The Secret to Working Out Your Marketing Muscle with Dean Mercado

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me here in the UK. I'm Jim James and I'm delighted that we're going to have Dean Mercado who's joining us. Dean, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jim. I'm so glad to be here with you today.

Well, we're going to Long Island in New York. I think I'm pronouncing this right. Yes, Hauppauge. Is that how you pronounce it? Hauppauge in Long Island. And we're going to talk about a new methodology you've got called Clone the Owner. And you're on a mission to help over 1 million business owners that have been suffering. And you've mentioned a figure of nearly 40% of small business owners in New York alone have gone out of business with COVID and, you know, one or two events after that. And you've got a business called Online Marketing Muscle. So you've got 20 years experience of helping clients build businesses, and now you're helping entrepreneurs do that. So Dean, welcome to the show. Tell us about Clone the Owner, why it's so important for entrepreneurs to learn how to grow systems and teams based on a vision of where they want to go.

Right. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to share it. Now, Clone the Owner is a methodology of ours that came out of decades of work that were basically, we were getting clients saying to us, You know, Dean, if I just had 10 of me, if I just had 50 of me, life would be easy, business would be great. And so out of that came the Cloning Owner concept. We also were experiencing a lot of clutter. There are so many books being written. There are so many people out there speaking. There's so many people, everybody's telling you what you need to be doing. What we saw was heads spinning, people's heads spinning. They didn't know which way to turn, what they should do. So we wanted to kind of simplify and codify a methodology that small business owners could adopt and adapt into their business to help them navigate, to make things a little bit easier for them. Things are tough enough in this world. We needed to help them make things a little bit easier. So out of that came Clone the Owner. And Clone the Owner starts and emanates from its core. Its core is the vision. What vision you have for your company? Where are you going and why are you going there? Why is it important for you to accomplish that? That why is what drives you. That why is gonna propel that company forward. Now, I'm not talking about the kind of visions that we used to have hanging on the wall in corporate America back in the 1980s and 1990s, uh, where it was like, okay, there was a nice mission written on the wall and nobody ever read it. I'm talking about your real reason for being something that you wake up every morning and it just emanates from you. Right? So for us here at Online Marketing Muscle, we, we've taken a hard stance in 2023 where we're getting— we intend on getting in front of a million entrepreneurs this year. How that was gonna happen in the beginning, it scared the you-know-what out of us, but we didn't care. We knew we needed to do it. We needed to help as many as we could. Now, if that ended up being 999,999, would I be upset? Uh, maybe. Because I only needed one more, right? That's the entrepreneur in me, right?

Yeah.

But any opportunity to help the entrepreneurs that were struggling and suffering over the last couple of years, in particular here in New York and around the world, what we saw was unacceptable to us. So we adjusted our vision to go after and gift and give as much as we can to try and simplify this thing called business, to help it help make it a little easier to navigate. So, your vision is where it all starts.

So, Dean, if you've got that, you've got the vision of helping a million business owners. My experience is that many of these smaller business owners, you know, 6-figure, 7-figure, you know, family operated, maybe 10, 15 people, they're very good at the functional work. You know, they know how to do something. but they don't know how to bring people to that business. Do you want to just share with us, you know, with your experience of Online Marketing Muscle, but also what you're doing now, how are you going about reaching out? Because in a way, you've— you're building a new business, aren't you, by teaching people how to do business?

Right.

So take us through the steps, can you, that you're taking, and therefore my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs could be taking For their own business?

