Interview with Marco Torres

Welcome to One Sharp Sword cutting through to what Matters Most with your host, Dr. P. Dr. Wayne Purnell, the breakthrough success coach and your powerful presence mentor.

Welcome to One Sharp Sword cutting through to what Matters Most. I'm your host, Dr. P. Dr. Wayne Pernell, the exponential success coach, the president of Dynamic Leader Inc. And bringing you an amazing episode with a gentleman named Marco Torres. Now, he was born in San Antonio, Texas and he moved to Puerto Rico. He, because of that move and because of the way he grew up, he began to appreciate adventure and really gained an entrepreneurial spirit mostly from his dad. But his parents really influenced him. He got into telesales and, and marketing and he did that early on when it was just becoming a thing. So he is a foremost expert in both of those things. Having started in the 90s, he was among the first to leverage incentive based marketing. And we're going to talk a little bit about that because that could affect each of us in the way we position our businesses and even ourselves online for the future. So Captain Marco, because he loves sailing, he's a, he's an avid boat enthusiast. He's here to share his insights on marketing and standing out using value add incentives. Marco Torres, welcome to One Sharp Sword. Great to have you here.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. I look forward to our chat. Yeah.

So you, you started out in Texas and you moved to Puerto Rico. How long were you there? How long were you in Puerto Rico? What? Like, let's talk about how you grew up because you don't, you don't just grow up and go, I'm gonna, you know, do the value add thing. It's like.

Yeah, exactly. Right? You always evolve into whatever we end up doing for a living.

It's so true.

So I, I grew up, my dad, we were, you know, born in San Antonio, Mexican descendants. And then because my dad was bilingual, he was transferred to Puerto Rico to run General Electric credit. And so he was a executive vice president of the General Electric Credit gecc. And so I grew up in the Caribbean. It was awesome, you know, surfing and Puerto Rican good looking girls and, and being picked on by all the other school kids because I didn't speak span, even though I'm Mexican descendants who grew up in Texas, third generation. So Spanish was not a, you know what, we spoke at home. I'm fluent today. But at the time it was, you know, rough. You know, didn't. And anyway, grew up in Puerto Rico. I had a good time there. I got, you know, my dad was never one to hand out any Weekly allowances and what have you. And so I wanted a Schwinn bicycle one year. And he said, well, if that ages me right there. I don't even know if they still make Schwins or not.

But, but anyway, I remember Schwins for whatever that was. So, yeah, yeah.

So anyway, we, you know, he told me, well, you can wait for Christmas and Santa Claus might bring you one, or you can your birthday, or you can get busy working and start something to earn money and buy your own. So he suggested a paper out. And I built. By the time I was 12, I built the biggest paper out the San Juan had ever seen. I was featured on the front page of the newspaper for building a huge route. And by the time I was 23, I went on with my older brother, my mother, we opened five restaurants, and then I branched off from open a nightclub. So it's been in my blood early on to kind of be an entrepreneur. I dropped out of college myself after, you know, barely a year and a half. So I, for me, it was like I, I wanted to employ people versus being employed. And my goal when I was in college was, you know what? I'm. I'll bet you I can start a business and be employing a bunch of these my friends when they get out of college, which is. Ended up being kind of what I ended up doing in many cases. So.

Well, let's pause there for a second because that's, that is a huge concept for most people. We grow up. You know, you grow up, you go to school, you get a good job, that job supports you. You know, if you, if you want to grow, you grow either in that business you're in or you look for a new job. And it's about getting the next job and getting the next job. What caused you to be different? Because that's the. There's a huge difference. And this is really important for every audience member listening to this. There's a huge difference between an employee mindset, which is about stability, and there's nothing wrong with that, and an entrepreneurial mindset, which is about, which is about the roller coaster ride because, whoa, there's no, there are no guarantees. Right? So what caused you early on, like you were 23, you and your, your family, you opened five restaurants. At 25, you started a nightclub and you decided you want to employ people versus be employed. That's not norm, quote unquote normal or typical thinking. What caused that?

