Direct Marketing Predictions

The next era for freelancers, full-time writers, and solo creators

by

I woke up this morning, the sun shining into my eyes, an eager French bird chirping outside my window because it was almost 7am.

I groaned and realized it’s time to get up and get to work. In a few hours’ time, my friends, still asleep in various bedrooms around this cave-like Paris AirBnb, will wake up too. And by then, I will have to have this email finished.

I can tell you now, it won’t be easy.

I struggled during the night with a comforter that was too hot, a mosquito that wouldn’t shut up, and the effects of the first glass of alcohol I’ve had in months. The result is I’m tired this morning, and my brain is more foggy than usual.

“Let me read some stuff on the Internet,” I said. “Maybe that will help.” And lo — the email gods rewarded me with an article full of valuable and relevant ideas I can share with you today.

The article came from Simon Owens, somebody I’ve written about before in these emails. Owens is a journalist who covers the media landscape in his Substack newsletter.

Two interesting bits from Owens’s article:

1. The recent collapses of new media companies like Buzzfeed and Vox have left thousands of journalists, writers, and clickbait creators without a job. It’s not unlike the situation in the direct response space a few years ago, after Agora got into legal trouble and it put a chill on the whole industry.

2. The owners of media outlets and info businesses are realizing that freelancers just aren’t worth it. From Owens’s conversation with one such business owner: “Not only were they expensive to hire, but he also had to waste a lot of time editing their work so it met his quality standards.”

So if traditional employee-based companies that pump out content are failing… and if entrepreneurs are starting to realize that freelancers are a bum deal… where does that leave us?

You might say it leaves us with the creator economy — with all those unemployed journalists, writers, and clickbait creators going out and starting their own Substack or TikTok or OnlyFans.

​​Maybe so. But it’s harder to make that work than your Twitter feed might make you believe. From Owens’s article again:

“I’m on record as being an optimist about the future of the Creator Economy; I think we’re at the very early stages of an entrepreneurial media explosion. But at the same time, I’m a realist about how damn hard it is to launch and build a sustainable bootstrapped media business, especially as a solo operator. Not only can it require years of financial runway, but it’s also difficult for a single person to juggle a variety of tasks that include content creation, marketing, and business development.”

So? Where does all this really leave us?

Owens says it leaves us in a brave new world of partnerships, cooperatives, and jointly-created products. He gives examples of how each of these is already being done by people who create content and have an audience, and who are trying to monetize that content and audience, beyond just the work they can do themselves.

If you are running or want to run an info publishing businesses, or your own creator studio, then Owens’s article is worth a read. It might give you an idea that might mean the difference between failure and success in what you do.

And if you are currently a freelancer, or even a full-time employee at a marketing-led business, then Owens’s article is worth a read also, if only for an uncomfortable but possibly life-saving glimpse into what the future might bring unless you adapt.

In either case, if you are interested, here’s the link to Owens’s piece:

https://simonowens.substack.com/p/the-next-era-for-bootstrapped-media

Plan Horse: Text-based opportunities

by

News item one:

A few days ago, I got a text message that said, “You’re off the waitlist! You can now download Artifact.” So I did.

As you might know:

Artifact is a new service built by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who founded Instagram before selling it to Facebook for $715 million. Their new project, Artifact, is something like TikTok, except not with video, but with text content.

News item two:

Just this morning I read that Meta, aka Mark Zuckerberg, is developing a new decentralized social network. Details are scarce, but what is known is that the new network will also be text-based.

Not-a-news item:​​

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for more than a few days, then you know I am wary of late-breaking internet opportunities. I like to get my late-breaking opportunities from books, preferably books that have been aged and cured for at least a few hundred years.

At the same time, even I find it undeniable that tectonic plates have been shifting for the past few years, with surface effects becoming visible maybe today, and for sure tomorrow.

Facebook is aging. Google search is terrible. AI now produces filler content better than 90% of professional content writers.

That’s what’s been rumbling underground for years. What will the surface effects be?

“Sovereign Man” Simon Black has this concept of a “Plan B” — a strategy for when shit hits the fan, which also benefits you if things just keep inching along as they always have.

I’d like to suggest to you a kind of inverse of Simon Black’s Plan B. We can call it Bejakovic’s “Plan Horse.”

