The E.L.F. Marketing Plan: An Easy, Lucrative and Fun Way To Simplify All Your Marketing and Money Making Activities - with Dean Jackson and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing Episode #342

What's the biggest breakthrough that you could do right now rather than just going on a sequential constant improvement quest? I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish, and this is the I Love Marketing podcast.

Who else wants an easy, lucrative and fun way to simplify all your marketing and money making activities? It's called the Elf Marketing Plan. Remember to subscribe to I Love Marketing so that you don't miss a Future episode. Visit ilovemarketing.com subscribe for more.

Hey everybody, it's Dean and it is Joe.

So that would be Dean Jackson and Joe Polish. Since you're now going by your first name.

I just realized that I'm out of practice there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are the latest, what are the latest musicians?

What are.

Quit talking over me here. What are the, what are the. Do you want to say anything about that comment talking?

It's like we're immediately right back in the saddle. It's perfect.

Yeah. So anyway, you know what, I was going to say something about, you know, any recent musicians that are really big, that have one name that you like the most, but we won't even go there. Don't worry about it. So let's jump right into it. So we're going to talk about marketing plans at the time we're recording this. It's in December of 2018 and a new Year's coming ahead. Now, it doesn't matter if someone listens to this 50 years from now, this will be a really important discussion. And I also want to say for all of our listeners, this is really being recorded for our Genius network members and Genius X members. These are people that pay 25,000 a year and $100,000 a year to be part of a very high level discussion group to help build a better entrepreneur. And one of the things that I'm rolling out this year with the groups is a ELF marketing plan. Not just a marketing plan, but a easy, lucrative and fun marketing plan.

ELF marketing.

So you can have an elf business, which is easy, lucrative and fun versus half business, which is hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. And the people that I have probably learned the most about marketing plans from are my buddy Craig Fort, who. Dean and Craig know each other. He's been in the real estate business for many years. And of course, Dean, with all of the stuff that Dean has done over the last 20 years that we've known each other and I mean, gosh, going back to early, you know, 2000, I remember teaching marketing plans to our platinum members in Piranha Marketing. And then, you know, I have a whole laid out marketing plan to be, you know, released this year for our Genius Network members. And I don't even have that in front of me right now. All I have is some topics and some questions that I want to discuss with you, Dean, because one of the things, and I'll let you speak to this as soon as I'm done babbling here, one of the things that's most important, it's not the plan that's important, it's the planning and it's the psychology behind it. And that's what I want to talk about today. And I want to get some context wrapped around this because me and Dean's going to come to the January Genius Network meeting and we're going to basically teach the group how to plan their marketing for not only next year at the time that we're recording this, but for whenever they want to start planning. And we're looking at using this very high level group of entrepreneurs to see how they do it and what is applied. And then we may create a program in the future that's made available. But for right now, I just want to talk about the importance of it. So Dean, before we even get into a marketing plan, we've talked about this many, many times in the past. But I'd like you to, you know, just for anyone that's a new I love marketing listener or someone that's been listening to every single episode, a refresher. So what is your definition of marketing? And maybe even define, you know, your thoughts on, on a marketing plan and you know how it might be different than in like an ELF marketing plan because you're so you're so enrolled about living a friction free life. So let's first start with marketing.

