Today’s Infusioncast features Joshua Millage’s interview with Jim Cavale, president of Iron Tribe Fitness and winner of the 2012 Infusionsoft Small Business Icon award. Jim offers insights on lead generation, follow-up, and living with intent.

Jim Cavale and his partner, Forrest Walden, started using Infusionsoft in their business in 2011, when they had two gyms. They chose Infusionsoft’s sales and marketing software after hearing a business developer talk about how Infusionsoft allows business owners to automate their business, so they can be free to do more of the things that matter most to them. A year later Jim won the 2012 Infusionsoft Small Business Icon award.

With the help of Infusionsoft, Jim put together a marketing plan for building their franchise and a model for showing prospective franchisees that his system worked. He and his partner were able to focus on marketing while their managers ran the gyms and generated regular reports about gym prospects, active members, and other key statistics. Jim used those reports to set a schedule for following up with targeted categories of clients. Infusionsoft’s tags, sub tags, and categories made it possible to create customized direct marketing campaigns for specific clients. Iron Tribe currently has franchises open in more than 40 U.S. markets and is in heavy brand expansion throughout America.

Jim relies on referrals as well as creative direct mail and print ad campaigns for most of his lead generation. He feels that direct mailings and referrals from existing clients are much more effective than online marketing for attracting new prospects as well as motivating existing ones. Infusionsoft allows him to offer his franchisees a suite of tools for their own marketing campaigns, to create and use his own business-specific software system, and to generate customized interfaces for his targeted clients.

A majority of business owners seem to have a self-limiting mindset that keeps them from trying fresh new approaches to their marketing strategy. It is important to be open to trying different approaches, such as creative direct marketing. Jim’s campaigns employ engaging mailings to get clients’ attention and effective email follow-ups featuring text and video content to establish expert status and social proof for his brand. All of this is targeted to specific client categories whose responses trigger more specified information.

In a presentation Jim did for TEDxBirmingham he discussed his Intent Formula. His philosophy is that we must each choose to generate and embrace intent in our lives in order to reach our goals. Intent is driven and defined by our vision, mission, and values, how many people you want to reach, and how much time you expect to take in achieving your goals. Your approach to business is the same as your approach to life and sharing that with others is key to your growth.

You can get more information about Infusionsoft, plus useful WordPress plugins and support, at Infusionsoft.com. Thank you for joining us.

You can connect with Jim Cavale on Instagram and Twitter as @JimCavale or via email at Jim@irontribefitness.com with feedback, questions, or comments. He also has a webinar about Iron Tribe Fitness.

Show Links:

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• Iron Tribe Fitness
  
• Iron Tribe Fitness Webinar
  
• TEDxBirmingham Talk
  
• Infusionsoft
  

Joshua: Hello, Everyone. Welcome back to Infusioncast. Last week I had the incredible opportunity to go to InfusionCon, and while I was there I interviewed a person that I really admire, Jim Cavale, the president of Iron Tribe Fitness. Jim is one of those guys that not only is he brilliant, he really inspires you when you hang out with him. I had the opportunity to catch him as he was finishing up a livestream, and we sat in the lobby and did a quick interview on my pocket recorder that I was carrying around with me at ICON. It’s probably one of the highlights of my entire ICON experience this last year. Jim gives some incredible advice about follow up and lead gen, as well as some great life advice. I hope you really enjoy today’s interview, and I’d love to hear from you if you want to leave me a comment on this episode over at Infusioncast.co. That’s Infusioncast.co. Leave me a comment on this episode with Jim. Thanks, and I hope you enjoy the episode.

Speaker 2: How the heck do you use Infusionsoft? How do you make it work for you? Welcome to Infusioncast. The only podcast that show you the tricks of the trade and teaches you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. Join your host Joshua Millage as he sits down with Infusionsoft pros to hear their stories and experiences making Infusionsoft work for them. Ready? Here’s Joshua.

Joshua: Hello Everyone and welcome to the Infusioncast podcast. The only podcast that teaches you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. Today I’m with Jim Cavale. Jim is the president of Iron Tribe Fitness and the Infusionsoft Small Business Icon award winner of 2012. Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim: It’s really great to be here, Joshua. We’re at InfusionCon. Got a chance to talk to you again after seeing you here last year, and I’m honored to be on your podcast.

Joshua: This is good man. This is the first live Infusioncast at ICON we’ve ever done. Thank you for helping me break ground here.

Jim: Well, I’d be lying and so would you if we planned it this way.

Joshua: That’s right.

Jim: We both tried to make it happen a little earlier, but I think it’s good we got a chance to do it face to face.

Joshua: Yeah. It’s underground. I love it, Man. Cool. Well, I want to kick it off with a question that I get all the time that I ask a lot of people I interview which is, “What is your origin story? Where was your Infusionsoft ah-ha moment?”