Plan Horse is to find a new opportunity to latch onto, but in a way that you will come out ahead whether the opportunity drops dead or delivers as hoped.

Because you will eventually get to the inn if you just keep taking step after step along the highway. But you will get to the inn much faster and easier if somewhere along the way, while you’re walking, you “find yourself a horse to ride,” as Jack Ries and Al Trout put it in their book Positioning.

So keep reading this newsletter, because if I come across any interesting text-based opportunities, I might let you know about them.

Meanwhile, I continue to promote my Most Valuable Email. This course is really about taking those step-by-steps along the highway, while keeping an eye out for the galloping horse you can jump on the back of, Legolas-style.

Most Valuable Email is based on a fundamental of human communication and persuasion, one that’s been around for millennia. And yet, to many people in the Internet world, Most Valuable Email is a revelation. As freelance copywriter Van Chow said after going through MVE:

===

I love this course, I bet some money to see if it still talks about boring stuff like AIDA or PAS. But I was surprised, I had never heard of this concept before.

===

For a persuasion technique that will work both today and tomorrow, check out MVE here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

SEO Sauron makes a prophecy abot the coming “Age of Men”

by

A few months ago, I heard a depressing yet hopeful interview with Jon Morrow.

​​Maybe you know Morrow – he is a kind of Sauron of SEO, who has spawned immense armies of SEO writers within the fires of his online fortress, which in the tongue of men is called Mount Smart Blogger.

But in the same way that the destruction of the One Ring caused Mount Doom to crumble and instantly destroyed Sauron’s vast armies, so a new force — AI — threatens Mount Smart Blogger and Morrow’s numberless hordes of vicious SEO writers.

Morrow, to his credit, is fully aware and forthright about this. In the interview, he even says he’s been preparing for it all by creating courses on using AI for writing filler content. He’s also launching some kind of new AI-based email writing service, I guess to drive down the cost of email copy to the the level of SEO articles.

That was the depressing part of the interview. All that talk of SEO writing, of millions of words of filler content just to please Google, of poor minions getting paid 10 cents per word to create it.

But there was also a hopeful part.​​ During this interview, Morrow also talked about the coming age.

In that future world, Morrow believes, a lot of what used to set content apart will no longer work. Depth of information… drama in the form of stories… really incredible design… new data to share. All of that former magic will disappear, because it will become an automated commodity.

Is there anything left for men to do? Well, Morrow thinks so, and that was the part I found hopeful. From the interview:

===

Saying things that are genuinely new ideas, genuinely new types of thought leadership. My prediction is, in the world of AI, it’s the only one that’s going to have long-term value.

===

Like I said, I found this hopeful. All the technical, mechanical stuff drops away, and we are left with appreciating ideas, sharing ideas, building ideas.

I don’t look at this as the “world of AI.” I look at it as the coming “Age of Men.”

Anyways, if you think Morrow might be right in his prophecy, then it might make sense to, like Morrow, start preparing now.

I’ll tell you one added thing I believe about this future world:

There are no “genuinely new” ideas, not really. But you don’t need genuinely new ideas. You just need ideas will be genuinely new to the people you communicate with.

This is something I talk more about in Part 3 of my Insight Exposed training. I also list specific habits I practice to dig up ideas that are new to my audience, and give my best how-to suggestions for how you can do the same.

Insight Exposed is a course I am only making available to people who are signed up to my email list. If you’d like to get on my list, click here and fill out the form that appears.

Daniel Throssell, Daniel Kahneman, and a robot lawyer walk into a bar…

by

A few minutes ago, I got my coffee ready, I set my timer, and I got down to writing this email. As a first step, I checked some news headlines and bingo — I saw it:

“AI-powered ‘robot’ lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court”

Maybe you’ve heard the news already. A startup called DoNotPay is helping people fight speeding tickets.

Before, DoNotPay used AI to write a letter that you could mail in to contest your speeding ticket. But now, DoNotPay will help one lucky defendant in court.

The DoNotPay app will run on the defendant’s phone. It will listen in to the court proceedings. And it will tell the defendant what to say to get out of his speeding ticket in court.

