Wayne Ledoux is the Founder and CEO of Mayhem Digital Media. Wayne's story begins with his service in the Air Force, where he honed his technical skills working on F-16s. Post-2008 crisis, when the job landscape shifted dramatically, Wayne found himself at a crossroads. While he considered continuing in the aerospace sector with giants like Boeing or Lockheed, fate had other plans. He leaped into the world of marketing and sales, starting with selling websites and SEO services to real estate agents.
In 2016, Wayne's entrepreneurial spirit led him to establish his own agency, Mayhem Digital Media, with a focus on generating leads and appointments for the solar industry. This niche was thriving until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, throwing a wrench into the traditional methods of conducting home visits for solar installations.
The pandemic was a turning point for many businesses, and Mayhem Digital Media was no exception. Wayne saw an opportunity amidst the chaos and pivoted his business to cater to high-ticket coaches and course creators. He stressed the significance of personalized coaching and the right leadership to enhance team performance, acknowledging the diverse talents within his team and the need for varied coaching styles.
Connect with Wayne on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayhemdigital/.
Learn more Wayne about at https://www.mayhemdigitalmedia.com/.
Key Points
• Wayne's beginnings were born out of the chaos of COVID, which caused mayhem inside his company that had scaled to multiple six figures (0:38)
• Wayne's success at the job came from personal coaching and a mind shift change towards embracing sales and understanding the psychology behind it (4:59)
• Wayne discusses how he started booking leads for solar installers and then shifted to coaching during COVID-19 (12:37)
• Wayne explains how he found clients through a combination of Facebook and Instagram ads and cold email scraping on LinkedIn, but notes that LinkedIn is touchy about having their site scraped. (15:15)
• Wayne mentions several data companies with direct partnerships to pull data, including D Seven, Lead Sniper, and Lead Leaper (16:28)
• Wayne discusses how they apply what they know from other industries to lead generation for high ticket services, and emphasizes the importance of strong messaging and offers (17:41)
• Wayne criticizes long ascension funnels and instead advocates for simple solutions that sell implementation rather than information, and emphasizes the importance of market research (19:40)
• Wayne advises those struggling in the current economy to get creative with pricing structures and do market research quickly, emphasizing the importance of breaking down ideas into their most basic parts and reorganizing them in a unique way (21:39)
Transcript
Craig Andrews 00:14
Today I want to welcome Wayne Ledux. He is the co owner of Mayhem Digital Media. They provide done for you solutions for high ticket coaches and course creators in the digital marketing space. But his beginnings were born out of the chaos of COVID and that was where the very name Mayhem Digital Media came from. Wayne has a fascinating story that he's here to share today, going all the way back to the Air Force. Wayne, welcome.
Wayne Ledoux 00:47
Thanks for having me, Craig. I really appreciate you spending some time.
Craig Andrews 00:50
Yeah. So let's start back at the Air Force. What led you to the Air Force? What did you do?
Wayne Ledoux 00:56
Well, I actually used to fix F 16s in the United States Air Force. So navigations, weapons delivery, computer, basically the brains of the aircraft. And back before I got into the marketing and sales space, I thought that I was going to work for Boeing or Lockheed or something like that. But I had the unfortunate luck to be graduating college and going back into the civilian world during the 2008 crisis. So I got into the very first marketing job that it would actually even just take my interview. And they used to sell websites and SEO to real estate agents. That was actually where I got my start. And I spent the next six years of my life building my craft, learning about how to sell high ticket programs, learning about digital marketing and things like that. But that actually led me to starting my own agency in 2016. Now, 2016 to 2020 was pretty much I thought that my life had kind of organized itself out. And I had a two person team. We were running solar leads and solar appointments on residential homes. And when COVID happened, it totally took all of our clients ability to get into the home to do their job, and as a direct result, caused a lot of mayhem inside of the company that we had scaled to multiple six figures at that point.
Craig Andrews 02:16
Wow. Hang on, let's back up a little bit. So you got out of the Air Force in eight, nine, and you said you're graduating college. Were you going to college while you were in the Air Force?
Wayne Ledoux 02:29
Yeah, I was in the Air Force from 2004 to 2010, and the GI Bill allowed me to start college in 2006. And I also had credit from because F 16 avionics takes about a year and a half of school as well. What most people don't realize is you can actually apply those military credits to traditional college to accelerate how fast you can graduate from college. It's called clepping your stuff. But that said is that that was never the just I wanted to work for Boeing or Lockheed or one of those big corporations that fixed airplanes because I knew I could make six figures doing that. Unfortunately, when I chose to go from active duty to guard and just try to pursue civilian studies in order to kind of change my fortunes, for lack of a better term. It just so happened to coincide with the eight crisis. My wife and I moved to San Diego, and literally the first job that called me, I went for the interview and they hired me on the wow.
Craig Andrews 03:30
Wow. So when you were talking about working for Boeing or Lockheed, so I was in the Marines and I worked around Grumman Aircraft, but we worked with a lot of what we called tech reps, technical representatives from the companies, and they worked with the active duty military. Was that the type of thing you were looking at doing, or was it more working in the depot?
