249: Small Business Advisors | Prosper Taruvinga Shares His Controversial Million Dollar Marketing Strategy

Transcript

Welcome back to Season 20 of the Business Infrastructure podcast. This season features twelve different small business advisors, each of whom is tasked with sharing actionable tips, tactics, and strategies to cure various back-office challenges that you might be experiencing in your small business. And this episode will not disappoint you!

This episode is underwritten by Equilibria, Inc. the company behind this podcast where we design scale-ready business infrastructure for fast-growing small businesses.

Our featured small business advisor joining us today does so from all the way down under in Melbourne, Australia. He’s the Founder and CEO of Livelong Digital, a digital marketing agency with a proven formula for scaling revenue from $200,000 to $2M, specifically for business coaches and consultants. How? Well, that’s what you’re about to find out.

This is Episode 249 – Prosper Taruvinga Shares His Controversial Million-Dollar Marketing Strategy.

My name is Prosper Taruvinga and I’m based in Melbourne, Australia, and I’m the founder and CEO of a digital agency called Livelong Digital.

I’m super pleased to be here. I’m basically a digital marketing strategist, and I get hired by coaches and consultants to successfully help them generate visibility in this whole noisy online world. And that visibility then creates demand and essentially growth for their business. So, we’ve worked with 450 plus businesses to help them start, scale, and grow a business that’s actually profitable and enjoyable.

And I think, you know, with what you do with the business infrastructure stuff is to actually make people enjoy working in the business, not actually being bogged down by all the systems, processes, people, and everything else that comes along with making business. But I predominantly consult my clients to just help them improve their SEO positioning and strategy and pretty much make the world a better place in the process.

Considering Prosper’s massive success in helping his clients scale their revenue as well as his other accomplishments, you’d never guess his humble beginnings.

I was born in Zimbabwe in a small town where we basically grew up like any other African kid that you probably can see on TV, you know, with no hopes for having any sort of prospects of what we were gonna do in life. Zimbabwe, it’s got one of the biggest inflation rates, which basically means, if I can explain to you in words that you would understand if you walk into a supermarket, you know how they have the fridge for milk at the end of the grocery shop, right?

So if you walk into the grocery shop and you take a catalog and the catalog says two liters of milk is $2, by the time you walk all the way to the back of the shop and all the way back to pay for it at the tiller, it’s already $3 or $5. That’s how much the country was losing value. So, with such a framework and with such a mindset, you never can plan for anything. You can’t even plan to save any money because by the time you take it to the bank, it’s not worth how much it was when you got paid for it.

So being in such an environment, we didn’t have any role models. The people that would live around us would just maybe work and do what was necessary for them to live. Nobody had a career. Nobody had some sort of view of the world besides what was around them and what was instant, because you had to make do with what you could. But my life changed when I turned 13 and we had an Australian exchange student teacher that came to our little town.

This chance encounter with the Australian teacher would forever change Prosper’s life.

So, you can imagine what was happening there. Somebody took the time to, first of all, go to another country, learn about the culture, and want to teach them how to be you and have a happier existence.

And I’m gonna say this with utmost love and respect, Alicia. In my culture, women normally just grow up to be homemakers. They don’t necessarily go to work. You can imagine, all right, so this, this woman who’s coming from another country and is foreign, and it’s teaching us one of the hardest subjects, which is mathematics, different. So I took attention and, little did I know that was now
going to shape the path of where I was gonna end up. So, she started telling us all about Australia. I got interested, and that put the anchor point for that being the place where I wanted to be.

So, I started studying, studying, studying, and did all I could, first of all, obviously as a teenager, hormones were kicking in. There was this beautiful lady there. I just wanted to impress her, but I didn’t realize that in the process of that happening, I was actually bettering myself. So, years went by, and I attempted to come to Australia, and obviously, that didn’t sort of work out in the first instance. And then I tried again, and then I ended up, here in Australia.

