Marketing Wins and Roadblocks: The Cap Gap, The Chainsaw, and The Arithmetic Business with Joe Polish and Dean Jackson - I Love Marketing Episode #479

That's right, no expenses spared to bring you into I Love Marketing with Dean Jackson and Joe Polish. Today's topic is marketing wins and roadblocks. I honestly believe that you really can't have a marketing win without a roadblock sometimes. That's why we put these two together. We emailed many of you the opportunity, if you were on the right list, we mailed you the opportunity to submit some of your roadblocks and wins, and we'll be chatting about them. But we want to start simply with Joe Polish, I would love to hear a marketing roadblock you've had in the last 6 months and a win you've had in the last 6 months. And then we'll go to Dean with the same thing and then we'll go from the audience. And we've got some that were sent in, but if you, if you have an amazing one, put that in the chat as well and we'll see what happens. Joe Polish, roadblock and a win.

Just learning about AEO, answer engine optimization versus SEO and changing and shifting things. But luckily I have very smart people in Genius Network and people in my network because that's kind of what I do. I connect people. And so, I'm learning a lot of stuff of positioning and just making the transition. Another roadblock is myself. And what I mean by that is there are so many things now that can be assisted with AI. And when you have done— the analogy I use is if you were a lumberjack for 30 years of your life and then someone invents a chainsaw, And then all of a sudden, you know, you realize, well, an axe is an inefficient way to chop down a tree when there's a chainsaw. But now with AI, there's like 10 million lightsabers that can take down multiple trees and it's never-ending. The biggest roadblock is just letting go of the way we used to do things in the past and adopting that. So, you know, but I think I'm managing it quite well and we're doing some pretty incredible stuff, which of course, So we may talk about that today. So that would be my version of a roadblock, mostly my own self-imposed limitations because I have not yet gotten my habits instilled in a way that allows me to just new game. You know, let's try it this way now. Forget all the— sometimes starting with a beginner's mind is the greatest way to get through roadblocks. The curse of knowledge. Can be detrimental if you are attached to it.

I think that's a great analogy, that the chainsaw— if you're a lumberjack and you've been chopping down trees, to think about AI is really exactly that. It's just a technology. It's an amazing technology. But the bottom line is, if you're a lumberjack and you get a chainsaw, it's going to allow you to chop down more trees. Of the same size that you've been chopping, or it might make you more ambitious that maybe you could chop down some bigger trees because you don't have to limit to what your personal capability is. I look at it as an amplifier like that. That's a good one.

No, thank you, thank you. What about you, sir?

Well, the thing I was asked about AI stuff is, the question that I was followed up with is, "To what end?" And I think that what you were saying, about— that's why I think the chainsaw is a good example, because the core thing— a chainsaw is not useful unless you're chopping down more trees with it. And the same thing with AI is, to what end? What are we doing with AI? What is this allowing us to, to, uh, do? And it still comes down to the bankable results, the end results of, are we getting more leads? Are we converting those leads into appointments? Are we making more sales? Are we helping people get more results? And are we building long-term relationships and getting referrals with people? Those are all the bankable results that we could say, to what end are we applying AI rather than just learning the tool, learning how to operate a chainsaw? Is only going to be so useful. You could be an expert chainsaw operator, but someday, you got to point it at a tree.

Like anything else, it's out of all the things you could do, you only need a few tools in your toolbox and how do you deploy them in the most intelligent ways. And of course, like most driven entrepreneurs, their ambitions can cause them so much internal angst and chaos. As my friend Dave Kekich said, the world's highest achievers live with the highest levels of dissatisfaction. And the thing we've talked about all the time in Genius Network is the best thing about being your own boss is you're your own boss. The worst thing about being your own boss is you're your own boss. And so, getting some direction, but like you take free recorded messages as an example, both me and you relied heavily on education-based marketing and we still do in a lot of ways. I Love Marketing is a podcast. The way this started, many of you that have been with us, and there's quite a few people that have literally from the very beginning when we first started this in 2010, so 16 years ago, we have a few people that are on here that have been listening to I Love Marketing when we started it 16 years ago. And I Love Marketing helped launch so many other podcasts. We always tell the funny story of arguing with Tim Ferriss before we were interviewing him on one of the podcasts, why he should start a podcast. He's like, I don't want to start a podcast.

