Starting conversations with the right people is more valuable than reaching everyone.
In this episode, I sat down with Dave Dubeau, who's been helping real estate syndicators connect directly with accredited investors for over 20 years. Dave’s approach flips the traditional marketing script—and it’s surprisingly simple.
He walks us through how high-net-worth professionals are often unreachable through standard channels, and how his clients have struggled with cold calls, networking events, and content marketing that leads nowhere. Instead, Dave’s team builds podcasts that are tailored to attract and engage their ideal investor—not for audience growth, but as a direct relationship builder.
We cover the full evolution of this method: from trying to “net fish” for clients, to using one-on-one interviews as a lead-generation engine. Dave shares how creating a guest-first experience not only opens doors but sets the stage for low-pressure discovery calls with high-caliber prospects.
This episode is a must-listen if you're looking for practical ways to use your book—and podcast—as tools to start quality conversations with your top-tier clients.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
In this episode, I discuss with Dave Dubeau the strategic use of podcasting to attract high-net-worth investors for real estate syndication, highlighting his unique journey from British Columbia to Costa Rica and back to Canada.
We explore the challenges real estate syndicators face, such as regulatory barriers and ineffective networking, and how podcasts can offer a more efficient approach to connecting with accredited investors
Dave shares his insights on creating podcasts that resonate with successful business owners and professionals, focusing on converting guests into investors through meaningful conversations.
We discuss the complementary role of books and podcasts in personal branding and business development, using them to foster genuine relationships rather than relying solely on audience growth.
The episode emphasizes leveraging podcasts as direct lead generation tools, inviting ideal clients as guests to build rapport and accelerate trust, rather than focusing on broad audience metrics.
Dave provides strategies for crafting podcast content tailored to specific target audiences, turning interviews into discovery calls and potential business opportunities.
We touch on the importance of meaningful conversations in building lasting investor relationships and how books can serve as effective conversation starters in the real estate market.
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Website: How To Get 20 Accredited Investor Meetings Every Month
TRANSCRIPT
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Stuart: hey, welcome back to another episode of the book more show. It's Stuart Bell here and today, great pleasure, joined by Dave Dubuai. Dave, how's it going, buddy?
Dave: it's going great. Good to see you again, Stuart, but you're putting my scruffy little beard to shame, so I don't know how I feel about that Yours has developed a bit since last we spoke, so I imagine they've both also gone for that colour. So I'm going for distinguished.
Stuart: I got you beat in the Silver Fox department, by the way, it's catching up with all of us. This is going to be a cool show because there's a big crossover between what we do and what you do. We've obviously had a good few conversations in the past, but this is the first podcast that we're doing. So, yeah, really excited to share your story with people and then also really tie in the idea of having the book out there with the end product of how you serve and, as said, we'll get into what you do. It really is a big crossover for people. So, yeah, this is going to be great. I'm looking forward to it. I know the Dave story, but let's start by sharing it with everyone else. Give people a bit of background on you and what it is you do.
Dave: Okay, so the big picture overview. I am up here in the great white North of British Columbia, Canada, born and raised here. After university went and traveled the world a bit, lived overseas for about 14 years, 10 years of which were in San Jose, Costa Rica, got married, had kids down there, had a business down there. That's where I kind of got into marketing and Dan Kennedy and all that kind of stuff that your partner Dean Jackson, got into around the same time. So, anyhow, really got into the whole marketing thing. And then in about 2003, my Costa Rican wife and myself decided that it would be a better idea to raise our kids in Canada, and Canadians always go tropical paradise, frozen hinterland.
Stuart: Why would you do that?
Dave: Well, you don't realize what you got until you don't have it. So you know canada is pretty awesome, especially for raising kids. So we packed everything up, moved to canada. I had to start all over again from scratch. Didn't want to start another language training company, which is what I had in canada and in costa rica. So I saw one of those late night infomercials you too can get rich in real estate with little or no money down. I said, said perfect, because at that point that's what I had. After upending everybody and moving back to Canada, yeah, yeah so.
I got that course and put it to work and got into real estate doing creative deals. Then I hooked up with a Canadian real estate guru kind of a mini rich dad, poor dad kind of guy and joined forces with him for a number of years as kind of his marketing dude and did that for quite a number of years. Then got back into real estate one way or the other. Been in and around real estate since 2003. These days what I really focus on a lot is I work with real estate syndicators, fund managers, professional capital raisers, and we help them to connect with what are called accredited investors so they can raise more money for their deals.
Stuart: It's such a I think many industries can think about the same scenario that the end users, the people who you're actually trying to interact with, aren't necessarily the people that you would think about at the first level.
