How To Apply The 8 Profit Activators To Grow Your Business - I Love Marketing Episode #228

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast, Everybody. It's Dean Jackson and Joe Polish.

And welcome to a special episode of I Love Marketing. And today we've got our good friend Chip Franks, who's in Austin, Texas, who is heading up joevolunteer.com. we're still in the midst of a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. I want to thank those of you who listened to our last episode where we talked with Chip and we talked about what happened at the Genius Network annual event. We had Chip on as a guest because we announced and launched Joe Volunteer at the Genius Network annual event. And it's been really well received and this is a game changing idea. And the reason that we have Chip on is because for one, we want all of our I Love Marketing listeners to be aware of Joe Volunteer and what it is, which is kind of like uber for linking people that would like to volunteer with organizations and causes that need it. More importantly though, this was an idea that was born out of the I Love Marketing podcast because Chip, running his own successful real estate business, had heard one of our episodes, episode 186, where we actually talked about this idea and he made it real, put together a business plan, sent it to me. I was extraordinarily impressed. And this ended up starting a really great relationship for us to take the before, during and after print and the eight profit activators and basically implemented into an idea which was just simply an idea. It was just an idea. And now it's become a real business and a real campaign. And this is a massive game changing value creation concept. Dean had this great idea on the last episode. If you've not heard the last episode, you can still listen to this whole one and go back and listen to it. If you have heard it, then you remember at the end Dean said a suggestion of, hey, let's, you know, maybe we can do a separate episode where we take this idea of Joe Volunteer and go through all the eight profit activators. Very much the way that Dean takes people through his, you know, his breakthrough blueprint three day events that Dean does. We're going to kind of you're going to see a version of how Dean will take Chip and this business through it so that whatever business you're in, whatever ideas you have, you can actually see how we're applying it to a real business. And this is a business that is kind of like a benefit corporation. It's a business that is our main motivation with Joe Volunteer is not how do we get rich off this? It's how do we create something that is lacking in the world? And the whole concept of volunteering would reduce suffering and change people's lives. And that's what I so much appreciate about Chip is that he's just a guy that really wants to help people. And he has a real affinity with this. And I'll let him share why he's doing this and what it means to him. I had dinner last night with Brendan Bouchard, who was in town and spent about three hours with Brendan after I just got back from the GKIC event where I was speaking at the Info Summit. And I showed. I showed Brendan the Joe volunteer video and he loved the idea and says, wow, this is a pretty big deal of what this can do with people.

I love the idea. I mean, it's so needed. And so part of the thing about a great idea is when you hear it, you just know and can see that it's going to make an impact. I'm excited about this because. So cool to be on the ground floor of this, you know, and actually to be right there when it was. The whole idea was founded, you know, so it's kind of a. It's kind of a great thing. We haven't had anything kind of like this come through on. I love marketing yet. So I would like to spend the time and kind of go through and kind of brainstorm and create kind of a version one of a marketing blueprint here for us. Yeah.

So I'm just going to let you guys. I'm going to obviously pipe in when I feel the need, but I want you to lead this thing, Dean. And what I want all of the listeners to take away from this is understand that this idea, literally this all started just a few months ago. And this is where. What happens when you have just an idea and how do you make it up and make it real and gain traction and turn it into something that in this particular case, we don't know how many months, weeks, years it's going to take for this to turn into what we hopefully becomes a global, you know, global platform for helping people with volunteers. And I think this is really instructive, no matter what business you're in, to look at. How do you take the seed of an idea and lay out and think about the communication, the telling of the story, the enrolling people into it? I mean, there's all kinds of things that we can be doing better with it. And so we're looking at this episode as how do you take Something and make it. Set it up so it has the highest possibility of success. Make it into something real. This is the ground floor of something. And I know that many of our listeners, even people that have been in business for many, many years, they have started to develop the marketing mindset that let's look at everything we're doing as a startup, because when you come at something from a beginner's mind, there's a lot that you can learn.

So go for it.

Dean, where do we start?

I mean, the thing is, I think we want to kind of acknowledge that we've come and, you know, Chip especially has come so far to get to this point, you know, to get to a point where we're really on the verge of launching here. And one of the conversations that we had, when you've got something that can potentially serve the whole world, there's often our appetite is kind of bigger than our capabilities in the beginning. And so if you're going to help all kind of matching up volunteers and matching up people, organizations who depend on and could be benefited by volunteers, that it makes sense to start in a containable market. You know, start in an area where you can really make an impact. And so rather than try and take on the whole world, it's been smart to kind of narrow the thinking right now just to one city in Texas right in Chip's backyard. And that makes it so much more. That makes it so much more manageable. Even big companies like Airbnb and Uber and things that have exploded like that, they started in one manageable market. So when we're. We're going to talk about all of the profit activators, but one of the things that we always start with is starting with the during unit and the definition of actually what the result is going to be. What is it that Joe Volunteer is going to do? There's more than one market that this is going to serve. It's not people interacting with one business or one entity. We've got volunteers matching up with the organizations who need or could benefit from volunteers. So it's at its core core, it's a matchmaking service. So let that help people easily connect. How would you describe the core of what it is that Joe Volunteer is going to do? If you think about the one unit of transaction now, Chip can finally speak.