Wayne Ledoux 03:51
Yeah, I was trying to go get my amp license. And one thing that I found out when I came back, because at the time I was in California, but when I came back to California, the school that was at where my base was, where I came back to, they're like, hey, we can't teach you how to be an amp from here. So get you what's? Amp, aircraft, mechanical, something. It's basically so that that way you can be a mechanic on civilian aircraft. You have to have a license to do so. But the school that I went to, they said, hey, we can't teach you that here. And I said, Well, I'm kind of stuck here, so how do I make six figures? And they said, first thing they said is, you need to be an accountant. And I laughed, I said, that's not going to work. She said, I said, well, if I can't be an accountant, how do I make six figures? She said, you need to be in marketing. And I said, okay.
Craig Andrews 04:43
Interesting.
Wayne Ledoux 04:43
21 year old kid coming straight out of the military. I just didn't necessarily know what those consequences would have on my life. That said though, it ended up being the right choice for me.
Craig Andrews 04:57
So what was that first job that you got?
Wayne Ledoux 04:59
It was selling websites and SEO to real estate agents. I would literally cold call a real estate agent. And the company was actually an Ink 5000 company. 20 million, $30 million a year, all from cold calling.
Craig Andrews 05:12
Wow.
Wayne Ledoux 05:12
And what they would do is they would bring in 2030 people at a time. They would train us on their specific sales process, and they would give us 90 days to learn it. The deal was if you met your metrics and your numbers, within 90 days, they would actually keep you and you would have a long term job. If you didn't, they would show you the door and you could go back to doing whatever you were doing. That's why I took the job. It's because I thought, hey, if I fail, I'll just go back to school. And then the plan is still the plan. Yeah, now they should have fired me because I sold two websites on my last month of the 90 day trial, but they didn't. What happened was the guy that hired me said, hey, look, if you can fix planes, you can do this job. I'm going to change your coach. I'm going to give you some one on one attention. The next month, I sold 23. Wow. I never looked back.
Craig Andrews 06:04
So what was that difference? What was the difference that made that that moved you from two to 23?
Wayne Ledoux 06:10
Honestly, it was a difference in personal coaching. Now, I talk about the solar industry, but as of today, in 2023, moving into 2024, we serve the high ticket coaching space. That said is that I'm really a big fan of the idea of the right coach for the right things at the right time. And that was one of the biggest differences that made it for me, was we just switched the type of person that was teaching me how to perform the tasks. We provided a certain level of personal service. And that 21 year old kid who had never sold a thing in his life became a top producer for six years at that company.
Craig Andrews 06:52
And there's something really key that you just brought out there. It's really about having the right coach. It's about having the right combination. Just because somebody isn't performing doesn't mean they're not capable. There's something missing in the mix.
Wayne Ledoux 07:10
100%, Greg. 100%. And I just didn't know it because I was basically thrown into a foreign land. When I called my parents to tell them that I had this job, the response was not necessarily positive. So that background reinforced the fact that that whole sales and marketing thing being a negative type of profession, my background comes from that type of mentality. So it was a complete mind shift change from actually embracing the success that can come from sales and actually understanding the psychology that goes behind some of the methodologies and some of the reasons that people say what they say when they're on the phone. It was fascinating.
Craig Andrews 07:52
So would you say that was the difference was the first coach was just telling you what to do, the second coach was telling you why?
Wayne Ledoux 08:00
100%. He gave me the why behind it. And when the why happened, it changed everything for me.
Craig Andrews 08:06
And it's so fascinating that people miss that. I think so many leaders miss that. I would call it old school management. Don't ask me why. Go do that's your job. Your job is to do. I'll figure out the why. But if the goal is to really get the most out of people, people understand why they're doing what they're doing.
Wayne Ledoux 08:31
And our best rep right now is almost the exact same way as I was. She performs ten times better when I just spend an extra five minutes telling her why, and she becomes the person that I don't need to manage. She's our best person.
Craig Andrews 08:51
Interesting. So in that I hear that.
Wayne Ledoux 08:57
You.
Craig Andrews 08:57
Have a variety of talent on your team that responds to different type of stimulus.
Wayne Ledoux 09:01
Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry.
Craig Andrews 09:05
Yeah, expand out on that.
Wayne Ledoux 09:09
The girl that I mentioned, she's heavily involved in the design work and some of our content and taking a lot of the long form stuff that I do and turning it and repurposing it into other assets. She comes from more of a customer service background and more of a middle management style background. And I think that because of that background and because of where she's been in her previous position, in order to build quality content, she needs to understand the full story. And I think there's a lot of people behind that. Whereas with somebody that's my video editor. I love him, he's been with us for a year. He doesn't need to understand it. He's a very visual person. And as soon as you show him that 1 minute clip or that 1 minute thing or that 15 minutes thing, he just has it visually embedded into his brain and then he's able to bring us a final product at the end. So two people that are very similar and work very closely together but view things very differently.
Craig Andrews 10:10
Yeah. So I guess another takeaway that we have here is in leading your team, what works for one doesn't work for everyone.