Free and ELF go hand in hand. I'm all about easy, lucrative and fun. So that's totally fit. I like that. I take it as I look at as a multi layered thing. Right. First of all is the context of it. I look from the top down and say, you know, starting with the revenue kind of, I look at it as a time to kind of review what's happened. If you're looking at the end of the year here, it's always a good thing to look and see what you're actually doing. And whether that's in December or whether it's in February or March, you can always kind of look back on the last 12 months to get a good sense of where you've, you've come. And I often tend to look at everything in rolling 12 months. So you can see the directional improvement in something even next month, right? Compared. So part of the thing that I do when looking at it is to take all of the revenue, 100% of the money that you ended up making in the last 12 months came from all the cumulative activities that you did to generate that revenue. Every customer you had, every service you provided, every product you sold, everything, all amounted to whatever that big top line number is. Now that alone, sometimes people just set directional goals. That way they'll set like a top line number. You know, they want to do a million dollars in revenue or 100,000 in revenue or 10 million in revenue, and they look then down at the bottom line and say, we did, we netted this much money. So they, you know, made a million dollars in revenue and did $300,000 in profit, if that's the way we kind of look at it. But those two things are the first way to look at it. But now I want to kind of dig deeper and just have a top layer understanding of dividing that revenue into before, during and after. Because it's from there that we're going to be able to see which tactics or which strategies are actually going to be able to move the needle. You know, and most people, this is what is so great. When we start, we talk about the eight profit activators and the before, during, after model that you can overlay that on any business, right? Because it's a context, it's not a strategy, it's a context that some of the revenue that came from the total amount of revenue that you did came from people who had already spent money with you, your after unit, people who were already clients and they did more business with you, they continued to do business with you, or they referred new people to you. That's really the three ways that you get revenue in the after unit. And for every business is different, but there's some distribution of that. You know, some amount of all of the revenue that you did last year came from people who would be considered being in your after unit. And for a lot of people, just understanding and defining what is the after unit for them is a, you know, kind of a directional breakthrough because that gives you the ability to then look at the, you know, you're establishing what the, what the dials are to understand the numbers. But then you get to really understand, well, what are the knobs and levers that move that dialogue? And that's where we can get the action on the actual marketing plan itself. You know, I think layer one is just the diagnostic of it like that.

Well, you know, so aside from just talking about marketing and talking about before, during and after and I mean some of the things that I'd like to touch on because we've gone very deep with them and previous episodes and people can always download Breakthrough DNA on Ilove marketing.com right. There's all that sort of stuff is just the whole concept of planning it out. I mean you can do this. I want people from a just context standpoint and just application standpoint realizing that you could map this out on a whiteboard. You can do this on three by five cards. There's a lot you can do. Now granted, we're going to go much more in depth with our genius network members throughout the year and have accountability and tracking and do it in a way to where they can build it into whatever project management system that they use, whatever calendar that they use, be it paper and pen or electronic CRM or not from the whole concept of just a marketing plan. How do you think of planning really planning something out for days, weeks, months, year in advance versus you know, here's a nine word email that you should use or here's a particular strategy or here's the, you know, target market. How does that fit into a plan from your perspective so that people listening can really wrap their head around it?

Well, when I'm looking at something like that, what I look for is to use it first of all, when you set up the context of it, like we were just describing there, we broke down the after unit. But let me just take a couple of minutes and kind of talk about the during and the before and then that's the perfect jumping off point for what you just said. So overlaying that idea of some of the revenue is coming from your after unit, some of the revenue is coming from your during unit, meaning the first, first time that somebody does business with you. And some of it is coming from your before unit that you, you know, that you spent money on marketing to acquire new people. That's you want to kind of account for how much of the revenue was brought in by all of those, those pieces. Now understand that gives you the place now to see how to use this. That's kind of the diagnostic part of it is to now look at it and say where's the biggest opportunity? I don't like to look at things and say this is the annual marketing calendar and we're shooting for 20% improvement or you know, sustainable growth over the year. I like to look and see what's the biggest breakthrough that you could do right now rather than the, you know, just going on a sequential constant improvement quest, you know, because in every business there are, there are breakthroughs that are just sitting there kind of waiting for you to find them. So I look to go over and see what are the things that we can get in place that can impact those numbers in the fastest way and then move on to the next thing. So we kind of use it as a roadmap that it's constantly evolving. It's constantly, you know, we're using it as a guide map to pick what's the best next thing we can do and then taking that action fully and then hopefully setting it up in a way that it sustains, you know, that it's not an event based thing, but that it's a, you know, has a cumulative effect.

Okay, so for, let's talk about people that are listening and they're hearing this. Where do they start? What do they, what would you say they do first? I mean, we could always go back to the, I mean one of the things that I would almost say people would be well served to do first if they have never read it or they do read it, is go to ilovemarketing.com and download our breakthrough DNA so that they have all of the eight profit activators and with a more in depth discussion about before, during and after. Even though they think they may get it, reading through it with, you know, just taking notes and turning things into a checklist is going to be smart. What that would be one action, I would say beyond. Let's just assume they kind of get it and you kind of see an overview of it. Like for instance, the first profit activators, you know, select a single target market as an example. You know, find your avatar is an example to create their elf marketing plan. What, what would you just in terms of behavior, what would you, how would you go about doing that?