This is a little different because you try and determine who your customer is and all of that, and I guess we will get to that, but we have several on this one. But the way that I see this working and the end of it is that volunteers can easily open up their phone and see this app and find places that need volunteer work done, worthwhile organizations that have a need, humane societies and children's hospitals, veteran centers and things like that. So people can open it up, find a place that needs someone and they can go there, fulfill a need, help them and feel great for doing it. I just want it to be as seamless as friction free process as possible for them to go and help someone and hopefully help them feel a lot better for having helped and of course ease some pain or suffering or just help out with other organizations. And I guess the end result of that is both parties feeling great about what they've done and actually making a difference in the lives of others.

The core function is going to be.

That.

An organization can list some needs that they have. Would you have it so that they can list, you know, individual like opportunities or like, like almost like an indiegogo kind of campaign for a specific task. Can they list like, we need to clean out the basement. We got all this stuff, we need to clean out the basement. And it's going to be, we need about five people to do that on this Saturday. Is it going to be that specific or is it going to be, hey, we need volunteers, Just the general type of thing?

Yeah, I would say specific, but until it gets to that point, it might be we need volunteers, but. And we honestly, we're not going to know because I want this to be as open of a platform as possible. So any organization can post things like we need volunteers, like you said, to clean out the basement or something like that. They might just say we need general volunteers or what have you. But we're going to try and train them into being somewhat specific with what they need. So the volunteers of the Joes out there get a very good sense of what they're getting themselves into. Yeah.

And that's kind of, I think, you know, when you kind of get down to the engine of how people are going to be aware of this, you know, keep narrowing it down to what's the, you know, what's the opportunity that people have, you know, what, what is it that they're going to do? And the more specific I think the better it's going to be. Feels like if there's, you know, we need, you know, volunteers to come and play cards with some of the residents of our senior home or something like that.

Right.

Like a very, very specific sort of browsing type of opportunity for people who are. Because I think if you're thinking about it from the organization. They probably have a list of things that if they had a magic wand that they would love to get completed. Right. Or love to have ongoing volunteers for.

Yes, they do. And in fact, very specifically they have dances that they have at the nursing homes and they have bingo sessions and they have signups to where you can read to the elderly there. And yeah, I think that the way that we're going to do this is actually make each one an individual volunteer opportunity. I think that's probably the best way to do it.

Right. And that way then that way when people are browsing the opportunities to volunteer, they'll feel like they can pick something that resonates with them or talks to their heart or makes them feel good. Like maybe somebody likes to read to seniors or maybe somebody likes to dance or to play cards or to, you know, to organize a sing, play the piano for a sing along or something like that where there's, you know, everybody gets a chance to jump in and do something that they feel like completely resonates with them rather than kind of a blind, you know, just volunteers. That's kind of a, it's kind of a fluffy thing in a lot of ways. Right. Like a lot of people may shy away from that because maybe they will get, or maybe they're afraid that they might get, you know, put doing something that they're not comfortable with. So the more, I think the more specific, the better where people are going to get a sense of feeling like this is something that spoke to me that I get to do. And I think that's going to have a built in encouragement for people, you.

Know.

So at its core, what we're talking about is if you break it down to the one transactional unit sort of thing, is an opportunity for a organization to list and describe specific volunteer opportunities that they have and for volunteers to browse those opportunities and pick one that resonates with them.

Absolutely. That is a great way to break it down.

Yeah. And so knowing that, because often when you start thinking again, there's so many ways that this could be used. It's at the core you always have to get down to. And this will, I'm saying this for everybody listening in on this process here is no matter what, even the biggest business has a core transactional unit. And so for Uber, the core transaction is that I need a ride somewhere and I'm going to be hooked up with somebody who's willing to take me there and I'm going to get in the cab or get in their car and get out. And that's really the core transactional unit that is multiplied millions and millions of times through their interface, which is really what Uber is. And that's really what I see that Joe Volunteer could be same type of thing, right. It's that type of an interface for an individual who wants to volunteer, and maybe they can recruit their friends, maybe they can recruit as a group to pick a task that needs multiple people and everybody can get involved with that. Or a family could pick one. And maybe that's kind of the way that. That might give a sense of later on, sort of categorizing some of the volunteer opportunities. It's thinking like something that would be suitable for a family or something that would be suitable for a group or a, you know, or a. A baseball team or, you know, some. Some kind of a social group to do where it needs, like, bulk type of things, you know, like cleaning out the basement or cleaning the yard or taking, you know, taking stuff, moving stuff, or doing something that's going to be. Be helpful to have a lot of. A lot of people. So knowing that.

