Ep 54| Your One Page Marketing Plan w Allan Dib #MUIYB Podcast

So, um, dude, I didn't realize, bro, you're like an IT nerd.

I am, I am. Or I was. Still am. I don't think you ever become not an IT nerd. Yeah, you never, you never leave.

So I am too.

Oh really?

I'm curious. Yeah, yeah. How far back do you like— what were you doing?

Oh, I had a room full of Linux machines and I was, um, yeah, yeah. I still do have a few. I built our home automation system. So, um, still do a little bit of scripting here and there, but, uh, yeah, um, back in the day I was, um, Microsoft and Citrix certified and all of that sort of stuff. Managed service provider business, that was my first business. Yeah. What about you? What did you—

so I was a CNA, Certified Network Administrator. I was pursuing a CNE, uh, we were doing network installs back on Token Ring, right when Ethernet—

wow, wow.

And, um, and when I sold the business, I, Linux was just getting hot.

Yeah.

So same thing at my house. I'm like, I'm going to set up a music jukebox on a Linux server. I got the piece. It was the biggest piece of crap, Alan. And I set this thing up. Linux is like, it wouldn't fail.

It wouldn't crash.

It was so solid.

It is. It is. It's good. And, uh, yeah. And then I, and then in the telco business, I got into the Cisco side. So I was Cisco certified and all that. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, a couple of geeks turned authors. It's pretty unusual, isn't it? Yeah. Right.

Not a common, not a common journey. What happened to that, that business that you had?

Yeah, I, I ended up growing it and selling it. And the second business was the telco business. We grew that, and 4 years later we were in the top 100 fastest growing companies in Australia. So sold that as well. So, um, yeah, that's right, she used 2 exits. 2 exits. Yeah, yeah, 2 tech exits. There was a lot of fun, uh, but, uh, yeah, this is fun too.

Yeah, yeah, I got you. So just, just me too, 2 exits.

Yeah.

Both in tech services. One was the network integration and the other one was— I did computer forensics, computer crime investigation.

No, no, telecommunications. So—

No, no, I'm saying me.

Oh, you, you. Okay, right, right, right, right, right.

I investigated— there was a sale of a telecom company in Australia. It was our biggest criminal investigation. So what inspired you to become an author?

Actually, I never, never, never thought of myself as an author. Still really don't. It was just I wanted to— I had the One Page Marketing Plan as a process. Long before I had the book, and it was working so well for my clients, I thought, I've got to get this out to the wider world. And, you know, obviously a book is a really good authority tool. But yeah, so, so I don't know if I'd still identify as an author. I guess I have to fit in. Yeah, that's funny.

I mean, because your book's success is nothing short of extraordinary. I mean, you're done well, it's a top 1,000 or 2,000 books in the world.

Yes.

Uh, one of the top 1,000 or 2,000 selling books in the world for now, for a year.

Yes, perennial bestseller.

Yeah. What do you attribute that to, particularly if you don't think you're in or feel that you're an author? Um, why is it such a successful book?

I've treated it like a product and a product launch. So it's like, you know, a lot of authors, they, you know, they spend 3 years writing a book and then 3 months promoting it, a little bit of a pop, and then next book kind of thing. Like, they're— the marketing is almost like a dirty part, you know. Um, so, uh, so yeah, that's the way I view it. And we put more resources into marketing it now than we ever have. I mean, I've got now a team of 12 people that, you know, we— our whole job is getting the book and the message out there and the One Page Marketing Plan. And, um, I'll do that, um, for, for the rest of the rest of my life, maybe. I don't know, who knows.

So, okay, you treat like a product Um, I've read your book. I love it. It simplifies the whole concept of marketing. Um, are you using effectively the One Page Marketing Plan to market the book?

Very much so. Very much so. So we've got our own One Page Marketing Plan. Um, and the, the beauty of the One Page Marketing Plan, the reason why I created it was because I wanted people to be able to have a practical plan that they can update any time that they want. And so as we get better and more information over time, um, we update that plan and and we update our messaging. We sometimes pivot our target market or whenever we're doing a launch, any of those, any and all of those things.

Why do most business owners, small business owners in particular, why do we, why does our marketing fail? Actually, I would actually, let me rewind that. Why do we not even market in the first place? It seems like most people are relying on referrals.