Sure. Well, in all honesty, once you know what you want and why you want it, life does get a lot easier. Things get clearer. And then we use— we have several strategies that we apply in our business, and one of them is what we call differentiate or die. So, okay, so we want to go ahead and get in front of a million entrepreneurs. Some people would look at me and think I was crazy. Some people would look at me and say, no problem, that's easy. The key is, is finding out how do we differentiate ourselves? How do we make ourselves stand out from everything else? All the clutter going, everyone is distracted right now. Massive distraction. How do we cut through that distraction? And that's where the differentiate or die strategy comes in. And that's about figuring out how do we increase our visibility amongst the people who may know of our brand already, who may have heard of us somewhere before. How do we increase our credibility with those people as well? And how do we go ahead and increase our reach? And that's the big one with this new vision. This new mission we're on right now is about— really, it's about our reach. So we looked at the Differentiate or Die formula and we said, okay, we know we need to go after reach. We need to hit on reach very heavily. So that being said, then we tapped into another one of our strategies that we developed over the years called Your Unique Marketing Recipe. And what that was, and that comes down to, is, okay, there are literally thousands of different things we could do. We know we can't do thousands of different things. It's not feasible. It's not reasonable. And we'll end up doing a few of them very badly because we're stretched way too thin. So the key is, is picking those 1, 2, 3 things that we know are unique to us, things that make us stand out, things that make us better, things that come easier to us, things that fit our budget. Things that relate and make us more relatable to our target market, to our audience. So with your unique marketing recipe, when we looked at Online Marketing Muscle, we said, okay, well, what are— what is our unique marketing recipe? And for us, we knew that one of the pieces lied with me, my comfortable nature on audio, on video, in front of an audience. So getting on stages, getting on podcasts, Those were 2 big things that we said, all right, well, we need to ratchet that up a significant amount in 2023. And that's why if you look all around, I'm on lots of podcasts. We're just maximizing our reach through podcasts. We're on lots of great podcasts such as the one you're watching here today. And the intention is to give as much as we can to help as many. If you come away and walk away with one tip, one idea out of this today, then maybe we've accomplished our goal of, of helping you navigate these kind of murky waters that we're in right now. It's a little complicated. So again, the unique marketing recipe for us, we knew, lied within, uh, my speaking. So the podcasts, getting on big stages— we got a big conference going on in November that we're doing. For a specific industry, and that'll put us in front of thousands and thousands of people as well. So again, it's about figuring out what's your unique marketing recipe. And again, not everybody's the same. So this is not about just because Dean and Online Marketing Muscle are getting on podcasts that you need to get on podcasts. If you're deathly afraid of getting on and engaging, Then it's probably not the right fit for you. Does that make sense, Jim?

Yeah, no, absolutely. I was going to say, you know, Dean, you're plainly very comfortable on the camera and on the mic, and I've seen your YouTube as well, which is great. What would you recommend for my fellow shy, unnoticed entrepreneur? Because I do meet also a number of entrepreneurs, maybe they come from a technical background, for example, and actually they're not interested in being the front of the business. They want the product to do the talking. For example, what would you at Online Marketing Muscle suggest to those entrepreneurs who want to make an impact but don't want to be the front of the business?

Sure. And that really plays right into the Unique Marketing Recipe formula where we classify the entrepreneur, the business owner as one of a couple of different categories. And I'll give you a few of those categories to give you an idea. One of them is called the schmoozer. The schmoozer is a person who loves people. You put them in a room full of people and they can network till the sun goes down. They, they just love it and beyond. So when you're a schmoozer, there are certain marketing tactics you should choose from. Another one might be when you're a writer, if you enjoy writing and you just want to stay behind the scenes, but you, you have the power of the pen. Well, there are a lot of marketing tactics for you to choose from that will allow you to stay behind the scenes but still be able to use your creative writing skills, right? There's the designer, right? That's the more graphical person. We're seeing memes go crazy all over social media these days. So there's that aspect of it. And, you know, so there are lots of different categories you could place yourself in. So if you are That more introverted person, you've got to ask yourself, okay, I'm introverted. Am I comfortable writing? Am I comfortable in small settings? Right? So if I'm comfortable writing, could you be creating content? Yes, you can. Absolutely. You could be creating content and floating them out on social media. You could be creating content and blogging. You could be creating content and having somebody else get in front of a camera and, uh, Having them, you know, create or basically present your content. So there's— where there's a will, there's a way. You just gotta find out which you're most comfortable with.

Yeah.

And if it's none of the above, then you probably wanna bring people around you that are comfortable doing something that your target market would be interested in hearing or watching or participating in.

Yeah. And maybe that leads us, Dean, into your methodology of the cloning, because you want to just take us through how that works. Because if we found our unique marketing recipe and we've got visibility, credibility, and, and reach— you've talked about how you're doing that with, in your case, podcasts and speaking at conferences— just take us through then, um, the clone the owner, because it, it— that's very attractive, but Are you saying that the owner can or cannot clone themselves if they're the face of the business? Because that's a fundamental challenge, isn't it, for most entrepreneurs, is the business can't scale beyond how available the entrepreneur makes themselves to the customers in the market.