Well, the first, I think the easiest things like to have, that I've seen have the most consistent and immediate breakthroughs are to, number one, offer the most expensive thing that you offer to the people who know you like you the most and immediately start doing that. So whatever your most expensive thing is, we're going to reestablish what your next most expensive thing is and start doing that. And that's really an interesting outcome for most people. I've seen a lot of cases where people have courses or they have products or things where the most amount of money that they, you know, they sell people are $97 programs or $197 programs and or maybe $1,000 thing that to throw your hat over the fence and start to think, what would be the most value, what would be the most valuable dream come true opportunity that I could do with these, with my clients, the people who already know me, like me and trust me. And in a lot of cases that could be having an event, even a small mastermind event, or our mastermind group, or the opportunity to work with you one on one, you know, just kind of look at it and see what would be the, the highest thing, the highest amount of value that you could create for somebody and offer it to them. That's number one. That's the by far. Because number one, it costs you zero to acquire that higher level of client. Because they're already your clients. They already like you, they're already leaning into you and you've got that opportunity to just kind of ask them, you.

Know, okay, so if you were to just use Focus on Buyers and Subscribers as an example.

Yeah.

And the ones that are already know you.

Yep, yep.

They're always the highest level. So as you put that into a, like, for instance, the marketing plan that we're going to share with people, we're going to have, you know, fill in the blanks and things that they can lay stuff out with. And I'm just wanting people to, even though I may sound redundant here, I want this to be like, it's. I always love the Stephen Covey quotes. You know, to know and not to do is not to know. To know to understand and not to do is not to understand. And so a lot of people will listen to a podcast passively. And we know that we've had millions of people that have downloaded our podcast over the years and from every person that says, oh, your podcast is great. And there's been thousands of those that, you know, I've either read or have personally met us at events or things like that. Every once in a while we get someone that will show us, oh, here's the plan I put together. Here's the notes, here's what I'm doing. Here's the nine word email, here's the consumer awareness guide. Here's all the stuff that I'm doing. So I just want to get a little bit more teeth into what it is that you're saying so that we.

Can have this examples. Okay, so before. Let's even use you as an example. So before 25K, before Genius Network, you were. The highest level thing that you were doing would be your platinum group, which was $10,000 a year, right.

Or, yeah, well, 1,000 bucks a month. I had it. I had different levels of it, up to as high as, you know, 17,000 a year based on monthly payments or 15,000 a year. But yeah, the average was 10,000 in full or 1,000amonth.

Right. So that was what we would call the largest check that you were getting with $10,000. Right. Aside from consulting days that you're doing. Right. So now when you look at that, the next, you know, the immediate thing, which was like, not just a incremental improvement in your business, not just an incremental improvement in your revenue, was the moment you threw your hat over the fence and you called up Robin Robbins and said, okay, I'm doing that group that you told me to do, so send me your check. And then you showed everybody Robin's check, and all the other people sent in their check. And now all of a sudden, your. Your largest check, product or service or group, was your 25k group. And that immediately put you on another level. And it all came from people who already knew you and liked you and trusted you. So it wasn't. You had to go out and build a whole marketing plan around it. You sent out, you told people you were doing it, and they signed up. And that's been now the foundation here of everything that you've done. Then last year, you decided, I'm going to do 100k group. And who did you invite to do that? The people who know you, like you and trust you and want a deeper, bigger relationship with you. Right. It wasn't. You weren't pulling new people out of the Blue to spend $100,000 with you. So that's really, for anybody, the biggest thing that it takes. It's the courage to do it. The courage and the confidence to do it. No, you've got the capability. You've got. If you have it, if you're playing smaller than you have the capacity for, you know, if you have a bigger opportunity to add value for people, that's the. That's the surest, easiest way to have the biggest impact, because it's almost all profit. Right?