Wayne Ledoux 10:20
Yeah. And I think that was the biggest difference for me in taking it from being literally the worst person on a 100 person sales team this guy right here, to being the top producer for consistently six years straight. That company sent me on two different cruises. That company paid for so much stuff and the birth of my son, all because I was the top producer at that company for several.
Craig Andrews 10:47
So in the midst of all this, you're married, you have a son, and you're trying to so where was your son born in this whole journey?
Wayne Ledoux 10:58
Okay, so here's where the funny story and the little twist for my own unique part comes in, Craig, is when I got that job in 2009, right, my wife, she was working at Victoria's Secret. She was a manager person out of Victoria's Secret and retail. She worked nights, I worked days. What I came to realize over my work by being an employee there is that customer service and retail is very similar to customer service in an Internet company. And I said, hey, we never see each other if I got you an interview, do you think you could do that? So not only did we get her the interview, but we got her hired six months later. She was the manager of the entire customer service department.
Craig Andrews 11:42
Wow.
Wayne Ledoux 11:43
Okay. So in 2016, when I chose to leave the corporate world and I chose to start to chase my dream of being an entrepreneur, which would have never happened had that coach not opened my eyes to what's possible and changed the way that I viewed things. Right. But when I chose to leave my job and after we had scaled to six figures, my wife was still the manager of that customer service department and was pregnant with my son. So when she had my son, I told her, hey, don't work for anybody else anymore. Come and be part of the Mayhem Team and help me build this to seven figures.
Craig Andrews 12:19
Wow, that's bold.
Wayne Ledoux 12:23
Yeah, I'm nothing if not bold. Craig.
Craig Andrews 12:28
So anyway, so you start the solar company. What you're doing is basically you're booking leads for solar installers, is that right?
Wayne Ledoux 12:37
Correct.
Craig Andrews 12:38
And then 2020 comes around, COVID hits what happens?
Wayne Ledoux 12:46
Literally the week before that call came in to say, hey, come pick up your son from school, I had brought on a men's marriage coach who I still work with today. He was like, hey, Wayne. He was just frustrated with everything that he was doing. He said, Wayne, I'm just really sick of my current marketing company. I'm plateaued. I've made ten or 15 grand every single month, and I can't seem to get past that with where my current company is. And I said to him, I said, I don't even know if what I do will work for what you do. I've done this for real estate, business to business loans and solar. And being a coach is completely different. But I showed him our methodology. I showed him the digital newspaper that we build. I showed all that stuff, and he's like, hey, I got nothing to lose. So he came aboard, had his 1st 30K month, a week before that phone call happened.
Craig Andrews 13:38
Yeah. And so I think some folks are missing what happened with your son in school.
Wayne Ledoux 13:43
He got pulled out of school because.
Craig Andrews 13:44
Of COVID Oh, okay.
Wayne Ledoux 13:47
Yeah. So before COVID my son was born in 2016, right after I started the business. The only way that it worked is because my wife was working at the job. That was the manager job, and I had scaled the multi six figures.
Craig Andrews 14:02
Yeah.
Wayne Ledoux 14:04
My life was set according to what Wayne thought. For the next 20 or 30 years, we were just going to run the agency, run solar leads, sell the service, and build the team. That was it. And then my son literally had just started kindergarten when COVID happened. Okay, so son started kindergarten. We started working with this men's marriage coach. COVID happened, and then the phone calls started coming in saying, hey, Wayne, we can't get into the homes. We've got to pause. Hey, Wayne, how do you expect us to sell the solar when we can't do the home inspection? Hey, Wayne, we got to not do this for the next couple of months. We don't know when this is going to end. So I had to make a choice, leverage the win that we had with the coach, and completely shift the business model away from solar and roofing and home services, which is all we knew.
Craig Andrews 15:03
Right.
Wayne Ledoux 15:05
And we just took a leap into coaching.
Craig Andrews 15:09
So what did that look like? Where did you find your clients?
Wayne Ledoux 15:15
How did you take? Yeah, by that point we had some funds and we had some things going. And so the first methodology was through Ads. Traditionally, we've been utilizing Facebook ads and Instagram ads up to that point, but that was where we got our first couple clients. Now, as you probably know, ad costs started to rise exponentially also at that same time. So what we also did is we invented a cold email process that switches the proxies and switches the senders and switches the email addresses. And we integrated that into the business as a secondary channel to generate new business. And we just started scraping LinkedIn
Wayne Ledoux 15:57
up to this day, it's three years later. Now, we've been using cold email along with Ads, and when you combine those two strategies together,
Wayne Ledoux 16:08
as long as you got back end systems and automations to actually set that stuff up to make sure you're not having leads fall through the cracks, that combination is lethal. Well, not in a good way, I hope.
Craig Andrews 16:22
Yeah. Now, LinkedIn is a little touchy about having their site scraped. How do you get around that?
