Editor:
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Editor:
Today, I am thrilled to have Shawn Casey join us, a former lawyer who made the bold leap from corporate America into the dynamic world of marketing. Based in Georgia in the southern U.S., Shawn has not only transitioned careers, but has also carved out a niche for himself in some truly unique markets. He’s also the mastermind behind webfire.com, which I’m sure we’ll talk about where he offers tools and strategies that help businesses get seen online.
Shawn, thank you for joining us today.
Shawn Casey:
Welcome. Glad to be here.
Editor:
Well, I can’t wait to dive in, so let me start by asking what motivated you to leave your career as a lawyer to enter the world of marketing?
Shawn Casey:
Well, that’s actually pretty simple, and if you talk to a lot of lawyers or barristers in England, then it’s not any fun in most cases. People only come to you as a lawyer like, “I got hit by a car,” “Somebody died,” “I’m getting divorced,” it’s generally something bad happened. “I got screwed in a business deal.” You’re not dealing with happy people, you’re having a positive impact by trying to solve their problem, but it’s just not a happy time and very negative energy. So it wasn’t hard to convince me that I should be doing something else.
But I was fortunate, early nineties I guess, to start working with a guy named Ron LeGrand. There was a gentleman named Ernie Kessler who said, “Hey, I need somebody to speak at a conference in Washington, D.C.” I lived in Pittsburgh at the time and he said, “I just need somebody to talk on a legal topic.”
So, I went down, my wife and I, to D.C. on the July 4th Independence Day weekend and spoke at this event and afterwards, people are coming up saying, “Hey, listen, do you have a course that you can… So, I know how to do this legal stuff for my real estate investments.”
And I said, “No.”
I met Ron LeGrand there and I think I’d met him one time before at something in Pittsburgh and he said, “You need to make a course and if you make a course, I’ll let you speak at my events and sell it.”
I went home and created an information product, and this is the days when you had a physical printed manual and you had a little square, three and a half inch or whatever, floppy disc and you had cassette tapes.
We’d cart these things to events and speak at events and that’s when I started selling directly to consumers and business owners information products. That was my first foray.
And that led in 1995. I then moved down to Jacksonville, Florida, became a part owner and the CEO of Ron’s company teaching entrepreneurs and real estate investors all over America how to do it, what to do, how to grow their business, how to protect their business, and everything else.
That’s how I got out of practising law and transitioned into marketing and the business of direct response marketing.
Editor:
Wow. Can you remember how long it took you to put that first course together?
Shawn Casey:
Well, I don’t know. It was miserable.
Creating products is to me like pulling teeth. People who want to be writers I think, God bless you, someone has to write all the great content, but I would gladly never do that again and have since created many courses and all of them I think are a lot of work, but having to physically type and write? Talking isn’t bad. And now of course you can talk, record, get it transcribed instantly, and have a huge amount of content to start with. I’m much better at talking than I am at sitting there thinking about the next sentence. That’s brutal.
Editor:
I understand. It is amazing how things have moved forward in such a relatively short period of time.
You mentioned the physical products, the big folders I guess that you had to ship out as well. Do you ever get reminiscent about those days or are you really glad that now everything can be delivered online?
Shawn Casey:
I’m really glad it can be delivered online.
Shawn Casey:
And the other thing was at the time, so really this predates [inaudible 00:04:04] seminars when I was doing this, and the only way to connect other than a one-on-one phone call with customers really or a small conference call was to physically go have an event in a city. That meant I was on the road two or three weeks out of every month seeing customers, speaking at events, delivering follow up three-day training events and that’s just…
For those people who have actually done that, it’s not as much fun as it sounds because you’re not on vacation. You’re just literally in an airport, in an airport, in a hotel, in an airport, in an airport, home, and back out again.
Now, you can deliver the same thing eventually on teleseminar, which were an amazing thing at the time and then…
And for those of you that are too young to know what a teleseminar is, that’s where people get on the telephone and connect up and it’s just audio only, there’s no webinar component or Zoom or Skype or anything else that everybody’s used to now, but that didn’t exist back then.
And then webinars came in and that was completely amazing that you could show your PowerPoint presentation and your content to people. And now, of course, you can stream live video. It’s really a lot of changes.
Editor:
I can imagine.
Going from a lawyer into this scary world of marketing, did you ever have any doubts that you were maybe moving in the wrong direction or perhaps even in the right direction?
Shawn Casey:
Well, I never had any doubts I was moving in the right direction as much as that the transition required thinking differently.
When you go to law school, they just pound it. You got to think logically, take emotion out of it. And really selling is all about emotion. It’s not about A plus B equals C. It’s if you’re experiencing and suffering from A and you would like to get to B, then our product C can help you transition from A to B.
Shawn Casey:
It’s such a different thing and there’s so much emotion and different way to look at things. I constantly have to remind myself of that because there are times that I would sum up someone’s entire thing that they’re trying to do for one of our consulting clients and be like, “Look, it’s just this.” And then I have to go back and go, “Okay. Let me give you the 10-minute explanation, but the summation is three sentences,” but I’ve got to work them through the emotions of it as well as helping them work that for their clients.
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