You know, I, I don't remember. What was the trigger that made me want to do that other than realizing that the school or the. The cons, you know, I was never good at paying attention enough and studying enough to. To. To take an exam and. And pass the damn thing. And I used to really piss me off when some of my friends were as smart as, you know, smart as attacking without even studying could, you know, show up and get an A on the tests and stuff. And I'm like, man, I don't know if it's. I'm missing a few bolts up here or I just don't have enough, you know, attention spanned or bothered. Yeah, you know what? At the end of the day, I realized later on in life, it was. I never had them. I never saw the motivation to educate myself, you know, during the educational process, you know, school. Once I dropped out of school and got in business, then I realized I need education. I need to learn how to do the following. I need to learn how to even learn how to speak Spanish. I didn't have the desire to learn to speak Spanish until I opened a Mexican restaurant. And then all of the clients, you know, would make fun of me because I didn't barely speak Spanish to explain the menu to. To, you know, Puerto Ricans and what have you. And, and now with the financial motivation of not sound, not being ridiculed by my own clients for my broken Spanish, I was, you know, like, motivated to learn, you know, to actually study and learn something. And that made. All the day since then, I've always been a, you know, I study to this day. I realize you've always got to be educating your got to be staying relevant to the new technologies, the new, you know, whatever's going on to stay and to be nimble in business, but early. So that, that step, you know, and, and mind you, my dad, you know, he's. He kind of laughed at my brother, and I said, okay, you want to be in business? You want to open a restaurant. You don't know anything about restaurants. If you want to open a restaurant, then prove it to me. And first you guys go need to go work for other restaurants and learn it. And so we went. We flew back to Texas, live with my uncle, and went to work. And mind you, this is a lesson that I would give anybody who's thinking about entrepreneurship. Be, you know, a student first. Go work for somebody else in that industry niche that you're interested in having a business in. Don't go do it until you've at least worked for multiple companies that do what you're planning on doing. So we went to work for restaurants. My brother and I in Texas, living with my uncle, and we went to where we were planning on opening a Mexican restaurant. And of course, San Antonio is full of them, so we went to. But, you know, we'd work a day shift, a night shift. We, we'd volunteer to, you know, work the midnight shift so we could be in there when nobody else was around and we could take pictures of everything from, from inventory sheets to equipment brands and models to into, you know, food brands that they would order to, you know, their systems and processes. And we were, you know, funnel hacking before they, before they called it a funnel. Right. We were learning how to be in the restaurant business, specifically the Mexican food business, without spending, you know, several hundred thousand dollars buying a franchise, which we looked at as well, and go, that's not an option. That's way too expensive. And so we essentially, you know, we work at multiple restaurants, come back, compare notes, have photographs of everything to, to review until we had enough to come up with our own business model and business plan and came back and succeeded with our first restaurant. We hit it off the ground running.

I think that's amazing. And it's such an important, it's an important lesson where people who are bad students in school often feel like, well, I'll just get a job. And, you know, the, you know, I, I won't amount to much, but I'll, I'll get a job, it'll be good enough. Etc. And the truth is you could do that. The other truth is you could leverage that just because you're not great in school or learning the way that school offers. There's so many entrepreneurs I've talked to that are like, I was bad at school. But you know what? Learning is so important. I started doing this and then I started learning the things I needed to do to build that. And pretty much 100% of the entrepreneurs I talked to are students first. Even if they were bad at school, they're students first. Right. They go off, they get their education. So I think, you know, during our, during our time together, Marco, what I'm going to do is pause you and underscore some of the, the leadership points and the learning points for our, our audience here, and that's a key one, is that you've got to keep learning and learn what you want to learn, learn what's going to support you. So I think that's awesome.

Yes. It may not be, you know, getting a degree. Right. It may. At least it wasn't for me. It was. And. But once I got in business I realized, man, I don't know how to, you know, something simple like using Excel spreadsheets. I mean, my first paper out back at the time, you know, my dad taught me, I, you know, I needed. In those days, there was these big green spreadsheets on paper with all the little green bar, green bar with all, all the little square boxes and everything. And you know, I had to run, you know, take, I had to. Back then we had to sell the subscription, we had to deliver the papers and we had to go back and collect the money. There was no Internet subscribe people to, for them to pay their own bills online. So I had to go door to door to subscribe, get the subscribers, sell the, deliver the paper and then go back and collect the money. And then I had to have that spreadsheet marked. Who's paid me, who hasn't, you know, organizing the business as a real business. So I knew which, who had to go back and collect on or who I had to stop delivering the papers for because they were in the rears and what have you. But then later on you have, you know, another a real business. Okay, now I need to learn, you know, QuickBooks. And all of that means, all that type of stuff means you have to educate yourself. And sometimes it still frustrates the heck out of me almost every day. It gets even harder for me as I'm getting older here. Right. Seems like no matter what I want to do, I have to go watch a YouTube channel just to figure out how to turn my computer up.

