LIVE At The I Love Marketing Meetup! Featuring Joe Polish and Alex Moscow - I Love Marketing Episode #366

So the first way is you learn just getting bloodied. School Hard knocks. Second way to learn is you learn through the experiences of other people. You read their books, go to their seminars, listen to their podcast. However, you're going to get a mentor, whatever, hire people. That's a very effective way to learn from the experiences of others. And the most effective way to learn is actually teach other people. I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish and this is the I Love Marketing podcast. Foreign.

Ever wonder what happens at a live I Love Marketing meetup group? Listen to the interesting conversations, elegant insights and immediately actionable marketing strategies in today's episode of I Love Marketing. In this episode, Alex Moscow and Joe Polish answer the questions about lucrative marketing, effective learning strategies, and building businesses of global impact. They'll break down the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make and the one thing you should be doing with your top clients today in order to attract more high level clients. You'll learn the simple strategies that yield ridiculous results, bring in loyal clients and elevate your position instantly in the marketplace. If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at this year's Genius Network Annual event, then apply today for your invitation to attend. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event or to apply, go to geniusnetwork.com we're here just.

To be as helpful and useful to everyone in the room whatever your business or entrepreneurial ventures are. We can do Q and A, we can talk about stuff. And Alex, who lives in San Diego happened to be in town and I was like, you know, just come down, talk about he's a really smart dude and he's in Genius Network and he just knows a lot. So for people that don't know you explain who the hell you are and what you do.

My name is Alex Moscow and I have a brand called Congruent Coach where we help six and seven figure coaches and experts scale their business mainly through high level programs and to craft their marketing to attract a higher level clientele to also do live experiences whether they're free events like this or doing two or three day seminars to make six and seven figures in single weekend. So that's mainly what I focus on.

I was talking with Alex earlier like what would be something cool that we could talk to everyone in the group on? And part of it is what's working, what's not working. Some of the future marketing before we get started though is anyone in the room have some business issue, problem, challenge that they would really love to have solved or a couple of Them. And then we can kind of structure this conversation around figuring out or fixing some of those things or enhancing them.

Getting into corporate settings.

Getting into corporate settings. Selling what?

I'm a chiropractor. My new health care.

You're a chiropractor. So you want to literally go on location and. Okay. Okay, cool.

I just have a clarifying question for that. What's the reasoning for that?

To provide employee benefits so as, like, a service that the employer can say, oh, look at. I'm bringing in a chiropractor for health benefits on site.

Okay. Do you have an actual physical location in office? Are you wanting to do that to acquire them as patients to come. Come to you or always go into the business?

Always go into the business for that. I mean, they can come into the office also, you know, if they had, like, wanted to come in for more frequent than they go to their office. But yeah, I want to have the, like, I have a mobile business and an office.

Okay.

So I'm looking to get into more of the corporate scene there.

Gotcha. Are you the only doc or you. Okay. Okay, cool. All right. Who else has something? First time raising capital.

Have my first investor meeting tomorrow. Gonna be raising a couple million dollars.

$40 million valuation for Cody.

So, needing help on pitch deck? Cause I've only been working on it since, like, 11:00pm last night.

Your pitch. Okay. God, who do we know in Genius Network? Someone specializes in pitch decks. I can't think of. I'm asking Michael Fishing, who happens to be in the room?

Roland and John of the, like, the Exit guys.

Okay.

Roland Frazier. Oh, you like John Ratliff and, okay, Randy Long.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, I can actually. I wish. The guy has a book called Braveheart.

Exit.

Okay. And when do you need to raise the 2 million? By next 30 days. Okay, that's easy. What's the category? Let's find one very wealthy. Sauce.

Oh, sauce.

Okay, sorry.

Yeah. Sauce or sauce. Okay.

Yeah.

And I can say shit to make it sound like I understand anything about that business, but I really don't. Even though I have equity in some companies that.

That do that.

Okay, cool. So raising money, who else?

Kind of along the same lines. I unfortunately underfunded my new startup company. I wasn't expecting it to go viral like it did. And I've got distributors from overseas now that want us to come overseas. I don't have the money to scale to meet even a third of what they're asking for.

What do you sell?

They're decontamination kits for firefighters and Police officers.

Interesting.

So fighting the cancer in the fire.

Service, do you just need, like, fulfillment.

Capital for the pos?

Pretty much.

Well, I don't have.

They won't give me a solid PO yet until I know they know I can meet the demand, actually.

Because if you can get a po.

I'd be the sure. Yeah.

If I can. I'm trying to talk them into it.

Just give me a commitment on an.

Order and I can go to a bank.

Awesome. And by the way, if anyone here in the room, and this is certainly very obvious in many cases, don't expect me and Alex to have the answers to everything. If one of you like what you just said, if you can get me a po, I'll get you the money. I mean, go for it. What the hell? Everyone's here just to kind of build and grow their whole thing. And that's, you know, the I Love Marketing meetup groups grew out of me and Dean Jackson starting the I Love Marketing podcast back in 2010. And there was a period in the beginning where I was really pushing the meetings, and there was at least 100 meetings throughout the world going on almost daily. There's still meetings all over the world, but I just haven't put a big emphasis on now I'm thinking about, you know, kind of ramping it back up. And so it's cool that this one. How long has this one been going on?

Half a decade?

At least.

Yeah. At least five years. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Maybe six. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. So if anyone here has an answer to anything. Yeah. Please, please blurt it out. Anything else?

Yeah, Trying to figure out an automatic way to get new customers work in the comic book industry. Comic book publisher.

So, okay.

Just wanted to put it start to get people coming in, but automatically.

It's not automatically new publishers or something.

No, I work for a comic book publisher. I'm just trying to get new customer acquisitions. New people coming in. Comical book. Comical book, entertainment.

Chemical book is for like drug dealers.

Who's our customer? Like, is the customer the end user who actually reads the comic book?

Yeah.

Okay, gotcha.

Are you connected into Comic Con?

Yeah, we do comic cons. The owner also owns Tucson Comic Con.

Yeah, very cool.

All right.

And then we got doctors in the room, we got. What about you? What?

Stephanie, for me, I'm a medical massage therapist and I fix chronic pain. So your broken company, I'll fix your. I'm also a neuro nutrient therapist, so I help with ADHD and I do a bunch of stuff I hate. I would like you Know what I want? I want to know how to say what the fuck I do. That's what I come up with.

Can we do that?

And then, and then I can get people in, right?

Yeah, Messaging. Okay. And by the way, she's excellent. So if anyone here literally wants to utilize her services, I can vouch for. She's, she's grabbing. We've known each other a decade at least more than that. How would we find those services?

My website is functionalhealthguru.com and I'm on Facebook, I think.

Yeah.

It'S usually word of mouth and literally I can address and take care of pain in minutes.

Yeah, yeah.

Either amino acids or. With Danzone.

Yeah, she's been doing training for years, especially the neuro nutrient stuff. Things with how amino acids and different things affect moods and affect, you know, for addiction. Yeah, yeah, yeah, gotcha.

And is your practice right now? Do you only work with clients one on one?

I do all one on one and all mobile.

Okay.

All mobile services and pretty much I cover the whole valley. I've got people all the way from Canyon City. I actually have clients all over the US but that's more for other coaching.

Yeah. Okay, cool.

So there's an in person practitioner component to it and then you have a health coaching business for people virtually as well.

Yes.

Okay, cool.

And anything to help me again, speak my message. So messaging being able to, if I'm put on the spot, know what the fuck I'm saying?

Yeah. You know what, Michael, at some point I'd like you to actually speak to that because Michael's really good at that. He, he runs a consumer health summit. And now how many years now?

Since 94.

Since 94, yeah. And prior to that he was one of the top list brokers in the world. And I met him through Brian Kurtz at Boardroom Inc. We've known each other for a long time. I go to his events every year he does an event at Sanctuary with some of the top health experts. New York Times, selling all kinds of people like Jeffrey Bland, founder of Functional Medicine, to Mark Hyman and you know everyone, J.J. virgin. All kinds of people. So he's, he's an advisor for, you know, Bulletproof Coffee, Dave Asprey, stuff like that. So yeah, he's good with messaging. Very good with messaging.

He's smart guy.