So, okay, so the. No, keep going with me. If you want to use me as an example, that's fine, because I.

Well, that's the perfect. That's the perfect example. Right. I just use that as the. As the thing to show how anybody, you know, could do that same thing. Anybody listening, if you look at it, what's the highest level thing that you could get involved with? What's the new lead thing that, that you could do, you know. Right. And that's no, go, go, go. And that's a, that's, that's job one. That's what I'm always looking for first rather than going to do new marketing on the front end. Right. So we look at work backwards. You've heard me say before, if we were gonna, if I was gonna improve your golf game, what I would do is I would start by making you a better three foot putter so that you can get the ones that are closest to the hole in the hole all the time. Right. Then we would back up and let's convert more of the leads that you already have. Right. You've all, if you've got a list of people, you've got a list of unconverted leads. That's where I would do that same thing. Send a nine word email to those people, engage with them and make an offer so that they become, you know, a client. Because you've got this, you've already spent the money to engage with those people, you've already got them your list, you've already got the cost of acquiring them as a lead, you've already spent that money. So it's an asset that you have and you're just kind of maximizing what your investment was by doing that. Then I would look for what can we do to bring in new people, but only after done all of those other things to really pay for it, you know. Right.

And now, okay, in us being in the world of marketing and a lot of self help and a lot of experts and a lot of people that are, you know, gurus and whatnot. So for instance, in Genius Network I have some very successful members that have zero interest in being on social media, writing books, being on stage, doing any of that stuff. And many people that's like their dream come true is to be New York Times best selling authors to filling up rooms and stuff like this. And I want this to be applicable to brick and mortar online. I mean people that are running non profits. Every element of any sort of movement enterprise business has some sort of message to market match. And I want to have people go from being episodic to being consistent with repeating and doing things that work. So for instance, one of the things that I have learned a tremendous amount from you on is like super signature emails, three a week emails and where I will write an article that is content based, people get it three times a week. Underneath it is all the different podcasts and different things that we have. So people are getting value, but they're also learning about what it is that I offer. And people love these three week emails. Now if I just said I'm going to send out an email talking about Genius Network or about my upcoming book or whatever, and I did it once or twice, then there's no, you know, without a marketing plan that's real easy to do and that's how most marketing is done. It's very episodic and in many cases when you badly need it or sporadic.

Yeah, exactly.

Whereas building it into a marketing plan. So let's just take like my business as an example. So for Genius Network members, I'm selling a high level discussion group which builds a better entrepreneur. Well, what the hell does that mean? And how do I determine what's going to make someone a better entrepreneur? Well, for one, I have to be aware of what is happening that's improving their income, their life, their relationships and making their business more elf and less half. So like for the upcoming year, and as you've known being around me for this long and being in Genius Network this year, I'm focusing on marketing plan and elf marketing plan. Another is focusing on setting up your business and running it as if you're going to sell it so that you can exit. Even if you don't have any plans on exiting your business, if you run it that way, it's just going to function that much better. And I've got one of the best experts in the world who's not an expert because he's ever written a book on it, but because he's actually done it and has helped like dozens of other people sell companies for, you know, hundred million and upwards. And his first company, he sold, he sold for 65 million. And so we created a whole program on how to exit before, during and after everything, you know, even after you exit so you don't go off the rails, which a lot of people do once they have a lot of money. How do you do that? So we've put together this whole program. So that's one thing that Genius Network members are getting and another is an emphasis on managing money. Because a lot of people will bring in money, but they don't profit very well. They're expensive, they don't know what to do with their money. I've learned over the years by hanging around very financially successful people that a lot of them make the dumbest decisions in the world. And people that don't make a lot of money, if they don't know these things, they're never going to have money and they're going to get to a point in their life where they're like, oh, my God. And so those are just some of, you know, and then of course, everything else that comes along with Genius Network, it's a connection network. I mean, all of the content and all those things that I've done is really. It's really more of an excuse to put, you know, a tribe of tribal leaders in a room together. And they all get to meet each other and amazing relationships. So but that's some content, just so that people listening kind of get that. And they meet three times a year. Then I do a big annual event. Next year's will be in around November 2nd through the 4th in Phoenix. And that's the only event that I do every year that people pay ten grand a person to come to. So I have a $10,000 fee for that. I have 25,000 for Genius Network and I have 100,000 for Genius X. And a lot of these people come to my group, they don't cut a check for who's in the room, even though some do, because there's amazing people in it. But a lot of people cut a check for who's not in the room. It's not filled with a bunch of wannabes that are gawking at the famous people. They're all the stars and they want to be in a room with other stars. So that's sort of like the content. Now, in order to get those people, we create applications. So everyone has to apply. You know, they go through a process, not just if they apply, you know, financially, bare minimum of money brought in, they have to make at least a million a year to come to Genius Network. And, you know, we do all these things. You know, we have three a week emails, we have podcasts, we have sales letters that go out, we have content that we put out there. I've got books, I've got reports, I've got all kinds of stuff and that has to be delivered. You know, we have a Genius Network letter that we just started. So they're getting a monthly newsletter. There's a membership site that has all of the 10 minute talks and all of the content. So I've got all this stuff. And that's an information business, that's a knowledge business. And there's a lot of people that are in those businesses. But then there's optometrist and then there's doctors, and then there's all kinds of different. You know, I've Noah and Dan Katz, who own Foodtown, which is a chain of grocery stores in, you know, New York area. And so we've got a whole slew of different people. So those are just some of the things. So if I was coming to you, Dean, and saying, okay, how do I, you know, how do I make this more consistent and not do this stuff in an episodic fashion, what would you, what would you say to me?