Jim: My origin story with Infusionsoft really occurred in 2011 when we bought it at Dan Kennedy’s GKIC Super Conference event in Chicago. We bought it, because we listened to a guy named Colin Daymude, who used to work for Infusionsoft in business development, speak about the opportunity you would create for yourself if you automated as much of your business as you could so that you could be out there doing the things that you can’t automate. Doing the things that are you, that are your person, your being. That really hit me. That was when we bought Infusionsoft. It was April of 2011. I was in charge of putting it together at the time. Me and my business partner had one gym each. He had one on one side of town. I had one on the other, and I built it for both of our gyms to be able to operate off of it. Automated sequences, and create tags, good reporting, so that eventually I could step out of our gyms and help grow our brand to more locations, and that’s exactly what we did.

We built it all in 2011. Q2 2011. Literally one year after we built it, we were on stage when an Ultimate Marketer, which is now called Small Business Icon. That’s a quick story of how we ended up using Infusionsoft.

Joshua: That’s awesome. Literally one year and you’re on stage. I think that’s so inspiring. A lot of people think it takes years, and years, and years to get something working. What’s the trick? What did you do? Did you get after it? Start implementing?

Jim: Another stereotype that people have is that you have to be really technical to be able to do it as well. I’m not a programmer. I’m not a coder. I’m technically sound, and I’ve always been decent with technology. My business before Iron Tribe was a technology business, so I want to be honest. I don’t want to make myself sound like I’m technically illiterate, but all I did was I watched a lot of videos, and did my research enough to be able to to build a basic marketing plan. A marketing plan that would have a main follow up sequence for all prospects to go through, and then customized on-going sequences based on the actions they took. Some main tags, some core tags that really every business would have like “prospect” for a person who’s raised their hand but hasn’t signed up for your product. “Client”, somebody using your product. “Renewal”, somebody who’s renewed and used it again, and “Inactive” client, which is somebody who’s used it and hasn’t bought again. Hasn’t come back.

Based on those four main tags, a lot of sub tags and sub categories for what I built so that we could create customized tracks and sequences for them to go through. I did it all knowing that I wanted to step out of my gym, and Forest wanted to step out of the other gym, which he really had already done at that point, but I wanted to join him so we could build a franchise brand. That was our dream. Infusionsoft allowed me to step out of operations, and have a manager at each of those gyms report to me, but also have the system report to me based on how many prospects do they have? How many active members do they have? What’s the average active member value? All those key statistics I was now tracking through what I had built in Infusionsoft. It allowed me to step out and start building a franchise business and base the franchise system off of the system we built in Infusionsoft. Now I had a model I could show potential franchisees that was running itself.

Joshua: That’s amazing. Yeah, that’s a huge value add for a franchise coming in. That’s awesome. Let’s talk a little bit about how you … Let’s talk about those prospect tags and how you attract and capture leads, because I’ve heard it from a couple videos I’ve seen online. You guys get pretty creative, so tell me a little bit about that.

Jim: We do. Honestly both the Infusionsoft system we’ve built and those lead generation tactics have changed dramatically from 2012 to the present. You didn’t ask that, so I’ll go right to what you asked and then end up there.

Joshua: Cool.

Jim: In 2012 the primary way that we generated leads is the same as today and that’s referrals. What we like to do is we like to use our current list to build a list and we like to go to the current list to get them to do things they haven’t done yet. We are big believers in the fact that every person listening to this right now has it’s most valuable asset of its business embedded within their list. You should be trying to not just get new leads from advertising, and other places, but to really leverage the leads, and the list you already have in a lot of different ways. That’s always been the primary way, is generating referrals and then going to our list to convert people to do things they haven’t done before. However, when it comes to lead generation and advertising we’re big believers in offline pieces.

Whether it’s direct mail, which we love, or print ads, we’re very creative, and I think what you’re probably talking about is a campaign we put together for unconverted leads, which we call TIOs, Thinking It Over prospects. After 30 days of being on the initial drip follow up sequence, and they didn’t sign up, we put them all into this group that gets a three step offline campaign via direct mail. The three steps are the Bank Bag Mailer, which comes in a bank bag. Of course they’re going to open a bank bag. Who wouldn’t open a bank bag when it comes in the mail-

Joshua: Yep.

Jim: … And it’s got a direct mail piece telling them about Iron Tribe giving them a special offer, giving them a guarantee, giving them a B offer trying to get them to come in for a free consultation. Many people don’t respond to that. More than 99% don’t respond to that, so because of that we have a second step. Second step is an interesting step because it comes in the form of a trash can and it says, “Hey listen. You threw away our letter. It’s okay. We threw this one away for you, but you really need to read it because it is going to have a chance to change your life.” It’s doing things like that, and the third step’s in a bottle that looks like it’s lost at sea, and it’s rolled up. Those kind of campaigns worked great for us at the beginning. What we’ve learned is referrals is how we’ve grown this brand in every facet. It’s where all of our franchisees have come from. They’ve been clients of one of the gyms who decided they wanted to buy a franchise.