“This courtroom stuff is more advocacy,” said Joshua Browder, the CEO of DoNotPay. “It’s more to encourage the system to change.” Browder says he wants to give access to law to people who can’t afford it.

As you might guess, this noble mission isn’t very popular with lawyers themselves.

When Browder tweeted about his new courtroom “robot”, lawyers jumped on him, and threatened he would go to jail if he followed through with this plan.

And verily, a courtroom robot is not legal in most places. In most places, all parties have to agree to be recorded. But I doubt good will and keeping Browder out of jail is why lawyers jumped all over Browder’s tweet, telling him to stop this project immediately.

Lawyers still have a bit of time.

Right now, courtroom AI robots just handle speeding tickets. And Browder admits even that took a lot of work.

His company had to retrain generic AI for this specialized task. “AI is a high school student,” Browder said, “and we’re sending it to law school.”

Law school… and then what? because Being a good lawyer is not just about knowing the letter of the law.

Specifically, I have in mind a passage I read in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.

Kahneman says there are two fundamental ways lawyers argue.

These two ways are actually illustrated perfectly in the little debate Daniel Throssell and I had last week, in emails talking about newsletters and who wants ’em.

So I will make you an offer right now, which you are free to refuse, in case you’d rather go read Thinking Fast and Slow yourself.

My offer is a disappearing bonus.

It’s good until 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PSST tomorrow, Thursday, Jan 12 2023.

If you’ve already bought my Most Valuable Email course, and would like me to spell out Kahneman’s two lawyer strategies, write me before the deadline and ask.

​​I will write back to you, both with Kahneman’s passage, and the specifics of how Daniel and I each took one of the two approaches.

And if you haven’t bought my Most Valuable Email course, then my offer is the same, except you have to also buy the course before the deadline.

Buy just to get the bonus?
​​
If you find yourself desirous of the disappearing bonus, but reluctant to buy a course just to get that bonus, then I will argue that desire itself is a reason to get MVE.

​​Because this desire is something you too can create in others. It’s something I talk about in the course itself, specifically inside the 12 Rules of Most Valuable Emails, specifically Rule #10.

For more info on this course, or to get it before the deadline:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The bigger point of the rising AI flood

by

Yesterday, Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, wrote an email with the subject line, “John Bejakovic is wrong.”

​​Daniel’s email was about my email two days ago, in which I said that nobody really wants a newsletter.

I would like to respond to Daniel’s email, and I will. But a promise is a promise.

And yesterday I promised that today I would continue and finish my email from yesterday, and reveal the bigger point.

My smaller point was that there’s already a ton of fluff on the Internet, and it will only get worse now that anybody can write quickly, cheaply, and convincingly thanks to AI.

You can choose to take advantage of the current moment, which is what my email yesterday was about.

But there’s also the bigger point I promised you yesterday. It’s this.

Last month, over the course of two weeks, an estimated five billion people gathered in bars and on street corners all around the world, or squeezed in on the couch at home next to their friends and family, while watching opposing groups of 11 grown men desperately chasing a rubber ball around a grassy field.

The reason why billions of people engaged in this strange ritual is the same reason why I sent a physical postcard last year as part of my Most Valuable Postcard project.

Because it’s something real.

All those people around the world, hanging out with friends, tuning in to a live football game that everybody else is watching at exactly the same time, with the result still unknown and even uncertain — that’s real.

On a much smaller scale, so was my physical, handwritten postcard.

So that’s my bigger point for you.

The world will soon be flooded by AI-generated and AI-augmented content. This content will be warm, sweet, and inviting.

​​That means the flood will stay, and it will cover and absorb all the other warm, sweet, and inviting content that’s being created by the last generation of well-meaning human influencers and personality-based content marketers.

But islands in the flood will form, created by people who want some actual real experience of human connection to complement all the time spent being plugged into the solipsistic AI heaven.

So start thinking now, about how to create something real, and how to give that to people.

At least that’s my advice if you want influence and impact in the nearly developing future, or maybe just a better society to live in.

Anyways, I had a special, time-limited, free offer today for people who are subscribed to my email newsletter. You missed that, since you are not subscribed, but are only reading an archived version of this email.

In case you’d like to keep this from happening in the future, you can sign up to my email newsletter, and get my emails as they come out, in real time. To do so, click here and fill out the form that appears.