So, drilling down to that accrediting investor, the people who are interested in investments in the real estate space, the people who are interested for your clients, interested in potentially a particular geographic area, we're kind of drilling down to who those people really are and the best way of interacting with them. As we'll get into in a moment with the, with the book and your approach generally, it's really interesting to kind of see one level kind of behind the curtain. It's like the wizard of oz type thing. It's not necessarily the almighty oz in the in front of the curtain, but it's the person pulling the levers behind the curtain. So really I think we're going to dive into this a little bit more. Your clients, as they're looking to engage with those accredited investors, give us a bit of the backstory on those people and what they've typically tried and what brings them to you. Look for another approach.
Dave: Yeah. So these real estate syndicators and fund managers are consistently trying to raise millions of dollars to fund their real estate deals. So, for example, if you think of a big apartment building, well, whoever built that needed to get yes, the bank to finance them for a big chunk of it, but the down payment and a lot of the other costs that they have to come up with that money themselves. So most people don't have that deep of pockets to bring up millions of dollars for that. So they go out and they raise capital to do these syndications or to create a fund for these kinds of development deals. And the Securities and Exchange Commission was created to protect the general public against getting scammed. So there are very tight criteria on who can and cannot invest in these kinds of projects. So usually the stipulation is for somebody to invest in one of these syndications they need to be what's called an accredited investor and that basically means they are high income, high net worth. So they're making at least 200 grand a year. They got a million dollars in equity, excluding their private residence. So the government says, hey, you know what. These folks are sharp enough financially to take some risks that we won't let the general public do, so they can invest in these kinds of deals.
So, long story short, our syndicator clients and fund manager clients want to connect with these high net worth, high income individuals and the way they've been trying to do it it's so going to networking events.
A lot of these guys and gals are going to real estate events and they're hobnobbing and schmoozing and pitching and all this kind of stuff which is just kind of like that networking hell and it's very incestuous because everybody else there is trying to pitch people on their stuff and it's just kind of gross. So networking is something that they try to do. They try coming up with lists and cold calling people and trying to get them interested in deals. They try social media content creation hamster wheel of hell just coming up with stuff all the time to try and create engagement. But they have to be very careful they can't cross the line and be soliciting directly online and that kind of stuff. So there's lots of rules and regulations around this and it's just a very hit and miss kind of process for a lot of them, especially if they aren't huge, with hundreds and hundreds of existing investors that they can go back to and get referrals from and that sort of thing.
Stuart: So those are the folks that we're working with and that's interesting and no matter who your target audience is, there is this problem of invisible prospects that you can't necessarily just go out and buy a list of these people High net worth individuals I mentioned on a podcast before my brother's a yacht broker for luxury yachts Same deal. It's's difficult to go and buy that list of people because they're trying to be obscured and they're themselves behind gatekeepers. So whether you're at that end of the spectrum or the higher volume but the lower margin, end of the spectrum but still you're trying to identify those invisible people. It's almost like one of those. Is it the pachenko games, the chinese games, where you put the marbles in at the top and they?
Dave: go ding, ding, ding, ding, ding ding. Yeah, eventually something comes out, it may or may not end up in the right spot right, yeah, right, yeah, exactly.
Stuart: If you've got 10 different holes and you're representing one of them, there's quite a lot of waste in that machine and, I think, so much of the other stuff to get to those people. But if you can be more strategic about it and more direct, it just makes the amount of effort overall so much more targeted, meaning that you can be much more efficient. So let's bridge into your approach, let's give people a bit of background on your particular approach, and then we can bridge into the book and how the book fits into that. Because, again, whether you're looking for multimillion dollar accredited investors or whether you're looking for small but still invisible clients, I think it's very translatable.
Dave: Yeah. So we've got kind of a different approach, stuart, one that you're very familiar with because we're on it right now. So the approach that we have, or the funnel that we create for our syndicator clients, is what I call a capital conversation and conversion podcast. So let's just zoom out. The big idea is that we start a podcast for them, their own podcast, that appeals directly to their ideal investor avatar. Everybody loves that word, avatar, right, and it's not usually about real estate because if we think about it, we zoom out.
Most accredited investors, people that are making that kind of money, have that kind of net worth. They're either successful business owners who are making good money and have a lot of wealth in their business, or they are successful professionals aka doctors, dentists, lawyers, cpas with their own firms those kind of people that have been in business for a while, paid off the student loans and now they're doing good. Or they are C-suite executives of big companies, you know. So typically 300 employees up. If we're talking to the CEO or the CFO or COO or founder of those kinds of companies, chances are they probably fit the criteria of an accredited investor. Now, these guys and gals are not out directly looking for real estate investing podcasts. They don't. They may or may not be aware of it as an asset class. They certainly aren't spending their time listening to these kind of real estate podcasts about how syndications work and blah, blah, blah.
So we want to create a podcast that appeals to them. Number one to be a guest of the podcast. We want to invite, we want to go skip straight to the front of the line and invite them to be a guest on the podcast so that we can start that conversation, start that relationship right. And then we also want to attract those kind of people as the audience members of the podcast as well. So kind of a double whammy. So that's step number one let's build out a podcast that's appealing to our investors. Step number two let's find them and invite them to be guests on the podcast. Now, this is kind of cool because you know you and I are used to podcasts, stuart, and it's not that big of a deal. You're doing them every week, I do it myself. I do 10 to 12 interviews every week, so it's not that big of a deal for us.