Michael Fisher, Michael Fishman. And by the way, you can listen to my I love marketing episode with Michael about messaging on the podcast. So if you guys have not heard it, it's definitely worth listening to. So let Me start with this then based on what everyone said. So something Gary Halbert, who I learned marketing from originally, who was a crazy copywriter, really brilliant wordsmith, he said there's three things you need in order to sell something. You need a product or service. Okay, so whatever your thing is, everyone that talked said what their thing was. You need a product or service. Second thing you need is a sales pitch or marketing message. So sales pitch or marketing message. And the third thing you need is a delivery system. Okay, Product or service? Sales pitch, delivery system. So delivery, what most businesses focus on is what's their product or service, what's the thing they have and how do we deliver a message about it to people? Do we do that through social media? Now I learned all this before there was any Internet. So what I would think of a delivery system is tv, radio, direct mail, postcards, telemarketing, fax broadcasting. If you can imagine that any place that would take your money to deliver a message. But you know, the only thing worse than singing the wrong notice, singing it louder, right? And you take things like the auto industry which literally developed a bad name because they think selling is yelling. You know, the more you can like say it and you know, face to face to face. Selling is a delivery system. It's very, you know, limited by the clock but you know, marketing is really selling in advance. And so, and I've always, you know, this has been said a million, like we've recorded 350 different. I love marketing podcasts and I've said this, you know, a hundred times. But you know, selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody. Marketing is what you do to get them on the phone or face to face with you properly positioned. So by the time you're talking to them, they're pretty interested, pre qualified, predisposed and pre motivated to give you money. And so the distinction between selling and marketing, so if you could create a really powerful marketing message, then all the delivery systems become that much more valuable and people. When I first started in marketing again there was no Internet. So I would hear people say Yellow pages don't work, Valpak doesn't work. And all of these things work. All of the medias work if it's a message to market match first off, if the people that are willing to hire you or give you money are, you know, are able to, you know, if they go there with the right message. So only the hungriest fish snap of the crappiest bait so going, which is another Gary Halbert line. So with that being said, we can talk about different medias, different ways to do it. Alex, earlier today, before we were talking, so I'm going to turn this over to you in a second of what's working, what isn't. Certain things will work very powerfully and then they'll start to grow tired or the marketplace will see so much of it they become suspect of it and things change. What's never going to change is that marketing is applied psychology. And so technology is important, but psychology is infinitely more important. And if you can understand the psychology, you can, you know, determine all the different ways, be it, you know, social media, be it websites, be it webinars, be it livecast, all the, you know, and in the future, you know, tying in algorithms with VR messaging and AI generated ads and all kinds of weird shit. I mean, we had a genius network member yesterday who's an engineer that does 3D printing, that literally has something he's working on that is an AI system that will write a book for you. And then I had a guy named Jerry Makowski who has a. There's a software called the Brain. I don't know if anyone's ever seen it. The brain.com, he's their number one user on the brain, jerrysbrain.com is his site and he's open sourced everything he's inputted into Jerry's brain over the last 22 years. 450,000 inputs, 750,000 links, all individually entered. And while I was sitting down with him and this other guy saying, how do we take everything in Jerry's brain, insert it into an AI system and take all of this shit that he spent 22 years into books and there's everything you can possibly think of, every topic matter that this guy has entered. And so who knows where this shit's going to go in the future. But the, the fact is your job as a business owner is find people that want to buy stuff, sell them stuff, make sure they're so happy with the stuff that they keep buying more of the stuff and they tell other people to buy your stuff. And it could be complicated or it cannot be. And marketing is all of the stuff that we can do to make it as what I call elf. Easy, lucrative and fun. You can have an ELF business or half business, which is hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. So Alex, the way he uses marketing is he coaches, he runs high level groups, he shows people that want to do groups and masterminds and events how to target high end clients. There's all kinds of different delivery systems and methodologies. He knows how to sell from the platform. And it's interesting because what I always think is funny about a public speaker who also stutters is that they have big cojones because you literally get up and do something. And so like Alex just has some really awesome ninja skills that are far better than mine in many areas because he just knows a lot of shit about stuff I don't even explore. Mostly because you're probably like half my age. Even though you look, you look kind of like an old dude. Yeah. How old are you now?

31.

31.

Okay.

It's not half. I'll be 52 next month. So you go.

Yeah. So I think it's important just to really piggyback on what Joe's sharing of. It doesn't matter if it's through Facebook, LinkedIn or any type of new crazy tech that's coming out. If you don't understand human psychology, if you don't understand the real reasons why your customers are coming to you and the real reason why somebody buys, like we have, you know, a chiropractor health coach, you know, in the room, like there's a bunch of them everywhere. So the differentiation factor of why should they go to this chiropractor versus another one, like if you're not clear of, of that reason why and in your marketing and your messaging, if you're not communicating that, then it's going to be a saturated marketplace. So no matter what medium that you're using, whether it's through again, social media, if you're running ads, if you're doing live meetup groups like this to promote the different products that you're selling. Which I definitely want to talk about too, where I believe that a lot of what's happening online, some of the most powerful marketing happens offline in rooms like this. So you're a chiropractor. So if you did a training on how to get rid of pain or how to get rid of pain, you know, and if you had a group and you're leading something like this and there's 20 people in the room who are, you're teaching your methodology of how you've learned it over X amount of years to really help anybody get out of any type of pain, like how many more clients would you have? And also versus then chasing everybody down one on one, like asking for referrals everywhere, you're creating a hub to where everyone is coming to learn from you. And then that would be a lead generation platform for you. Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah. So I think just getting down into. With everyone's business. Who's here? Hi, Ryan. Just getting down into, like, what is the problem that you're solving? I think this is back to the basics. I'm sure you've talked about it on this podcast a million different times, but really getting clear of, like, what is the problem that you're solving for your ideal customer? And what I'll add to that is how do they perceive their problem? Not that, you know, as we'll continue on the chiropractor path. Like, you know, that at some point, you know, in their younger years that they are. That they always drive with the right foot. So that that's created imbalance in the body and that's created XYZ thing for them. Like, they're not thinking about that. They're thinking, shit, my freaking lower back hurts. Like, I can't get out of bed. So if your marketing is telling them, hey, you have this thing in your foot that you've been driving for so long, they don't care. Like, they want their pain. They want their pain to go away. So we just want to make sure that we're clear on what is the problem and what is the pain that we are really getting to and that they're coming to us for to actually solve what's the problem that we're coming to solve. And that can be interpreted through many different platforms. Once you're clear on that. I just think the biggest mistake most entrepreneurs make is they make it way too complicated. They see that everyone's doing stuff on YouTube or Facebook or LinkedIn or all these different platforms, but they don't understand the core fundamentals of getting clear of what is the problem that you solve and how are you unique in the marketplace? Why should they come to you? Why are you different? Why is this different than everything else that they've actually tried? And so if you're not differentiating yourself in the marketplace, you're going to be swimming in a red ocean where everyone is screaming that same message. But if you can create something that's unique with your positioning, I think positioning is one of those powerful things you can do in marketing, too, where your service or your product, your outcome that you solve or your outcome that you produce is a unique mechanism for the delivery system that you're actually going to help your client with. Does that make sense?

Cool.

So simple exercise. I'll just give and I'll hand it back to you, Joe, is go to your top five clients and survey them like top five, top five clients, survey them and ask them what was the problem that you came to me to solve? Number two, why me? So why did you buy from me specifically? That's it. What is those two? Because that will be massively insightful. Because in my experience in helping thousands of entrepreneurs do this is like the reason why we think they buy versus what they actually tell you. Why they buy is usually vastly different. And once we can get clear of the reasoning why we actually. Why our customers actually coming to us versus anyone else, and we can start to amplify that, that's what's going to really attract in, you know, generate more leads. You know, you said on autopilot, you know, once we're clear on what is the factor that makes us unique and why they come to us, then we can start to shine light on that versus on shedding a message that everyone else is shouting.

Yes.

So when it comes to that final question, I usually narrow it down a little bit on what was the emotion.

Or like, turning point.

I wish you trusted me to be.

Able to solve that problem.

So I frame it a little bit differently because then I can narrow it down to give me more exact feedback that I can be able to use more than returning.

So you, you just had in the element of trust, Is that what you're saying?

Yeah.

So what was like the turning point?

What was the emotion or turning point or piece of information that actually caused.

You to be able to choose?

Getting that nailed down allows for you to be able to prioritize the copy and stuff like that on your sales pages and your messaging and your marketing. And we've been able to really optimize and cut down cost by doing that.

Let me ask you a question. How did you learn how to do that? How did you learn how to think about it like that? What was your process? Because I think it's always interesting for people to hear when someone you know is able to dissect, you know, selling persuasion, which is what marketing is. How'd you learn this?

So I started out with building. I mean, I've been building software since I've been 12. So I built a lot of marketing software tools. And through that, when you build software tools, one of the biggest things that you'll get back is customer tech support, like feedback and stuff like that, like user experience and what's broken, what's not. And I basically got to the point where I started asking people, like, at what point, like, were you not able to understand like this or that? And I was getting very Very specific on the technicals. And then when I came over to marketing, when I started actually doing marketing consulting for businesses and such, I kind of carried over the same tech policies over that and customers for feedback on exactly where the break was or where are they having that turning point. And that allowed for us to narrow things down toward. We're able to be able to drop those acquisition costs by double digits.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, cool. So, Michael, you want to add anything to this?

Everybody's solving a pain point, right? You know, that's. That's always critical.

Well, they're either solving a pain point or they're creating pain because there's a lot of. But yeah, there's a lot of that.