That was in 2011. And ever since then, I’ve been working in different industries, and different sectors, just trying to find my feet in order for me to create the life that I had envisioned and also, become a reference point for all the other kids that seriously never had any role models.

So, there he was in Australia…young, full of energy, and ready to make his dreams manifest. But as Prosper soon learned, this wasn’t going to be easy. He’d have to start at the bottom and work his way up in this new country.

Obviously I knew no one, the system is designed for people that grew up in the system, you know what I mean? You literally had to introduce yourself to the taxation system, the rental system, and everything else. Transportation. Remember, we walked everywhere in my little town. So I had to learn, relearn, reskill, all of these things.

And predominantly speak to people because I’m from a foreign place where the language is totally different. So you can imagine coming into a place, with no money, no connections, and no people. I just plowed myself into what I could do at that time. The first job that I literally did was work in a kitchen as a dishwasher. But the thing that I did while I was working in that kitchen, which got me fired from that job is exactly what I’m doing today.

Hmm…well, before we find out the details of how his getting fired led to the very work he’s doing today, I wanted to know more about Prosper’s stint as a model. It was another one of those odds-and-ends types of jobs he had to cobble together money, experience, and…connections.

I realized with every level in society, there are the bottom feeders, and then there are the top people that are always at the top, and those are the people that get the big bucks. So I wanted to find out how the people at the top in this industry started working out. And, I realized you actually had to learn something, study something, in that space.

And the easiest thing that I could do was take up modeling. But as with anything, I don’t do things half short. So, I noticed that if you wanted to be a model, you actually had to be one of the best, or fight for all the other nasty jobs on Instagram and be some sort of half-baked influencer.

So I figured out who was the best person to teach me how to get to where I wanted to be. And there’s a modeling institution called the Australian Academy of Modeling. So I was studying during the day to do the modeling class. And during the night I was working in a restaurant. So I combined those two things together. Okay. So this is where I then got fired because I then went on and created a Facebook page for the restaurant without the owner’s consent.

So there Prosper was – a model by day, a dishwasher in a restaurant by night. He worked both jobs for about six months before he boldly concocted a plan to create a Facebook page for the restaurant – a decision that cost him his job.

Back in that time, the internet was looked upon as a place where people write bad reviews. I was out of a job for about two weeks because I was trying to figure it all out and I couldn’t then afford to do my modeling work. But something happened. Once I got fired for creating that Facebook page, the restaurant owner’s brother didn’t know I had gotten fired.

The page was starting to get momentum and he says, “Stop doing the dishes! You come and do the internet.” All right. So that was my initiation into the online space. It’s not like all the other people that would’ve gone to some marketing college or whatever it is. I got into this industry by accident through the worst pain. Cuz you can imagine I had no money, no friends, and no connections. I got evicted from my house for doing what I’m now doing.

Wow! So, was it at that point that you actually started your company or were you rehired by that restaurant, but as a digital marketing person?

I was rehired as a social media person. Now it wasn’t social media back then, you know.

The year was 2012, just one year after Prosper first arrived in Australia. All of the freelancing and hustling he’d done to survive was about to pay off with this new position in uncharted territory.

I went into that new role with the fear that I wanted to hold onto this for as long as I could. And, since I was already doing the modeling thing, I started inviting my model friends to the restaurant so we could take photos with them and put that on social media.

Now, before influencer marketing was a thing, we had already started instigating that. And now that I was giving my other modeling friends an outlet for them to showcase themselves, they started introducing me to the people that were also working with, the art kits. And I started really connecting with, you know, real influencers at that time. Australia’s really big on football. Australia’s big on cricket, Australia’s big on, you know, the celebrity types, and that in and of itself just got me into a whole different societal level. Instead of me trying to scavenge around, I now had a platform where I could give people an opportunity to be seen and I wanted to hold onto that so much.