But it's amazing how few of these people high level people, successful people have ever been invited to be a guest on a podcast before. So it's kind of a big deal for them, it's an honor and it's a way for us to lead with the giving hand by providing value first right. So we invite them, they come on the show, we make them look good and sound good and feel good, because it's not a 60 minutes expose kind of thing.
Stuart: It's a friend.
Dave: Hey, what's your secret sauce? And, professionally, what do you do differently? What do you find that works well? So, just kind of getting that, what's? How do you balance work life and family life? How do you keep that balance? And then we, you know, for our clients, we transitioned towards the financial side and, hey, dr Smith, chances are it sounds like you're doing really well with your practice right now.
A lot of doctors in your position are looking at the future, when they don't want to be slicing and dicing people so much anymore and they want to keep that income level up, but they don't want to work so hard for it. They're kind of looking at what does that look like for themselves and their families in the future? What are your thoughts about that? So, and their families in the future, what are your thoughts about that? So, just kind of open things up to if they're doing anything around investing. And then step number three is convert those interviews into investment discovery calls, right. So at the end of the interview you're done with the interview. Then it's hey, dr Smith, great interview.
By the way, you mentioned you're starting to dabble in crypto or whatever they talked about. If you don't mind me asking, how do you feel about the kind of returns you're getting with that, the stability and the security of that investment. Is that something that you're 100% happy with, or is there maybe a little room for improvement? I don't care who you're interviewing, stuart. I could interview Warren Buffett. He's going to say there's always room for improvement, okay, cool. Well, we're doing something really interesting with other doctors just like yourself, who are really busy in the alternative investing space with apartment buildings. The great thing is we're able to get them very solid double-digit returns on their money and, at the same time, reduce their personal taxes dramatically. Is that something you might be interested in taking a look at? Boom, book them into a follow-up discovery call.
So that's the process in a nutshell Boom, book them into a follow-up discovery call. So that's the process in a nutshell. Number one start a podcast that appeals to our avatar as the guest and as the audience. Number two find them and invite them to be guests on the podcast. Number three interview them and convert those interviews into discovery calls and then, in our case, investors from that. Does that make sense, stuart?
Stuart: Absolutely, discovery calls and then, in our case, investors from that. Does that make sense, stuart? Absolutely, and it's such a perfect example and complimentary service to what we do. So, as you say, we run our own podcasts, have done for years and years. We do some client ones, but we don't particularly talk about it. It's not really something that we advertise. The ones that we do just come out with the back of books because it was a natural transition from something right in the book in this subject and having that as the attention grabbing piece at the top of the funnel through to the podcast which is then content. It's actually the same way that we use them to keep people engaged over the long term. For most of the podcasts that we're talking with people about either the ones that we're individually running or the ones where people have got them, but we're talking about them as the time to the book very few are using them as specific opportunities to talk to an individual and then having that bridging conversation.
So I think the interesting thing that, yeah, on a one-to-one element with the actual guests themselves. We're very much using it as content creation for the broader conversation to the wider audience. But what I really like about your approach is because you're dealing with a small number of very specific individual clients. You're much more line fishing, one-on-one with people, rather than net fishing and trying to get that group fishing, one-on-one with people rather than net fishing, and trying to get that.
Dave: Yeah Well, I've been doing the podcast thing myself, stuart since 2018, which is a long time in podcast years and I, at the beginning, I did it for those exact same reasons.
Like, well, you know, podcasting was starting to become a thing and I thought, like everybody, hey, if I put out a podcast there and I interview the big wigs in my case in the real estate industry then hopefully some of them will share the podcast with their audiences and somehow I'll grow this big audience and somehow some of those people will figure out I'm a smart guy and reach out to me somehow and maybe want to have a conversation about my services and it's a great way to create content right. So that those were my goals at the beginning. So I was doing the normal thing, like a weekly kind of podcast whenever I got around to it, or twice a month or twice a week, sometimes you know,
it was very hit and miss. And then credit where credit's due. About two and a half years ago almost three years ago now I was listening to a podcast and this young, smart Brit guy named Jamie Atkinson talked about this whole idea. Instead of trying to grow an audience with your podcast which is great, but that's a vanity metric. Really, it makes no difference unless you can monetize it Instead of focusing on the audience growth, just focus on interviewing the exact kind of people you want to work with and convert those conversations into sales conversations afterwards. Right, give them the full value of the interview, the podcast, but don't be so focused on audience growth and all of this kind of crap that most podcasters are focused on.
Stuart: Very few of us are going to compete against Joe Rogan or any of those big guys.
Dave: We're not going to monetize our podcast that way most of us but we can monetize it big time by flipping it on the head and just really focusing on who is your ideal guest. Get them on the show, make them look good, make them sound good, make them feel good. Create that rapport, create that relationship good, make them feel good. Create that rapport, create that relationship and then see if there's a potential connection between what you do and what they need. Yeah, there you go.