You can't create demand. You can only channel existing demand or trigger what I call latent demand. I mean, nobody thought they needed an ipod or an iPhone or any of those things. But the demand that got triggered was a demand for convenience and demand for a lot of capabilities in one device, et cetera. And, you know, and the other way to look at the other way to look at what it is that people need is to look at what they are aware that they need, and then what does their brain want them to have at the level of survival?

Correct.

So it's pain. You know, in nature, an animal in the fullest expression of pain can't defend itself and can't gather food and therefore doesn't survive very long. So, you know, what you're addressing with pain is giving the human animal the ability to be mobile.

Right.

So there's always like, there's what people can report and then there's what they can't report, which is the reptilian brain, the amygdala, where really the game is won and lost. So you want to be able to message to what people can report to you what they're aware that they need. And in subtle ways, if you can identify it, to locate what it is that is happening in their brain at the level of survival, that actually fits into your product and. Or service as well.

Yeah. So in the case of like an ad or an offer or a promotion or an ask, it's, well, do they respond? And do they, you know, will they give you anything from, you know, an email to contact info to a click to money, which ultimately, you know, it's. It's the money that is.

And I mean, we could go on for a long time, but, you know, there's ways, you know, when you're selling a conference or a meeting, which is your superpower, you know, there's layers. There's who's in front of the room, there's who's in the room. There's the hospitality, there's the experience, there's, you know, but the one thing I always say is things are either valuable or expensive and never both. You could spend $2,000 and that would be a waste of time. You could spend $20,000 and that would be priceless.

Right? You know, so. Yeah, exactly. So that means once you sell something, everyone here, let's just see. Don't just pitch something if you want, so tell everyone, like, what example more so for, you know, them seeing kind of how you, you do it, what do you actually sell and how. Because there's a lot of stuff you put out for free. But what do you actually sell and how. And how do you do it? How do you get people to give you money? I mean, I can talk about I do it all day long, but it's like, like I'd like to totally.

So, like next month I. I have an event. It's called small events, big profits. And it's how to run impactful events and retreats for less than 30 people and walk away with multiple success. Six figures in three days. So the actual value prop. Super clear, clear outcome, who it's for. And to talk about how I think about selling it is I think about what are all of the different objections that somebody has to actually to actually running an event themselves. Because it sounds good, right? It sounds like, yeah, make six figures in a weekend. Yeah, that's something that people want, is that if you guys can make six figures a weekend, would you guys want that? Right? But then there's all of the beliefs that come up in your mind, okay, well, how do I do it? How do I fill the room? What do I say when I'm on stage? Do I need to be a professional speaker? So the way that I think about selling something is I think about what are all of the preconceived objections that are coming up in their mind that's gonna stop them from them saying yes. So even though my outcome is very. It's clear, it's attractive, multiple six figures in a weekend, people want it. There are different beliefs that I need to shift in order to get somebody from interested to actually giving me money. And this is the same for all of you. So I think about it in a way of like, what are the biggest beliefs that I can shift for them, which are the objections? So, like that one I just talked about is, okay, I want to do an event, but do I need to be a public speaker? So in my marketing that I craft, like I do a lot of marketing that talks about that. I say, hey, like I've had a stutter for my whole life. Like I on stage, like I drop F bombs all the time. Like I'm just me and all of my clients who produce six ferries in a weekend, like, I don't tell them, don't go to Toastmasters, don't do any speaker training. If you can just be you, that's what's going to create the best result, the best value, and also to create the most revenue for you as well. So it's taking what their misconceptions are in your marketing and flipping it upside down. So that's one, right? Another one is what is it that I actually saved for two days? Because some people have fear around doing events of, okay, what am I going to save for those two days? And it's like, hey, well if you're good at what you do and you produce results for your clients. So this is again being really clear on who your program is for. But I think what's even more important is being clear of who it's not for. Like the more that you can be clear of who your program is not for. So for me, like I said, hey, if you're brand new, this is not for you. Like if you're not confident in producing results for your clients, this is not for you. Right now, like, go get, go start from your skill set. Like, I don't make them wrong. But I say like, you need to be good and confident at what you do and help your clients produce results if you want to do a live event. Because at a live event you're in front of a room, you can't hide behind your screens, you can't edit your posts, you're live in person. So if you're not good at what you do yet, then you shouldn't do a live event. So I'm crafting my marketing to really speak to the level of client that I want to attract too. So if you want higher level clients who show up on time, get awesome results, pay in full for your high level services, then you want to make sure that you're speaking to the higher level challenges, the higher level problems that someone's going to have. So that's like, that's how Joe, I think is somebody who's been, he's the best person I know who's consistently attracted people to pay him 25 to $100,000 consistently like there's very few people in the world who I know who've been able to actually do that. And so he speaks to and he creates experiences that attract that higher level client. So all of his marketing and the problems that he solves for his clients are very different than an entrepreneur who is just starting. So that comes back to really knowing who the person is and knowing what are the misconceptions and what are the myths. What are the objections that they have to actually purchasing what your services?

Yeah, yeah. And by the way, like, this is from what I actually do because I just spent the last two days running a Genius Network meeting and we had 60 something people at the meeting. If you do the math, they're paying about $8,300 a person, although they all pay them full for the year. But if you just take three meetings a year and times 60, what the hell would that be? So about 500,000 I brought in for two days, right? So I'm making about a quarter million a day. When I'm speaking, like I'm one of the highest paid speakers that no one knows, right? I'm not like a famous guy.

I'm not like a famous guy.

I'm not like Will Smith. I'm not getting, you know, big keynotes. And it's funny, I mean, I'm listed at CAA as one of their speakers and my speaking rate is 50 grand for a speech. So why the hell would I do.

An I Love marketing meetup group?