Wayne Ledoux 16:28
There's actually several data companies that have direct partnerships with them. You can pull the data like we started with D Seven. There's also a couple of tools that you can purchase for a one time investment. I forget. The one that we just purchased a few days ago is Lead Sniper is another one that's got a direct integration that pulls directly from them. And then Lead Leaper actually is another version as well. They're all third party. I don't have any affiliations with them. I've just used them as well, and it's all been great. You combine that with a fourth service called Ulink that links directly with their API, and you can automate the message sending as well.
Craig Andrews 17:14
Very cool. So from the time you started the Pivot at the beginning of COVID to the time it was running, how long did that take?
Wayne Ledoux 17:22
Three months.
Craig Andrews 17:24
That's fast?
Wayne Ledoux 17:27
Literally. Craig all I did was I applied what I knew from the other industries I had worked in and applied it with the messaging, the offer, and the strategy that worked in the other industries. That's the thing, is, when it comes to lead generation, I'm not talking ecom because I've done a couple of ecom things, and ecom is a completely different animal. But when it comes to high ticket services, anything that's over $1,000, you change the offer, you change the audience, and you change the messaging and you put it into the same type of system that any one of those things builds, and you will generate leads and appointments. You will.
Craig Andrews 18:08
Wow.
Wayne Ledoux 18:09
Now, how strong is your messaging? How strong is your offer? Those are two big variables that go into the strategy. Right. But at the end of the day, I can literally take four words out of my cold email script, replace them with four other pieces of jargon that happen in a different industry and still generate leads and appointments. We did it just this past month with coaches and then in the med spa industry just to see if it would work, and it does.
Craig Andrews 18:42
Cool. So who are the type of people you're helping most right now?
Wayne Ledoux 18:46
Still? Coaches? Yeah. I explore a lot of other niches because in 2021, actually, I got invited to a community of entrepreneurs called the Blocks. It's on Amazon Prime now, and it's just a bunch of startup people that are going through a business accelerator that they record. It's really cool. It was a lot of fun.
Craig Andrews 19:06
Yeah.
Wayne Ledoux 19:08
And through that we've done coaches, med, spas, real estate people, handyman, spirituality people, a lot of stuff. But I always say this if you don't understand marketing enough to do it simply, you're not good enough to do it at scale.
Craig Andrews 19:26
Wow. That's a golden nugget right there. Let's dig into that. What's an example of what not simple looks like? Where do you see people doing something not simple?
Wayne Ledoux 19:40
I see them doing something simple or something not simple by having these huge long ascension funnels. Like, you'll see the people that sell the thing for $7, and then the next thing you know, it's 197. And then they've got the cross sell where they're going to tack on another $50, and then they're going to send you into their group. Because all that really does is, number one, it fragments the solution that you provide, making it so that that way it's not as complete solution. So people don't get the results, so they don't come back to you. Right. Or number two is they make things too long. They don't incentivize their people to come back for the content. And what they do is they sell the content itself and they sell the information. They don't sell the implementation. You can actually sell something that's a much, much higher ticket with a very simple ad or cold email to a landing page solution. And I've even seen some of the thought leaders today do it straight to a Google Doc. Then you tie in the backend automations with emails and text messages and now you tie in AI and chat bots and you can sell high ticket programs very simply, very easily, changing out a few different simple sentences and talking specifically to the audience using the jargon and the knowledge that they use, not what you've used. And a story.
Craig Andrews 21:06
Wow. As we're kind of winding down, you had two kind of defining times in your career. One was looking for a job in eight during the Great Recession, and then the other was having your business model blown up by COVID. And both times you had to kind of sort your way through there's a lot of people that are struggling right now. They're looking at this economy. They're not sure how to react to it. What advice would you give them today?
Wayne Ledoux 21:39
Get creative with your pricing structures. Because that's the thing, is that throughout all of those challenges, Craig, I never changed the model itself. It was always super simple forms or phone calls to connect the person that has the problem with the person that has the solution, nurturing and sequences to build the relationship, and automations to close the deal. Never changed any of that at all. Yeah, but what I did do is I changed the messaging, and I did market research, and I did my market research quickly. You got to remember there's a saying that I heard in some entrepreneur movie somewhere slow is smooth, smooth is fast. I did my research, and I did it so that that way I could deliver what I researched to my audience smoothly. And when my research aligned with what they were seeing in the marketplace, then we moved fast.
Craig Andrews 22:44
I like, So, where do you go for your market research?
Wayne Ledoux 22:50
I mean, Google, I do a lot on Reddit, so Reddit's a great resource. People think it's, like, a weird thing that's only for weirdos and Internet trolls. No, it's got a lot of great information on it and a lot of huge communities that are super, super helpful. So I'm digging into Reddit right now. And the thing about it, too, is that everybody wants to take a complete idea from somebody else and turn it into their own idea. No, if you do the research properly, you can break it down to its most basic parts and then reorganize it in a way that's totally yours. You're just not doing the research properly on the front end so you don't break it down far enough to make it.
Wayne Ledoux 23:36
And and that's kind of where the Air Force and the military mind and my experience with airplanes. I can take stuff apart, and I can put it back together in my brain. It almost happens like a map.