That's awesome. That's awesome. No, and it's, and it's true. There's, you know, the, the idea of you've got to keep learning in order to keep up or keep ahead. You know, it's, it's. Well, I learned what I learned will bury you. I learned what I learned that's a foundation for the world, keeps, keeps changing. And so we all have to keep learning, which is great. I think it keeps our creative edge. I think it keeps our minds sharper. So that's amazing. Let's talk a little bit about what you do now because that's part of what fascinated me and what made me want to have you here on one sharp sword. There's incentive based marketing that you do now, and that's not a term that most people know. So can you describe that and how it works and, and like what? So like can anybody do it at any level? That kind of thing? Where would it plug in? Right. So what's incentive based marketing?

Great. Question and let me jump right into that two one examples that comes to a couple of examples that come to mind I'd like to describe so that anybody listening would say oh, that's what he's talking about by incentive based marketing. And so one example comes to mind. Everybody will recognize this. Amazon.com you know, Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world. One of the most powerful incentives he came up with when he launched the, the Amazon prime in 2005 was get Amazon prime for 79 bucks a year. And although it included a streaming video library at the time, nobody was into streaming video. What we bought for Amazon prime was free shipping. That was the incentive. That was what took our, you know, we wanted the free shipping and we bought into that like kind of Sam's Club. You buy your membership so that you can get discount wholesale purchases. So the incentive was free shipping. And man, it was a genius. We all became loyal clients and shop now. And 70% of all online shop shopping starts on Amazon. The searches start on Amazon anyway. And if you search somewhere else you end up going and comparing it on Amazon before you buy it elsewhere. So powerful, right? Another example is hey T Mobile, Verizon Wireless, what are they doing? They're including hey, when you sign up for two year Verizon Wireless you get the Apple phone free. You know, it's the, some sort of powerful incentive. But then you can bring it down to, you know, all kinds of, you know, how would you. McDonald's is another quick example. Dave, for years, decades now generate an extra $4 billion a year with the Happy Meal where parents around the globe are choosing a McDonald's over other fast food outlets because that we help they take our eye off of the price. We focus on the prize. If we have children buying the bundle, the, the, the burger, the snack, the soda and the seasonal toy which is part of that Happy Meal. And so what is your Happy Meal? Is what I kind of talking to business owners about. What is your adult Happy Meal? What are you offering that can help you stand out from that crowd to get people to jump off the fence and buy with you versus thinking about it or to you know, help you stand out from a crowded space and offer something that others don't now, whether that be creating your own incentives or partnering with others colleagues on similar products and services where you know, like I'm, I do multiple things like that to this day where if, if I'm selling a product line of my own, I might include a part of somebody else's as a Bonus and creating a value stack with an additional bonus that maybe a partner provides. And then we share the leads. He gets everybody who buys my product, who received the bonus that he can follow up on his upsell product. And when he offers his product, I'm getting his clients as well with a bonus, a portion of what I offer that he's including as a bonus incentive. And we're both now offering an incentive we wouldn't have otherwise. It may or may not cost as much of anything and we are acquiring and sharing leads to follow up with and so forth. So that's just a quick example of how you can you create an incentive value stack whether you use marketing boost or not. And I'll tell you a little bit about what marketing boost is as well and how that came about if we have time.

Oh, that's awesome. So I, I just want to add different language to what you just said and you can guide this or correct it along the way if I'm off. One of the things you said incentive based marketing was you pay for something, for example Amazon prime or a Sam's Club or a Costco. To me that's a prepaid subscription. And so you're prepaying. So of course because you've prepaid the in long run your price comes down. And so the prepaid subscription model is incentive for lower pricing. It's a, it's a discounted pricing model which also creates loyalty. Right. Pre if you've prepaid, you're going to be loyal to that particular brand, which I think is brilliant. The Happy Meal thing is about the prize. The, the feeling, the feeling that you get when you get a toy that's worth a few cents. But you've paid for this package to make your child happy which in turns give, in turn gives you some relief as a parent. And then the value stack is kind of a JV joint venture partnership that you do with others where both of you are contributing to a larger package and it costs neither of you all that much to contribute. So just from my perspective, that's what your, that's kind of how, what the, what the incentive pieces comprise. Right?