I mean, it makes no financial sense to do this if it was purely just a money play, right? I actually like what I tell people all the time. There's three ways you learn something. You learn through the school of hard knocks. You go out and get bloodied, you figure shit out. You don't, you know, don't really take lessons, but you know, you'll learn, you'll learn how to do stuff if you just go out and do it. Given the choice of starving or eating, most people don't starve unless they have no, no other alternative or they simply cannot figure out what to do. And started my business starving. I mean, I went into credit card debt by 30 grand trying to run a carpet cleaning business. And when I was 22 years old is when I started that business. So the first way is you learn through the just getting bloodied school, hard knock. Second way to learn is you learn through the experiences of other people. You read their books, go to their seminars, listen to their podcasts, go to. However you're going to get a mentor Whatever, hire people. That's a very effective way to learn from the experiences of others. And the most effective way, way to learn is actually teach other people. So by me doing a podcast and talking about all the books and all the stuff I do, it's a very accelerated way, so I do that. But the reason I'm doing this is like me and Dean Jackson, I say this all the time. We teach people marketing and I love marketing. We have the worst monetization model on the planet and I love marketing. We don't take any sponsorships, we don't really pitch stuff. We'll talk about books once while, you know, we'll obviously talk about what we do. And you know, people may, you know, Bob, it's not like people are flocking to sign up for $25,000, you know, coaching programs and things like that. I mean, those, you know, people go and buy food, they buy clothes, they go to movies. Shit that I saw has to be sold. It's not, you know, and it's usually sold through referrals. If there is any secret to what I've done is I've just created so much value for people over the years without asking for anything that they, some people are like, well, God, the guy's generous, he's useful, he's helpful. Maybe I should give him money. I mean, it sounds kind of weird, but the reason I bring this up is what you said. Getting in a room like this, okay, we are more connected electronically than we ever have been in human history, but we're more disconnected as humans. And when you can bring humans in a room and know them like you had talked about trust earlier, you know, the number one question in all consumers minds is who can I trust? That's what everyone's thinking. And so your job as a business owner, as a marketer is to establish trust and rapport. And rapport is trust with comfort. You don't just trust the person, but you feel comfortable with them. And it's funny because I actually learned that line from my crazy buddy Neil Strauss, who wrote the Game and his latest book, the Truth, after he went through 10 years of screwing his life up with all his escapades and then he got into treatment and all that. But you know, he, he would use that line for pickup if you're trying to pick up someone, you know, try. And I remember talking with him, he goes, thank God I revealed everything before the Me Too movement started. It would have been a shit show. Yeah, but so the, the thing though is like I say, all of this Even though we talk about marketing, that doing it in an ethical way, I mean, there are like, I have, I've grown to like the reason I. Before we started recording, you know, I had Dr. Ramany who wrote don't you know who I am? She's one of the top narcissist experts in the world. And, you know, she spent a couple days with us at Genius Network and I interviewed her. We're actually going to put it up as a podcast. Her talk was great. But I have really learned that most of the gurus, self help experts, the bigger the Instagram following, the more famous they are, the more they talk about how transparent and honest and all this. Actually, most of them are wolves in sheep's clothing. They're just narcissistic, you know, egotistical, arrogant, you know, assholes. Not all of them, certainly, but a lot of them. And so the thing with marketing is marketing has. I actually started the I love marketing podcast when I originally registered. I hate marketing.com because I was like, there's a lot of people that just hate marketing. I mean. But you know, and here's the funny thing, I hate the fact that I have to do all this marketing shit. I wish people would just buy stuff because I think I'm a good guy, great value, and I shouldn't have to use emotional copy and scarcity and powerful offers. But that's a fantasy land. You know, we live in a world where you got so many people competing. And I've always said if the world supply of toilet paper ran out tomorrow and you have a garage full of toilet paper, you don't need a fancy website, you don't need to be on LinkedIn, you don't need to have a big following. You know, you just need TikTok. That's all you need is TikTok. All you need is a cardboard. You need a cardboard sign and it says, I got toilet paper. 50 bucks a roll and you'll sell it out, literally. Because the world needs toilet paper, right? And if you're. So if you got supply and demand on your side, you don't need sophisticated marketing. But if you have competitors, if you have prospects that are out there and there's all kinds of people vying for that person, then you have to position yourself, you have to do things differently. And I think, you know, my favorite method of marketing part of this, because my age and what I learned marketing from was direct mail. If I could only rely on a single way to get customers, if there was some law that was passed saying you're only allowed as a business owner to have one way to generate a customer. What would it be? I would pick direct mail over everything because I know, I understand it. So that's one. So that's an advantage. Secondly, there's less noise in people's mailboxes than ever before. So I've always been able to make it work. Now, that being said, there's all kinds of different people in the room here. And you have something that you're doing right now that is bringing you clients, even if your business is nowhere near where you want it to be. And I've never been in a room of millionaires and asked how many of you here don't need any more money? And anyone's ever raised their hand. It doesn't matter how successful someone is, they always want to more, right? So everyone always perceives that their situation isn't anywhere near where they want to be. And that's what's funny, because, you know, as marketers, you know, we just. When I say we, I mean, like, everyone in the industry is constantly telling everyone how inadequate they are. You're not rich enough, you're not young enough, you're not old enough, you're not whatever, enough. And so you're dealing with, like, a world of people communicating inadequacies. Now, if you do know how to solve problems for people and you're an ethical person with good character, then the question becomes, how do you actually frame it, position it, say it in a way that gives you the highest possible chance of success, and what method of delivery do you actually use in order to do it? Because what you are as a business owner is you're someone that solves problems for a profit. So when you're gonna raise funding, it's still product or service, gotta raise money, sales pitch or marketing message. And who do I deliver it to? So, I mean, same thing. It's everything if you're trying to, you know, I mean, I started a 501C3 for genius recovery because I spend half my time helping people that struggle with addiction. I currently don't make any money off of it. But I have a calling because I nearly died as a drug addict years ago. And I understand the pain of that and I want to use my marketing skills for that same thing. Though if I'm trying to do something, it's all a marketing thing. So what I would like to do is spend a few minutes talking about how do you actually fill up a room like this? But if you could imagine yourself, no matter what business you're in. You're in solar. You're a chiropractor. You're a doctor. We got a dentist back here, wonderful dentist. My dentist, Cameron Turner back here. So if you guys need a great dentist back here too. So it's funny, I got several people here that I actually do business with. Dr. Rebecca Miller, who's amazing. She has the only holistic urgent care center in. And it's here in Scottsdale in the world. You know, she's absolutely incredible. Yeah, yeah, she's awesome. So in Trenton here, you're starting a new coaching business, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, it's.

It's actually a new modality of therapy.

A new modality of therapy? Yeah. Yeah. It's unique. Is it one that I've been through? Because you know how much therapy I've done. It is true too. I've done it. You will be a client of mine. Good. Yeah. Because I'm all those so many ways. No, but I'd love to talk about like that. Even though you may like, I can't even envision. Why would. I'm a massage therapist. Why am I going to have a room full of people? But the fact is lots of money are made just by getting humans together and the fact that they would even show up. You know, one commonality here is you obviously are interested in marketing because this is not like I love knitting. So it's like, so you get people that have a common interest in a category or what their niche or pain or problem is and then you speak to it and then you offer the solution. A lot of those people will give you money and a lot of things like, you know, it's funny, most of the stuff that I teach I never will get paid for and I give away for free because we have millions of people that have downloaded my podcast and most of them aren't going to join a $25,000 a year program. But I get a lot of relationship equity because of it and it makes me feel good in order to put this stuff out there. And the added benefit is I get to practice all the time. But I still. It's funny, I will talk about the same things for free that I charge people for. So it's not like I'm holding shit back. There are people will actually appreciate when you're useful. And I think if you show up in a room or you write a book or you write an ad or you do a podcast or you do a live cast and you're just useful, you're gonna sift, sort and screen People that whatever level they're out there are going to want to give you money for. So anyway, so back to you.

Yeah. Something that I just want to add into, to speak to what you're sharing is most people get in the business not to become awesome marketers and awesome salespeople. It's usually like you have a product or service that's gonna really help somebody, right? And so I just wanna add to the conversation of this is just my belief. It's not right or wrong, but it's mine. It's worked for me and for my clients. So I believe if you have a life changing service that can really help someone, I believe you have a moral and an ethical obligation to learn how to market and sell it. Sometimes it's not fun or it's not something that you want to do, but it is something that will really get. If it's mission based or just a product that can really help people, it's something that you can really get out to the world in a way. And you have to learn these skills in order to get people to pay attention to it. I think about marketing as it's the most valuable currency right now is people's attention. Like attention span is so short, it's shorter and shorter. Think about what Amazon has done. Like I even noticed myself like with Amazon, like if I'm wiring something from Amazon, if it's not same day, I'm like, there's something like what Amazon, you're not doing it the same day now they have like Amazon now where it's literally like literally like two hours. I have to wait two hours for my Whole Foods groceries to be delivered. Like, what are we living in?

Right? And so it's so inconvenient. I'm gonna violate and be the asshole that I am. And I'm interrupting again. So. So Dean Jackson, I was talking to him like right before I started the. He was talking about 20 years ago. I think it was like 1997 and the Internet. I had my first website in 1996. But like most people weren't like there was no Google, there was no Facebook and there was some study done in, I think it was the UK where they got a group of people and they gave them like 2,000 bucks in an empty room and they couldn't leave and they had to spend the whole month with two grand seeing if they could live just by communicating on the Internet. They couldn't make phone calls, they couldn't leave the place. So they had to get their beds, their clothes, their food. All through the Internet and only something like three of them made it or something. And then they did some other tests where people had a week where you could only rely on the Internet in order to survive. And this was a big deal. Oh, can you actually make life work with the Internet? And then I was talking to Dean. It's like today, could you imagine going a week without the Internet? It's like the complete reverse, you know, like, can we actually. So anyway, I mean, for some reason, whatever you said reminded me of that. And it's. That's how quickly things. And we're only talking two decades, you know, wild.

So getting your audience into a room, that's what you ask, right?

Yes. Cool.

With whatever type of product or service that you offer, creating some type of event that's local, that's free, it can be free. It can be a nominal investment for it. It's one of the most effective ways that I've seen for people to really gain customers. And there's usually some type of educational component to it where you share your expertise. So you'll go deep into one aspect. If you're a dentist, it can be the five biggest mistakes people are making in 2020 that are rotting their teeth day by day without them even knowing it. And so creating a room like this where you can invite people in, it can be patience. Your patients can bring their friends to come in, you give some education about the best practices, and then at the end it's okay. If you want to learn more, then you can come talk to us. So very simple, very light. It's not like a huge sales pitch, but it's something that you're creating value and I believe in what you're sharing of. There's universal law around reciprocity. And I believe in, I mean, I live in Southern California, so I'm connected to spirit and to some of the woo woo stuff. And I believe as you're delivering more value to the universe, the universe will deliver more value back to you.

And baby Jesus prefers California. It's true.

Yeah. And so I believe, even if. And also just from a business perspective, what I've learned, I've been in doing what I've been doing for 10 years now. And I'm all about playing the long game. It's like, I think so many people are, they're in instant gratification mode where an event like this, like, consistently, like you're building value, you're building goodwill and trust long term. Like the people who come here. Now, I know there's a lot who said this is their first time. If they consistently come back, you're adding value to their life consistently for a long time. So I think that so many entrepreneurs, they're not thinking about what is their long term strategy. Like so many years of so focused on this next quarter or this next year. You know, we just entered the new year. I'm sure many of you have done yearly planning, but I think about how do we create value long term? That's going to be everlasting. That's an asset for that. And I think creating human connection in person in a room is one of the most powerful ways to one create connection in the room as well. Because there's also even what we've seen here, there's value in what is what Joe has shared, you know, and there's also been a lot of value from what other people have shared in the room. So the value isn't just on Joe and it isn't just the like Joe show. Right. Like there's a lot of other amazing people in the room. So there's so much value that's not just directed towards the I love marketing Mastermind meetup group, but there's also everything that's happened from the connection with people here that can be the same thing from the events that you put on too in whichever your industry is. So especially with like chiropractic or helping them with their health in some way, it's like to put people in a room who all have pain for them to feel like, oh my goodness, I'm not alone. Like, I thought I was the only one who woke up every day and felt like this, like, oh my God, like I'm not, you know, all those stories of me thinking something's wrong with me, what if I have cancer? What if this, what if that? You know, to really be in a room and to actually connect with another human, to think like, wow, like I'm.