Craig Andrews 23:48
Very cool.
Wayne Ledoux 23:48
I can see very big pieces and how it breaks down to its each individual parts. It's like my little superpower.
Craig Andrews 23:55
Well, that's certainly been a valuable skill for you over the years. Well, Wayne, this has been such fascinating discussion. I appreciate you coming on. Leaders and legacies. How can people reach you?
Wayne Ledoux 24:08
I'm easiest to find on Facebook and Instagram. So either Mayhem Digital official or Mr. Mayhem official. All of my platforms say that one of those two things, depending on if the Mayhem Digital was available or not. Apparently, I was onto something with that Fight Club feel of the words, so somebody already took that one from me years and years and years ago before I even had the idea.
Craig Andrews 24:31
Yeah. Wow. So, once again, that's Mayhem, mayhem Digital.
Wayne Ledoux 24:37
Official or or Mayhem official, depending on what was available.
Craig Andrews 24:41
Okay.
Wayne Ledoux 24:42
All right.
Craig Andrews 24:42
Well, Wayne, thanks again for being on leaders and Legacies.
Wayne Ledoux 24:46
Thank you so much, Craig. I appreciate it.
Today I want to welcome Wayne Ledux. He is the co owner of Mayhem Digital Media. They provide done for you solutions for high ticket coaches and course creators in the digital marketing space. But his beginnings were born out of the chaos of COVID and that was where the very name Mayhem Digital Media came from. Wayne has a fascinating story that he's here to share today, going all the way back to the Air Force. Wayne, welcome.
Wayne Ledoux 00:47
Thanks for having me, Craig. I really appreciate you spending some time.
Craig Andrews 00:50
Yeah. So let's start back at the Air Force. What led you to the Air Force? What did you do?
Wayne Ledoux 00:56
Well, I actually used to fix F 16s in the United States Air Force. So navigations, weapons delivery, computer, basically the brains of the aircraft. And back before I got into the marketing and sales space, I thought that I was going to work for Boeing or Lockheed or something like that. But I had the unfortunate luck to be graduating college and going back into the civilian world during the 2008 crisis. So I got into the very first marketing job that it would actually even just take my interview. And they used to sell websites and SEO to real estate agents. That was actually where I got my start. And I spent the next six years of my life building my craft, learning about how to sell high ticket programs, learning about digital marketing and things like that. But that actually led me to starting my own agency in 2016. Now, 2016 to 2020 was pretty much I thought that my life had kind of organized itself out. And I had a two person team. We were running solar leads and solar appointments on residential homes. And when COVID happened, it totally took all of our clients ability to get into the home to do their job, and as a direct result, caused a lot of mayhem inside of the company that we had scaled to multiple six figures at that point.
Craig Andrews 02:16
Wow. Hang on, let's back up a little bit. So you got out of the Air Force in eight, nine, and you said you're graduating college. Were you going to college while you were in the Air Force?
Wayne Ledoux 02:29
Yeah, I was in the Air Force from 2004 to 2010, and the GI Bill allowed me to start college in 2006. And I also had credit from because F 16 avionics takes about a year and a half of school as well. What most people don't realize is you can actually apply those military credits to traditional college to accelerate how fast you can graduate from college. It's called clepping your stuff. But that said is that that was never the just I wanted to work for Boeing or Lockheed or one of those big corporations that fixed airplanes because I knew I could make six figures doing that. Unfortunately, when I chose to go from active duty to guard and just try to pursue civilian studies in order to kind of change my fortunes, for lack of a better term. It just so happened to coincide with the eight crisis. My wife and I moved to San Diego, and literally the first job that called me, I went for the interview and they hired me on the wow.
Craig Andrews 03:30
Wow. So when you were talking about working for Boeing or Lockheed, so I was in the Marines and I worked around Grumman Aircraft, but we worked with a lot of what we called tech reps, technical representatives from the companies, and they worked with the active duty military. Was that the type of thing you were looking at doing, or was it more working in the depot?
Wayne Ledoux 03:51
Yeah, I was trying to go get my amp license. And one thing that I found out when I came back, because at the time I was in California, but when I came back to California, the school that was at where my base was, where I came back to, they're like, hey, we can't teach you how to be an amp from here. So get you what's? Amp, aircraft, mechanical, something. It's basically so that that way you can be a mechanic on civilian aircraft. You have to have a license to do so. But the school that I went to, they said, hey, we can't teach you that here. And I said, Well, I'm kind of stuck here, so how do I make six figures? And they said, first thing they said is, you need to be an accountant. And I laughed, I said, that's not going to work. She said, I said, well, if I can't be an accountant, how do I make six figures? She said, you need to be in marketing. And I said, okay.
Craig Andrews 04:43
Interesting.
Wayne Ledoux 04:43
21 year old kid coming straight out of the military. I just didn't necessarily know what those consequences would have on my life. That said though, it ended up being the right choice for me.
Craig Andrews 04:57
So what was that first job that you got?
Wayne Ledoux 04:59
It was selling websites and SEO to real estate agents. I would literally cold call a real estate agent. And the company was actually an Ink 5000 company. 20 million, $30 million a year, all from cold calling.