Yeah. Let me mention also, Dean, while I'm listening to this, that people listening to Joe Volunteer, if you don't have a concept of it, you may want to pause the podcast and go to joevolunteer.com and check it out, or go to the, you know, the Indiegogo. You can type in Joe Volunteer and Indiegogo and find the, you know, the crowdfunding campaign that at the time that we're recording this episode, you can learn more about it. But, you know, Joe Volunteer in a lot of ways could be disaster relief, it could be animal shelters, it could be companionship in nursing homes, recovery centers, and it could be, you know, cleaning things up like you're mentioning. I just want to make sure that this, that everyone is aware that there's volunteers for all kinds of things from homeless people to, you name it.

That's exactly right.

Like, anything you can imagine is still going to go through that core transactional unit of here's the task or here's the opportunity, and here's the volunteers that we can connect with that opportunity. What were you going to say, Chip?

I was just going to say this is going to be a very open platform because people are going to use this in ingenious ways that we haven't even thought of. And that's. That's the idea. Yeah, yeah.

To make it sort of.

Yeah.

Just to kind of make it sort of where it can grow and scale, you know, based on different iterations of that one transactional unit. So we're pretty clear on that. Is there any. Is there going to be any cost for the organizations or costs for the volunteers, or is it completely free interface?

What we're thinking at this point is that there will never be a cost to a volunteer that wants to volunteer someplace because they are giving their heart and soul and time and efforts into helping someone else. So we want to make that as friction free as possible and as easy as possible. At this point, initially, there won't be any fees or any setup for the organizations, but we reserve the right to maybe do something nominal in the future, just depending on how we have to fund this, and we do something extremely easy for them, like maybe a dollar per volunteer, no matter how long they work, or something like that. But the idea is to make this a benefits corporation instead of a nonprofit that just depends on getting handouts all the time. That would dilute our mission. And we want our mission to be completely focused on growing volunteers and getting people to help other people. So that's one way. And then the other way is just if there is a background check required, then we're thinking that we're going to partner with a company that can do that and either get a referral fee or have our own background check company eventually, something along those lines. So we can get paid with that. But how that is paid for, it could be a volunteer. If they wanted to work, say at a children's hospital and they have to do a background check, then it'd be worth them to pay the $13 or whatever it is to be able to do that. And some organizations have. The organization will pay that for the volunteer, and some ask that the volunteers pay it. So that's the only other. The only other cost, I think that would be associated with it.

So let's now, if we kind of break this down into the before unit, the during unit, and the after unit, and we start looking in the before unit, you know, profit activator number one is select a single target market. And if we focus on. So right now, the geographic market is going to be strictly Austin right now, is that right? Yes. And so we've got. We've narrowed it down to Austin, Texas. And what's the population of Austin?

Oh, gosh, I think it's about 800,000 thereabouts.

Okay, so 800,000 population in Austin. And on the organization side, the ones who could be beneficiaries of all of these volunteers, what kinds of organizations are there that would make up Kind of our target audience for people who can. Would benefit by this. So like seniors homes?

Yes, I would say obviously the seniors homes, the homeless shelters are a big thing. And the food pantries downtown, the humane societies. And I'm thinking initially, especially the places that are somewhat established that have a volunteer program or something where they can easily plug people in, it would probably be the lowest hanging fruit on this. And children's hospitals, churches. Actually churches have a lot of opportunities to help other people out, so that's definitely a place we go after as well.

Well, churches would be good sources for volunteers, right?

Yes, but I think that they'd also have volunteer opportunities as well. So that's just what immediately comes to mind with that. I think a lot of this too, we're probably going to have to rely on some Joes to actually go out and find more places that need help as well.

Right. And that's kind of an interesting thing. Like where are those organizations right now? So are there, you know, certainly you can I imagine in the. That there's a lot of nonprofit organizations within Austin.

Yes, there are quite a few. And I guess that's kind of the problem that we're running into though, is a single place that has all of them in one spot that makes it handy. And that's kind of part of the problem that we're solving. Right.