Yeah, I would say, you know, exactly. Going down this, this path that we've been sharing here, you know, of looking at establishing first of all the, the baseline metrics, because every business has different metrics, you know, different ways that revenue comes in. And you know, if somebody, you've got somebody who's got a large number of people who pay a smaller amount per transaction, but they do many transactions during the year, is very different than a business where somebody like as a realtor, somebody may buy a house from you this year and then it may be five or ten years before they buy another house. Right? So you've got to understand that those are going to have different approaches and different objectives. Right? And some businesses may have a small number of people who pay a lot of money, some may have a large number of people who pay a little bit of money. And so knowing for yourself how to both draw the lines between what the before unit, during unit and the after unit are and understand if you isolate them, where is the revenue? What's driving that revenue? Some businesses have mostly back end revenue, mostly after unit revenue. Like your business is very after unit focused, right? Like the majority of your revenue comes from people who are renewing members of, of Genius Network and Genius X. Right, right. And so knowing that when you look and break that down, that people in their first year of Genius Network, I would consider to be in there in your during unit, right? That the objective is that they get an amazing experience that they get locked in in terms of how everything works, the things that are available to them, and that they get a return on Genius that's important to them. Because you said yourself that not everybody is money, the return that they're looking for. And that's, you know, but you've got to be able to be crystal clear on what, what the return is that your clients want so that they know and can, you know, say without any doubt that they got the results. So a lot of that strategy is helping define what the result is and then drawing attention and confirming that they actually got the result by measuring and recording and celebrating and documenting all the things along the way that they've done to make that difference.