Part of holding on to this work with social media involved Prosper immersing himself in resources to learn more about networking and making connections. He read the popular book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. Eventually, he began working at an agency for models when he saw an opportunity to harness his new social media skills.

So I went in and I talked to them and I was like, “I could help you with this.” This is what these platforms are now doing. And then I just started working behind the scenes to get that right.

So, this is one thing that I always want to tell people, that your life story and your experience have greater commercial value than you could ever put a dollar to do. You can teach people who you are, what you value, and where you’ve been just by showing up because most of people are waiting for somebody to put them on a platform.

A lot of people are waiting for somebody to pick ’em up. You could literally do that for yourself, and you can now find the systems, the processes, and the people that will continuously elevate you. So, long story short, it was all just trial and error. There are so many things that had not happened, I wouldn’t have met my wife. I wouldn’t have had the family that I have, I wouldn’t have had the business that I now have. I, I really, you know, encourage people to, whenever you’re going through stuff, you need to stay present and pay attention because one day you’d have a good story to tell.

And what a story Prosper has! Two years after moving from a rural town in Zimbabwe to a bustling city in Australia, Prosper started his company, Livelong Digital. It was 2013. Number two holds significance in what Prosper calls his Online Prosperity Blueprint. It’s a controversial, yet highly effective and proven system for helping small businesses grow and scale from $200,000 to $2 million in two years. Prosper is clear on who this system works best for.

First of all, I I wanna work with people with heart. But if you are providing a service, maybe you are a consultant. And if you are helping people either with their health, their wealth, or their relationship, and there’s a consultation involved in you initiating that service with them, then that’s the sort of person that I can best serve. The reason why that is very crucial and important is that with those kinds of services, you are not limited to an hourly sort of, you know, production.

You can have all the systems placed so that you can literally be working with anybody globally at any time, at any stage of their client journey. So that’s a reason why for me, I really maybe need to speak to somebody first, find out where they’re at and what their, appetite for growth is. And we can now put this controversial system in there because they have to unlearn pretty much everything they have actually got to know about business and they can now, learn how to market and service their business in the most intentional way possible.

I don’t know about you, but I wanted to find out more about this Online Prosperity Blueprint and why exactly is it so controversial. What will we have to unlearn? So, as Prosper and I continued talking remotely, I shared my screen to display his company’s impressive illustration of the four stages of the Online Prosperity Blueprint. I requested that he explain each of these stages from a business infrastructure perspective. That is, the people, processes, and tools involved in each stage to help achieve sustainable scale.

Fantastic. Every time I look at that, I’m just thinking, wow, this is something that seems rather obvious to a lot of people, but we are missing a few key components whenever I start speaking to coaches and consultants that we end up working with. So, the premise of this is, in order for you to grow profitably, obviously like you’re saying, your business infrastructure has to be sound, okay?

Your people, your processes, and the technologies that actually allow you to grow your business and make your decisions and maintain confidence. Cuz it’s very important to be confident while doing your business and then for you to be able to then offer help to the right kind of people at the right time for the right money. You need to have a repeatable process, just like you have mentioned, Alicia. So if you can notice that the first tile is people.

Basically what that means is you have to have an intricate understanding of who you are wanting to work with, who needs your service, who would pay you, and who is willing and able to afford the services that you are offering. And why does it matter to them to be able to get that information from you. Now, once you understand who that person is, you need to understand what is keeping them up at night.

What exactly is the one thing that if you could help them solve, they would be willing and able to pay you just so that they don’t have that pain? A lot of people are always running away from whatever pain that is in their environment towards pleasure. If you can articulate somebody’s pain more than they can, then they assume you’ve got a solution.

Imagine your customer is holding their credit card statement at the end of the month. Each line has to mean something to them. They have to be able to defend the payments that they’re making to you.

In other words, will your customers feel good and confident about their investment in your company’s goods or services?