Stuart: We had just double tap into the. Double tap, that's not the word I mean. I just dive into that point. You were talking about the numbers. The same with the books. We're not interested in book sales because exactly we're business owners. We're not interested in book sales because exactly we're business owners, we're not authors. We don't care about the sales themselves. One actual client is going to be worth way more than any number of books that are sold. So rather than getting caught up in the value metrics of traditional publishing, we're using the books to start those real conversations. So, diving into what you were talking about in the addressing your ideal avatar, the target market, the people who you're really trying to speak to, I think not only if you got that opportunity of the one-on-one conversation with people who might be investors. There's also the opening the door of other clients. So we do.
We have some books and a podcast with a good friend who owns a tax practice and the tax practice is specifically around the ICDIS, which is a very niche, exporter-focused tax strategy in the US. So he's been doing the podcast for five or six years. They only do a monthly show. They've got a super low cadence years. They only do a monthly show. They've got super low cadence but they have had some great success in reaching out to other partners and industry experts and not necessarily influencers, in the sense that they'll share the podcast and the podcast is the thing that they're interested in. But it starts the conversation with other professionals within the environment where to try and get a conversation with that person otherwise might be pretty difficult, because if we go to network events, everyone's at network events. If you try and arrange to meet someone specifically, our calendars don't always align. But, like you say, for most people they're not getting invited to podcasts all the time. The cohort of people where that happens they're kind of Ever ever yeah, very very slim.
So to be able to have that as a door opener, one of the book products that we've got in the we've got a couple of different tiers of book products One of the slightly higher tier one we've got I know I'm one of your customers, stuart, right, exactly yeah, and we'll reach into the book in a second for sure, because again, that crossover in how the podcast is being used and how the book is being used, so complimentary. But on one of the slightly higher tier products we've got like a hardback book methodology that we talk about and again, nothing to do with selling books, nothing to do with whether it's on Amazon or not, nothing to do with book signings, because who cares, that's all traditional stuff. But a hardback version if you're trying to open a door to specific most people could probably identify the top 50 or top 100 clients who they were their wish list of ideal clients. So, using the hardback cover, personal note in it, send that across, follow up with a phone call and that phone call much more likely to to get picked up and taken rather than just an out of the blue call. So those two things, whatever the mechanism is, whatever the vehicle is, podcast book, any other idea that you could come up with. It's the outcome, the conversation. That's the important thing, not the vehicle in its own right. So it's such a great leveraging of something that is out there and getting some attention, but in a very different way.
So the clients that you're working with, then the syndication, the syndicators, syndicate yeah, syndicate source they. It's not like they're doing this idea already and then they're coming to you just because they're trying to make it easier or looking for efficiencies in the podcasting world. So, as you're talking to people, what's the the bridge between syndicators trying the traditional things and then you introducing the idea of the podcast? Is that a light bulb moment for many people and there's an immediate realization? Or is it that they think of podcasts maybe in a traditional sense and then they're kind of a little bit gun shy thinking are you trying to tell them to be the next joe rogan of the syndication world?
Dave: yeah, it's usually a light bulb moment and the way I explained it is we aren't trying to be a joe rogan in the syndication world and you know our because we provided done for you, turnkey service for our clients, where we build them their podcast, we fill it up with their ideal avatar as guests and we do all the production stuff behind the scenes for them. So they just show up on zoom a couple of times a week and have conversations, right. So it's a very and it's very clearly spelled out. This is a direct lead generation mechanism. The there will be an audience, there will be audience growth. It'll be organic. We don't pay any attention to that. We focus on who we get as your guests and that's all you should really focus on.
Now. Is it a happy by-product that sometimes some of our clients get audience members reaching out to them starting that company? We just had one client raise $75,000 from an audience member who'd been listening to their podcast for a while and said, hey, this you know Matt's pretty sharp when it comes to real estate. It sounds like maybe I'll reach out to him. They did. They connected Boom. That turned into a $75,000, what's called limited partner in one of his syndications. So, but that's not the focus. The focus is let's connect with our ideal avatar as a guest on the show. And the beautiful thing is about this, stuart, is it flips the switch right. So I mean, if somehow you manage to book a sales meeting traditionally with one of these kind of people through networking or cold calling or whatever, then you show up for that meeting. You're the one that's nervous, you're the one that's kind of under the microscope, you're the one that's right, that's feeling all the pressure right.
Yeah, this turns it around. They're coming to you excited to be a guest on your show. They're the ones that's feeling a little bit nervous, a little shy, a little unsure of themselves, even though they might have. One guy runs a billion dollar fund. Okay, never been invited to be a guest on a podcast before.