Not the only one who feels this way.

Like, how valuable is that? Not just from a monetary perspective, but from like a human perspective.

Right.

I think that the more that we can provide value to other human beings, the more that we are rewarded for that as well. And when we can put systems and structure in place to attract in a business way to really bring people in, then that's when we can also develop systems to also monetize it as well.

Yeah. If you have an office and you, several of you here, I know you have an office, you have a location and you can hold meetup groups as an example. If you just wanted to do meetups. And if you don't have a location, you probably have clients that have a location that know like and trust you. And you can do an endorsement and you can use it in order to have an event, you know, to have people come there. And I mean, when I was a Deborah carpet cleaner, I would go to real estate offices and I would ask, hey, can I ever do a talk to all of your real estate agents? Like I remember doing one at Century 21, one of my very first ones ever did in Ahwatukee. I said, can I talk to all your real estate agents about how to make the carpet look good so that when they're trying to show a home what are some tips and suggestions that you have? And I just showed up and I just gave a live version of my consumer guide to carpet cleaning. Because my market in my very first marketing sales letter and those of you that are familiar with my stuff know this whole spiel. I had a consumer's guide to carpet cleaning. Read this guide and discover seven questions Ask a carpet cleaner before invite them into your home. 8. Mistakes to avoid when choosing a carpet cleaner. 6. Costly misconceptions about carpet cleaning, how to avoid 4 Carpet cleaning rip offs crawling critters and crudded guys to the slime grime of livestock that's seeping, creeping and galloping through your carpet. Which method cleans best? And how to get your carpet cleaner to 100% guarantee their work. So I had this consumer guide and then it was a printed thing. So I did a whole presentation just going over my consumer guide and I would talk for 30 minutes to an hour, depending on whatever amount of time I could get. Then I started going to interior design shows and I started doing trade and I would give these talks and then of course, you know, oh, okay, that's great. Well, here's the consumer guide, right? And then I turned that consumer guide into a 24 hour free recorded message. I was running ads that said, warning, don't call any carpet cleaner until you listen to this free recorded message. Call anytime, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Now I think everyone should have one of those things, you know, warning, before you hire a chiropractor, call and listen to this re recorded message. Go watch his video on YouTube. YouTube, opt in and get this thing. If you are not a sophisticated, brilliant, emotional copywriter like a Gene Schwartz or like a Roy Williams from the wizard of Ads, it's a whole nother level of writing and getting people engaged emotionally. What most of you can do without a tremendous amount of training. And you can learn this just by listening to a couple of I love marketing episodes on education based marketing or things like the nine word email, or read the free report Breakthrough DNA that we have on ilovemarketing.com, which you can download for free. That doesn't even pitch you on anything, which is incredibly stupid on our parts. But you can learn all of that stuff there. You just do education based marketing. What are the things that people don't know that they don't know because no one wants to hire a carpet cleaner. It's like going to the dmv. It's not like, fuck, I can't wait till my license expires so I can go wait in line with all these idiotic bureaucrats and just look at, you know, this, the Star wars bar of people sitting in there. But anyway, so if you create your own education based marketing, then like what Alex was saying, what do you talk about? You now have stuff to talk about. And if you look at the I love marketing, like how to run a meetup group, we have a bunch of questions. And, you know, you've seen that. So we teach people how to run meetup groups, but the way we show them how to run meetup groups is we just give them topics and we give them questions. And there was a book I read years ago that was incredibly valuable to me. And you can still buy this book on Amazon for like nothing called Socratic selling. And it just gives you a bunch of questions to ask people that will elicit what it is that you can find out from them that would cause them to, you know, want to, you know, engage in conversation. And the beauty of doing a live meeting is, unless I'm in the room is it's, it's more dialogue instead of monologue. Right. And when you're just writing an ad or you're doing a promotion or they're watching a video or a webinar, it's like you're doing all the talking, right. When you can start answering questions and doing Q and A, which we can do. I mean, we can do that here also until they kick us out or whatever. But that's one of the reasons to do a live event. So has anyone here ever done a live event? Okay, could you share what it did for you and how it worked?

So When I was 17, I used to be parties, but more relevant to businesses.

That's great. Live events. I used to throw parties when I was 17, people.

So it was pretty big.

Yeah. As far as what were you, like an MDMA dealer? What was going on?

It was a good time. So in relatives to businesses and stuff, one of the things that we've seen work for us and also for anybody, like, you can literally write down this model and use it for your own business is to find any space anywhere. And there's one big need that every single business owner needs, and that's professional headshots. So what you do is you end up having it to where you host out your space. Just a networking event where everybody can meet up, mix with each other, network, et cetera. But you have it to where on the ad. Like, for instance, you can do a Waze ad. So the Waze driving that, where it shows you where cops are, and you're.

Like all that other stuff, point A.

To point B, you can actually do virtual billboards that if you drive within a mile radius of that virtual billboard, it'll alert you on your phone that there's an event or an offer to your business or whatever it is. So what we did is, for $28, we drove over 400 people to an actual networking mixer by saying, if you ended up coming, not only can you network, but you also got free professional headshots. So if you end up advertising free professional headshots, you'll get a bunch of people into the room, and then during that entire time, while everybody's networking, mixing and everything, then you can be able to present whatever your business or idea is or anything else like that to the entire community. And you're able to be able to obviously close sales and choose your service, your product, your brand, your business. And it only costs, like, 28 bucks and maybe some food or whatever you want to be able to bring to the event. And it works stellar for any business model, like, for instance, chiropractic or any. Anything holistic coaching, anything.

That's very smart. That's clever. Yeah. Who else got one? Mine was kind of on accident.

I've spoke for years on different things, but I started a firehouse subs. I retired from the fire service and opened a firehouse sub. And surprise.

Oh, wow. Okay.

And corporate had this thing in there in our franchise agreement that said we're not allowed to have a Facebook page for a restaurant. So I started a Facebook page, a personal Facebook page, about my experience of being a former firefighter opening a restaurant. And so all of my. I was pinning the rules.

I know.

But I didn't have money for local retail marketing.

Right.

So I did all of it there. I mean, I was five in the morning till 11 o' clock at night, I was in the restaurant and for two hours at home at night, I was on every page. And surprise that had to do with restaurants or business or anything like that, searching for my name or searching for firehouse subs, or searching for subs or sandwiches. I had a whole list of about 12 things that I would search for and I would comment on everybody's comments, invite them to the page to deal with, you know, my experience building firehouse subs. Because of that, within five months of opening, we were ranked number one in the world out of all of the firehouse subs. And we did 1.4 million in sales, which previously unheard of. And I ended up accidentally with this loyal following in the community and just because everybody knew who I.

It was weird.

Like I would go to the grocery store and people are like, dude, you're that firefighter guy.

Can I take a picture? I'm like in sweats and stuff trying to grocery shop.

But it became free advertising and it wasn't. The funny thing was, is probably 95% of my posts had nothing to do with food and nothing to do with the restaurant. Had everything to do with employees that were going off to college or heading off to basic training or some of the customers that came in, or just the experiences of eating or some of the charity work that we do in firehouse subs. Very rarely do I even talk about the product, but I still spend zero on local retail marketing. And I've been a million dollar producing store for three years in a row now. But where that led to was the city. And multiple chamber of commerce was asking.

Me, hey, can you come teach small.

Businesses to do free marketing like you're doing?

Right.

And so it gave me a chance to get out, talk to small businesses on a larger scale. They were actually doing the events for me. They were just inviting people to come and putting me out as the keynote speaker. And I would just teach people how I accidentally did this free marketing on Facebook and created this weird following.

So much of it is so obvious and it's so right in front of you and it's there. It's capturable. Do you know the author David Bach? He's written a bunch of financial books, so he's now spending a year in. Where's he at? Spain. I'm trying to think of what part, because his son's going to school over there. And I was talking to him the other day and he sold millions of books and he was telling me that, you know, before he was like the famous financial author. He was working in a real estate office. And there was like a listing that, you know, these realtors, they had a real estate office, and there was a building that they're trying to sell next door. And it'd been three years and not been able to sell it. He said, this guy's like, have you ever just gone and talked to the other building owners if they'd be interested in buying it? And they're like, no. And so he walked over and talked to one of the guys saying, hey, we're selling this building next to you. You interested in buying it? I was like, yeah, yeah, I would like to buy that building and sold the building. And like, everyone was like, what the fuck? Like, how did you do this? They wouldn't talk to the person, the neighbor. Like, who would be the most obvious person to maybe want to buy the building? The person, right? And I was like, you know, to me, it's like, it just made me think, like, today, how many people will not pick up the phone? How many people do not get up close and personal with other humans? And we now live in this sea of digital marketing that literally prevents so much of the obvious human connection to take place.