Exactly. That's even before we get into to marketing boost services that we provide. But yeah, and, and a quick. You know how I got here. I've, you know I'd mentioned when I started in the restaurant business, but then I became started getting in Internet marketing back in 1996. So I've been a very early adapter of Internet marketing and seen the whole evolution of the, of the Internet and bill and building of tools to sell to consumers online. I mean back when I started, nobody bought online. People bought over the telephone so they wouldn't, they didn't trust putting their credit card into some box and so forth. And so they always wanted to talk to somebody to tell me why this product is what you claim it to be. And they'd feel warm and fuzzy and buy over the phone. Well, today nobody wants to buy over the phone, right. So that's complete, that's completely gone. We want to be able to read reviews, click, click and buy. You know. And so it's completely evolved. And now that's where your, you don't have the power of a salesperson on the phone more and more likely in most cases to walk people through your buying process. So you need to build a powerful sales team funnel a landing page that can makes an offer so good that people feel stupid saying no as Alex Harmosi says in his book. And so part of that is now building creating incentives that help people push them off the fence. And that's what marketing boost does. Can I go ahead and throw in what Marketing Boost today is?

Of course, yeah, it's your, it's your business and we're gonna right, we're going to send people to marketingboost.com as part of this. So of course.

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so what we do for our starting at Baindu it's only $37 a month just to get that out of the way is super affordable. Any solopreneur entrepreneur smaller big business can afford us and we offer a some tools travel incentives that can be used as part of your value stack to add value to whatever your call to action is with our subscription plan. These is the incentives we offer are complimentary hotel stays from three to seven nights. One category that we offer is complimentary hotel stay from three to seven night stays in over 130 destinations around the world, such as three nights in Las Vegas, three nights in Orlando, five nights in Cancun, four nights in Cabo San Lucas, five nights in Hawaii, seven nights in Phuket, Thailand, that kind of thing. Then we have hotel savings cards. They're like gift card, but they don't pay for the entire hotel stay. And they're good. They come in increments of 1, 2, 3 and $500. And they save off of, you know, compared to booking a room at Expedia or Priceline or what have you. And, and then there's restaurant savings vouchers. They come in increments of 1 or $200. And we're starting in January, we'll be having increments of 25, 50, 100 and 200 that you can give to clients and when for our subscription model, you get the ability to give away an unlimited amount of these to your clients or prospects at no additional cost to add to whatever it is your call to action is. For example, you know, today a lot of people have used Zoom calls to get people booked on an appointment for yourself or your sales team. So you might be saying, hey, we'll give you a 200 hotel savings savings card if you book an appointment with our sales team and show up on time for the appointment. So you're going to kill two things with this incentive. You're going to reward them for booking that no obligation call to see if we're a good fit to work together to hear about our widgets or this, our software, whatever it is you sell, B2C or B2B. And you might say, hey, if you're the, if you, if you'll book that appointment and more importantly, show up on time. So now all your reminder messages can be, including a, don't forget, show up on time tomorrow, 2pm and we're going to reward you with a 200 hotel savings card, good at a million hotels worldwide. Now, you've given a reason to help you get more bookings and more importantly, eliminate no shows. So that alone can help you, you know, and keep your sales team busy with more appointments showing up. I've got hundreds of case studies on different ways these incentives are being used. And then you might throw in on that same zoom call. You might say, hey, by the way, if you take action with our software, I think you're a great fit for, we can work with you, we can help you if you buy, you know, hire me to be your business coach and, you know, stick with me for A minimum of six months on our anniversary, I'm going to reward you with six days and five nights hotel stay on us in Cancun, Mexico. It doesn't include airfare, doesn't include food and beverage, or government taxes and fees. But I'm going to take care of your hotel stay in Cancun as a reward. If you for loyalty, if you stick with me for six months or if you pay in advance for six months or again, you can create and use these however you wish to help. Use our powerful high value or perceived value travel incentives to help you acquire more leads. Sleepstakes, giveaways, trade show giveaways, closing tools, reward programs, loyalty programs. You know, you can point systems. If you're an e commerce vendor, you might say, hey, when you buy a thousand dollars worth of or earn a thousand points, you know, whatever it might be, you get to earn one of these different incentives, you know, in your value ladder. We have just, and we have offered training and ideas on how to use these incentives to acquire more leads, close more sales, or get your existing clients to spend more money. At the end of the day, there's really only three ways to grow your business. You either need, you either need more clients, you need your client buying more often or you need your clients to spend more, you know, at one time. So how do you do that? That's, there's, that can be a challenge and, and incentives. Whether you use ours or create your own, you need to come up with ways to incentivize your clients to select you more often than your competitor, come back more often and spend more money with you. And we've seen that work with travel incentives more than you know, in any industry niche. We've seen it work for everything from multi level marketers to retail, you know, real estate agents, insurance agents, all kinds of direct sales, solar shit. I can't. You name it. It can help any business, including podcasters, get people to show up to live webinars and so on and so forth.