Yeah, I've seen that a lot. So people kind of view themselves as or it's kind of that, that lie we've been told from Silicon Valley. It's, uh, it's, uh, the best product or the best service wins automatically. And we know, we know that that's not true. So we know that the best product or best service doesn't win every time. I mean, sometimes they do, and that's great, that's, that's luck. But I wish the most deserving products, the most deserving people in our society got paid the most. But we know nurses and firefighters and frontline workers, they're not the highest paid people in our society, you know. So, so it's not the the most deserving. I heard a good quote. It's, it's, we don't get what we deserve, we get what we negotiate. So, so very much applicable to business owners is really becoming someone who positions yourself as a marketer. So I'm a marketer first, not an IT guy. I'm a marketer first, not a doctor, not an accountant, not a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, whatever it is. So position yourself first as a marketer, because here's what we know. We know that the The best marketer wins every time, not the most deserving product, not the most deserving business, but the best marketers win every time. And so that's a real mindset shift that I needed to have in my first business.

So are business owners just assuming, because they're doing the best of themselves out there, that that's going to win business?

Yeah, yeah. And I had that assumption in my first business as well, and, and that kept me broke and struggling for a long time. I was, I was an awesome IT guy, and I was certified in, in everything, as we've already discussed. And in fact, I had some competitors would hire me to train them on the latest stuff, the latest Linux, the latest FreeBSD, the latest— all of this sort of stuff. And they were doing far better financially than me. And I'm like, what is going on? I'm certified, I'm better, I've got better skills, I know 10 times more than these guys, and they're running rings around me financially. And it was, was frustrating. So, you know, I don't know if you've ever felt this, Mike, but There's almost nothing more frustrating than people who are dumber than you who make more money than you. So, you know, yes, yes.

Oh my God, you, you hit the nail on the head. I don't know, in Australia, is Geek Squad— were they ever in Australia?

No, I don't think so, but there's, there's similar services.

Okay, so Geek Squad, you know, I had my little company, I had all the certs, A+ certified, I had CNEs and some stuff where NT was just becoming popular. And we go into clients and say, look at all our credentials, we're amazing prospects, I should say. And then in walks this other company wearing, you know, they're wearing glasses with tape and these floodplants. It's Geek Squad. And they sucked. They were dumber. They kicked my ass Sunday.

Yep. Yeah, exactly.

It was marketing.

Exactly. Exactly.

So, but and they rode that one-trick pony all the way to a— they were acquired by Best Buy. It's now a billion-dollar brand. One trick was just how you dress. Can marketing really be that simple? Does it only require one powerful, consistent marketing message? How do we set up a winning marketing plan for our business?

It's, it's simple, but, but simple doesn't mean easy. So a mentor of mine early on said to me, look, no one knows how good your product or service is until after the sale. Before they buy, they only know how good your marketing is. And so, and so you need to become a marketer of your products and services. So, um, for, for me, that was a real mindset shift. And so then I understood that having a great product, having a great service is really a customer retention tool. But before customer retention, we need customer acquisition. And so becoming a master at customer acquisition is really the master skill of business. I mean, if we learn nothing else in, in business, um, learning that one skill will just cover a multitude of other sins. So, um, you know, if you get 10% better at negotiation, great. If you get 10% better at financial analysis, that's great. That'll give you an incremental lift. But getting 10% better at marketing can give you an exponential lift. And so that's something that I, I learned, um, maybe not early enough in my first business, because I call it expensive experience. I spent probably a decade in the wilderness trying to learn this stuff. And, you know, for me, that was really a trial by fire. It was a very frustrating time, but it was a time that I I learned a lot. I attended every seminar, read every book, I hired every coach, and, you know, it was a, it was a long and difficult journey, but I learned it. And, you know, doing it differently, I would shortcut the process, uh, these days.

Okay, so why don't you give me the shortcut? I, I want to increase, improve my marketing by 10%. Where does someone get started with trying to figure out where to get started?