Once you’ve got that in place, you can now create email marketing. You can now create content. You can now create podcasts that is directed at the right kind of people with the right kind of pain, with the right product, giving them the right payoff. I stayed a very long time on this aspect because this influences the rest of, the process.

This whole infrastructure is usually an investment because once you set it in your business, it has to be consistent and it has to be the last thing you’ll ever do. in terms of designing the framework of your business and all the systems that you’re gonna be creating. As you will notice, the content that you’re gonna write, and the way you’re gonna reach out to partners, all stem from your understanding of why should people care about you. And that’s the people, the pain, the product, and the payoff.

And that encapsulates the first stage or the first major step in the Online Prosperity Blueprint. So I’m assuming we’re moving on now to the second piece, which is content.

Absolutely. Right. So now that you know the people, now that you know the pain, now that you know the product you’re showing them and the payoff they’re gonna be receiving that you now need to get those people engaged, you now need to find where they are and literally go out there and tell them you exist.

Ah, tell your customers you exist. Sounds easy in principle, but getting found by your potential customers can be a huge challenge, especially as the world becomes noisier by the second. So, how can you break through that noise so that the very people whose pain you have a solution for know how and where to find you? Don’t go anywhere. Prosper will explain that and the other stages of his Online Prosperity Blueprint after the break.

How do you know if your business is growing faster than you can keep up with? If you have trouble keeping up with things like deliveries and projects. Your customers are angry, team turnover is high, and the complaints are piling up. Where can you go for relief? How can you save your business from the chaos of unmanageable, fast growth?

It might be time to build business infrastructure. Business infrastructure is a system for linking the people, processes, tools, and technologies that act as the heartbeat of your back-office operations. It gives your fast-growing small business a stable foundation to not only continue growing but to scale in a profitable, sustainable, and repeatable way.

That’s why if you want a business that can consistently operate without your daily presence, then the Smooth Operator course is for you. It’s an online introductory course on business infrastructure that can provide you with proven tools, tactics, and techniques to calm the chaos and restore order. Go to SmoothOperator.courses to learn more. That’s SmoothOperator.courses.

We’re back with Prosper Taruvinga, Founder and CEO of Livelong Digital – a digital marketing agency that specializes in working with coaches and consultants ready to scale their businesses to the next level. He explained the first part of his Online Prosperity Blueprint as defining your customers. Once you’ve defined them, how do you tell them you exist? Here’s Prosper…

So people are not just gonna come, “Hey Alicia, we’re here! We heard you’re doing these things.” No, because people are busy with their lives.

Right!

And you now need to break through that chatter. But you need to know who am I going to speak to, what am I gonna speak to them about, and what am I gonna sell to them?

There was no glitch in the podcast. No, I just was speaking my own language. Okay. Don’t you touch that dial!

I’m gonna tell you what I said. I said, “If I start speaking in a language that you don’t understand, would you hear me.” The people we are trying to talk to have a three-second attention span. You show up and you ain’t ready. That’s it. Grand opening, grand closing. So you need to figure out how you’re gonna show up. And this is where you need to have processes to constantly show up.

How do you then engage those people? You speak their language, you speak to their pain, you tell them you need this because it’s gonna give you this payoff.

You need to know your message intricately inside out so that you are literally showing up to that audience and asking them to stop by. And once they’re there, you need to be able to educate them to want more, be more, and have more. Because people are inherently lazy. They’re selfish and they’re stupid. Stupid in the sense that they don’t know what you know.

Well, um, Prosper certainly doesn’t mince his words. But he’s going somewhere with this, I promise. In fact, what he’s describing is the second stage of his Online Prosperity Blueprint – Content – an area where you share information with potential customers hoping they’ll take notice.

We know people are selfish cuz they’re always looking after numero uno. So, you need to educate them about how you can make their life better. And in the process, you need to be inspiring them to continue to learn because if they don’t know exactly why they should care, then they’re not going to care. And this is gonna take a redemptive amount of energy on your part. Cuz if you know these are the right kind of people with the right kind of pain and you’ve got the product for them, you will show up for them consistently.