Very nervous when my client was, you know, having a little conversation with them before they started the interview. So that's an awesome way you put the person at ease. You have a wonderful conversation, a nice interview. At the end of it they feel good. You've made them look good. You shine the spotlight on them. You know you allowed them to strut their stuff because even super successful people, they don't get much recognition at work. They get even less recognition at home. So this is, you know, it really is an instant rapport builder. So you cut right through that. You know no like and trust factor. Just fast forwards that so much. So by the end of the podcast, if you do it right, they know you and they like you because you've made them feel good. It's working nicely towards the trust factor. And then it makes it so much easier to get them booked into a quote, unquote sales call, after that a discovery call. We call that.
Stuart: I think when you think about the relationship building, we for the longest time. So we have the similar challenges on the book business, in the sense of when you say book, everyone immediately thinks of a traditional book. When you say podcast, everyone immediately thinks of NPR or Joe Rogan.
Yeah, joe Rogan, yeah that's right, yeah, reaching that gap to say, hey, no, we're looking for all the benefits and the credibility and the authority of those things, but in a very different way. So for a couple of years now, I really doubled down on putting the phrase of conversation starting book versus traditional book as a kind of a hook, a name to help people separate out the two things and the idea of having a relationship building podcast, not a media podcast right.
Yeah, exactly, relationship building, the audience building, that's the perfect distinguishing because it allows people in a relatively easy way to think about what those differences are and come into it with a premise of a podcast, but not without all the baggage of an audience building podcast. It helps kind of break that mold a little bit. The idea is that relationship building so at the end of that, who cares about the audience, the relationship with that individual is at a completely different level and the likelihood of them remembering you, even if they're not an ideal client themselves, they're swimming in the pool of other ideal clients. So the likelihood of them remembering a 60 minute long friendly conversation versus the five minute long pitch, I mean the difference in the policy of the relationship, not only immediately but in the long term.
Dave: Well, not only that, Stuart, but we take it to the next level. So, yeah, we don't, obviously we don't charge the guest anything to be a guest on the show, right, right, yeah, and we also I have my team take each episode and slice out three or four short form videos the reels or the shorts, whatever you want to call them with the subtitles on them, and then we take the transcript of the conversation, put it through ChatGPT, create LinkedIn articles, facebook posts, instagram posts, all these kinds of social media content, and then we deliver that to the guest when their episode is released, so that way they can leverage their appearance on the show and then, selfishly, it helps us to grow the show organically, because guess who they're going to share that with their sphere.
Right, guess who are in their sphere lots of other people just like them, right? So this is a way for them to kind of brag themselves up a little bit, strut their stuff a little bit and organically it helps us to grow the audience as well and you can imagine someone who is less sophisticated than you are in terms of thinking about the job of work, the conversation.
Stuart: they would click it up, but it would be very much focused on the audience, building podcast hosts, so it would be about the show and about the host and about what they want. That's what we see a lot of the time. The sophisticated approach that you've got of knowing that it's about the conversation and the relationship and not about the audience, means that you can clip those up in a way that promotes the guest and makes them look good, and knowing that they're rarely guests, if at all of things, I mean taking all of those clips and really optimal plight way of blowing smoke in the most authentic way possible and useful way possible. The job is to make them look as good as possible, so they're super enthusiastic about sharing it.
Dave: That's the whole goal. Let's make them look good. We do two things, stuart, so we create a version for the guest. We also create a version for the client so that they can use that, if they want, as content, because most people hate creating content on social media and all that sort of stuff.
Stuart: So it's kind of like a done for you content machine for them as well yeah, and this is why I was so excited about sharing the show, because the overlap of what you do with a podcast as a vehicle and what we do with a book as a vehicle so complementary and we come to it from the same perspective. Yeah, and and surely you have similar conversations people talk about ai as a one-click button, a one-click solution. I don't want to. I don't need to think about any of this. I'll just a one-line prompt into gpt and it will spit out all of this magic stuff and job done. But the reality of that is, even if it's successful which honestly isn't that successful taking that approach, even if it was, what gets put out is generic stuff. The benefit of having a podcast, the benefit of having a book, is that you can use AI to leverage everything that you've done as an individual. So that is a game changer because its ability to leverage it is second to none, just the efficiencies and the quality.
Dave: We could not do what we do without AI. But, AI is a tool. We don't use AI to create content from scratch. We use AI to transform existing content into different kinds of content.
Stuart: Because what you're doing is amplifying them, amplifying the author, amplifying the host and going up from there, rather than just a generic pool of stuff and the ability to know that the outcome for both of us is the conversation.
Conversation and relationship. Leverage in the podcast and the conversation opportunity from the book. Knowing that the job of work, the outcome, is those conversations, not the vehicle itself. Book. Knowing that the job of work, the outcome, is those conversations, not the vehicle itself. The fact that we're leveraging and amplifying what our individual clients say means that when they eventually get around to having a conversation with the real person whether it's the guest on the podcast or, like you were saying, the audience member, where previously they they had no relationship with them at all but the audience member is coming to the conversation feeling like they know them already. Same for a book if someone's read the sun, at least if your book or all of it they're coming to that conversation feeling like there's more of a relationship, just so much more effective than just some generic push button stuff that everyone else is doing well the other thing is like a book and a podcast.