The old future of new newsletters

by

I’m a regular reader of Simon Owen’s Tech and Media Newsletter — it’s an insightful rag. For example:

A few weeks ago, Owens wrote a piece about the future of new media startups, and what those will look like.

He made five predictions. One of those was “niche editorial products.”

Here’s a relevant bit from Owens’s article, where he is writing about Axios, a conglomerate of email newsletters (free and paid) that sold for a thumping $525 million back in August:

What most impressed me about the company was how it simultaneously managed to be a general interest news site while also funneling its audience into niche verticals, making it much easier for it to deliver highly targeted advertising and industry-specific subscription products.

In other words, Axios offers general and free newsletters on the front-end… and specific and expensive newsletters on the back end.

When you put it like that, this ain’t nothing new:

1. Write something like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Give it away for free or sell it for $0.46 on Kindle.

2. And then, to the people who bought the book, sell something like the Dale Carnegie Institute’s High Impact Presentations corporate training, which consists of two in-person sessions, and costs $2,195.

So Owens’s prediction might not be new, but it’s still a good reminder for each new generation and each new technology.

And it’s something I’m thinking about, especially in the context of email newsletters. If you have a highly niched offer, it might be something for you to think about also.

Meanwhile, let me remind you that this basic idea is not just about offers. The same idea actually applies to copywriting, marketing, and effective communication of all types.

In fact, everything I’ve just told you is related to “chunking up”, which is the first big and new copywriting insight I had by looking at the bullets of A-list copywriters.

The way I describe it inside my Copy Riddles program, “chunking up” allows you to expand your market 3x, 5x, or more.

Which goes to show:

Once you learn the essence of effective communication — once you learn to make interesting and attractive appeals — you can then apply that from a single sales bullet all the way up to the core structure of a $525-million business like Axios.

Perhaps you’re curious to learn more. Perhaps you want specific examples from print ads, video sales letters, and paperback books.

Perhaps you even want to practice chunking up yourself, so next time you try to get your message or offer across, it comes naturally.

You can do all that, and more, if you buy Copy Riddles, which I am currently selling. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

AI wants you to take its job

by

Yesterday, the waning gibbous moon in Leo opposed Saturn in Aquarius. That’s the only way I can explain the fact that a half dozen marketers all independently and yet simultaneously decided to send emails with their thoughts about AI and what it means for copywriters.

But in spite of the AI barrage yesterday, the most interesting thing I’ve read about AI for copywriters came not from a marketer, but a guy named Sam Kriss.

​​Last week, Kriss published a long article, putting ChatGPT into a surprising historical context, and making the claim that AI writing is getting worse rather than better.

Worse, because earlier versions of GPT were weird, sometimes useless, but sometimes new and wonderful.

Meanwhile, the most recent version of GPT has simply gotten very good at approximating the current state of writing on the Internet, which is bad and getting worse — clickbait and fluff, optimized for skimming, for nodding along, for other AI like search engines and front-page algorithms. Kriss makes a prediction:

If you write the keyword-laden babble for Emily’s Scrummy Kitchen, or monetised blog posts angling for answerboxes, or bludgeon-headed political takes that go viral every weekday, or flatly competent student essays, or little inspirational poems in lowercase, or absolutely anything to do with cryptocurrency — if your writing can be done by a machine because it is already machinelike — then ChatGPT will take your job. If you do screenplays for Netflix, it may have already done so.

At this point, the standard email marketing formula calls for saying something hopeful, about how there’s still time to up your skills and build the right relationship with your audience, so you can insulate yourself from the coming AI purges.

But I won’t follow the standard formula. In part, because I’d just be helping the AI obsolete me sooner.

In part, because rather than hopeful, I feel mostly curious. I feel we’re on the verge of a big moment, not just for copywriters, but as a society. I’m curious what what that moment will look like, and what’s waiting on the other end of it.

And now, even though I probably haven’t done a good job preparing you for it emotionally, I’m still going to tempt you with an offer. That’s one part of the standard email marketing formula I’m not willing to forgo.

So here goes:​​

Maybe you yourself are curious why exactly I found the Sam Kriss article so interesting, and why I decided to share a quote from it with you.

Really, I told you above. But maybe you want it spelled out a little more clearly, or maybe you want some more examples.