Um, well, I'll tell you what I do now whenever I want to get good at something. So for example, recently I started, uh, to to take my health and my nutrition and my weightlifting very seriously. And so I hired the best guy that I know to show me the shortcuts to so that I don't have to spend years in trial and error. I do the same thing now, uh, both from a marketing and a business perspective. If I've got a business problem I want to solve, I hire the best guy in the field. I pay once, I cry once, and then I, I get on with it. Whereas I tried to do the DIY way, and there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, when you start, when you're starting off, especially when funds are low, you've got to, you've got to do what you got to do. But whenever it's possible for you, hire the person in your field who can show you the shortcuts, because it'll save you in a lot of cases years and hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of dollars, depending on what scale you're operating in now. So to me, that's such a great shortcut, just finding a finding the person in that field who can really help you. If your— if your— if budget is an issue, then books are just the best bargain you can ever have. I mean, yes, someone can give you— someone can put the formula for building a billion-dollar business, and you know, the ticket price is what, $20, $25, or whatever else? It's incredible.

It kills me as an author because Cause it is your life's learning and work put in there. It's, it's a download of your brain. Yeah. And, uh, the, the way people assign value or ascribe values is very peculiar. A book, $20, you know, and you'll try to buy it, but, but attend a webinar, I'll spend $3,000, $5,000. Yes. And it's scant in knowledge compared to the book.

Yes. Totally.

But you know, one thing interesting as you're giving that download on hire the best guy, before that you said you committed to your health. I have some— some seen some people who are in the process of learning, but they really don't care about it, and therefore it's kind of like a sift. Is it important to make that visceral commitment first?

I need this. It's not just the commitment, it's how you identify yourself. So, uh, you know, I think of myself now as a weightlifter. Now, if I'm a weightlifter and I don't lift weights 3 times a week, I can't really call myself a weightlifter. So if you call— you call yourself an author, Mike, and you are an awesome author. Now, if you didn't write I mean, we would have trouble calling you an author, right? So, right, that's right. So the label that you put on yourself, the way that you identify yourself, is incredibly important. And so if you identify yourself as a marketer, well, you've got to do marketing. You've got to put marketing processes into place. If you're an entrepreneur, you need to move capital to higher places of yield. So these are important things that how we think of ourselves and how we label ourselves is incredibly important.

Yeah, that's extremely helpful. I love this. So let's talk about some of the marketing tactics, assuming our listening audience either already identifies as a marketer or they are going to compel themselves to be this way. Now it's time to start doing better. So are there some tactics I can take to enhance my existing marketing, or do I start anew?

Yeah, so, so I would start no surprise, with a plan and a strategic plan. So, you know, what I see a lot of people do is kind of random acts of marketing. Let's, let's change up the website, let's get on social, let's do ads or whatever. And none of those things are bad things. They're all, they're all good things to do. But it's kind of like building a house. And I had that personal experience 2 years ago. I moved into this house, which I spent probably about 2 years building. But the first 6 months we spent with the architect. And, you know, I remember walking into the architect's office saying, you know, I want a rooftop terrace. And a 4-car garage and this and that. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on, Alan, hang on, hang on. Tell me about your lifestyle. Do you have children? Do you entertain a lot? He pulled out a map and he's like, okay, your, your house is right here at the top of a hill, so it's extremely windy in summer. It's going to get very hot. You're not going to use a rooftop terrace and all of that sort of stuff. And so he took my circumstances into account. We worked on the strategy first, so we built the house before we ever built it. And so, so that's step 1, is really get your plan into place, get dialing your messaging dial in your target market, get all those things right, and then now great, let's deploy some of the tactical elements. Let's do the Google Ads, let's do the SEO, let's do all of that sort of stuff. But a lot of people start with that stuff, which kind of leads to bright shiny object syndrome. So, you know, we try a little bit of this, didn't work, tried a little bit of that, sort of worked. And, and so, um, getting the, the blueprint right, building it before you build it, um, is incredibly important. Uh, you know, had we just started laying bricks randomly and digging a pool here or there,, would have had a disaster, right? So as it was, we had a plan to build the house and it still didn't go super smoothly, but, uh, better than the alternative. But better than the alternative, of course.

I'm thinking about, uh, competition though. So Clubhouse, you know, just in recent months is exploding in popularity. I see my competitors rushing to Clubhouse and I'm like, I'm missing out. I gotta jump on this. But that's shiny object syndrome. Do you have a way to prevent, you know, the rush to the new, you know, gold rush when your competition is doing it so quickly?