I think, you know, it's all about his blog.

Yeah, yeah, it is. And Mike, but yeah, but you have a ton of people that read your blog. And, and of course, uh, we've tried endlessly to find the original unedited recording so we could find that initial conversation. But you know, there's, there's so many people that have started I Love Whatever podcasts or platforms and stuff. But me and Dean were talking, and it was around maybe the end of 2009,. And we had this really killer conversation of just, you know, what we were doing in our businesses, marketing. And I said, you know, could you imagine if other people heard what we had just talked about for the last hour, other business owners, how valuable would that be to other people just to listen in on this conversation? And the reason a lot of people don't love marketing is they've not been able to figure out how to make it work. And the original website I registered was ihatemarketing.com. Because I was like, let's try to take people that just have not had success with marketing. They don't like it. They hate that they have to do it, which, you know, all of us need to do marketing. You know, unless you're in a situation where you're the only person in the world that has the product, service, experience, offer, solution, cure of anyone else, then, you know, then you don't have to do marketing. However, if you have competitors or people don't quite know what you do, you have to do marketing. So, one of my and Dean's objectives, and we did this and you can go back and look at the original reviews that people would put on I Love Marketing. And I said, let's not try to sell anything. So, Paul just showed the housekeeping rules and suggestions that Anna and Chrishell, who are on our team, originally put together for us. So, I want to give credit to them. And because we, every once in a blue moon, someone just pops on one of these things to be a problem. Pain in the ass person and they start pitching their shit. And so, but most people are just really cool and awesome, which would be every single one of you because I haven't seen the jerk yet. So that being said, I said, let's not try to sell anything. Let's just deliver and talk about stuff that's better than what people are paying for. And let's see what happens. And let's not mention any promotional stuff of any kind of what we do, what we sell, even though like that's where people are coming to I Love Marketing to figure out how to market and sell what it is that they do. I go, let's just give pure value. Let's educate people on marketing. And we created the, you know, this whole model about how we did that, which you can download, Breakthrough DNA. But we didn't even promote our own stuff on the first episodes of I Love Marketing for a while. And then people, I said, let's not promote anything until people start to complain. And then finally, like someone made a post saying, I don't understand what you guys are doing here. You teach all this stuff on marketing, but then you never try to sell us anything. And it became this whole new model of like, here's a good way to sell, just demonstrate value. And the reason I bring it up is if you become really valuable and useful to enough people, they will simply want to do business with you. Because of that. Now, if you need to pay the rent, if you need to make payroll, you can't obviously live on that. So, you know, I Love Marketing was never our core business. That's why other people have gone off to build giant podcasts, because it was always something that we never took sponsorship, even though we've been offered it hundreds of times. Uh, we, you know, we just— we've done this more as a as a hobby to kind of keep ourselves sharp and just to talk to people and do things. And there are many people that have become millionaires that have never bought anything from either me or Dean, simply from listening to the I Love Marketing episodes and stuff. So, the reason I bring that up today, I wanted, Dean, I want you to give that framing that we did it at a $100K meeting, one of my $100K groups on the last year where we talked about the signature result. What's the signature result that you produce? And as Paul presents questions and stuff, I want to deliver the framing where you think about it this way. Whatever someone is asking us today, how does it apply to your business? Ask yourself, how do I put— not, oh, this won't work for me, but more, how could it work for me? And what is your signature result? And then, Dean will explain like how to think about if you could not charge for what it is that you deliver as a product or a service or an experience or whatever it is that you're offering to the marketplace. Unless someone got a result or an outcome first, how would that change the way you think about it? So that's what— that's the framing I want you to deliver, Dean, because you're really good at explaining it. And I think it's pretty profound the way— if you do a good job today explaining it. And then Paul, we'll get into some questions and that everyone leaves here with a lot more direction on your business, no matter what technologies or AIs that are out there. We want to give you a little bit of some superpower. So So go ahead, Dean.