I can see it for pretty much any business. You know, I have friends who are photographers. So you know with your wedding package you get a free. I have, I have clients who are dentists. So you know, it's like refer a friend, refer a family member and get a. This I have, I could just, I mean friends, people who are authors. You know, it's like hey, leave a review, I don't care. It's like I'm not gonna pay you for a four or five star review. I'm gonna just reward you for Leaving a review. You choose what. What level. Right. So. Because it's not. I'm a big fan of ethics. Right. So it's not ethical to say, well, I'll only give you a prize if you give me four or five stars. Leave a review and. And you get a reward. Absolutely.

Mind you, that's how our business was born. If I can jump in with that.

Sure.

This whole idea came about because we've been in the travel space, my partners and I, since 2010, and we opened our own travel business. You know, well, I've been in the travel space since 1983, but the. We launched our own travel business in 2010 with some partners of mine. We were growing really quick, but we wanted video reviews, speaking of reviews. And we kept thinking to ourselves, man, if we only had more people giving us video testimonials from hotels and resorts we were selling, we'd be able to leverage those reviews. If we had video reviews even more than written, we'd be able to leverage them on our Facebook ads, our YouTube ads, or TV ads, and, you know, have real people talking about their vacation with our. From our website. Well, we couldn't get hardly anybody to do it, so we came up with an idea to say, hey, if, you know, to do a survey. Now, this is a good point anybody can take away from. And, Wayne, this is what we did. We did a survey when we felt. And we still do this today. We did the survey when we think our clients are at the peak of their happiness. And this can be done with whatever product or service you offer. When you think they should be at their peak of happiness with your product or service, that's when you do a survey, send them a text and an email saying, hey, what do you think of our service so far? Would you give us a star rating from 1 to 5? How are we doing? What do you. What. How's the hotel living up to your expectation? And if we got back at 1, 2, or 3, we were all over that. You know, hey, what can we do to fix this? We're sorry you're not happy with the, you know, our service or the hotel. And we would do our best to solve the problem. If we couldn't solve them. I mean, if we did get a 4 or 5, rather, that's when we would send them back a message going, you know, wow, we're thrilled that you're loving this hotel. We'd love to ask you a huge favor. Would you help us spread the word about this hotel? And if you'd go that extra Mile and film a selfie video from the pool, the beach, the bar, whatever you like best. Brag about that hotel brand and our brand will reward you with a complimentary hotel stay. Three nights in Orlando or Las Vegas. When we started, we only did Orlando and Vegas and boom, right away we had dozens of these video reviews coming in. And then we were again, we were leveraging them all over our website, generating hundreds of more bookings. And then we had to turn it off because it's like this is expensive to fulfill those three nights we were giving away. And so we said what was scratching our head. What could we do to keep this campaign going because we love these video reviews coming in. So we went back to our hotel partners in Orlando and Vegas and said, look, look, you've got a problem. And we think we came up with an idea to help you fix it. Let's be honest, your hotels never fool year round you're full on certain weekends, certain peak seasons, certain holidays, special events. But the majority of the year you've got 30, 40, 50% of your rooms sitting empty. And yet you still have all the same fixed costs, mortgage payments, front desk staff, maintenance crews, etc, so we got these hotels to agree to give us their unsold rooms at a usually discounted or even free so that they could convince them that they would earn some money versus none did get people to hopefully buy, you know, spend money on room service, the bars, the restaurants, the casino, the gift shop, the excursion desk. They book extra nights and generate some revenue versus none on those otherwise empty rooms. So now we could fulfill those giveaways we were doing. So we went back to doing that, that then we thought can you imagine if we had hundreds of hotels worldwide participating with this, we'd have another standalone business. And that's what eventually became Marketing Boost today where we offer, you know, 130 destinations around the world with three to seven nights. And the end user, typically the way these work is the Marketing Boost member gives it to the client, says here's three nights in Las Vegas. It doesn't include your airfare, food and beverage or government taxes. So the end user pays an activation fee which covers the government taxes when they travel. And now they've got 18 months to log into a website, select from the available dates, book their room, get instant confirmation, no phone calls to make, no hoops to jump through, no timeshare presentations, none of that crap. Easy to use and everybody wins. So it's been, that's how the business was born and, and that's how it's incredibly unique in the marketplace. We're not the first to be in the travel incentive business, but we reinvented how we make it affordable and easy for everybody to use.