Well, and there's part of the thing is that when we look at it, what I would encourage you to do, if I were doing like a full on, you know, exploration of applying all of the eight profit activators here, I'd make a sort of an exhaustive list of all of the organizations, you know, all of the types of them. So when we've narrowed it down to homeless shelters, for instance, and to keep getting it narrower to the actual list of the homeless shelters, you know, how many homeless shelters would there be in Austin? How many senior homes would there be in Austin? How many food pantries, how many churches? You know, getting more and more crystal clear on who these audiences are. So the thing about it, we always talk about this idea of visible prospects and invisible prospects. And this is very similar to the real estate business in a lot of ways. Chip that I talk about that. Sellers, home sellers. You can get a list of people who own lakefront homes and use those as your prospects for getting listings. But it's more difficult to get a list of people who are going to buy a home. And so I say that the sellers are more visible prospects because they already own a home. The buyers are sort of invisible prospects, because we don't know who they are. We don't know they could be coming from San Antonio or Dallas or somewhere else. And so we don't know. So we have to kind of turn them into visible prospects. But if we look at our situation here, if we look at the organizations as the visible prospects, it's easy to get a list of who the initial target audience could be. And so when we're starting again, it's so easy to see how all of it can be fully implemented and how it's all going to be all these possible organizations. But sometimes getting started, it's easy to pick consciously, the most, the easiest sort of audience right now to kind of get the ball rolling, you know. And I think if you look at just what you've named, seniors homes and homeless shelters, food pantries, what were some of the other potential organization target audiences?

Wow, got plenty here. And actually just looking at it right now, just doing some Google searches right now, and they have volunteers needed for robotics events, for holiday gift wrapping, for gifts for children that are, that are needy. Let's see here. Apartment set up for volunteers for elderly. Gosh, there's a whole bunch of them. This will be a pretty big list of a lot of places here.

And there's kind of like when you look at it, that that's going to give you some, some cues into maybe the types of, the types of organizations who the beneficiary of these are. So if we say like children and seniors and homeless, you know, those are giving us an organ that gives you another kind of perspective on how to, how to kind of filter this, how to kind of narrow it down that way. And that's always where, you know, I always say, you know, profit activator 1 is select a single target market at a time. But the first step in that is to knock yourself out, to be exhaustive in listing all of the possible target audiences that you could help so that you know that the first one that you choose is the one that can have the biggest impact right away, or the one that can, for whatever reason, seems like the one that could make a, make a big difference. How quickly are you looking to.

Have.

The first sort of volunteers out?

I would like just looking at this now, I'm thinking by the first of the year. And I think that we need to set a deadline on the application just on creating it. And we're doing a minimum viable product or as our app users call it, or the app makers call it, a minimum valuable product to do this. So I'm putting that basically an artificial timeline on it just to get it done and disper action. So I would say by the first of the year is when I'd like to do that.

Okay. And so that, see a lot of times that means right now we're having this conversation and it's a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving and going into the holidays and a lot of times people might think, oh, we want to kind of rush this and get this out there so we can make a difference over the holidays. And I think you're doing, you know, the right thing by setting up realistic target for it, right? So that 2016 is going to be the thing. So going down and looking through those, the target audiences there, both the organizations that are already doing this, the types of beneficiaries of this, you know, children, seniors, homeless, all kinds of the different, all kinds of the different things that you could imagine because they're all going to appeal to different people, right? They're all going to be, some people might be, you know, completely willing to do anything for children and then other people might be just completely willing to do something for, for animals. You know, that, that could be the, that would be the thing. So having something for everybody but being able to attract them uniquely, you know, attract them in a different, in a different way. So if we were to say right now, if you just on for the short version here, what would be kind of the target audience for organizations that kind of jump to the top of your mind if you had to choose just one right now?

If I had to choose one, I'm just kind of looking at this. And the most prevalent in here is actually helping senior citizens. And I don't want anyone to get the idea that that's all this is because we.

I know there's the thing. You just say it immediate. Now here's the thing. It's like you're not unlike any business owner starting their business, right? Like if I say to a real estate agent, okay, if you could just work with anybody right now, just one target audience, what would that be? And if they're afraid to say, well, first time buyers, because they don't want to like pigeonhole themselves and only be able to work with first time buyers, right? Immediately, Immediately. It's our human nature to not want to limit ourselves, right? But I'm going to say we have, we're going to be able to help everybody, but we are going to do it in a way that builds on itself, okay. And everything that we're doing right now, all the Exercises. Every question that we're going to consider and every strategy that we're going to contemplate is going to apply exactly the same way to children's organizations when we start talking with them or homeless shelters. But just for going through this process here, we're going to pick the senior organizations, right?