Well, just because you're the owner doesn't mean you need to be the face of the business. I mean, that's one point I want every entrepreneur to understand out there. I mean, Big businesses have been doing this for my entire lifetime where they have celebrities doing that role for them. So where there's a will, there's a way. Finding if it's not you and you're not comfortable being that face, that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. However, if you are comfortable, it's very— it's a very authentic position for you to take if you are comfortable. People don't want to You know, they like to see warts on people. Nobody's perfect, right? And when they see the human side of us, it adds the humanity into our business in a way that is very palatable and very tangible for a lot of us because they look like us now, right? We're so used to maybe this whole persona that these big businesses put on, but that's not real. That's not reality. For 90-something percent of the businesses on the planet, the smaller businesses. So if you are daring enough to put yourself out there, wonderful. You know, work with a coach that can help you maximize that experience. So this way it's not so painful for you. You don't have to do things you're not comfortable with. However, you, you know, always remember you can bring people around you. who are comfortable doing things like that. So try not to trap yourself, would be my point, into thinking that it's got to be this or that or else forget it. No, that's not the case. There's always a way to, to, to make things happen. Does that make sense?

Yeah, no, I love that. And this idea that it needs to be done, so you find whichever way is most comfortable for you. So if you're cloning yourself, which parts then, Dean, are you suggesting Um, that the entrepreneur clones?

Well, a lot of it's going to stem from what are you not so good at? What are the things you dislike? Right? Because remember, just because you don't like doing something, there is somebody on the planet that loves doing that something. Right?

That's a great—

or there are a lot of things that you do throughout your day that can be automated. We say either automate, delegate, eliminate. That's the angle we go to, because a lot of things you're doing, you probably don't need to be doing at all. They're really not helping you much, right? Look at the 80/20 rule, the Pareto principle, right? Whereas 20% of the things that you're doing are creating 80% of your result. Imagine if you were maximizing those 20% things, you know, might you get more than 80%? Maybe, you know, at least your business might be a little bit more fun and a little bit more palatable for you.

Dean, you've mentioned before about having this goal of getting to a million entrepreneurs. Can you, can you give us an idea of what kind of problems you're seeing from a marketing perspective that these companies are facing and the advice that you're sharing with those entrepreneurs?

Right. I think one of the big ones happens to be in the name of your program. How do I get noticed? How do I stand out? I, you know, we're, we're doing this, we're doing that, and we're not getting any traction because there's so much clutter out there. And yes, there's a ton of clutter. And this way, I'll always say, whatever you're going to do, do it great or don't do it. Stop doing 50,000 different things. Pick 1, 2, or 3 things, your unique marketing recipe, Learn how to do those great. So if you, let's say you're gonna do blogging, right? Become the greatest blogger, right? Become in the top 1% of the bloggers out there. Learn how to blog great, right? And then learn how to promote those blogs that you're creating wonderfully as well. So maximize. If you're gonna do a podcast, it's not just about getting and recording a podcast. Get the best guests. Right. Put in the best marketing plan so that the episodes are being marketed before, during, and after so that you're maximizing your presence. You're maximizing everything that you do, right? Implement email marketing into that. So you're reaching an audience, you're creating a tribe, right? So you find ways to maximize the few as opposed to minimizing all of these, the maximum or the most things, right? Just because everybody's on Instagram doesn't mean you need to be. Is your target market on Instagram? Do you know how to do Instagram? How do you do Instagram where you're going to actually have an impact? Who can you learn from? Who can you model? Who's doing it great right now that you see out there? And what can you learn from that? So again, whatever you're going to do, do it great or don't do it. Focus on the few and dive deep in those few as opposed to just kind of skimming the surface. With dozens and dozens of different marketing tactics. Okay, that's, that's start to—

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think I want to just address maybe the elephant in the room for entrepreneurs that have gone through a loss or a breakage. Confidence, Dean, you know. Yes, because getting back up, sharing in whatever content format requires some self-belief. Right.

That's right.

How are you helping entrepreneurs to rediscover the strength, the, um, purpose, um, after they've had a big setback? Because that's— let's face it, that's a big part of being an entrepreneur, is self-belief. And if you've had a failure, it's kind of hard to go back out there and say it's going to be fine. How do you help with that, Dean?