Well, that concept of a signature result is a way of framing— is what's the thing that you can do that excites you, that you have the best outcomes with, and that you would if you were to set up a provocation for yourself. If I ask people What would you do if you only got paid if your client gets a result? That points you in the direction of the thing that you absolutely know how to create for people. Every time that you are exchanging with people in an economic exchange, there at its core, it's somebody giving you money for a good or a service, and we all hope to deliver an amazing utility outcome for people. And I love starting that way by getting crystal clear on what is it that you would be able to do. What's— I often say it in another way too, is what would you be able to do for somebody if they would just get out of the way and let you do it? Because so often we may have— you go through life with a fire hydrant of value that you could create for somebody, but you're forced to meter it out through the garden hose of the constraints of your current pricing model or the, the what people, what you think people can afford to pay for something. And you, you know, you've got all way more value that you could add for people. Than what you're able to convert into a transaction. And if you were to, people, what I discovered by asking that question of what would you do if you only got paid if you get the result is that allows you to think silently, just kind of asking yourself. It's a great provocation to work in your journal and say, what would I do if I only got paid? Like, just kind of explore that idea, because do you even know what people are paying you for? What do they expect that they're getting for what they're paying you for right now? And when you— it's a very interesting thing, because if you look at what your current ability, your capability to create a result for people entails. Then you layer that and look at what is your capacity for that. If that's the thing, if your, if your thing is creating a model where you are delivering an outcome for people, certainly there are some constraints on that in terms of if it's a service, there's some labor constraints on that. If it's a product, there's some manufacturing constraints on it. But what is the actual, like, capacity of what you could do if you were firing on all cylinders? Asking yourself, how high is high? You've heard me, I tell the story about Ghimal Aziz, who took over the MGM Grand Hotel. And the question that he asked himself always is, how high is high? He started looking. And by the way, all these clues are in your P&L right now. If you look at the line item revenue contributors to your P&L and you just ask yourself the question, how much, how high is high with this particular things. So he looked at restaurants, gaming, hotel rooms, conventions, retail, entertainment, and he went down the list. And he knew because he would stand in the portico of the MGM Grand night after night, and he'd see people getting in limos, and he'd ask them, where are you going tonight? And they'd say, we're going to Spago, or we're going to Nobu, or we're going to Cirque du Soleil. You know, they're going somewhere from the largest hotel in the world to go somewhere else. And he realized they had a restaurant in the hotel that was doing $4 million a year, profitable. Everybody loved it, was happy with it. But he knew that if we had a Celebrity Destination restaurant in this same footprint, that we could be doing $8 million a year. And in his mind, he booked that gap as a loss. And he said, we're losing $4 million a year because of our profitable $4 million restaurant. And he went to the board, got them to agree. They ripped out the restaurant, rebuilt, partnered with Michael Mina, opened up Nob Hill, and first year out, they did $11 million in sales. And when you look at, that's just the first thing that he did. But when you look down those line items for yourself and you start to ask yourself, how high is high here? And then what is that? You have your capability and your capacity and the gap between what you're capable of and what you're actually doing is, I've made up a term for it that I call it your cap gap. Your CAP gap is the capability and capacity gap that you are losing right now. You're losing money on these by not having that filled out. And that gives you a really good place to start from because now at least you know what is the signature result that I'm able to create.. And then you go and look at who is the best person to do this. And that's where your before unit starts.

Well, there you go. That was pretty darn valuable. You know, like the one thing I would have conversations with Gary Halbert about when it relates to the making of money, you know, we would talk about Operation Money Suck. You know, what are the, what are the things that you can do to set up your business to make as much money, especially when you need it. And those of you that didn't know Gary Halbert, Gary was the guy that I originally started reading that exposed me to direct response marketing. I ended up becoming really close friends with him, and he was— I never met another person that had hundreds of millions of dollars in his life go through his hands, and he never saved a penny of it. He was— and when he was in his 60s, I was like, Gary, what— you know, and I'm in my like late 20s and I'm like, Gary, what the hell is wrong with you? And like, how, how can you make so much money and not have anything to show for it? Because there are a couple times where I literally had to loan it— loan him money to pay his rent. It was the most ridiculous thing. And, um, he said, you know, I'm an edge walker, Joe. He's like, this is how I've always been. And which of course is a, is a really Look, looking back at it now, I didn't understand it at the time, but it was a really good alibi and a really bizarre form of learned helplessness, right? Well, I just can't do this thing.