Absolutely. That sounds good.

Okay, so now if we are talking about the seniors, we've got it now that there are different flavors now of that even. Right. When you look at it, that there are seniors residences, seniors homes, there are organizations that help seniors that are living alone at home, right?

Yes.

But there, you know, the main thing is these organizations are helping seniors. Now when we look through this, it's going to be easy for you to kind of find the organizations because we've narrowed our focus here. Right. Everything becomes much clearer as you sort of dial in the resolution here. We're kind of getting closer and closer to it. Now, if we take seniors residences, where and how many do you suspect there are seniors residences in Austin?

Wow. Just off the top of my head, I would not know, but I'm guessing maybe 100. Okay.

And now. So there we go. So we got 100 senior residences right now. And you wonder, you know, when you look at how many people that is, and these are all questions, these are knowable answers, right? Because in order for anything to happen, it's going to happen one seniors organization at a time. Right. And part of the thing is that we start to imagine it, that it's all done, but every one of these, if they don't know about it and they don't know how to get the help that is available, then they're losing out on this. Right. They're missing out on it. So part of our strategy, when we start thinking about now, if we've narrowed it down to, let's say, the top 100 seniors residences in Austin, Texas, that's a very knowable thing. Attached to that would be 100 directors of the seniors residences in. In Austin. So we've got it down to 100 people right now. Right. As the people who need to know about this. Yes, that makes sense.

Yes, it does.

Okay, so when we look at this now, when we look at this and we move on to profit activator number two, which is to compel our prospects to call us, what would be the thing that would be on the mind of a senior, you know, a director of a senior's home? That would be, you know, something that we would want to be the answer to, like what's, you know, we always say, hear these words. What's the conversation going on in the mind of these directors of these seniors residences? What's, you know, the conversation that they're having? What's going on on their mind? What's keeping them up at night? What are they constantly struggling with or looking for a solution for? Have you been involved with any of the seniors homes to that level that you kind of get a sense of what their need is?

Yes, actually, I have. And just to a person, they need more volunteers. They need people to make it easier and smoother for the paid employees and for the smaller number of volunteers that actually show up. So. And in talking with all of them in every organization I've talked to except one, they said that we absolutely need more volunteers, and to have some would be a godsend. So that would be it. So I would say warm bodies that can actually ease their burden and help the people at the nursing homes.

Okay, and what kinds of things would you think that they would need? Like, so if you could say, is there one specific seniors residence that you got in mind?

You know, there's a place that I've been spending most of my time with my family, and it's actually not in Austin, but just a little north of here. But probably the biggest thing, and honestly, it's just having enough human beings to be with and share time with the folks that are there. And they generally do have paid employees that can do the basic nurse functions and that type of thing, but there are literally some adults there, and this goes back to Joe when he was talking about at the Gratitude Dinner that are just profoundly lonely people, and they need people to talk with. And one of the things that we try and do is just walk in and say, hey, don't let this sound creepy, but is there anybody that you think just needs someone to talk to today? And they always have. Yes. You know, come here and let's talk with Ms. Jones, or let's talk to Mr. You know, Mr. Jones. And they have that available, and that's something that's pretty easy for a volunteer application that we have to provide for. So I would say to keep people company would probably be the biggest one. And of course, they also, in working with them, too, they have social calendars, and they have needs on the social calendars. So sometimes they have music sessions and dances and bingo and reading and all of that as well. So they want the directors of volunteers or the directors of operations there need people to help run that, to pick up the baton and just take it and run with It. So it makes their life easier.

And so social things, social calendars. So as we're looking here, you know, part of the thing would be that how have you. Or are you planning on approaching the seniors residences about. About this? How would. Yeah, how would you think that there. Because part of this is just kind of getting them to know that it's even out there. And so what would be kind of the compelling. You know, the compelling part of this.

We can get you as many people as you would need would be something that's very compelling. And the way that we approach them now is a. I work with an organization called Joe Volunteer, and we've actually done this with a few organizations to kind of try it out and just to get them to sign up as an organization on the website. And we're trying to. Yeah, I guess to make it a smooth process so we can teach other people how to do it in a video is kind of what thinking about at this point. But we approach them and say, listen, this may sound strange, but do you need more volunteers? And they usually answer that with an emphatic yes. Say, great, well, that's what I'm here to help you with, is to get you more volunteers and make it easier and to help the folks that are here. And we want to do it at no cost to you just to make sure that these folks have some human interaction and that we can help. Is that something that would interest you if we could do that? And generally they say yes. And at that point then we say, okay, well, this is how we do it and this is how we go about it. And then we actually show them the application and show them where they can sign up. The way we've done it so far is to actually just do it on an iPad and have them sign up on the iPad so we have the contact information of the person that the volunteers would be reporting to.