Then even at the gym level, all the news clients when you look at them, 90 plus percent of them come from other clients. We’ve really tried to build more and more tools to help our gym owners and operators be able to generate their list off of referrals. It’s been a big, big focus. Even Infusionsoft has evolved too since then, and that is why we don’t actually use the Infusionsoft interface. We’ve built our own software system, and Infusionsoft pipes in through their API, which is really the future of technology in general is leveraging existing platforms and tapping into your own custom software.

Joshua: Yeah. I love that you bring that up, because we always talk about how Infusionsoft is an amazing engine to a car and how we believe that you should build your car around that. Whether that’s a Lamborghini, an SUV. It’s got to fit your business. That’s awesome.

Jim: You get a chance to work with that yourself with codeBOX-

Joshua: Absolutely.

Jim: … And you know it better than anybody. Building three different interfaces, the prospect interface, an athlete interface … We call our clients athletes, and then a staff interface. Centering it around a lot of existing platforms, but you make them yours with the design aspect, and even how they operate with the other features is something you can do these days for a lot less money in a lot less time then you could do it five years ago.

Joshua: Yeah, and you’re building an asset, which is awesome. I love that.

Jim: An asset that … You know we believe in franchising is going to make us that much more valuable.

Joshua: That’s great. First off before we go into follow up, I want to ask you, what would you say to someone … You’re a fitness business doing these crazy direct mail pieces. I know that there’s people listening. We’re a pretty tight knit audience, and I know some of them are going, “Yeah. That’s awesome Jim, but that would never work for me.” What would you say? What’s wrong with that mindset?

Jim: What’s wrong with that mindset is really what’s wrong with the mindset people have really on any topic and that is you’re thinking like the majority. First of all I understand why you think that, because most people think that, but most people probably also think that a lot of people buy stuff online. The reality is when it comes to eCommerce statistics, only 7% of transactions that occur, occur online. Ninety-three percent still occur offline. Why does Google send me direct mail pieces?

Joshua: Right. Yeah.

Jim: They’re Google. Why do they send me direct mail pieces if they’re the best at digital marketing, and as much as they sell in SEM, and SEO? Come on. Because direct mail works. Think outside the box and not like the majority, and realize that a minority thinking cap could let you try something new. Try to use offline marketing. There’s all forms of it. Doesn’t have to be direct mail. It could be going to the mall and having a kiosk and telling everybody about your product, and selling that way. It could be going door-to-door with door hangers and knocking on doors and talking to people and having conversations. Could be a lot of different offline things, but realize that there’s a lot of noise online, and if you want to stick out you’ve got to really do it well offline. Same time direct mail, going back to the topic you originally asked me about, can be done wrong.

That is it can be done in a way where you’re going to end up in the B pile or the C pile. You get home, and you take your mail out, and you have the A pile of things you’re to put in there and you’re going to open, and you have the B and the C, and we both know we’re throwing those away. The question is not, “Is direct mail good? Does it work?” It’s, “How can I get in the A pile?” If you get in the A pile you’re going to get opened.

Joshua: Yep.

Jim: You can’t say that about your emails, because we all know we spend a lot of time each day deleting emails.

Joshua: That’s right. Absolutely. When it comes to follow up you’ve got that lead. You mentioned that these very creative 3-D pieces of mail come after they’ve been off your initial follow up sequence. What does that initial follow up sequence look like?

Jim: Initial follow up sequence takes the main movements that we teach in our program and features them in an informative way that uses social proof to sell. What we do is we create expert status by having our director of performance talk about that movement in that email. There’s copy, and there’s also him on video. Then it says, “Find out how this movement changed Chuck’s life,” one of our athletes, ” … And how it could change your life too.” Then Chuck’s telling his story in that email too. That happens in each of the main nine portions, the nine steps of this eleven step follow up sequence. There’s an intro step right away, and there’s an outro step, but the middle nine steps are based on these nine different movements we chose. It allows us to illustrate some of the differences between us and the other fitness programs out there, show expert status on how much we know about what we’re teaching, and why we know it works and why it does work, and then provide a social proof aspect from the actual athletes that can really help make it more real for the prospect.

The cool thing is we customize it. We actually have 44 emails built, so there’s four different eleven step introduction series follow up sequences, but what we do is we customize it based on your gender, and your goal. Obviously there’s two genders male and female, and there’s two goals, weight loss or performance. When you opt in you have to chose, “Is your goal weight loss, or performance?” And you have to chose “Are you a male or female?” You can’t even opt in if you don’t. Sure we might lose some people because they I guess aren’t willing to say that, but we haven’t seen a lead drop off in our opt in rates to the point where we think it doesn’t work. Now you’re seeing stories if you’re a person who’s 100 lbs overweight looking for weight loss and you’re a male, you’re going to see stories from men who are overweight that lost a lot of weight with us.