I was actually going to say that earlier when you were talking about Amazon, because earlier this week I really wanted to supplement. I didn't want to wait for Amazon. So I actually, like, go, maybe I'll.

Go to the store.

Right?

Then I looked it up and I'm like, oh, yeah, it's right next to the gym I go to every day.

So.

But I went in there and then I just told them I was a local chiropractor and got a new relationship with them just because I actually went there and talked to them in person instead of worrying it on Amazon.

Yeah, well, see, here's what's interesting is that those of us that grew up when there was no Internet, you had to go out to stores and buy shit. You had to go talk to people, right? I mean, if you're young enough, like, there was. I remember when there were no remote controls, you literally, if you wanted to change the teeth, you had to get up from the couch and go and turn the thing, right? And you, you had a cord that was. Kept you a leash to the phone. And now that it's cordless, we have more leashes to phones. We cannot let it slide our thumbs. And I'm so concerned about young people where you just don't even get any socialization anymore. Like, everything is done through a screen and you don't go and talk to people and it's so weird. So I think there's a huge advantage with doing in person events because I honestly think most people are scared of it. They're just kind of worried about it because it's awkward to most people now because, you know, and the reason I went on that whole rant about the people live. Now I remember why, because I don't know if I tied it together about going on the Internet 20 years ago is because you're talking about Amazon prime for like two weeks. I mean, two days, you know, two hours, two weeks. We want it instantly. But back then when they were doing this thing, they're trying to track down anyone that could bring them food. There was no, you know, you couldn't Uber eats or anything like that. So the thing is, if you can get humans together, I think there's a huge advantage.

Yes.

I've done gatherings a couple of ways. You mentioned my Consumer Health Summit, which is a founder community that gathers once a year, 100 people, invitation only.

And how much you charge for that?

10,000 per se.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's a bit. It's a good event, good chunk of.

Money, about 60% alumni every year.

Right.

So people are coming back. They're not on half at that price point. They wonder why it isn't. The other thing that I've done that's less well known, when I lived in the New York area for two years, I co hosted a dinner series with Ramit Sethi, who's an online publisher. Great courses and amazing guy. In 24 months, we hosted 22 dinners. It was the first Monday of every month. Same restaurant, same table. The restaurant got to know us. They knew how to take care of us. He would invite two guests and I would invite two guests. So there'd be six of us. No agenda, no theme, just great people and magic happens, right? He and I would split the check. He and I would both bring like our favorite books for the four. Like he'd bring his favorite book for the four guests. I'd read my favorite book for the four guests. At the end of the evening, the servants would kind of parade out with bags, like really ceremoniously. And magical things happened. You know, at the end of the first year, we had a party for the first year of guests. At the end of the second year, we had a party for all two years of guests. And then we kind of put a bow on top and said this was a moment in time. It took some work. It Was magical.

And we're done.

People connected. You know, someone had a series published on Huffington Post. Someone else had a book published.

You were at one of the, you.

Were at one of the very top. You know, I was introduced to a best New York Times best selling author, John Durant, who introduced me to the founders of Thrive Market, where I became an investor. I mean, the most magical things happened. And you know, the theme has been said earlier, which is when you approach anything with generosity, without expectation of something coming to you in return is actually when the most magical, most unexpected, most amazing things happen.

Yeah, yeah.

And you know, so, you know, once a month in New York area you think, well, there's an unlimited number of people to invite to dinner. It was challenging.

Yeah.

To like to do it once a month. But it was pure magic.

Let me say something too then. I think this may be a good idea based. You made me think of this. So I have a guy named Kevin Thompson who bought my carpet cleaning course in 1997. He was like a former Alaskan fisherman. He was broke as shit. And I don't remember this conversation, but he swears it happened. This is a time when I was still getting on the phone and talking to people that would call my office and stuff. I was selling a carpet cleaning course back then. I think it was like 697 or 797 for a gold package out of basic and a gold package. And he had supposedly called my office and again, I don't remember the conversation, but he said he didn't have any money. And I was talking with him, I said, well, do you have credit cards? And he's like, do you have a credit card? He's like, yeah, I do. And so I said, well, then you have the money. And then I supposedly got his credit card, charged him and then he bought my course. And so he ended up using this course that I taught on my strategies to carpet cleaners. And he used it to transform his life and build and grow his business. Now he teaches people how to bring together joint ventures and connections and he's been doing it for years. I mean, by the way, I have to mention this, whenever any someone whines about how it's difficult to run a company and do marketing and it is okay. That's why most people don't do it. When I was a Deborah carpet cleaner, I didn't learn marketing ever, thinking I would teach it to anyone. I was broke, I needed to eat, I needed to survive. I was cleaning carpets 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 hours a day. Getting paid shit, paid money to do it. I mean, one of the dumbest ways to go broke is going broke. Sitting on the couch. Like, hanging out, watching TV is smart way to go broke. Dumb way to go broke is doing hard manual labor and paying money to do it. But I had this damn entrepreneurial fantasy, and when you have to figure out how to sell something nobody wants to buy, it actually makes you pretty good at marketing. So I, you know, I literally learned marketing in the worst of situations because I picked something nobody fucking wants to buy, right? But. But I figured out how to make it work. And so he was selling carpet cleaning. It's like, carpet cleaning is boring. How am I going to do meetings with people about carpet cleaning? And he came up with an idea. He had, like, his best clients, the ones that really liked him. He had a core group of 20 to 30 people that would use him frequently. So he came up with this idea based on a chapter in my carpet cleaning course called Client Appreciation Dinners, where you do a dinner for your clients. You say, a client appreciation dinner, Bam, smash my head. And those of you listening on the podcast, I'm just wailing my head in the wall behind me. So he said, well, I'm going to do. I'm going to create a client council. So he did a client appreciation dinner. And then he asked everyone at the dinner that, I want to create a client counsel. I want to be of best service to you, not just for carpet cleaning, but what are all the other things that you would want that I might be able to refer to you? And I had another thing called the. A homeowner's Rolodex. So I would get carpet cleaners to mail out a monthly client newsletter. And then they would also have all the other services that a carpet cleaner want. An electrician, a painter, a landscaper, a pool service company, a pest control company. And you would get all of these other companies to subsidize the mailing of the newsletter. But what he did is he's like, I want to just be the referral source, and I want your advice on how I could better run my company. So all of a sudden, he took his best clients, and they became his free advisors. And then he would get together with them, and he would bring in speakers that had nothing to do with carpet cleaning. They could have to do with financial services. They could have to do with bringing an interior designer and things that were relatively related to the home. But he would bring in all these other things, and it ended up becoming his best business building thing. Then all of a sudden, by calling them the client council, they would start referring to. Referring more people to him. And it was. It was this thing that he like, ran for several years until he finally sold his company. And I think anyone here could actually do a variation of that sort of thing. So you think of who are your very best clients? Invite them to a client appreciation thing. You know, wine and dine them and do something, you know, and just say, hey, you know, you're my best clients. Thank you. And I'd like to have you be part of my client council, if you'd like. And just tell me how can I be of better service to you? Because, you know, people support what they.

Help to create for a podcast that I'm not trying to monetize yet or maybe at all.

Yeah.

How do you get people interested in that?

How do you get. What's your subject matter, your podcast?

Motivation, Inspiration towards like millennials that are.

Stuck in Life Story Finance Group.

Okay.

So that's the easiest way we've been able to get people to be able to actually out there. You get them on an email, you.

Get them on a.

And every single time they release a podcast, you send out a text message and you'll have it where they start subscribing and cross following to your other.

Say this again.

What?

Sorry? Okay, say, say. It's a little slower.

So you can do it either through organic Instagram stories or paid Instagram stories. And the swipe up is going to have. It's where they opt in for like an SMS or something. So it's a lead capture and you're trying to get their phone number. So when you end up doing any podcast or anything, you send out an smart SMS where you just released a new podcast update. And as a result you've been able to have like get clients like even at the worst case when we first launched it and didn't optimize like 30 cents per opt in. And as you continue to be able to build that as viewers can be able to grow, then you'll be able to grow your podcast super, super quickly.

Where do you do that? Text and up the up and texting that's on. Because you have to do it through Facebook ads, right?

Like in order for you to.

No, you can have. Where it just goes to a landing page where you have like a. Oh, gotcha.

Okay. Yeah.

Like a plugin or.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah. Do you have any. Do you even do a podcast?

Not yet.

Okay, here's what's funny. Like, you know the thing with podcasting. Like my very first podcast that I ever recorded was with Alex Van Dosian for a carpet cleaning event that I was doing in 2005 and no one knew what the hell. And I kicking myself because at the time I was like, let's do the highest price. No one even knew what the hell podcasting was in 2005 and hardly anyone was listening to podcasts. But I was like, let's start a ten thousand dollar person podcast. And I was like, even if we just sell one person, we can say we have a ten thousand dollar a person podcast. Right. So I thought that'd be really cool. But I never did it and I'm kicking myself ever since. And so would your question about like, how do you get listeners or how do you get people to interview or how do you get topics or what, what specific.