And once you’re there, you need to be providing value cuz why should anybody stop what they’re doing to listen to what you’ve got going because we get paid in direct proportion to the value that we bring to the marketplace? Start solving people’s problems instead of selling things to them. People like buying stuff, but they don’t like being sold to.

And that brings us to the third stage of the Online Prosperity Blueprint – Convert.

Once you start solving people’s problems, you’re nurturing them. You’re really taking them on a journey and you’re utterly allowing them to grow into who they really want to be at their own pace. Now you are literally doing the art of online marketing because online marketing is simply guiding people from the start of your funnel to where you actually want them to convert. Online marketing is not spamming people, it’s not spraying and praying. It’s not just showing up, dancing, and twerking
on TikTok. Online marketing is, is literally taking people through a journey, okay. And then pretty much obviously as anything you need to also have systems and processes to measure. Alicia, I’m trying to be serious here.

Wait, did he just say dancing and twerking on Tik Tok? But seriously, I get it and I hope you do too. Through your content you provide value, and…if it happens to be information that a potential customer needs at that moment, that’s when you advance to the fourth and final stage of the Online Prosperity Blueprint – Connect.

Last, but not least, you now become pretty, pretty famous because you are now starting to build loyalty and ambassadors. People literally snitch about the work that they’re doing with you to their friends. Their people are even, even strangers on the bus because you’ve done it so well. They feel heard. Cuz that’s all that people are looking for. People are looking for community. People are looking to belong. People are looking for somebody to hold their hand and walk them home. The internet has managed to create a global village. I am all the way down under like you mentioned, and you are all the way in, in America, but we are communicating as if you are sitting right next to me.

Everyone is looking for their kin. And if you can be the person that brings them together while solving their problems and getting paid on top of that, see, that’s, that’s the controversy around the whole instance. Once you have done that, you have now created a brand. A brand is not the colors is not the widgets or anything else that comes along with it. A brand is the conversations that are happening around the products and the services that you are enabling people to solve problems in their life.

That’s how we help people. And with that, once you’ve got that place within your business, we now create the funnels. We now create email marketing systems. We now create the communities around everything that you’re doing because you’re bringing in like-minded people. They’re not gonna fight. They’re not gonna be talking about the new current thing that they saw on the media yesterday. No, they’re moving towards one particular goal. And eventually, you have a business that now becomes repeatable.

Those people inform their friends. And for lack of a better example, you now have what we call, idea viruses. The idea now starts spreading around to people that you would never have been able to spread through. So, through the podcast you’re doing the content, everything, because you are speaking to the right kind of people with the right kind of pain, giving them the right product and the actual payoff that they’re having. That way everybody becomes happy in their life. And who doesn’t want that?

Absolutely. Wow! that was phenomenal Prosper. Thank you so much for walking us through these four main stages of creating this Online Prosperity Blueprint. And I love the play on your name, by the way, Prosperity. I mean, it’s so fitting. As we start to wind down here, I mean there’s so much more that can be said, but I’m curious, do you only work with entrepreneurs or small businesses in Australia?

Like I said, the internet has become a global village and there are people out there that are also seeking for somebody to hold their hand toward whatever goal they might have. So, we work with, people of that mindset that they really want to create something remarkable. And this person could be in South Africa, this person could be in America, this person could be in Bujumbura. As long as they’ve got internet and a heart and a vision of where they want to go, I can work with that person.

Okay, that’s good to know. And it also begs the question, how does Prosper himself capture our attention? Well, one way is by being on this show but he also has another place that he recommends.

The first place where I would ask people to dust their feet really is in my podcast. Every single day at 12:00 pm AST I drop an episode where I’m helping coaches and consultants that are really passionate about doing work that they’re meant to be doing, and, you know, living an inspired life while doing that. It’s called the Online Prosperity Experience. So, I went very far and wide thinking of the names of all my products, right?

