. I would drop an F-bomb in between us.

Stone Payton: [00:24:49] I love it. All right. Let’s make sure that our listeners can reach out and have a conversation with you or someone on your team. I want to make sure it’s easy for them to tap into your work.

Jena Apgar: [00:24:59] Really simple. Just go to two x, my biz to x and Y by z and right up at the top. Ignore the phone, Don’t call me, Don’t hit my social media. On the top side you’ll see it says, Know your numbers. Put your business in there. If it doesn’t pop up, it’ll give you the resource to says can’t find your business. Click here and put all your information in, get your info in there and you’re like, Oh, she just wants my info. No, I promise I will give you a full dashboard. I usually I used to before I had the platform to work with, we charged our clients $50 a month for this platform and you plug in, you connect your Facebook account, connect your Google Analytics account, get your Twitter in there, your Instagram, and just start connecting your account. And this dashboard is a wealth of information and you never have to pay me for it.

Stone Payton: [00:25:52] Fantastic. And that website again.

Jena Apgar: [00:25:55] To x my biz the is dot com.

Stone Payton: [00:25:59] Well Gina, it has been an absolute delight having you on the program this afternoon. Thank you so much for investing the time and the and the energy to share your insight and perspective. You have a great deal of enthusiasm and, you know, just neck deep in knowledge. I have thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and I know that our listeners have as well.

Jena Apgar: [00:26:21] Well, thank you so much for having me. Happening me. And if your your listeners have any questions, feel free to find me. Dm me on Facebook, LinkedIn and always happy to help.

Stone Payton: [00:26:34] Well, it’s my pleasure. All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, jenna apgar with two x my babies and everyone here at the business radio x family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.