More on the subscribers.

Getting subscribers.

Yeah, because like I'm. I haven't been unlucky to where like nobody was listening at first. Like I had just steady, steady growth. But it's like, how do I get to it? To where it's like I get to just.

Yeah. Grow that. Okay, what's the outcome that you would like the podcast to do for you? Get me?

No, I feel that I can do good in the world, but I just need the money to go with it. So I have a regular job, I have my marketing company and then I have the podcast. The podcast. That's why I said I'm not maybe looking to monetize it at any point and just help people and then from there have it leak into what?

By the way, there's nothing wrong with wanting to monetize it.

I mean, I mean, I just, I'm not sure that that's what I want to monetize. You know, I think I'd rather sell a service or something else that might actually help people than to try to like run ads to it or something like that.

Right, right. You know, it's, it's interesting because I, I don't even know like a lot of people know me because of my podcast and stuff. I don't do a very good job of. Because it's not my main thing. Right. And what's funny is I actually think I have one of the best podcasts in the world because it's not my main thing. Because I don't have to like just tease people. I just talk about. I mean, you can totally see how useless I am tonight. However, there are quite a few podcasts that are pretty useful. Right. The thing that I started Doing. In the beginning, when me and Dean started doing it, I said, let's not pitch or sell or even talk about anything, like, for months until people start complaining that we're not selling them. So. And if you go look at the original reviews, which are all very high, I mean, they're all like, you know, four and five stars. And the main thing that people bitched about was the sound quality, because we would do them over the phone, and they hated the sound quality, but the content people loved. And once in a while, they would say, you know, I talk too much, which is totally legit. But they were very high reviews. And they. And they started saying, I don't get it. Why are you guys doing this podcast? You're teaching all this stuff, but you're not. Can I give? Can I buy stuff, something from you? And I'm like, boom. We knew we had something there. And then people started referring it, and it became a referability thing. And so I think if you can actually create something that will spread without having to advertise it, that's awesome. Seth Godin has this line where he says, advertising is the cost of being boring. And I disagree with that, though. I understand what he means by it. But if you can put a dollar, a dollar in a slot machine, pull the handle, and $5 pop back out, shove money in that thing, you know, like, there's this little. You know, I've talked about this before. There's a little caption on a sugar packet, you know, which. You should not eat sugar. It's poison. I was in a restaurant, and there was, like, a little, like, thing of all the nutrisweet and poisonous chemicals and what was a sugar packet? And they had little sayings on it. And one said, advertising. And the caption was, he who has something to sell and whispers in a well is not as apt to make the shiny dollar as the guy that climbs a tree and hollers. And of course, I memorize that because I remember quotes and dirty jokes. That's how my brain works. And I was like, yeah, you know, if you got something to sell, fucking tell people about it. And if you can spend money to do it, which is where monetization comes in, if you actually can make the numbers. Because the business that everyone's really in when it comes to money is the arithmetic business. If you can make the math work, then I'm a huge believer in advertising. And I think it's crazy not to advertise, but you can look like the most profitable company in the world, which is Apple, which spends a fortune on advertising. Then you look at a company like Tesla that spends no money on advertising. But what they do do is they spend it on referability and they get other people to refer it by creating something that everyone wants to talk about. So there's not a right or wrong way to do it. What I would do though, is I would look at people that are already successful doing what it is that they're doing. Like. Like with the podcasting thing, I'm. Me and Dean are going to relaunch. I love marketing because we've just honestly been very lazy the last year. We have not been doing a lot of episodes. It's kind of like whatever. And I do so many weird episodes with people that have nothing to do with marketing. But. But I don't know where to put them. So sometimes I'll slap up a health interview on I love marketing because where the hell else am I gonna do it? So I'm really thinking about doing like the Joe Polish show. Just random shit. Cause I'm interviewing people on Ayahuasca and Molly Bloom from Molly's Game, I haven't published that one. And Alice Cooper, the singer who's a friend of mine, and all these random topics that have nothing to do with marketing, addiction and all this. Like, where do you put them all? And I'm thinking about doing the Joe Polish show, but it's kind of funny. Me and Dean are trying to find the original recordings of our episodes with Tim Ferriss before, because we have several episodes with Tim and I've known Tim since when the four hour workweek first came out back in 2008 or whenever that was. And me and Dean were trying to talk Tim into doing a podcast and he's like, I don't think. I don't know if I like that idea here. He has one of the biggest podcasts in the world and I'm trying to find that so we can. Where the hell is that raw footage? So we could show like how funny it is. Because, you know, you never know when you're going to stumble. You hear something, you're like, no, it doesn't sound like a good idea. But then you actually realize it does. And the reason I'm bringing that up is that I hope everyone leaves here semi excited about how the hell would I put together a live in person thing that Alex was talking about. But I know that half of you are like, I just. I don't see that. And fuck, I don't know how I'm going to do it. I don't know what I'm going to say. I'm a little worried about. I'm a little scared. And. And the thing is, the real making money with marketing is the willingness to actually do something you have not done before, take the steps needed to do it. Having the marketing stamina, I mean, the ones that really do well. Because in the real world, it's called failure. In the marketing world, it's called testing. And you never will become a great marketer if you are not willing to try numerous combinations. And it is maddening at times because you can be a really good person, you can really care. You know, you're working your ass off, you're trying to run a business, and you're like, oh, now I got a shoehorn in this marketing shit. To try to, you know, like a doctor goes to school for years, spends, you know, they're massively in debt and they never teach them how to sell anything effectively. And then they got all this fucking cost and they're like, okay, how do we make money? Oh, you gotta do some marketing. You know, great, let me get some of this marketing shit. But think of marketing as storytelling. Think of selling as influence. And the more that you can tell a better story and you'll never have it complete. And I say never. With a caveat. If you have something that's working like gangbusters, leverage it, expand it, advertise it. But know that at any point in time it could change. Like you were talking earlier, you know, webinars. Talk about webinars two years ago versus webinars today.

There's market sophistication that happens. So like, webinars are a platform, a type of marketing, a medium that a couple years ago, everyone was using them, everyone was crushing it with these presentations. And a lot of them were staged live, where it said that, hey, sign up for this live presentation. And there was software that would automatically play it at that time, so it wasn't live. And that worked really, really well for a while until everyone started to realize that, shit, people are lying to me when they're telling me it's live, when it's not. It's not live at all. And so there's things that happen, or there's the different technologies, different strategies that come out that will work for a certain amount of time. And that's why I believe that, why we started this with, like, if you can understand your customer, understand what they want, understand the problem they're coming to solve, like, you can win, you can make, you can make any Type of platform, a word like, we're talking about all sorts of digital marketing keeps us disconnected. Like, I agree and like, I still use it. Like, I drive all of my online marketing through Facebook to get people live in a room. So there's still powerful mediums to use. And when you understand that the psychology of why people are actually coming to you, then you can use them to funnel them into whether it's an event or it's to get on the phone with you or to purchase as well.

Yeah, yeah. And so the thing with your podcast, so this applies to anyone here, whatever it is that you're trying to do, if you're going to start something, go to people. Not everyone's going to say yes with a real something they really want that would be useful to them. So you can instill genuine reciprocity and talk and get advice from people that have already built what it is you want. I mean, I will listen to what, what people will have to say. It's rare, though, that I will really want to spend my time with someone that wants to dispense advice to me doing something that they themselves have not done. And there's plenty of your friends and all kinds of people that will, you know, give you their opinions disguised under this is what to do, but they have not done it. And what's funny is, as you get well known and famous in a particular area, people start asking you, they think that because you're good in one area, that translates into being good and others. Like, people always ask me, like, marriage advice. And I've never been married. Like, I'll give you my opinion. I've never had kids. I will tell you what I think. But like, you really probably shouldn't listen to me. Right? What's that?

Don't listen to me.