Before wrapping up, I couldn’t let Prosper leave without me asking if he had any more resources he’d like to share with us starting with his website.

My website is LivelongDigital.com au. There is a couple of books that I might, especially with business infrastructure, the E-Myth, by Michael Gerber. That is a book that even if you don’t quite understand what is being said in that book, is a book that you really want in your foundational, library.

And, when it then comes to reading, this is something that I usually tell people. It’s not the particular book, but the essence of why you want to read that book. Because there are seven aspects of our lives. We’ve got the spiritual, we’ve got the mental, then the physical, behavioral, social, our vocation, which happens to be the work, and we’ve got emotional. And then last, but not least, we’ve got the mindset.

And then when it comes to, spiritual, you know, there’s, there’s a guy that I respect so much. Kyle Cease. And he’s got a book that is called, I hope I Screw This Up. And then there are people that are well established. People like Dan Kennedy is really good at marketing. And some people might not like who I’m about to say, but Gary V is also a really good point of reference without the swearing.

He’s done a lot and it’s in the public eye that you don’t necessarily have to subscribe to what he’s doing, but you need to watch how he does it and how he follows through on the execution. There are systems, there are processes and methodologies in everything that he does. And last, but not least, on my website, I’ve got a whole bunch of resources. so, if you just jump on my website, it will take you to maybe the podcast, and the resources that we’ve created. Also, have a book that actually explains the
blueprint in detail. So, it’s just live longlivedigital.com.au/blueprint.

And I certainly would be remiss if I did not mention the very crux of what gives Prosper’s Online Prosperity Blueprint a continuous stream of loyal customers – community. He’s practicing what he preaches as evidenced by his LiveLong community. This is the reason why you won’t find him personally on different social media sites. No, he invests his time networking and building his own community of savvy small business coaches and consultants. It’s not every day you find someone with this level of commitment. So that’s why I’m so grateful to Prosper for coming onto the show. I really do feel smarter every time I talk with him.

Let me tell you something. It takes two to bring out the best in other people, okay? So, you should really be proud of what you’re creating and how far you’ve actually come because not so many people can get this much out of anyone because they are basically just intrinsically looking at themselves and comparing themselves to the person that they’re interviewing and thinking, “Oh my
God, I can’t be like that!” But kudos to you because it really takes a redemptive amount of self-esteem to literally just sit here and listen to me talk about stuff.

Well, because I’m learning too. So, thank you so much!

I was only here for 10 minutes to just say hi. But I appreciate your platform. Thank you.

Not only is he smart, but he’s funny too! I love it when people who are clearly serious about their crafts can still have a sense of humor. So, let’s give it up for Mr. Prosper Taruvinga! Be sure to check out BusinessInfrastructure.TV to access links to all the resources he mentioned during this episode because there’s a lot of them! You’ll also be able to see the full video version of this episode while you’re there. It’ll include a
picture of the Online Prosperity Blueprint and we’ll even through in a picture or two of Prosper back in his modeling days. Again that’s BusinessInfrastructure.TV.

Thank you so much for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, then subscribe to the show and leave a five-star rating, and review wherever you’re listening.

Coming up in the next episode, you’ll hear from another great small business advisor. She’s going to give even more insights on getting found online – it’ll be like a crash course on Search Engine Optimization.

As you continue navigating the operational challenges of managing a fast-growing small business, just remember to stay focused and be encouraged. This entrepreneurial journey is a marathon and not a sprint. So don’t grow alone! We’re here to support you so don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

This podcast was written, produced, and narrated by me, Alicia Butler Pierre. Audio editing by Olanrewaju Adeyemo. The original score and sound design by Sabor! Music Enterprises.

This is the Business Infrastructure – Curing Back-Office Blues podcast.