Marco, that's amazing. I, I will say right now I am not a member nor are am I affiliated. So just having you on and talking all about this is, is an invitation. It's not a. I'm not getting anything. So this is for my audience. I'm not getting anything out of the having you here other than enlightenment, which is, it's a great idea.

And one of the reasons I like telling that story in a way is because. Sorry to interrupt you. It's because it's because it's, it's whether you use marketing boost or not. I sometimes I sound like an infomercial. But the idea here is, is also how we created a problem. How we saw we solved our own problem.

Yes.

And that turned into another whole business by solving problems for the hotel industry and creating and creat a solution for entrepreneurs around the globe that now have these access to these incentives very affordably. So we created this, you know what I call a win, win, win for everybody. A win for the resort partners and hotel partners because we're helping them fill rooms that they wouldn't get any revenue from. We're helping our marketing boost members give them these incredible tools to grow their business. And we help the, the end user who receives these incentives because now you should see some of our current reviews. People are sometimes thrilled that they're traveling to amazing destinations where they wouldn't maybe have even been able to afford it to otherwise if that other, you know, that business owner had an incentive, the incentive for doing whatever it is they did to earn it.

So this is, this is key and I'm glad you, you bounced to that. We solved a problem not only our own, but we saw something that was big enough where we were solving someone else's problem along the way. That's huge. My thinking as I'm sitting here, I'm thinking about the audience and you know, some of our audience members have jobs. J O B S's right. That, that they're comfortable in. And so if you're, if you're you know, working your day to day life, you could still make use of this with friends and family and like the idea of hey, if you, you know, even like as a, as birthday gifts or something. Birthday, Christmas, other you know, seasonal holidays, it just sounds like a great way to engage. And the idea is that this is, this becomes a relationship based Gift, not just like sign up now and we'll throw in a free whatever. You know, it's like, like this is because you're doing this because you're in relationship with. And I think those are the key points to keep in mind along the way. What can you do as an individual that allows you to stand out and as an individual, either business owner or as an individual in the world that allows you to stand out that nobody else is really doing? What would it mean if you gave friends, family, work, associates the gift of, gift of travel? Yeah.

Dr. Wayne, you just came up with something that one of, one of our, well many of our members do today, but one of them came up with this idea a couple of years ago and he's an insurance agent and he has hundreds of insurance agents under him and he's created a whole training module within our platform that we call lead by giving. And it would work as you say for an individual who's employed or maybe in, especially if you're in sales or, or what have you. But for example, he teaches members how to lead by giving by supporting local non profits and fundraisers which could be done whether you, you know, are just happily employed somewhere or you're an entrepreneur. But if, even if you're an entrepreneur, you can't figure out how you would use these incentives, you might be doing it this way. He leads by they, they support local nonprofits, fundraising opportunities whether it be a high school football equipment fund run fundraising or, or whatever the drive is. They'll go in and say hey, we'd like to, you know, sponsor your next fundraising event on behalf of my company or XYZ Insurance or XYZ Realtor, XYZ

Plumbing or, or even as a good, as a good neighbor, right. I'm so invested in this, this local non profit, I want to give the gift of travel to your next.

Right so, so that they could walk, right they can walk into the nonprofit. Look, we're going to give you a half a dozen of these complimentary hotel stays. Three in Vegas, three in Cancun. You get to auction them off and keep all the money. Or you can wrap, sell raffle tickets and keep all the money. I would like to, maybe I should be at the event to tell people how they work. Hey, they don't include airfare, don't include food and beverage, don't include government taxes and fees. And here's how they work. You're going to get, you know, to log in and 18 months, you'll have to travel and so forth. So now you're rubbing shoulders with the philanthropists at these events and so forth. You're being exposing yourself as the expert, the authority and whatever it is you do. You're showing yourself as you mentioned, just the good citizen in the community that has a relationship with the travel company that you can give these incentives to for and, and, and you're, if you are in business, you know, now you're, you're taking your sales hat off, turning it around and you're being a good Samaritan, the good hero in the community and that's going to being bring leads your way by as a byproduct. People will be like what is it you do again? You know, and yeah, give me your card. I'd love if I need ever, ever need a plumber, if I ever need a realtor, I'd love to, you know, chat with you and, and your, you know, you're networking and you're building your, your network of, of community that whether you have something to sell or not, you are building your personal brand by supporting local non profits and you can do it affordably with a marketing boosting subscription, so to speak.