You know, where have you seen the most successful people as they document and track things? What have you? And let me say it from this perspective because this has always struck me as sort of interesting. I have met people that have the most well laid out business plans, CRMs systems, all kinds of stuff, but they just cannot. And they spend a lot of time getting all this stuff set up, but they don't have a single offer, sales letter or identified reachable target market and they still go broke or they struggle. And I have met people that have never written a business plan. Let's take Bill Phillips, my client, many years ago, he wrote a book called Body for Life, which ended up becoming the number one selling fitness book of all time. And he built a company that was sold for $300 million experimental and applied science eas ago back in 1999. And he built the largest sports supplement company. Over a million people went through his Body for Life transformations and all kinds of stuff. And I just had dinner and hung out with him and his wife about three weeks ago where they live in, outside of Denver, Colorado. And I remember when I was consulting with him and it started in 1995, so this is, you know, many, many years ago. And I remember like during a fax communication, because there was not email communication at the time that, you know, people were easily doing. And I was like, you know, what sort of business plan do you have for your company? And his company at the time when I first started consulting was with him was doing 60 million a year in revenue. And literally in about 18 months he built it up to close to 200 million a year in revenue. I mean, just massive growth, a lot based on the marketing that we did together and a lot of the concepts I actually came up with. And I remember this fax to him, I was like, do you have a business plan you can share with me? And he wrote back, I've never written a business plan in my life. I don't know any idea how to do it. He's like, I, I've built this up with a sales letter and you know, targeting the right audience and that kind of, I don't know if that was good or bad for me to read because I was like literally in my late 20s and you know, during my consulting time I turned 30 with him. And it literally planted in my seed. I don't need a plan. I don't, you know, I mean, I'm making this shit work, right? I know how. And I've proceeded to, you know, build a multimillion dollar company. And a lot of it was with things that never had a plan attached to it. Now that is not an anti plan sort of mindset, it's just, it's a result mindset. But if you can produce a result and you can build it into consistent consistency and not be episodic, not only have I done well and many of my clients have done well, but things that are really like planned out and done strategically and intelligently always are going to produce results. So even though there are, you know, looking back, I've seen a lot of things I've done really well and I've also seen where I've cost myself a fortune and all kinds of stuff. So I wanted to ask you for people that you've seen. I mean you work with some franchises, you work with people. How do they keep track of stuff, how do you keep track of all of these things?

Well, the biggest thing that I see is that, that a lot of people, they're either numbers and trackers naturally or they're not. And the ones that are, are often tracking data but not information. And the information is far more valuable than just the data. And you know, without any sort of, you know, it's really taking the data and turning it into information that then turns into an actionable strategy that can then determine what the tactic is that you can do to execute that strategy is where the, all the revenue comes, right? That's where all the wins come. And you can do that by. That's why I say I use it more as a diagnostic and kind of compass. This is the direct, this is the thing that's going to have the, the biggest impact. And just by far, as I said, when I look at it, that the number one thing that somebody can do immediately to have the biggest, the biggest immediate windfall in their business is to immediately think about how you can add the tippy top amount of value to the people who know you like you the most and do that first. And that's so the thing about it is that those people, you're not going to convince people to do stuff like that. There's people who already would know that that's a good idea and would just welcome the opportunity to do it, you know? Yep.

Okay, great.

So start there. Yeah.

Okay. Now in terms of what are your thoughts on business plans? What are your thoughts on written mission statements and visions and KPIs and CRMs? I mean, I've read we use a combination of all kinds of different things to run our company. I of course have Read good to great and it's a fantastic book and traction from my buddy Gina Wickman. And you know, the Rockefeller Happens and Scale up by Vern Harnish who's also in Genius Network. And so there's a lot of things that people are taught and we definitely have a system in place in our business and a new one, a new way of going deeper with it on a more consistent basis. And I have weekly team meetings and all of that sort of stuff. But I wanted to just get your thoughts on planning tools and the concept of it in general.

Yeah, I think that this diagnostic approach of seeing, you know, knowing what the important numbers are, what the independently driver, what independent drivers there are in your business, certainly that as a baseline then I really think having your vision is the thing that counts the most. I think Cameron Harold has really, you know, knocked it out of the park with vivid vision. You know, that concept of getting crystal clear and you know, last time I got something even on a deeper level because I love Cameron's stuff. But to hear him talk about it, one of the 10 minute talks that he did at a Genius Network meeting, one of the ones in your office, was the exercise of taking people through describing the something so vividly that somebody can get the picture of it. And the way he used it was the, the Sound of Music. You know, if you've seen the movie the Sound of Music, what he was describing of the scene in the field in the meadows where they're singing and playing the guitars with all the children in the same outfit. And that scenario, if you've seen the movie, you've got that, you know exactly what they're talking about and that that level of specificity is important. Whenever you're going to need to enroll other people in working collaboratively on getting a result. He said, imagine trying to hire somebody to build you a 6,000 square foot house and saying I want it to be amazing and just leaving it at that. What do you get? You're not going to get, you're not.