But it's also—

it's ADHD. I recognize that now, that that's exactly what that was.

Oh, is that why I had to loan you money for rent this month, Dean? Is that what's right?

That's exactly right. And I thank God for you.

The reason I bring up Gary is that, you know, People have this, "I can't learn marketing. I can't make marketing work." And it's been one of the biggest roadblocks that I think we have, you know, do our best to help people with. But he said one thing, though, that like Gary was so brilliant, though. I mean, he truly— there are so many people that became skilled at marketing because of him. And he said, "You're in the arithmetic business. The business that you're really in is the arithmetic business." So, however you want to look at it, if you can identify where is that gap, that because you're doing things a certain way, what do you need to creatively destroy in your business or in your life that opens you up to have a breakthrough? Because in order to have a breakthrough, you typically have to break something. And that oftentimes is your mindset. That's sometimes the business model you're in. That's sometimes, you know, getting rid of, you know, people in your life that you're no longer aligned with and that are holding you down or adding people to your life that will bring in capabilities you don't currently have, or utilizing AI in a particular way that will give you leverage versus being used by it. And I think with technology, you know, most people don't use technology, it uses them. And that's just kind of the way the world works. And in any industry, if you look around, you know, 5% of people make all the money, the other 95% scrape around for the crumbs. I mean, that's just how most business industries work. And so, in order for you to excel at the top, there has to be effective marketing. There has to be the deliverables that are done in such a way that people are super happy and they keep doing business with you and tell other people about you. And it's packaged uniquely. So, it's all how we bundle and unbundle everything. Like TK, let's talk to TK real quick. You have this great product on hydrogen water. There's probably a lot of different hydrogen waters that are out there, but one's ability to package it and deliver it are going to make all the difference in the world. But let's first talk not as marketers, but just what do you actually sell, TK? Like, and why should, why should people care about what it is you sell? And then after we go through this rant, Paul, let's go through the list of questions that we have from people. I'm putting you on the spot— I know you weren't expecting me to do it!

Oh TK loves it, TK loves it!

Thank you, Joe Polish Polish Polish Polish polishish? Yeah we have molecular hydrogen water and our goal was through metaphysics of Water how do we raise vibration of water to its greatest vibe to help people heal themselves from their illness or disease that they're having right now so yeah this Raise product has been developed for 3 years but not only just one their year ago when COVID hit us all over own again because before then there's no way around what happened last time during pandemic times everybody had cancer everything like vibration crazy okay let's go back into your question about why did we create these products first and off well if somebody asks my wife she go said oh he wants money outta his company look at him trying through hard make some cash here... No sir ma'am their I don't want any more money than her own anymore actually thank God enough already anyway uh yes um basically we've got two main goals which were number one spiritual healing patients who needed treatment after getting sick due to whatever reason whether it be an autoimmune condition diabetes heart failure stroke brain tumor Alzheimer's dementia Parkinsonismobility issues journey, anxiety depression stress disorder PTSD trauma shock traumas things happen every day especially today many kids nowadays suffering from mental but health problems addiction disorders addictions substance abuse etcetera et cetera so those types of conditions can benefit greatly by drinking high-quality pure oxygenated alkaline also distilled H2O waters.

Okay, I'm puttin' ya on the spot; I know you weren't expectin' me to ask y'all.

Oh, T.K.

Loves It, T.K.

Loves It!

Oh thank providing you, Joe. Um, yeah, we have Molecular Hydrogen Water and our goal was through the Metaphysics Of Water™ how them do we raise the vibrations of water to its Greatest Vibe® to with Help People Heal Themselves?! the best from the hydrogen and the purity of the water.

So what are the obstacles that you have? What's your biggest marketing obstacle with selling it and getting people to understand that? And by the way, what kind of doctor are you? Let's, let's first establish a certain level of credibility. What qualifies you to advise people that they should drink a particular type of water? And what, and what's your obstacle with getting the world to know about that?