Yeah, look, as long as it's something that's solid, that's great, that's driving you there. So if your audience is there, great, you should be there too. But if it's just because your competitors are getting on or it's the latest sort of FOMO thing, then, you know, think twice about the stuff that you're doing. For me, in my business, for example, one of the highest return activities that I can do is send emails to my email list. I know that, that drives sales, that drives engagement, that drives replies, that drives conversations. When I post on social media, it's valuable, but it maybe gets 10% of the kind of engagement and responses and sales and revenue that, that emailing my list would. And so for me, I'm very focused on my highest return activities. You want to you want to really assign a value to your time, even if it's aspirational at first. So let's say you said your time was worth $1,000 an hour or $5,000 an hour. So now you need to be doing activities that are worth $1,000 an hour. And so if you're doing kind of activities that are maybe $20 an hour activities or $50 an hour activities, either you shouldn't be doing them or someone else should be doing them for you. So it's incredibly important. And some— and, you know, when we're starting off, that hourly rate may be aspirational, but, um, we— you, you'll never get there unless you kind of assign a value to your time.

Yeah.

Okay.

I like this. So how, um, so with my own marketing, how do I get those measurements? How do I know what it's effectively costing me to do social media, where I am getting the return?

How do I do that? Yeah. So, uh, it's a, it's a metric that I got from a friend of mine. His, his name is James Schramko, and he calls it EHR, which is effective hourly rate, which is, um, you effectively take whatever your monthly gross revenue— so let's say, for example, you did $50,000 in gross revenue this month. Let's say you had expenses of $20,000, so you're left over with $30,000 of gross revenue that month. And so, you know, this is cowboy math, so this is not, not exact. So, and let's say you worked 160 hours that that month, so approximately 40 hours a week. So you've now got an effective hourly rate of $187.50. So that's kind of giving you a metric of what your, what your time is worth right now. Now you may want to push that up, and you probably do want to push that up. And so you want to be doing things that are above $187.50. So, uh, and if anytime you find yourself doing things that are below that, um, you've got to catch yourself and either not do it or have have somebody else do it. And that can even apply to your personal life. So for example, for me, it would be insane to mow my own lawn or clean my own house or wash my own car unless you personally enjoy those activities. Like if gardening is fulfilling or something like that, which to me it's not, so it makes no sense for me to do that sort of stuff because I can hire someone for well below my effective hourly rate to do that stuff. And the same applies in my business. So we've got marketing processes within our business. So for example, reaching out to relevant podcasters, replying to on social media, all of those sorts of things. Now, unless, you know, those things need to be handled by my team because it's below my effective hourly rate. And so that's how we're going to push up our effective hourly rate. If we, if we have something, a number in mind that's current, and then maybe a number in mind that's aspirational, a really, really important metric. I do use that with all of my clients, and yeah, it's something that served me really well. All right.

So let's go with that $187.50. So how do I know my marketing is returning that? We can even use this as an example. So we're doing a podcast together. You're investing an hour. I'm investing an hour. Um, how do you know that this is worth— does this have to generate more than $187 for you to justify it? And I know it's not that cold. There's currency of our relationship, of course, things, but how do you How would you measure the idea of, should I continue this podcast or not?

Or should I—

should you continue interviews or not?

Yeah, this is where you need to have a good marketing attribution model. So, and this is sometimes a little bit art, a little bit science. So you need to be able to track where does your revenue come from. So, so when we, when we do our financial analysis and and thanks to you, Mike, we've got a good system using Profit First. But, um, so, um, we love Profit First, um, but, uh, we want to track where did our revenue come from. So, uh, what X number of dollars, where did it come from, which camp marketing campaign. And again, it's not always— sometimes it's a bit of an art. So for example, someone may have heard of me by listening on this podcast, then they clicked on one of my ads, then they interacted with some other piece. So how do we attribute that? You know, Google, for example, uses last-click attribution, whereas other, other models are first-click. And, and so you might divide that up. So, so it's important to speak to your customers or have a way of tagging your revenue and tracking that. And, and now a lot of the software that's out there makes this a lot easier. There's analytics software that's out there that can really help you track the source of your revenue, what, what's working and what's not working. So if I see that the bulk of our revenues coming from email marketing or from Google Ads or whatever else, it makes sense to double down on that. And whatever time and money and energy that you're investing in that is getting you a return and, and spending the time on that. So for me, for example, it makes a lot of sense to appear on other people's podcasts like, like I am now, because it increases my audience. I'm able to reach and serve more people. I'm able to connect with people like yourself, Mike. And so to me, that's a valuable use of that time.