Amazing. I love the idea of build your personal brand. And so whether that's you in your business or you as a good individual, build your personal brand through, through giving, through the idea of, of that. So marketing boost. Here's my understanding, it costs $37 a month to have access to unlimited basically coupons for hotels and some restaurants around the world. Is that, is that right?

The restaurant vouchers work in the United States and Canada on LinkedIn. They're powered by a company called the Entertainment Group or Dining Advantage. It's a phone app that you get, you download the phone app, if somebody gives you one of these restaurant certificates or as a member you can give to yourself, your clients, your staff, what have you. And these restaurant incentives, you download the app and then you plug in your zip code and you'll have typically dozens if not hundreds of restaurants and businesses in your zip code that you can select and get discounts as. But you know, 10 off, 25 off bill, buy one, get one free entree, you know, there's, you name it. Every restaurant makes their own offers in the mix, but it gives you all kinds of offers from you know, pizza discounts to high end restaurants to some local, some national chains, but the majority of them are local individual restaurants that are in the mix. Over about a hundred thousand, over 250,000 different offers with probably about a 55,000 participating restaurants nationwide that's amazing.

I, you know, I'm sitting here going, maybe just for myself, I could use that. So, so pulling away from the infomercial kind of feel of this for a second. Let's talk about you again as a, as a good human in the world. And, you know, you've gotten to this place of wow, you know, I started marketing. Marketing Boost. And so what's next for you? Like, are you writing? Are you producing? Are you like, what's your next, your personal next, big next.

I am writing a, working on writing a book to, you know, with a lot of, A lot of ideas that I've had over the years on what it takes to be successful in business and on how to build, you know, the, the how to help create that perfect offer to help your business get off the ground or get it to the next level. So working on that personally, I'm, you know, if you're watching this on video, you'll see I'm no spring chicken. So I'm getting to the age where I'm. What I love about the. My company I have today, Marketing Boost, among several other companies that I have, is this one gives me the ability to, to reach back down and kind of pay back or pay it forward. And I've. We have a Facebook group with over 30,000 entrepreneurs in the mix. I, I do my own podcast show as well. And I just, I get, you know, a really warm feeling essentially helping others, watching other businesses start to grow, helping the entrepreneur journey that I've had in my lifetime. And it's not easy to do. I mean, when you're on your own, especially nowadays, you know, you're a lot of entrepreneurs, it's never been easier in a way, but it's also never been harder. One of the ways it's never been easier is the technology today. There's so affordable, so much available to build your website, launch it, have an easy CRM, all this type of stuff. But, but you're home alone at it, right? You're. There's nobody on the pat you on the back when you're an entrepreneur. Solopreneur getting started. And that's what I like being a part of is helping build that community where we're teaching other business owners and kind of helping them along that path and keeping them motivated to take, to keep taking that next step forward because it's easy to give up and go right back to the safety of a job. And the risk and the roller coaster, like you said of being an entrepreneur is very scary. And if you don't have the support at home from a spouse or a mom or a brother or a sister. If you're on your own trying to do this is. It's hard. And so community kind of is one of the tools that we help provide to help help that succeed.

Well, I want to, I want to underscore that the, the idea of. And the engagement in community is so important. One of the basic human needs and desires is belonging and you know, as you venture into any kind of new venture, new adventure venture or adventure. Right. It's, it's really, it's really about with who. Right. With whom. And you're always going to be at the top alone. If you're the one that's starting it at the same time, you can do that in tandem with or parallel with other people who are at the top or starting on their own of us saying Marco. And that is lift as you lead. And it sounds like you're doing exactly that. You're. You're offering a hand back to pull others with you to get to this place of look, anybody can do this. Right? And I. That's so important. It's so good. So good.