Yeah, so true. No, you know, number one, causes divorce. Marriage. Marriage. Yeah. Yeah. So, but, but the thing is. So I would literally seek out people that have a similar model and then if you're doing something completely innovative, which is fine too. I mean, I actually like, you know, I like when people just innovate something that no one's ever done before. You know, use some intelligence about how you, how you go and build it and you know, and really, like, if I could look back in doing podcasts or anything, I would always stay within niches, especially when you're starting out. The reason I made millions of dollars for myself, literally in the billions for service businesses with all of my, because I built the largest training organization in the world for professional carpet upholstery cleaners and people that do fire and flood restoration. I still own that company. I don't really spend much time in it. I have someone that runs it and it doesn't bring in a tremendous amount of revenue because it's not a main focus. The carpet cleaning industry could not afford the talent of a Tony Robbins. You know, he's not going to go Tony Robbins motivation coaching for carpet cleaners, you know, so when you go into niches, there's always. There's always room for you to be the expert, right. And to be. And to be highly paid. So as a dentist, I'll just use as an example, like if I was starting a new dental practice and like, where am I going to get patients? Well, certainly there's proximity. Who's close to your office? Right? You always want to target that. And then if you want to take a niche, like who's the. Who is the top dentist in Scottsdale for real estate agents, right? And if you get a couple of real estate agents and you say, yeah, you know, I specialize for real estate agents. So we're going to have our offices opened from 6pm to 9 because they're working all day showing houses. I mean, you can do weird shit like that and it would actually probably work really well. Or the massage therapist for football players or, you know, things like that. So whenever you can go to a niche. So the same thing with like any category or podcast either. I would look at themes. So for me, I'm thinking with I Love Marketing, I should package all the stuff up in the I Love Marketing. We're going to have a copywriting series. So for the next three months, we're going to do it all on copywriting and we're going to do it all on digital marketing. We're going to do it all on conversion, we're going to do it all on live events. And the Joe Polish show will just be. I mean, one of the main reasons that I did the podcast was people would come to me and they, oh, what do you do? You do marketing? Oh, I really need you. And it's like, well, I'm not going to go just like mentor someone that owns a flower shop or a florist. Like, I have this $25,000 group. So what the podcast did for me is it gave me the ability to people that needed my marketing help that I'm not going to. I don't have the time or bandwidth to talk to people one on one, certainly for free, but I can direct them all to the podcast and Then all of a sudden, it fulfilled this thing. And now I always have a place to send people to. And that's one of the biggest beauties of doing a podcast, no matter what category you're in. So if you're a massage therapist, you're a pain specialist, you're a dentist, even if you did a podcast and only had like five episodes or 10 episodes, there's something that it gives you, like, author abilities. And that being said is all these. So Craig Clemons is one of my clients, and Craig is one of the highest paid copywriters in the world. He's done over a billion in online sales. One of the highest paid online copywriters in the world. World. We did a copywriter panel at my last Genius Network, Daniel event. He was speaking at one of my Genius Network meetings about three months ago, and he has a thousand employees. He, you know, he's building up a very big Instagram following. And I said, okay, what advice would you have? You've just done, I mean, done huge numbers online with online marketing. What advice would you give to people on how to use, you know, online marketing? And he said, you know, he goes, with all the time you're going to spend building up an Instagram following or you're going to spend building up any sort of social media following, he goes, if you actually sat down and spent three months, six months writing a book, he goes, all of that shit is going to disappear. And you always have to create the new thing every other day, every day, right? He goes, but if you really created a body of work and then you put it out there and then you put your focus on building a big following, he goes, ten years from now, you're going to be so further ahead. And I was like, that's such a good piece of advice. Because we live in a day and age where it's like, punch out content. Punch out content. And it's consuming. Like, I'm doing something really weird right now. For six years, I have personally gone into Facebook myself, not my team, myself, and posted a happy, happy birthday to people with me, with some famous person like Richard Branson or Arianna Huffington or Peter Diamandis was last year. JP Sears was the year before. Daymond John was the year before that. I can't anyway Tony Robbins, you know, so I've been in this year. I just said, I'm not gonna fucking send out happy birthdays. And I'm sort of weirded out by it because, like, now people are sending me messages like, why are you not sending Birthday. But I, and I said, for the longest time I've been doing this. But I'll tell you, like, doing that for six years, like, to people, they're like, they're incredibly appreciative. And a couple of those people have, literally, I didn't know them at all, but they're like, you do this every year, so there's something to be said about, you know, consistency. But also it took a lot of time. Every day I'm spending five or ten minutes doing happy birthdays. And you do that every, you know, to. It could, it could be half an hour to an hour a week. And then you do the numbers. Like, I could have, I could have written five books in the amount of time that I spent doing happy birthdays. What would have given me a greater return? One of the books would have gave me greater return. So as you leave here, think about all of the stuff that you spend here. You know, what are you really documenting? What are you really putting? What are you creating that's going to have longevity? And always, always use marketing in the most ethical ways because there are so many people that just are manipulative. And some of the greatest marketers that you're going to learn from are the biggest con artists. So it's, you know, it's one thing about understanding the street game, it's another about how you use it. You know, what you create, you know, is one thing. How you create is a whole other thing. Yeah. So doing things right versus doing the right thing. You know what I mean? One last thing. I was going to say, you already.

Have a place where people are coming.

To follow you and are you doing.

Like a fireman and don't.

And.

Yeah, offering good advice.

So then I'm kind of happy. People are asking me. They just started asking me if I'm selling anything and they want apparel. So it looks like the main way to sell is like people actually want to wear the brand and support the podcast that way and they're willing to pay for it.

Are you keeping it a secret or do you want.

No, sorry. It's a hashtag. In for the kill. That's actual. That's a hashtag.

Okay.

In for the kill. I want to.

Okay.

Are you like a violent person? That sounds very violent.

It was ideas. Modern day hunters, people that just keep doing like thing after thing. Hunter goals, huge goals. And then they just decide, I gotta go hunt again.

Yeah, this sounds very violent to me.

Yeah.

Every time you have a group of people, especially this is probably a core.

People who would like motivation and stuff.

You know, make sure you're presenting a message and stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Is there any other questions or comments or anything?

If you don't have a figure pointed message, get one.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Speak to that because most people can't fathom. Oh does that still work? I hear that more. Do people still. Yes, they still make phone calls.

I met up with you and Ishan and I got your book and I read it. I was like phone call, whatever, I'm.

Going to try it.

So I spent so I dragged my feet a little bit and then I spent some time on it and I was like all right. I made an 8 and a half minute pre recorded message. I had a call last week.

Tell them what business you're in first Solar business you need. You're a sergeant in the air force as well.

Yeah, so I'm still active duty. You got a solar business transitioning out here the next year. And I was like, you know what Joe said to do it. I'm gonna give it a shot. What's the worst is going to happen? I spent a little bit of time talk to myself that actually took me about 16 times to make a perfect take so that I could publish this out. But I had a client that called last week. He listened to the message three times, eight and a half minutes long. And he'd already talked to six other solar companies, closed them on Sunday. It was $67,000 deal.

Awesome. Love it, love it.

Like you know this is whatever it's a freaking. Who listens to eight and a half minute voicemail. I listen to it three times. You know when you told me to.

Listen to.

Was in person I was.

Like I'm just no way I'm going to listen to this.

And I listened to the whole thing and I was actually like stuck in the message. All right, what are you saying Person I didn't think I was going to.

Listen to we I had that on my desk and I buddy doing a mastermind and he saw your tag and he picks it up says does this work?

And I said I kind of dismissed it or something.

He called it.

He listened to home message and I wanted to ask him something real quick.

He's like hold on, hold on.

You can also listen to podcasts we've done on I love marketing on how to use free recorded message but it's a response mechanism so any messaging that you're going to put out and it's and where I first started understanding the psychology of free recorded messages. And again before the Internet existed I had consumer awareness guides, and I would run ads that said, warning, don't hire a carpet cleaner until you read this free guide. Call and request this free guide. People would call up and they'd say, yeah, I want to get the guide, but I want to get my carpet clean tomorrow. And there was not enough time in the physical memory because we were doing direct mail. So I turned it into a free recorded message. So I took the consumer guide and I turned it into a free recorded message script. And if you have service vehicles, people aren't gonna always. Now they do. I mean, everyone is driving and texting and, you know, shooting Instagram videos and all that, but which is why, you know, we're all gonna kill ourselves eventually. And hopefully autonomous cars are come out quicker than we can all die from, like, all the other things we're doing. You know, he watches a ton of pornoise driving around.

No.

So the thing, though is it's a lot easier to listen to a recorded message when you're driving than it is to go to a website. Right? People are like, oh, can I put a video instead? Yeah, you could. I'm not saying you cannot, because we certainly have that. You know, don't, you know, hire someone until you watch this video. You certainly can direct them to a landing page. You can do all that stuff. But I still love free recorded messages because there's something about it. And, you know, the beauty of the free recorded messages, Someone doesn't have to respond back. When you're talking to a live person, there's a phone call fear. When are they going to try to sell me? How do I end the phone call? But there's a different receptivity level when someone's listening to a free recorded message because you 100% control the conditions of the input of information. Does that make sense? And so there's a company that we use COA networks to get free recorded messages. And if you're, you know, just tell them you listen. I love marketing. You know what? Can we give it up for Alex? How do people find you? Give out your website. Website and everything so people can.

The best way to find me is Facebook. Facebook.com Alex Jmoscal A L E X J Moscow is like the city M O S C O W and then you can go to alexjmoscow.com but, yeah, I would say the main. The main avenue is Facebook. I put out free content almost every day that I think is pretty valuable.

Cool.

All right, thanks for having me, guys.

Thank you, brother. All right, see you, man.

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