And so that's kind of. That's part of that process is really that the signup process, like getting them on the app, is really the. That would be kind of the win right now. Right. Is getting them. If we take the process, they've got to. If we fast forward the profit activators.

Here.

They get the awareness of it. We educate and motivate them. We make an offer to provide some volunteers for them, and then that gets them into the during unit where there's actual volunteers on site doing something that they set up. Right. So part of the. That all of this only needs to happen one time initially to get somebody to know about it, agree to it, sign up on the app and once they're on as an organization that's going to create a, you know, a constant loop then. Right. We'll be able to continually have and post new volunteer opportunities there.

Yes. And I'm hoping, of course, that once they get the volunteers and it works out well, that it becomes a regular part of life for them and just becomes a habit. So that's the thought process.

Hey Dean. Dean, I'd like you to interject and just for some context for the listeners, kind of share with what do you think they should be taking away lesson wise, as this applies to them? Because certainly there won't be enough time to go real in depth with all 8 profit activators here because we probably have about another 10 minutes left to keep this to our typical episode length. But what should people be taking away.

From this dialogue right now initially, when we go through part of this process of a lot of people come and they've got a great opportunity, they got a great business idea, it could really serve everybody in the world. There's a huge opportunity for it. But you, you know, always applying constraints helps bring clarity and it brings focus and it helps get things going. Because no matter what, if you're going to, you know, I always say to people, if you're going to be, if you're going to cure all the acne in the world, you might as well start with all the acne. Portland, you know, are you going to help all of the, every volunteer organization all over the world? We might as well start in San Antonio and narrowing it down even more. You know, now we've got 100 people, we've got 100 senior organizations by narrowing it down to specific target audiences. Just like if I were a real estate agent coming into an area, narrow it down to the lakefront homes in Winter Haven. That's a manageable, you know, completely dominated all target audience. Right. Because that's always we talk about it as saying plan to dominate as the mindset. But and you know, that may not sound appropriate for a volunteer organization, but why not? I mean, if you plan to really dominate, make an impact, be a huge value within that community, you're going to learn all of the lessons that are required to do it all over the world by doing it in San Antonio, specifically for senior centers. And you're going to learn the things that you learn by doing it for seniors. Centers are going to apply when you roll it out to homeless shelters or to animal shelters or to children's organizations or to hospitals or to hospices or whatever all of those are. Rather than try and do a little bit of a lot of different things, it makes sense to really get everything organized around doing one thing really well, because there's a lot of synergies in that right now. You can find all the people to back this up that have a heart for helping seniors, you know, and that's kind of. It keeps a single kind of focus on it initially.

Yep. And I'm kind of curious about that, too, because we would need to find Joe's as well. And.

Okay.

It seems like we have two separate markets that we need to do with. With that as well. So I'm kind of curious about that.

Perfect. So when you look at it, where would be the opportunities to find groups of Joes, let's say? So like a, you know, like a church organization might be one place to find groups of people who would volunteer.

Where I'd say that. And then also schools as well.

Schools, right.

Large companies that. That have some type of giving program, like Dell Computer is a giant one in Dustin area.

Yes, of course. Good companies. What else?

You know, from then on, to actually find big groups of people might be a little. Little tough with that. The schools, companies, and churches are what I had in mind. And then forced the.

And that's fine that you've narrowed it that way. Right. So now when you look at it, you know, if we're taking one of those at a time, then how many churches are there in San Antonio? There's a fixed number. You don't know, but there's a fixed number of them. And there are attached to those 500 churches in San Antonio or in.

Wait, can I say something, though? You know what's funny, Chip? Can you keep seeing how Dean wants to get you out of Austin, which is where you're at, and take you to San Antonio? I think he's got some.

I think there's something there.

Yeah.

Well, what's San Antonio famous? Let's do some trivia. What's San Antonio famous for, Dean?

The Alamo.

You got it. And also my buddy Graham Weston, who owns Rackspace, who founded Rackspace, is there, too.

My buddy Homer McDonald, who I wrote stop your divorce with.

Yeah.

Oh, no.

Well, here's what I'd like to do, though. Seriously, because this is really good. But I also want to be cognizant of the time what I'd like to do, because in the time available, I want Chip to talk about the crowdfunding campaign, because I think it's smart for us to ask all of our I love marketing listeners if they've not had an opportunity to go check it out if they want to support this because they themselves may want to utilize Joe volunteer at some point where we can make this on a global scale. And I'd like you, Dean, to kind of look at. All right, we're not going to go through every profit activator in depth, but if you could kind of give an overview because I know offline you're going to consider, continue to take Chip through this whole process. But I want the listener to kind of get the most out of it. So do you think at this point you can kind of shift gears and go into that mode and then let's have, let's have Chip.