If you do, or if you want to write things that get shared on your behalf, by actual humans, then the secret is here, in Chapter 8:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Marketing prediction: Welcome to the Age of Insight

by

A year ago, I sent out an email with the subject line,

“Business Prediction: Welcome to the Age of Aquarius”

In that email, I made the claim that the world has gone through three distinct ages of consumption.

The first was the Age of Stuff. That age was made up of straight-up consumerism — Cadillacs and and Frigidaires and Armani suits — which became dominant after WWII. It was about what you own.

The second consumption age was the Age of Experiences. It began around 1990, or at least that’s when I became aware of it. Amazing Thai food, swimming with the dolphins, a visit to Ernest Hemingway’s favorite bar in Key West. It was about what you’ve done.

My claim was that the third age of consumption, in which we are now, is the Age of Transformation. It’s about who you would like to become. Crossfit, sex-reassignment surgery, Masterclass subscriptions.

Like I said, I sent that email a year ago. A year is a long time. I have been enlightened greatly in that time, and I want to share with you some of the things I have seen.

What I have seen is that, mirroring the world of production and consumption, there have been parallel shifts in the world of marketing and advertising.

What I have seen is that the world has gone through three distinct ages of marketing.

The first age was described by copywriter John E. Kennedy. Kennedy correctly divined that advertising is salesmanship in print. As a result, Kennedy gave birth to the Age of Promise:

“Let this Machine do your Washing Free”

The second marketing age was identified by a clever astrological duo, Al Ries and Jack Trout. According to their occult research, some fifty years after Kennedy, advertising had gotten to a point where promises were insufficient — there were just too many players in the market. As a result, we entered the Trout and Ries age, the Age of Positioning:

“Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars. So why go with us? We try harder.”

And now, if my calculations are right, we are now entering the third age.

It’s the Age of Insight.

Today, a hundred years after John E. Kennedy, it’s no longer enough to make a promise and build up desire.

Today, fifty years after Trout and Ries, it’s no longer enough to give people a mental hook to hang your name on.

Today, the smartest marketers — people like Rich Schefren, Travis Sago, and Stefan Georgi — are doing something different. They are using specific and subtle techniques to take the disgust with manipulation, the disappointment of previous purchases, the confusion and uncertainty and indifference that most of us feel on some level…

… and transform them into something new. Into something motivating. Into something contagious.

Into the feeling of insight.

Maybe you find that idea intriguing. Or maybe you find it confusing.

If so, don’t worry. You are in luck, or rather, you are in the right place at the right time.

I’ll be telling you more about insight over the coming two weeks.

Because, as you can probably guess, I’m promoting something. I’m promoting a series of live trainings, all about the Age of Insight. In these trainings, I will tell you how you can align yourself to this new age in such a way that you prosper and surpass those marketers who do not yet possess this esoteric knowledge.

The first of these live training calls will happen on December 1. So I will be talking the Age of Insight until the end of this month, when registration for this training will close.

If at any point you decide that this is an opportunity you do not want to miss, you can get the full details on my Age of Insight training, or even register for it, at the page below:

https://bejakovic.com/aoi

Join me today on Clubhouse!… err… never mind just read this email

by

Do you remember, in the olden days way back at the start of this decade, there was a thing called Clubhouse?

I certainly remember, when the lockdowns came hard and heavy, that many big-name marketers were enthusing about Clubhouse. “The future of marketing!” they said.

I never got it, but from what I could understand, Clubhouse:

1. Required an invite to get in, and therefore had a velvet rope effect

2. Was some kind of app that allows group video chat in different-themed rooms, kind of like a big conference center

Clubhouse was very cool until it was not. It didn’t take long. From a peak of 13.5M monthly users in July 2021, Clubhouse quickly started turning into a ghost town.

Last December, I read an article in Business Insider about the “Rise and Fall of Clubhouse.” It said that Clubhouse is mostly dead but will linger on as a zombie for years, thanks to its $100M of VC money. That was the last I heard of Clubhouse until a couple days ago, when I read that the company is trying to pivot in an effort to regain some of its lost coolness.