Yeah, I agree. It's. It's fulfilling. And, and you know, I've always. One of the first books my dad had me read when I started my paper route back when very early on was the Zig Ziglar series. And I don't remember the name of the first book I read of his. But the, the one message that stuck with me from early on to this day is if I help enough, you know, other people get what they need or what they want, I will get what I need and what I want. To paraphrase Zig Ziglar's line there. And it's powerful. You know, I help enough other people get what they want, I'm gonna though and in sales, even, you know, back to sales, marketing boost helps you might close more sales, etc. But the end of the day when you're asking for the order, if your product and service, you gotta. If you're really to. In order to help sell more, you really need to believe your product or service is going to help that client achieve what they want. And if your product or service can help that client really get what they want, then you deserve the order. You deserve to ask for the money and you deserve. And then you deliver and deliver on what you promised and it won't. You know, it's not that hard. One scare. Sales really scares a lot of people out of being an entrepreneur. Their fear, the, they fear the, you know, the no's are going to come their way and there will be plenty of them. But you know, that's a, it's a,

it's a key point. Marco. Rejection is not personal, right? You're. When you are selling something, and here's the truth is we all sell. We all sell. We show up in the world, we dress a certain way, we engage with others a certain way. We're selling ourselves. And if you have a product or a service that you were offering and you truly believe in that, then it is a service to offer that to others. And so there will be some that don't get it. And, and because they either don't understand it or they're not ready for it, they're going to tell you no. That's not a reflection of you, that's a reflection of them. And I think that's the, that's one of the key points to remember if you're in say a home. That, that the no or the rejection is not a full on rejection, rejection leading to abandonment. It's, it's a reflection of the other person's current state. So keep going, right?

You just keep going, keep going and keep learning because it is a learned skill to, to learn to sell and to learn to listen more than you talk.

That's very true, very true. It's one of the reasons I actually like a podcast, because I get, I get other people talking and, and I get to chime in every so often. Let's talk about how people find you. I know you're on LinkedIn. I know that we're going to send people to marketingboost.com what else? What? What?

Yeah, you can join search on Facebook for our Facebook group, the Marketing Boost Official 1 Special Offer I've got for your listeners. If you go to marketingboost solutions.com marketingboostsolutions.com and then there we have a multitude of products and services that we, we provide to business owners to grow their business. But there's a link there to Marketing Boost which will take you to be able to sign up for a version of Marketing Boost for free with no credit card required. So you can get not all of the bells and whistles, but you get a portion of what these incentives are about our top seven destination and you can send yourself one to check it out. You can and do that with no risk, no credit card required and experience what Marketing Boost offers.

Amazing. Okay, so you just said that people can give themselves a, a free vacation basically by going to marketingboostsolutions.com that's, that is quite a gift to our audience. So please, please, as you're listening to this, watching this, this, take advantage of that. All right? Anything else, Marco, that you want to, to bring up for our audience at all?

One last word of advice I would give if you're an entrepreneur, solopreneur out there. The thing that used to keep me back, hold me back when I was starting out was I wanted to do everything myself. I, I didn't want to spend the money to hire anybody. And I always felt nobody can do it as good as me anyway. No one's going to put their heart into it. So I wanted to be the one to build the website, write the email campaigns, do this, do that, do the other, do the data entry, do that, you know, and if you stay thinking small, you will stay small and you won't grow. So you've got to start being willing to hire virtual assistants, hire somebody else, hire experts, people that are smarter than you at certain areas where you're not so great at, and let delegate things out and grow your business, Start working on your business, not for your business.

That's amazing. So. Right. So what, what you just said was stay in your own zone of genius and hire people around you to do the things you're not great at, which is, which is really great. That was a turning point for me, me, it was a turning point for me in, in, you know, I'm a, I'm a solopreneur, right. And to be able to go, well, I need someone who knows this, I need someone who knows that. And just to invest in that, it's allowed me to do what I'm best at. So, you know, being able to, to do the consulting and the coaching, it's.

Yeah. Before you know it, you got a team, right? You gotta, you got your video editors over here, you've got the, you know, know, you've got data entry guys over here, you've got your email marketing expert over there, you got your website builder, you know, or multi, some people doing multiple of those roles. But you try to do it all and it's a big mistake.

So it's so true because it takes, it's consuming and it's. Then you wonder why you're doing any of it. So, yeah, stay in your zone of genius and enjoy the ride. And yeah, yeah, the challenge is the adventure. That's, that's what keeps me smiling every day. It's like, absolutely, I'm so good. Marco Torres. Thank you for joining us today on One sharp sword. Really appreciate having you.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.

Yeah. Very good. All right, well, my guest, Marco Torres, Marketing, Boost Solutions.com, if you're interested in checking it out, please do. Great. Guest this is one sharp sword cutting through to what matters most. I'm your host, Dr. P. Dr. Wayne Purnell, the exponential success coach and the president of Dynamic Leader Incorporated. We will see you here next time. Thank you. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for listening to One sharp sword cut cutting through to what matters most with your host, Dr. P. Dr. Wayne Purnell, the breakthrough success coach and your powerful presence mentor.