Dave: A book is such a powerful tool to get booked on podcasts, right. So I mean all of your clients, myself included like we're getting our, we're getting our book made by you guys. That's great. We're getting a landing page and we're, you know, we're pushing traffic to that landing page. A fantastic way to push traffic is to get booked on other people's podcasts to talk about your book, to push people to the book website to opt in, to get your book right. Does that make sense? So?
a book gives you a perfect vehicle to have something to talk about that's interesting and timely on somebody else's podcast and to then leverage their audience to get them to opt in for your book. So they work so nice together. They really do.
Stuart: It's such a fantastic closed loop system because people podcast hosts want to have an easy way of saying yes to you as a guest. If you're promoting or if you're out there in the world, they want an easy way of saying yes, I want to speak to that person. The book demonstrates your knowledge and the framework and what you're going to talk about. So everyone's joining the conversation as it's been recorded, knowing what the edges of the conversation are. It's not I'm gonna have this person on as a guest and then I don't know what to talk about after a couple of minutes or the roadmap is already laid out and, as you say, from the audience's perspective.
I don't know about you, but I tend to listen to a lot of podcasts on the move and I'm doing things and then sometimes I'll tune back in and five minutes have passed and I've kind of missed it because I got distracted with something else. But if something resonates and I'm interested knowing that, there's then an easy next step in the book, blueprint, scorecard the books I use personally most of the time now it's the eight steps of a business building book. One of those is the minimum viable commitment. It's the smallest next step that you can expect someone to take at this part of the relationship and when you think about a book as something that a podcast guest can download sorry, podcast listener can download just such a a logical next step. It's a closed loop. It's all a series of mini steps towards that conversation, absolutely very complimentary yeah, definitely.
So we should talk about your book then. So your approach you've been doing this for a while now, the books coming together as that opportunity to help people raise their hand and say, oh, this is interesting. Talk quickly about the content of the book and what brought you to the point of, hey, I've got all of these ideas. They really should be on the pages.
Dave: Well, I'd write the Kool-Aid about using books as glorified business cards years and years ago. If people are watching this, they might see that I got a bookshelf full of my own books in the back. I think this one with you guys was like number eight or number nine, so I'd done them all kind of traditional ways in the past. The first book I was part of was a really crappy anthology book promoted by a marketing guru. So like 37 of us all contributed our own little crappy chapters to this thing and we all got our cover and all that kind of stuff and it was. You know. The book itself was absolute crap, but it was something you could show people.
And then I started doing my own things and all this kind of stuff and writing my own books the hard way and then getting a little smarter about it. But, yeah, the most recent book I said you know what I'm going to I'm going to. You know, I've known Stuart and Dean for a long time. I like the whole 90 minute book idea. I get it. I like the idea of other people interviewing me, because that's how I've written a few of my books is is just kind of talking it through and then turning the content into the book. But I thought, hey, a lot easier, faster, get you guys to do it than doing it myself. So that's why I went with you guys, very happy with the end result as well, and just getting it, all the nitpicky stuff, getting it set up in Amazon and all that crap that I really don't want to figure out again because it's been a while since I did it last time. So, yeah, that's why I went with you guys. Really good value, very good system as well, Just to give you a little plug there. So my book is 100% dialed in for my target avatar, which is real estate syndicators and fund managers. So the title is how to Get 20 Accredited Investor Meetings Every Month. That's the title of it, so it's a how-to book. Subtitle is Without Cold Calling, networking or Chasing People, right? So that's what it's all about.
The book itself is your typical. It walks people through step-by-step, exactly what we do when we work with a client to go from zero not having a podcast, to building that podcast out, making sure it attracts their ideal avatar as the guest and as the listener. Then how to find those people and invite them to be a guest on the podcast. How to do those interviews and convert those interviews into investment meetings. You know how to you know some of the techie a little bit of the techie stuff on how to do some of this stuff or how to outsource that, which is a much better idea. So, yeah, it's really an A to Z process on what we do. And then the big red easy button is hey, if you want it all done for you, let's have a talk right. So it really is to educate people about the big idea of why this is such a great way to connect with people. You don't have to chase them, you don't have to cold call them.
Stuart: You to chase them. You don't have to cold call them, you don't have to network and schmooze. You attract these people and they're actually excited to meet you as you're interviewing them. Such a difference, I always ask people. We've been in business for a number of years, all of us. We could talk at length about what we do. I always find it interesting to ask people how do they go about deciding? And obviously people working with us. We guide them quite a lot in this. But how do you go about defining what to include and what not to include? Because obviously if you try and include everything, it's gonna it could be war and peace and and the audience probably aren't that interested in the nuts and bolts of some of it anyway. So how do you go through picking which of the important pieces to put into the book and then which lives outside of the book?