Going to get an amazing house. You're going to get their version of whatever they think it is. Well, you know what's funny is I'm actually having dinner tonight with Cameron Harold and approximately at the time that we're doing this, it'll be three hours and 14 minutes from now. I'm meeting him for dinner and here's what I've decided because you're right, I'm going to take that 10 minute talk that he did and I'm going to put it on I love marketing underneath this episode. So everyone listening. It's a whole thing on how to do Vivid vision. Like Cameron's real sharp dude. He wrote a. His first book was called Double Double and the first chapter was Vivid Vision and far better than a mission statement or many things that companies have. So. And that was one of the most utilized chapters and like a total game changer. So he wrote an entire book. Not a big book, but it's a book called Vivid Vision. And we've actually, we've got a podcast episode with Cameron which people can look up. But in Genius Network I have people give 10 minute talks. And so for Genius Network members when they get this, we'll just, you know, obviously it's part of their membership site, all of these access to these 10 minute talks. But I have people share in 10 minutes a strategy, a methodology, a best practice. If you want to use those terms that they are doing or have been have done, that has been worth at least 2, $250,000 or more to their business and they've got 10 minutes to share it in so that each minute is worth $25,000 if the people actually utilize what's being shared. And so one of the. Cameron has given many talks. I mean he wrote another book called Meetings Suck on how to do meetings that don't suck. And he's done talks on relationships. I mean there's all kinds of great stuff that Cameron, he used to be the COO for 1-800-got junk and he has the thing called COO alliance where he teaches the number two people in charge how to better do their roles, that sort of thing. But yeah, we'll include that. And that would be a really. You know, it's funny, Dean, I just tied it all together here is with what you've talked about. If people were to sit down and write a vivid vision, which the way that I think of it is it's a sales letter about what you do, why you do it, what your vision is not only for the public, but for your team. And a lot of people will write promotions to sell things to people, but the people that work for them don't really even have a clue. And as I say this, I don't want to sound as if, oh, I've totally got it together because I've got a half ass vivid vision for the current focus of my company. We've got a great one that we have just written with the help of Anna David for Genius Recovery, for all the work that I'm doing in people that struggle with addictions. And so we're now graphically getting that laid out and we're going to literally have it look like a movie poster so that when people come to the, you know, come to my company, they can see, okay, here's what we're doing in the entrepreneurial world and here's what we're doing in the area of recovery and addiction with what I'm doing with artists4addicts.com and geniusrecovery.com but yeah, the vivid vision, though, is the jumping off point of like, here's what we're trying to do. So anyway. Okay. Yeah, so that anything else that you have seen that you think is just a great model or something that someone should think about creating. Because after someone watches Cameron's talk or just get his book and follow his method for doing a vivid vision, it would really. Especially at the beginning of the year.

Yeah, definitely. That's exactly what I would do. Right. Because that's the. It's. It's going to have that give people that crystal clarity. That's. And it's work to do it. It's not easy. Correct.

Okay, let's talk about that. Okay. Because I, you know, part of. Part of what we're doing here and the reason I want to do an ELF marketing plan for people versus just a marketing plan is I want people to identify all of the things that are easy, lucrative and fun. Because I don't think people are going to want to consistently do anything that's arduous, annoying. And I've also prefaced this with the whole easy, lucrative fund that rarely getting things set up are just simple and they fall into place and everything works and you're going to hit a home run right out of the gate. I mean, in order to get the elf, you actually have to work really hard in some cases. My distinction, though, is if it cannot ever get to a point of being easy, of being lucrative and being fun, you're not going to engage with it. You're going to drop it. It's going to be annoying. You're going to have a half business. Hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. And why the hell would you want to run any sort of company, enterprise, organization, anything that's this arduous. And I look back at certain things. The reason I've come back to elf, I went for a while and I didn't talk about it all that much, but there was a period in business where I would just like, oh, let's focus on elf. Let's focus on elf. With all my clients and my clients be like, ELF Marketing. And I remember, I remember one seminar I did sometime, it was probably like 2000 and I don't know, maybe 2004. And we had hundreds of people that lined up and they're like, they walked up to the camera and the microphone and they said, this is elf. And they gave a definition of what ELF meant to them in their business. And it was like this huge thing. And then you end up talking about something so much that you think that, oh, I've said this too many times. And then I kind of went away from that and I started watching myself and my own clients like not doing ELF things. And it dawned on me is to me like, oh, do you really need to be that redundant with something and keep saying it? It's like, actually, yeah, you do. You know, you don't, you don't go to a 12 step group if someone's in recovery and they always start with reading the 12 steps. I mean, they're just fundamentals that are just reminders of this is what, here's the principles, here's what we are doing, here's what this is for. And so elf, I want it to be things that are automated, things that are robotic. I want it to include repurposing things. Like for instance, if someone writes a great article or gets some great PR in their business, or puts a video out and it goes viral, or does anything that just gets traction, keep utilizing it, repurpose it. If you send out an email that gets a great response, you might want to put it on a postcard or in a letter and mail it to people. You may want to post it on social media. Or if you do a social media post that gets a huge response, send it out as an email, put it up on your website, you know, that sort of thing.