We're going to lightning round of it.

Okay.

So when we narrow that down, you know, we've narrowed our focus to seniors organizations, we've narrowed our volunteer gathering focus to churches initially. So we've got, call it a hundred organizations or 100 seniors residences. We've got a hundred pastors of 100 churches in Austin to, you know, who both have access to what we need initially, the raw materials here. We need stuff for the volunteers to do and we need volunteers to do that stuff. So if we're connecting and using the, you know, the opportunity to get the volunteers to get the Joes to download the app, what that requires is maybe figuring out with the pastors an opportunity to maybe to share with them or to insert something in the bulletin with them or to send some postcard to the people who are, who are in that congregation, to the members of the church or in the church newsletter or in some way getting the people organized to get the first, let's say few thousand people to download the app. I mean, that seems like a pretty interesting, you know, if you take 100 churches and you had 100 people in each of the churches download the, download the app, that's 10,000 people right there. That could make a big. Now you've got something going there now. Profit activator three, when we start kind of educating and motivating people and profit activator 4 about making an offer. Part of this is going to be a flagship communication that kind of lets people know what's going on. So I would think like at least a weekly email, newsletter style thing that is letting people know about new volunteer opportunities or a podcast would probably be, you know, a useful thing there or a video, some way of kind of communicating with everybody every week and saying, you know, here's some of the new highlighting some of the volunteer opportunities that are available this week. Rather than you get into this whole situation where just like in businesses, people will say to people, hey, if there's ever anything we can help you with, you know, feel free to give us a call. And so we're saying we run into that same risk of saying to people, if you ever want to volunteer or you ever want to do this, please just download the app, get online here. I think that what we really want is to present people with very specific opportunities. Just like we talk about offering a cookie. Like if I were to bring you into the living room and say, hey, I'm glad you're here, if you want anything to eat or drink, there's lots of stuff in the fridge, versus me sitting you in the living room, going into the kitchen, coming out with a plate of freshly baked cookies and saying, hey, Chip, would you like a cookie? And I think that the more specific we can be about the volunteer opportunity, you know, with a date and a time and a specific activity or, you know, something that's going to happen to set, somebody gets a context of what they're doing that they're not getting into, a bottomless, you know, a bottomless thing of that it's vague and they don't know what they're going to be doing. But would we need, you know, we need five people to come in on Tuesday, you know, evening from 6 o' clock till 8:30 and spend time reading with the seniors or on Friday night we're having our A dance and we need some volunteers to come and dance with the seniors, you know, so that it's very, very specific and time related so that people know what they're, know what they're getting into and can take that. You know, you have to think of the language of what this is going to be. Is it going to be, are they going to claim this task, Are they going to, you know, book this task? Are they going to. I think the vocabulary is going to be a valuable part of this too. So that would be all the before unit stuff of getting people there. Then when we look at the during unit, we've got profit activator 5 and profit activator 6, which is delivering a dream come true experience for the organization, for everybody. And that's going to come down to, I think, a standard, a set of probably, I don't want to say a code, some beliefs, some, you know what I'm saying about how you would articulate the core beliefs of what Joe Volunteer is about and how people act during those times that they're volunteering or.

How they ought to feel when they're doing this. And I guess, yeah, that's part of the thing and the way that we're looking at it now is to be able to rank some of the organizations so the Joes that are doing it to know that if they're going to an organization that they're actually doing some good with it. So if they have a four or five stars, they can reasonably feel that when they're going there they are getting some fulfillment for helping other people. Versus Bob just puts out a volunteer opportunity to move his couch or something. You know, something along those lines. Because it needs to be self policing and we just want people to feel good for having helped other people. And I think part of that will take care of itself. But if we can facilitate it, obviously we want to do that.

Hey, you know what I want to do? I want to get a, I want to get a volunteer that can stand next to Dean with a clock so that when we are at the end of an episode, Dean is aware because no matter every little that I have to give Dean, he still goes over. So what I need to do, Dean, really, we need to wrap it up because I have another appointment that I have to do and miss any of this. But also, look, you got to be respectful for I love Marky listeners. You know, hey, even though this is a free podcast, so Chip, I want you to do a wrap up on what you any anything you'd like to say from what you've gotten from going through this thinking right now. Certainly we can, you know, we can share where this project we're going to. You know, I know there's a lot of people that are part of the I love marketing community that have been very supportive of this and have helped fund this and, and love it and want to be a volunteer are sharing the message. So I want to thank everyone that has obviously been doing that because that's awesome. I love how game changing ideas like this have come from us doing this podcast. So what has this done for your thinking so far and what should people that are listening be looking at and any ask that you'd like them to.