I personally couldn’t care one Euro cent if Clubhouse succeeds or fails in recooling itself. I’m just writing you about it because of a trending Internet conversation over the past couple weeks. It all started with article with the headline:

“Sunset of the social network”

The argument in the article ran, Facebook is changing its algorithm to be more like Tik Tok. So say goodbye to updates from your friends, family, and business contacts. Instead, say hello to addicting content from around the world, whether you have any “social” connection to those people or not.

According to the article, so-called “social networks” like Facebook have basically become giant, impersonal media platforms. On the other hand, messaging takes care of properly intimate and personal communication. The article concludes by saying:

“All this leaves a vacuum in the middle — the space of forums, ad-hoc group formation and small communities that first drove excitement around internet adoption in the pre-Facebook era.”

So the point I’d like to suggest is, maybe you shouldn’t be looking at the next cool tech solution for your marketing. Not the next velvet-rope app… the next “AI” algorithm update… the next “new” and sexy way of delivering content.

The fact is, the technology that’s been around for the past 30 or more years — websites, forums, email — continues to work, and work well. And if you want proof of that, then I can tell you that that trending “Sunset of the social network” article appeared on Axios, an email newsletter I wrote about a few days ago, which recently sold for more than a half billion dollars.

So if it’s not technology that will make or break marketing, then what?

My bet is on interesting and engaging content, along with a feeling of community, peppered with some subtle human psychology to actually drive sales.

It can be on a website. Or a forum. Or even in email.

And on that note:

If you do have an email list, and if you want to make it more interesting, and more engaging, and even more community-like, so you can drive more sales, then I might be able to help.

​​In case you are curious:

https://bejakovic.com/audit

Social justice for blockheads, the hardhearted, and the congenitally lazy

by

This morning I spent a few minutes performing a routine medical procedure to get my blood pressure up. In other words, I read an article that popped up on a news aggregator, from some site I had never heard of, called Stakedy. The headline of the article ran:

“Social justice for the bald man”

The article was a quick series of arguments backed with proof. Baldness causes social stigma and pain for bald men, who spend billions of dollars trying to repair their wounded self-images. Of the top 100 most beautiful actors in the world, exactly zero are bald. Baldness is a genetically caused medical condition. For all these reasons, discrimination against the bald should not be allowed in a progressive society.

The article concluded with the following:

“Do we need laws to fine people for such discrimination? Do we need quotas for bald men on movie sets? Do we need to demonize women who won’t date a bald man for fear that she will have a bald child? What we need are some bald social justice warriors.”

As I finished the article, I both grinned and I frowned.

I grinned because I looked forward to the furious comments, both pro and con, that were sure to follow in the comments section of that news aggregator site.

I frowned because in spite of myself, I took a side. I started preparing my own serious and impassioned arguments and getting ready to enter the fight, at least in my head.

Sure enough, in the comments, there was plenty of dismantling, dismay, disappointment, and disgust.

“What’s next? Social justice for the short and for the shortsighted?” “You can’t save everyone…” “I’ve been bald since 1989 and I think…”

And then there was the top comment. It quietly said:

“Stakedy is auto-generated by AI. (It’s hard to figure out how, it’s some crazy blockchainy thing.) The fact that people don’t recognize that and try to argue the merit of the article here makes me scared.”

So what to say?

I could get back on my favorite hobby horse, and say that “good enough” AI is coming, or is in fact here.

Some people insist that copywriters and marketers will be spared if they are smart enough, if they are empathetic enough, or if they are simply willing to work hard enough. Who knows, maybe these people will be proved right.

​​Or maybe they will be proved wrong. Maybe we will all soon be campaigning for social justice for our particular stigmatized and endangered groups…

But you know, that’s just my hobby horse. And you can’t ride too far on one of those.

So instead, let me saddle up a big and serious Clydesdale for you:

Humans have these predictable, robot-like emotional buttons that can be pressed.

One button for attention.. another for affinity… a third for acquisitiveness.

These buttons are so predictable and so easy to press that now even a machine can do it.

So shouldn’t you be doing more of this pressing, in your own marketing and copy, in some smart and empathetic way?

I’ll leave that question hanging in the air.

And I’ll just say that, if you want my help performing this routine medical procedure on your audience, now, while there’s still time, before we’re both out of a job, you can contact me here:

https://bejakovic.com/consulting