Now, and I'm really glad you brought that up because that is something that we're bumping into a lot right now. And a lot of confidence has been shaken. There's no doubt about that. We've actually classified that particular type of entrepreneur as somebody that we are targeting right now. When we come back to the Cloning Owner concept, that methodology, the outer band of that methodology what we call mindset. And those— that's an area where we are addressing the mindset of that entrepreneur. We, we are always pointing them toward and always trying to help them understand that where an entrepreneur learns best is failure. That's where we learn. If we don't embrace failure, if we're too worried about what everybody else thinks, Only to understand finally and ultimately that we start to understand that they're not thinking about us. Nobody's— they're not thinking about us as much as we think they're thinking about us. Uh, bottom line is we get the mindset right. That's the outer band of the Cloney Owner methodology on purpose, because your business will only grow to the degree that you do. So that outer band could either be a constricting A constricting outer band, or it could be an ever-expanding outer band. It's up to you. You've gotta choose whether or not you're willing to push through, or you're gonna allow yourself to be stopped. If you're gonna allow yourself to be stopped, being an entrepreneur is not the place for you.

Yeah.

And, and I hate to say that. And one of the most painful things for me to do is to sometimes tell people it's time to stop. Yeah, I know that this isn't going to work for you as long as they're not willing to do certain things that we know you're going to have to do, like push through those mindset issues. Okay, we all get knocked down, right? We all do. Yeah, it's just a matter of whether we can get back up.

Yes, that's a wonderfully, well, I guess, supportive and encouraging program that you've got there, Dean. If there's, if there's one piece of advice, if you like, that you would give to entrepreneurs, because you've run your own business now for 20 years, about getting noticed, what would you say that is?

Well, I mean, in terms of specifically about getting noticed, the first thing I would preface this with, I would say, whether this is directly on getting noticed or not, You're not going to get noticed if you try and go it alone. You've got to surround yourself with people that are going to help you, right? Business has never been intended to be a one-man sport or a one-person sport. It's just that simple. Get a coach. Get somebody who's done there, been that, who can help you navigate what's going on right now so you could focus more specifically and intently on the things that you want to create. And your coach can help you stop focusing on the things that you shouldn't be looking at, that you shouldn't be investing your time in right now. Right? So in terms of getting noticed, you've got to find your unique marketing recipe. It is critical that you find it because otherwise you're part of the clutter that's going on out there. Don't be the clutter. You have to find the things that make you stand out, the things that make you unique, the things that create a bridge between you and your ultimate ideal avatar, that perfect client, right? So if you could create that bridge, you know, they're on this side of the bridge and you're on this side of the bridge. You want a direct connection. So if that target market, if that ideal avatar loves video or they love listening to podcasts, right, then you ought to consider doing a podcast. If you, you know, or at least getting on podcast shows where your audience can hear you, right? Or if they're video podcasts where they could see you. So it's about finding how to create that bridge. I didn't say 40 bridges. You just need one bridge. That's it. Whatever you're going to do, do it great, but don't go it alone. That's the key. Yes, you could try and go, oh, well, I know how to build my own websites and I know how to do it. That's been my biggest problem over the years. Sometimes when you're too capable, you know, you learn things easy, you're getting in your own way. Stop, stop. Allow people to help you. You'll be surprised how many people out there want to help you if you just are willing to and open to asking for help and you're open to receiving. Allow, allow the gift.

Dean Mercado, it's been a gift and you've kindly Taking us across your bridge today. If people want to find out more about you and also to download the free ebook for Clone the Owner, where can they come?

Sure. Easiest 2 places are deanmercado.com. That's my website that has my book and all the different stuff about me. You could find where I am. onlinemarketingmuscle.com is where you could find the Clone the Owner stuff. Definitely go check it out. If it's easier for you, you could always just go to cloneowner.com and that'll redirect you right to where you can grab the ebook.

Dean, thank you so much for being so generous with all those resources and those thoughts. Thank you for joining us today on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur.

Thank you, Jim. I greatly appreciate being here with you.

Well, and I think we've hopefully got Dean another 1 or 2 entrepreneurs, uh, out of his million, which is a pretty big stretch target. But I know that with his energy and his focus, he's going to get to that number sooner than he thinks, I'm sure. So if you've enjoyed the show, please do share it to share Dean's knowledge and wisdom with your community. And if you've enjoyed the show, please rate it because it also really helps if other people know that you like this show. And until we meet again, I just do encourage you to keep on communicating. Thank you for listening.