So tell me about the analytical software. I don't know if you have any recommendations.

I'm actually looking into this now, but beyond Google, is there stuff that you recommend? Yeah, there's one that's very, very good. It's called Wicked Reports. So that, that can really track a lot of what you're doing across multiple channels. You can split up the attribution. So that's one I recommend. I also recommend installing on your website something like a Hotjar, where you can actually track people's clicks and links, and you've got heat maps, and you can track, for example, the, the pages that are converting the best, where, where people are clicking, and you can pick up user interface problems as well. So for example, you might see a lot of people are clicking on this thing that is not actually a button, and people are getting confused. So we know that a confused mind says no, and so we want to remove remove any kind of confusion from our websites, from our marketing materials, from, from our different assets, and make sure that we're providing a very smooth user experience. So that's a good one to really track what's happening on your website and what's happening with all of those sorts of things. If you're running an e-commerce store, so something like a Shopify and various plugins into Shopify will help you track different, you know, different campaigns and things like that. There's a plugin into Shopify called Klaviyo that will help you track, email, your email marketing and which campaign is working best and those sorts of things. I don't run an e-commerce store, but I've got a similar application called Ontraport, which is my CRM system, and I can track which emails have the best open rates, which have the best click-through rates, which emails get replies and conversations. So there's a lot of software out there that will help you do that. And, you know, a lot of people ask what's the best CRM system or what's the best reporting system. The best one is the one that you'll actually use. So, you know, so that, you know, you can— don't worry about the best one, worry about the one that, that will work for you and your business. And most of them offer trial periods and allow you to, to, to test them. So, uh, give them a try. Or if you're not a technical person, get your tech guy to— tech guy, tech gal— to, to implement that on your website and, um, start tracking, you know, and start tracking tracking 1 or 2 metrics. You don't have to have a full dashboard where you're tracking every dollar, but start tracking the big stuff and then you can improve it over time and have it get more accurate.

While we wrap on this, there's hundreds of thousands of people who have read One Page Marketing Plan and implemented it. I don't know how many case studies or how many people write back to you, but do you have any any stories or ones like, oh, I loved that we moved this business from X to Y, or wherever you move them to Z?

Yeah, because they followed One Page Marketing Plan. Yeah, yeah, we have tons of those. In fact, we, we collect video testimonials from people. But, um, I love the stories that come in every single day. I'm privileged to open my email inbox and someone has said, um, you know, I used it to start a business, or I used it to pivot a business, or I used it to, uh, start a new product or service. It's absolutely wonderful. So I had a company who was in the events space who emailed me. They pivoted to digital before they had to with the whole COVID, so it was, was just before that. And so that really saved their business because they were able to put together a plan to pivot to digital and get out of the— not get out, but supplement their physical events business with digital because they had a lot of content. They would record heaps of content from their events, and my advice was was to them, hey, monetize this content and create either a membership or split it up into courses that you can sell on a digital platform, because they had this great archive of, of content and they, they never really monetized it beyond the physical events. So it's highly likely that everyone listening here has some kind of asset in their business that's underutilized. I love the the Jay Abraham philosophy on yield. So thinking of maximizing the yield in your business. So a lot of times in business we think of, you know, revenue minus expenses equals profit, right? And of course that makes sense. But thinking from— of your business in terms of a mutual fund, so how can we maximize the yield of your business? What are some of the underperforming assets within your business? So it's highly likely everybody here is sitting on some kind of goldmine. There's some asset in your business that you haven't yet monetized. It might be your mailing list. It's very, very common where I'll work with a client and ask, okay, so when was the last time you mailed your, your list? And a lot of times the answer is never. So there's an underutilized asset. So there are massive, massive opportunities, even creating a reactivation campaign. So people who, for whatever reason, stopped buying from you or left you, that can be a massive win in the business as well. So thinking of your business as a mutual fund, if your business was a mutual fund, would we buy it? And then how could we maximize that asset for, for better return and better yield?

These insights have been awesome. Allan Dib, the author of One Page Marketing Plan.

Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, Mike. It was an absolute pleasure.