Do on this, this is good. Thank you very much for this opportunity. But what it does in my thinking right now, just going through this, Dean and Joe, it's narrowing the focus and actually going after one market because I think that just doing this, a sniper shot will be a lot more effective than a shotgun blast generally. And that's something that I was looking at and wondering, how do we introduce this to the market? But actually going after the organizations first and creating like a knockdown list of the different people that we want involved in this is something that I think that's brilliant as far as how to start it. And quite honestly, I was thinking newspapers and TV stations and things like that. And I think that's a shotgun blast. So to do the knockdown was just great.

That'll be a good thing to start evidencing all the good that is happening. Like, I think that that's all the news stations are talking about. You know that if you see all these people, if there's a big thing en masse where the community has turned out to completely clean up the playground or the yard or the garden for this senior, for the senior center, that's the kind of thing that the newspaper is interested in. That's the kind of thing that the TV is interested in. It all comes from what you're actually doing, not what, hey, we're going to do this or not. This is what it's evidencing. You can't get it so that it can't be hidden. Those things are going to be out there. Narrow it down like that chip.

So go ahead and give out anything related to the crowdfunding campaign if you could.

Absolutely. Guys, we wanted to make it very easy for you. So if you're listening to this on your mobile device, just text the word Joe's J O E s to the number 38470. And if you do that, you'll get the information. It'll ask you a few questions. And actually this is done by Call Luke. Chris Bresson is the founder of that and he's made it available to us for free. And as a marketing resource, it's a really cool thing to do. So check it out for your business but 38470 and text the word Joe's to it. It's going to ask you your name and your email address. But with that you're going to get all of the information on Joe Volunteer. You'll get directed to the Indiegogo campaign that we're doing right now to fund and get the application done. And then of course we will text every once in a while just to get joevolunteer.com. right now we're at 32,000. So the last I Love Marketing just went online and we just got a few donations from that already. So that's fantastic. And we really appreciate that. Yeah.

And for people that are people that are out of the country that obviously can't text in one more time. What would they need to do in order to find it?

Go to joevolunteer.com just like it. And if you're interested in helping, sign up to be a Joe because the first things that we're going to send out to you are ways to help out. So we are planning on having our own Joe army help build this entire process. So if you're interested in that, that is the place to go to and we will communicate with you and let you know what you can do to help bring this to your area. That's awesome.

Awesome.

Chip, I invite you to come to one of the Breakthrough Blueprint events to go through the whole blueprint on applying this. I mean, you can see what we just talked about in an hour. You know, imagine there's so much to so much to talk about, but we spend three days going through a process like that to specifically apply it to Joe volunteers. So I'm going to invite you to come to one of the Breakthrough Blueprint events as my guest.

Thank you very much, Dina. I would love to do that. And just something else I'd like to tell folks, Go to I Love Marketing and download the Breakthrough DNA blueprint. It is excellent. I just went through it again today in preparation for this call and I've read it before, but it's evergreen, it doesn't get old and it is fantastic. So just go do that. The Breakthrough DNA and it's spectacular. You did a great job with that, Dean.

Awesome.

Well, cool.

So I want to thank all of our I Love Marketing listeners. This is the first time you've listened to I Love Marketing because I know every episode we get new people. There are so many awesome episodes from interviews with various people to me and Dean talking about all kinds of different business strategies and models to Q and A calls. If you are one of the I Love Marketing Meetup Group leaders, thank you for continuing to do the Meetup groups. We have them all over different parts of the world. If you'd like to start your own I Love Marketing Meetup group, just go to the website ilovemarketing.com click on the meetup section and there is a downloadable PDF that walks you through how to set up your own group, how to lead it, questions to answer, and it's one of the best ways to just create a community of people in your local area that will meet in person and just talk about their, you know, their application of direct response marketing using the eight profit activators as a guide and you can subscribe on itunes to this podcast and please leave your comments and share. You know, please share the message of Joe. Volunteer with as many people where that you can. If you, if you resonate with this, we would appreciate it because we want to, you know, help a lot of people. And Chip has put a lot of time and effort in spite of, you know, having his own family and his own business and stuff in order to help make this reality. So that's, we would, we would, could sure appreciate your help with this. And until next time, we will talk to everyone on the next episode. So have a great day.