Craig Andrews 05:12
Wow.
Wayne Ledoux 05:12
And what they would do is they would bring in 2030 people at a time. They would train us on their specific sales process, and they would give us 90 days to learn it. The deal was if you met your metrics and your numbers, within 90 days, they would actually keep you and you would have a long term job. If you didn't, they would show you the door and you could go back to doing whatever you were doing. That's why I took the job. It's because I thought, hey, if I fail, I'll just go back to school. And then the plan is still the plan. Yeah, now they should have fired me because I sold two websites on my last month of the 90 day trial, but they didn't. What happened was the guy that hired me said, hey, look, if you can fix planes, you can do this job. I'm going to change your coach. I'm going to give you some one on one attention. The next month, I sold 23. Wow. I never looked back.
Craig Andrews 06:04
So what was that difference? What was the difference that made that that moved you from two to 23?
Wayne Ledoux 06:10
Honestly, it was a difference in personal coaching. Now, I talk about the solar industry, but as of today, in 2023, moving into 2024, we serve the high ticket coaching space. That said is that I'm really a big fan of the idea of the right coach for the right things at the right time. And that was one of the biggest differences that made it for me, was we just switched the type of person that was teaching me how to perform the tasks. We provided a certain level of personal service. And that 21 year old kid who had never sold a thing in his life became a top producer for six years at that company.
Craig Andrews 06:52
And there's something really key that you just brought out there. It's really about having the right coach. It's about having the right combination. Just because somebody isn't performing doesn't mean they're not capable. There's something missing in the mix.
Wayne Ledoux 07:10
100%, Greg. 100%. And I just didn't know it because I was basically thrown into a foreign land. When I called my parents to tell them that I had this job, the response was not necessarily positive. So that background reinforced the fact that that whole sales and marketing thing being a negative type of profession, my background comes from that type of mentality. So it was a complete mind shift change from actually embracing the success that can come from sales and actually understanding the psychology that goes behind some of the methodologies and some of the reasons that people say what they say when they're on the phone. It was fascinating.
Craig Andrews 07:52
So would you say that was the difference was the first coach was just telling you what to do, the second coach was telling you why?
Wayne Ledoux 08:00
100%. He gave me the why behind it. And when the why happened, it changed everything for me.
Craig Andrews 08:06
And it's so fascinating that people miss that. I think so many leaders miss that. I would call it old school management. Don't ask me why. Go do that's your job. Your job is to do. I'll figure out the why. But if the goal is to really get the most out of people, people understand why they're doing what they're doing.
Wayne Ledoux 08:31
And our best rep right now is almost the exact same way as I was. She performs ten times better when I just spend an extra five minutes telling her why, and she becomes the person that I don't need to manage. She's our best person.
Craig Andrews 08:51
Interesting. So in that I hear that.
Wayne Ledoux 08:57
You.
Craig Andrews 08:57
Have a variety of talent on your team that responds to different type of stimulus.
Wayne Ledoux 09:01
Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry.
Craig Andrews 09:05
Yeah, expand out on that.
Wayne Ledoux 09:09
The girl that I mentioned, she's heavily involved in the design work and some of our content and taking a lot of the long form stuff that I do and turning it and repurposing it into other assets. She comes from more of a customer service background and more of a middle management style background. And I think that because of that background and because of where she's been in her previous position, in order to build quality content, she needs to understand the full story. And I think there's a lot of people behind that. Whereas with somebody that's my video editor. I love him, he's been with us for a year. He doesn't need to understand it. He's a very visual person. And as soon as you show him that 1 minute clip or that 1 minute thing or that 15 minutes thing, he just has it visually embedded into his brain and then he's able to bring us a final product at the end. So two people that are very similar and work very closely together but view things very differently.
Craig Andrews 10:10
Yeah. So I guess another takeaway that we have here is in leading your team, what works for one doesn't work for everyone.
Wayne Ledoux 10:20
Yeah. And I think that was the biggest difference for me in taking it from being literally the worst person on a 100 person sales team this guy right here, to being the top producer for consistently six years straight. That company sent me on two different cruises. That company paid for so much stuff and the birth of my son, all because I was the top producer at that company for several.
Craig Andrews 10:47
So in the midst of all this, you're married, you have a son, and you're trying to so where was your son born in this whole journey?
Wayne Ledoux 10:58
Okay, so here's where the funny story and the little twist for my own unique part comes in, Craig, is when I got that job in 2009, right, my wife, she was working at Victoria's Secret. She was a manager person out of Victoria's Secret and retail. She worked nights, I worked days. What I came to realize over my work by being an employee there is that customer service and retail is very similar to customer service in an Internet company. And I said, hey, we never see each other if I got you an interview, do you think you could do that? So not only did we get her the interview, but we got her hired six months later. She was the manager of the entire customer service department.
Craig Andrews 11:42
Wow.