I'm a pharmacist and I have a degree in functional anti-aging regenerative medicine with the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. The biggest obstacle is getting the information across. The water takes a little bit of education for people to understand about the information and the theory that goes into with water carrying memories and all that stuff.

Got it.

Got it.

What I want you to test too is I want you to take your biggest marketing challenges and I want you to— because it's— I don't charge for it— is askjoe polish.com. All my books, all my videos, lots of stuff have been uploaded. So I have people writing business plans using my AI clone to give them advice. Someone just sent me a message that she just laid out a whole platform for her TED Talk just using AskJoePolish.com. So, try it. Awesome. Yeah. And, how many different waters are out there in the marketplace that are vying for everyone's attention? Here I am drinking like this. I grabbed the one water. It's in a glass bottle because I try not to do plastic, right? Icelandic. But, there's how many waters? Do you even know how many different waters there are in America as an example?

Different brands, probably hundreds that are competing for room on the shelves and stuff like that. And most of them— some of the biggest obstacles that we go through is getting into like shelf space. So then you're competing against Pepsi and Coca-Cola, who owns the subsidiaries of the other brands, and then they own the shelf, uh, space.

Yeah.

And when I used to consult with Bill Phillips— and I was just texting with him last night, literally, so I'm still in touch with Bill for 31 years later. That's how long I've known Bill Phillips. And when he had EAS and I was his marketing consultant, uh, we would talk about, you know, in advertising they would say mind share, and in his world, uh, back then it was stomach share. Like, how much of a human stomach can a particular company have a share of? And it's— and this is the sort of conversations that go on at Coca-Cola or Pepsi or McDonald's. I mean, you know, and it's unfortunate because a lot of the companies just sell poisonous, toxic shit that they want put in people's stomachs. But that's literally how you think about how does your product or service fit into the lives of people that are going to give you money for it? And how does it enhance their life in a way to where they not only will keep giving you money for whatever it is that you're offering them, but they will tell other people about it. So, those other people will start, in your case, drinking your water or going to Disneyland if you own Disneyland or whatever the thing. Is. So just some food for thought, I guess, or beverage for thought.

All right.

So Paul, let's go into some questions.

Yeah.

And by the way, I'll do this too. TK, me and Dean are allowed to like point out people and say, if you want to put a link for your product in there, if people want to order to find it, feel free to put that in the chat. At times we will do shoutouts to friends and stuff. So go ahead and do that. So go ahead, Paul.

There we go. You have been listening to I Love Marketing Live. The topic: marketing wins and roadblocks, where we talk about marketing wins and roadblocks. There are 4 different types of audience members. There are those of you who are on this live.

Thank you.

It's fun. And you get things like what Joe Polish just did where, you know, if you get the chance to promote, definitely leverage it. Definitely use it. Another audience member is those of you who will be listening to the video recording of this later. We do that. Uh, it'd be silly not to make this available to the world. But there are two more audiences that are interesting. Audience number three is the audio podcast version. More people will take the audio podcast version of this than anything else right now. That's where we're at in this industry. But the fourth one is truly interesting. And Joe kind of, uh, almost sandwiched this part of the episode in that it's gonna be AI. If you go to astropolish.com and ask questions, questions from this episode, will come out in the results. And people who have Joe and Dean and their virtual boards and some of the different AI options out there will get this content as well. When you create your content, definitely think about the live audience, the delayed audience, the audio audience, and the audience who is getting it from AI, because that's a very, very real one. What we're going to do for those of you listening to the audio version of this, we're going to cut it off at this point. And the next episode will be a question from Cliff Talking about being newish to entrepreneurship and business ownership. We're going to get marketing wins from Dean and Joe on that. You've been listening to a live recording of the I Love Marketing podcast. And if you'd like to come to a future live recording of the I Love Marketing podcast where all sorts of wackiness comes into play, visit us at ilovemarketing.com. Make sure you sign up and we will do that in the future.

Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today at ilovemarketing.com. Ilovemarketing.com/subscribe. If you'd like access to the show notes to take action on what was discussed, please visit ilovemarketing.com/479.