Dave: Yeah, well, my book's pretty short and sweet. I think it's like 67 pages or something like that, so it's definitely not, you know, super in depth. I think what I did was I'd done a webinar about the whole process before, so I basically kind of use that as the outline and then worked with your people on, you know, massaging their questions and kind of answering them using that outline which again gives the big, broad strokes, without going into the minutiae.
So yeah, I've been doing this kind of stuff for a long time Stuart. So I I learned a long time ago most people don't want the minutiae. They want myself included, like if I'm doing something new, I don't want it. I don't want to know all the nitpicky details. I want to know. Okay, what's the gist of this, how does it work, does it make sense, and can somebody else do this damn thing for me? I?
Stuart: think particularly because a traditional book, the product is the book. People are buying the book for the words that are on the page. A conversation starting book. Their outcome is a conversation. So the job of work of the book is just to get to the conversation and trying to deliver everything in the pages, particularly when people aren't interested.
People aren't buying these books for entertainment. The job isn't to share something that will distract someone for a period of time whilst they're doing something else. It's to help them fix a problem. And they're fixing the problem. Nine times out of ten, really, for most people is okay, you've got to get me to do it for you or you've got to get someone to do it for you. So the scope of it is really getting to that first point of the conversation and getting to the first point of the conversation, with people feeling like they've got value at the place that they are and they're not just being switched into a meeting. So there's definitely some content there, but it's not the be all and end all. I think too many people approach book writing in the traditional sense and thinking that they've got to put absolutely everything in there, which which is very far from.
Dave: Yeah, I mean you guys have got all the stats on how many books actually get sold. Of those books, how many actually get opened. Of those that get opened, how many actually get read all the way through. It's a miniscule, that's for majoritively.
Stuart: I think we're just going to say the same thing, that's for majoritively traditional books, where the entire purpose is that it's read, and still the readership rate Last year. I kind of think about this problem a little bit more and trying to help people contextualize the conversation, starting book versus the traditional book. I started describing it in terms of the presentation because that seems to be the best way to help people think about the overall idea that we're doing. So, saying to someone okay, let's imagine that next tuesday I can get you in front of a hundred of your ideal clients, so between now and tuesday let's work on the presentation together and in the presentation in the, in the auditorium, I'll be there to ask you the questions, to help you deliver the best answers to this very specific audience. So, okay, what would we do? Well, we probably wouldn't just turn up on tuesday and wing it because wasted opportunity. I, we probably could, because we've been doing it long enough, but wasted opportunity. So we would think OK, who's the audience in there and what do we really want them to do? So what's the outcome? We want them to come to the back of the room and talk to us afterwards about this specific thing. Ok, so we know what the next step is. Ok, so what are we going to title the presentation so that they come to our talk and not to someone else's talk? Okay, we'll pick something that resonates with them and push it a few buttons. We'll amplify it a little bit with a subheading that gets the juices going a little bit more.
The slides and the presentation will be the five or six things, because we know attention is limited. It'll be the five or six things that really again take them from the problem to the idea that there is a solution, and then the next step is go to the back of the room. So the big text on the slides would be the attention grabbing things that move them down. Okay, but what questions would we ask? Yeah, exactly the chapters. What questions would we ask? Well, we drill into these a little bit more. Again, we know that attention is limited, so we'll just hit on those main points and all of that framework.
If you take it away from a presentation and into a book, the methodology is exactly the same. We're trying to do that thing to capture people's attention span when they've got lots of other things that they could be doing. Introduce the conversation enough so that they take that next step, which is go to the back of the room. In that case, the presentation has done its job. The same with the book and the same, to a certain degree, with the podcast.
What I really like about podcasts is it gives you an easy way, because most of us don't have a problem talking, because we can help by our podcast. Most of us can talk about this stuff. So the great thing about podcasts is it's very easy to keep that conversation going for week after week, month after month, so that, because we know that it's the majority of people who are ready to act today, most people are ready to act tomorrow. So it really gives us the opportunity to stay in touch with the long term, because we can send people those emails saying, hey, just released another show. It's great. We were talking to dave about using podcasts as a way of engaging people. By the way, here's the next step you can take today.
Dave: Yeah, no, it's, it's brilliant yeah, for me the no. It's brilliant. Yeah, for me, the whole book idea. I agree with you guys. It really has. I mean, you don't want the content to be crap, you want it to be good. The real goal of the book is to get that opt-in, get the name and the email address and start that communication. For me, the secondary goal of the book is a way to get in front of other people's audiences. The secondary goal of the book is a way to get in front of other people's audiences Right.
So I'll give you a perfect example. So we've got some Facebook ads going out to promote and you know they're working. Okay, I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, it's relatively new early days for us in that, but let's say we're getting. You know, I don't have, I'm not spending a huge budget 500 bucks a month kind of thing, and I think last month might've got less than a hundred opt-ins, I think, but maybe let's say it's a hundred opt-ins, so it's five bucks a pop, whatever. However, I went on one podcast and promoted the book and it wasn't a huge podcast like 75 opt-ins from that directly right now.