Wayne Ledoux 11:43
Okay. So in 2016, when I chose to leave the corporate world and I chose to start to chase my dream of being an entrepreneur, which would have never happened had that coach not opened my eyes to what's possible and changed the way that I viewed things. Right. But when I chose to leave my job and after we had scaled to six figures, my wife was still the manager of that customer service department and was pregnant with my son. So when she had my son, I told her, hey, don't work for anybody else anymore. Come and be part of the Mayhem Team and help me build this to seven figures.
Craig Andrews 12:19
Wow, that's bold.
Wayne Ledoux 12:23
Yeah, I'm nothing if not bold. Craig.
Craig Andrews 12:28
So anyway, so you start the solar company. What you're doing is basically you're booking leads for solar installers, is that right?
Wayne Ledoux 12:37
Correct.
Craig Andrews 12:38
And then 2020 comes around, COVID hits what happens?
Wayne Ledoux 12:46
Literally the week before that call came in to say, hey, come pick up your son from school, I had brought on a men's marriage coach who I still work with today. He was like, hey, Wayne. He was just frustrated with everything that he was doing. He said, Wayne, I'm just really sick of my current marketing company. I'm plateaued. I've made ten or 15 grand every single month, and I can't seem to get past that with where my current company is. And I said to him, I said, I don't even know if what I do will work for what you do. I've done this for real estate, business to business loans and solar. And being a coach is completely different. But I showed him our methodology. I showed him the digital newspaper that we build. I showed all that stuff, and he's like, hey, I got nothing to lose. So he came aboard, had his 1st 30K month, a week before that phone call happened.
Craig Andrews 13:38
Yeah. And so I think some folks are missing what happened with your son in school.
Wayne Ledoux 13:43
He got pulled out of school because.
Craig Andrews 13:44
Of COVID Oh, okay.
Wayne Ledoux 13:47
Yeah. So before COVID my son was born in 2016, right after I started the business. The only way that it worked is because my wife was working at the job. That was the manager job, and I had scaled the multi six figures.
Craig Andrews 14:02
Yeah.
Wayne Ledoux 14:04
My life was set according to what Wayne thought. For the next 20 or 30 years, we were just going to run the agency, run solar leads, sell the service, and build the team. That was it. And then my son literally had just started kindergarten when COVID happened. Okay, so son started kindergarten. We started working with this men's marriage coach. COVID happened, and then the phone calls started coming in saying, hey, Wayne, we can't get into the homes. We've got to pause. Hey, Wayne, how do you expect us to sell the solar when we can't do the home inspection? Hey, Wayne, we got to not do this for the next couple of months. We don't know when this is going to end. So I had to make a choice, leverage the win that we had with the coach, and completely shift the business model away from solar and roofing and home services, which is all we knew.
Craig Andrews 15:03
Right.
Wayne Ledoux 15:05
And we just took a leap into coaching.
Craig Andrews 15:09
So what did that look like? Where did you find your clients?
Wayne Ledoux 15:15
How did you take? Yeah, by that point we had some funds and we had some things going. And so the first methodology was through Ads. Traditionally, we've been utilizing Facebook ads and Instagram ads up to that point, but that was where we got our first couple clients. Now, as you probably know, ad costs started to rise exponentially also at that same time. So what we also did is we invented a cold email process that switches the proxies and switches the senders and switches the email addresses. And we integrated that into the business as a secondary channel to generate new business. And we just started scraping LinkedIn
Wayne Ledoux 15:57
up to this day, it's three years later. Now, we've been using cold email along with Ads, and when you combine those two strategies together,
Wayne Ledoux 16:08
as long as you got back end systems and automations to actually set that stuff up to make sure you're not having leads fall through the cracks, that combination is lethal. Well, not in a good way, I hope.
Craig Andrews 16:22
Yeah. Now, LinkedIn is a little touchy about having their site scraped. How do you get around that?
Wayne Ledoux 16:28
There's actually several data companies that have direct partnerships with them. You can pull the data like we started with D Seven. There's also a couple of tools that you can purchase for a one time investment. I forget. The one that we just purchased a few days ago is Lead Sniper is another one that's got a direct integration that pulls directly from them. And then Lead Leaper actually is another version as well. They're all third party. I don't have any affiliations with them. I've just used them as well, and it's all been great. You combine that with a fourth service called Ulink that links directly with their API, and you can automate the message sending as well.
Craig Andrews 17:14
Very cool. So from the time you started the Pivot at the beginning of COVID to the time it was running, how long did that take?
Wayne Ledoux 17:22
Three months.
Craig Andrews 17:24
That's fast?
Wayne Ledoux 17:27
Literally. Craig all I did was I applied what I knew from the other industries I had worked in and applied it with the messaging, the offer, and the strategy that worked in the other industries. That's the thing, is, when it comes to lead generation, I'm not talking ecom because I've done a couple of ecom things, and ecom is a completely different animal. But when it comes to high ticket services, anything that's over $1,000, you change the offer, you change the audience, and you change the messaging and you put it into the same type of system that any one of those things builds, and you will generate leads and appointments. You will.
Craig Andrews 18:08
Wow.