If you’re more of a guy who’s already working out, and want to take yourself to the next level, you’re going to see stories from people who are already fit looking, but Iron Tribe helped them be fitter. That makes a difference.

Joshua: Absolutely. I love that. Customization through the follow up. That’s huge. Well Jim, I want to be respectful of your time. I really appreciate you coming on the show, and I encourage everyone who’s listening to this interview to go over to YouTube and watch Jim’s TEDx talk. It was phenomenal. I want to ask you about something you talked about called the Intent Formula. Can you walk us through what that is, and how it’s affected your life?

Jim: Yeah I will. Intent is something that we all have a choice to embrace. I feel very strongly that if we can embrace intent in our life, we can fully leverage the minutes and seconds that we spend in a way that would make us different when it’s all said and done. Whether we’re blessed by God to a life of 80 or 90 years on this earth, or for 20 or 30. No matter what, we can leverage the time we’re blessed with by applying intent. The formula is vision, mission, values multiplied by people. Then under that it’s divided by time. Time’s the denominator. I like to say VMV x P over Time. We don’t know what the denominator is. None of us know the answer, but at the end of the day there’s a certain amount of heartbeats left in you and me, and they’re already defined as far as how I believe. If they’re already defined and we never will know the answer the question is how hard will we work to use each of those seconds we do have, each of those heartbeats we do have left?

It’s by establishing your vision for your life, and figuring out what’s the thing that your life’s going to stand for that you’ll never actually achieve, but you’ll always live for? It’s your guiding star that you’ll never touch. What’s your mission? How do you take that vision and put it into a ground level place that is tangible? For example, Iron Tribe’s vision is to create fitness communities that change lives, but the mission is to create 100 fitness communities that changes 15,000 lives by the end of the year 2017. Now you’ve got a vision that’s abstract and touchy feely. It’s the guiding star. We’ll always work to create fitness communities that change lives, and it’ll go on after I’m gone, but hopefully I’ll be able to accomplish the mission which is in front of us, and that’s the mountain we’re climbing to open 100 fitness communities that change 15,000 lives by the end of the year 2017. Then we’ll establish a new mission, and that’s okay.

Then the values, the character that makes you who you are. The things you stand for. You’ve got to be careful with those because when you say them you better live them. They’re things like integrity, and working hard with excellence, and connecting God’s blessings with his purpose. All these things that we define our business by, but I also define my personal life by. You define your vision, your mission, your values, and then it’s multiplied by people, because the people you’re around are the ones that you leave a stamp on after you’re gone. Hopefully, the things you left with them through your influence on them keep the world changing. For me, if you just have the VMV by itself and you’re not multiplying it by people, it’s almost selfish. You’re withholding your gifts from God and not sharing them with other people to influence them. VMV x people and then over time. You only get so much time to spend using this formula, and based on the amount of time you spend, you’re going to have that much of an impact and leave a legacy that will go on well after you’re gone.

Joshua: That’s awesome. Jim thank you so much for being on the show. If someone wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Jim: You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter. It’s real easy. It’s @JimCavale. Welcome you to do that, and then if you’re interested in learning more about Iron Tribe, we have an awesome webinar that I recorded about the brand. You know what? If it does nothing else it’ll challenge you on your vision for your life. Your “Why?” so to speak. Go to Irontribefranchise.com/your-business-solution. It’s a webinar that just introduces you to the brand and the opportunity to maybe own your Iron Tribe in a new market. Those are two great ways to learn more about me and about Iron Tribe. You can always email me Jim@irontribefitness.com. I welcome feedback, even on this interview. If there’s any questions, comments, or anything like that. I want to thank you Joshua for having me on and for what you’re doing for the Infusionsoft world, because things like this weren’t around when I started using Infusionsoft. There were videos I found.

There were strategies out there that I tried to leverage and failed at many of them, but they were the things that helped me get started. If you’re listening, you need to listen to this podcast each time it comes out, because this is where you can learn the thing that will hopefully help you get on stage even faster than I did. I don’t doubt that it can happen.

Joshua: That’s awesome. Well, Jim, thank you so much. You can find all of this and more at Infusioncast.co/jim-cavale. Jim, thanks for being on the show.

Jim: Awesome. Thanks, Joshua.

Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us on this episode of Infusioncast. Struggling to embed Infusionsoft web forms into your WordPress website? Head over to Infusioncast.co, and download our free WordPress plugin FusionForms. FusionForms allows you to easily embed beautiful Infusionsoft forms into any WordPress website with a simple shortcode. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll talk to you in the next episode.

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