We have early to see which which convert better and all that kind of stuff. But bam, that's just that made up the work of a month of facebook ads in almost in one podcast appearance. So yeah, for me using the, the book my. My main goal these days is to use it for leverage, to get in front of other people's audiences, to do podcast swaps with other podcasters who have stuff. So it's it just really it's another tool in the toolbox to to make everything work. And yeah, I can tell you being an author.
You know, even though there are so many of us, it still is kind of a big deal, especially if you just don't have some ai created piece of crap I think exactly.
Stuart: I think that's going to be the interesting thing going forward is we see we're interested in writing books, we're interested in running podcasts for people.
So we're in that world.
We see we're disproportionately skewed to seeing more of those things because we're in that space.
When you look at the entire audience, it's still a tiny minority of people who have a book, tiny minority of people who have a book tiny minority, tiny percentage of people who have a book, tiny but even probably smaller percentage that have a podcast.
So to enable that for other people and to have it as a difference maker, and particularly a difference maker with the whole purpose of it being a conversation starter. Because if those subsets of people it's a tiny group of people who have a podcast it's an even smaller group of people who are having a relationship building podcast. Most of them are thinking about it as an audience building podcast, which is, as we said, is missing the point. So to be able to orchestrate that journey, it's such a benefit and adds another string to the bow in a way that's easy to do because for us, people come to us, we take 90 minutes of their time they're about to to create the book for you people just have to turn up like you say in your book, turn up in a bean shirt and have some questions and a smile and remember to click record.
Dave: That's.
Stuart: That's a big job it's so funny that you say that I touch words, have never yet not clicked record, but at the end of every show, particularly we record on zoom. So particularly now where they change the interface and the record button is sometimes not quite as obvious as it could be, it's always a moment of panic at the end of every show to make sure that I definitely click it. But yeah, going in with that it's easy for people to do and it gives them a whole other avenue to leverage. So, like you say, the facebook ads will keep running them because it's direct targeted traffic to the group. But being on the podcast, I mean, how easy is it that? And to get access to that audience we have and again, I don't want to suggest that this is indicative in any way, but we were running some book ads for someone.
At the moment we've been running in for I think we're probably about three months in and the the cost per click, cost per lead. So we run lead ads in Facebook so that the app details come straight through. So the cost per click of those over three months it's 68 cents. 68 cents a lead I mean insane. And again, that's unimaginably low compared with a lot of the other ones. So I don't want to suggest that's indicative, but it's an easy step for people to to take the click a button and download a book. There's not much barrier to entry to that. Go on a podcast, and how many times do you see guests on podcasts and the host will say, oh, where can people find out more? And they'll generically say I'll go to the website or follow me on x or something.
Yeah, it's specifically saying hey, that's great. We've talked about the framework here. Obviously there's a lot more to it, so just go grab a free copy of the book and, if you're interested in it, learn more. Such a great closed loop I think it's become a bit of a trope. I end every podcast by looking up at the clock and realizing how much time yeah, for sure.
It'd be really great to circle back in a couple of months and talk a little bit more about the. So the book's relatively new we've just wrapped up recently but we can talk a little bit more about how you're using it to attract that audience in the different ways. So facebook ads see what's happening now and the guest opportunity on podcast. So that'll be super interesting. I want to make sure that people can follow along a little bit more with what it is you do. So where's a good place for people to go?
Dave: Well, on any podcast where I send them is to go get a copy of the book. So again, the book is how to Get 20 Accredited Investor Meetings Every Month, and the website is 20accreditedinvestorsbook.com and 20 is the number 20. So 20accreditedinvestorsbook.com Fantastic.
Stuart: It almost seems like this was planned, like we knew what we were doing. But the whole demonstration of pointing someone to the book website after being on a podcast it's perfectly coherent. I love it. I'll make sure that we put a link straight to that as well in the show notes. So whether people are listening on a podcast player or on the website will just be one click through and go straight to it. Such a great crossover in the two approaches and I think, as people are listening, whether they're thinking about um, as I think about again in front of those audiences, whether they're thinking the book is a great idea or the podcast is a great idea, I think take the vehicle out of it. Think about the framework first, this opportunity that we're both promoting to people. That's saying, focus on the conversation. Focus on the conversation, because that's what makes the difference. The books are just such a perfect blend of so, yeah, really want to thank you so much for having me on the show, stuart.
I really appreciate it, real pleasure. We'll definitely circle back and go go a bit bit deeper into some of the lead pieces next time, but everyone thanks again for listening definitely recommend going across to Dave's website and pulling the podcast opportunity because some great insights into using that to start conversations and if you've been thinking about creating a book for your own lead generation tool, just either hit reply to the email that goes out with this or follow the links in the show notes and we'll be able to help you get that sorted out. Thanks again for listening. Dave, thanks for being a guest and we'll catch everyone in the next one.