Wayne Ledoux 18:09
Now, how strong is your messaging? How strong is your offer? Those are two big variables that go into the strategy. Right. But at the end of the day, I can literally take four words out of my cold email script, replace them with four other pieces of jargon that happen in a different industry and still generate leads and appointments. We did it just this past month with coaches and then in the med spa industry just to see if it would work, and it does.
Craig Andrews 18:42
Cool. So who are the type of people you're helping most right now?
Wayne Ledoux 18:46
Still? Coaches? Yeah. I explore a lot of other niches because in 2021, actually, I got invited to a community of entrepreneurs called the Blocks. It's on Amazon Prime now, and it's just a bunch of startup people that are going through a business accelerator that they record. It's really cool. It was a lot of fun.
Craig Andrews 19:06
Yeah.
Wayne Ledoux 19:08
And through that we've done coaches, med, spas, real estate people, handyman, spirituality people, a lot of stuff. But I always say this if you don't understand marketing enough to do it simply, you're not good enough to do it at scale.
Craig Andrews 19:26
Wow. That's a golden nugget right there. Let's dig into that. What's an example of what not simple looks like? Where do you see people doing something not simple?
Wayne Ledoux 19:40
I see them doing something simple or something not simple by having these huge long ascension funnels. Like, you'll see the people that sell the thing for $7, and then the next thing you know, it's 197. And then they've got the cross sell where they're going to tack on another $50, and then they're going to send you into their group. Because all that really does is, number one, it fragments the solution that you provide, making it so that that way it's not as complete solution. So people don't get the results, so they don't come back to you. Right. Or number two is they make things too long. They don't incentivize their people to come back for the content. And what they do is they sell the content itself and they sell the information. They don't sell the implementation. You can actually sell something that's a much, much higher ticket with a very simple ad or cold email to a landing page solution. And I've even seen some of the thought leaders today do it straight to a Google Doc. Then you tie in the backend automations with emails and text messages and now you tie in AI and chat bots and you can sell high ticket programs very simply, very easily, changing out a few different simple sentences and talking specifically to the audience using the jargon and the knowledge that they use, not what you've used. And a story.
Craig Andrews 21:06
Wow. As we're kind of winding down, you had two kind of defining times in your career. One was looking for a job in eight during the Great Recession, and then the other was having your business model blown up by COVID. And both times you had to kind of sort your way through there's a lot of people that are struggling right now. They're looking at this economy. They're not sure how to react to it. What advice would you give them today?
Wayne Ledoux 21:39
Get creative with your pricing structures. Because that's the thing, is that throughout all of those challenges, Craig, I never changed the model itself. It was always super simple forms or phone calls to connect the person that has the problem with the person that has the solution, nurturing and sequences to build the relationship, and automations to close the deal. Never changed any of that at all. Yeah, but what I did do is I changed the messaging, and I did market research, and I did my market research quickly. You got to remember there's a saying that I heard in some entrepreneur movie somewhere slow is smooth, smooth is fast. I did my research, and I did it so that that way I could deliver what I researched to my audience smoothly. And when my research aligned with what they were seeing in the marketplace, then we moved fast.
Craig Andrews 22:44
I like, So, where do you go for your market research?
Wayne Ledoux 22:50
I mean, Google, I do a lot on Reddit, so Reddit's a great resource. People think it's, like, a weird thing that's only for weirdos and Internet trolls. No, it's got a lot of great information on it and a lot of huge communities that are super, super helpful. So I'm digging into Reddit right now. And the thing about it, too, is that everybody wants to take a complete idea from somebody else and turn it into their own idea. No, if you do the research properly, you can break it down to its most basic parts and then reorganize it in a way that's totally yours. You're just not doing the research properly on the front end so you don't break it down far enough to make it.
Wayne Ledoux 23:36
And and that's kind of where the Air Force and the military mind and my experience with airplanes. I can take stuff apart, and I can put it back together in my brain. It almost happens like a map.
Craig Andrews 23:48
Very cool.
Wayne Ledoux 23:48
I can see very big pieces and how it breaks down to its each individual parts. It's like my little superpower.
Craig Andrews 23:55
Well, that's certainly been a valuable skill for you over the years. Well, Wayne, this has been such fascinating discussion. I appreciate you coming on. Leaders and legacies. How can people reach you?
Wayne Ledoux 24:08
I'm easiest to find on Facebook and Instagram. So either Mayhem Digital official or Mr. Mayhem official. All of my platforms say that one of those two things, depending on if the Mayhem Digital was available or not. Apparently, I was onto something with that Fight Club feel of the words, so somebody already took that one from me years and years and years ago before I even had the idea.
Craig Andrews 24:31
Yeah. Wow. So, once again, that's Mayhem, mayhem Digital.
Wayne Ledoux 24:37
Official or or Mayhem official, depending on what was available.
Craig Andrews 24:41
Okay.
Wayne Ledoux 24:42
All right.
Craig Andrews 24:42
Well, Wayne, thanks again for being on leaders and Legacies.
Wayne Ledoux 24:46
Thank you so much, Craig. I appreciate it.