So.

Let'S talk for just a few more minutes about elf and then this will be part of the continuing things that we come back to in future episodes of I love marketing.

Well, ELF is a great guidepost too. I mean, it's a great like way of looking at something, evaluating it. Timeless. It's, it's scalable. It's not, you know, the whole thing is really, it fits for any size of business. The whole kind of guiding thought of is this easy, is this lucrative, is this fun? Or in guidance, is this making this easier, is this making it more lucrative or less lucrative? Is it making it more fun or less fun? It's dialing those up all the way to every element of the business goes through that Elf filter. More than that. It is a tactic or a strategy. It's a. It's a kind of a filter.

Yeah, yeah.

No, it is.

And I. And to me, it's the greatest filter I've ever had for people and stuff. So I've. I have an Elf tool. I'm just going to talk about it in a way that. Where people, if they don't have, if they've never seen it, and the only people that have actually seen this are genius network members where we have an Elf tool and it has on the left side, elf, and it has on the right side, half up at the top. And it's people and projects and activities that are. Some that are elf and ones that are half. And it's a way for people to spend a few minutes just looking at their life and listing everything that they do, all the things that they're working on, the people, clients, team members, vendors, and whoever comes to mind, like, who's an elf person? Who's a person that you work with?

That's easy.

They're lucrative, they're fun, they bring you in money, they help you. And who are people that are hard, annoying, lame and frustrating, or hard, annoying, lucrative and frustrating? Because there are people that are. There are activities that are lucrative, but they're hard and they're annoying and they're frustrating. It's like blood money. I mean, you have to bleed every time to do something. And so I would recommend, you know, because one of the things of the marketing plan, one of the objections that I think immediately comes up for people is like, I'm so busy, I don't have time to plan it and I don't want more stuff to do. Part of the marketing plan is not adding all the shit you're going to do, it's taking away all the shit that isn't working. Like, they go through this thinking that you talked about. You're going, okay, I could go mine for gold, or I could mine for copper or silver or dirt or rocks or lead. So if you can identify the gold in terms of the people.

Unobtainium.

What's that?

The Unobtainium.

The Unobtainium.

Isn't that the fancy metal in Avatar?

Are you talking about? Oh, is it? Well, say it again.

The movie. The movie.

No, no, I know the movie. I know the movie. But I thought you were making up a word like titanium, but in something that was unobtainable.

Isn't that in the movie Avatar? The. The precious resource that these other planets have is unobtainium. Huh?

You know, I have to go watch it again. I can't remember, but I'll take your word for it because it must be.

J.R. can tell us. Yeah, that would be great.

Okay, so, yeah, so there's, I'm trying to figure out how to like make 3 off there money out of that, but I'm like, I'm just gonna make myself look like more of an idiot just because I don't. So, yeah, whatever. The most valuable thing is that you can identify and put your focus and your effort on those things and drop all the other stuff because I think part of your marketing plan for the year is remove everything that is half. And the way that I look at it is you really look and say, okay, this is half right now. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Is the time, the effort, maybe the money to put attention on this and to focus it? Will it ever become ELF? If you already immediately say no, you're probably right. And you know, out of all the interviews that I did with Arianna Huffington when I was helping her with her book launch for her book Thrive, you know, several years ago, we did hours of interviews. One of the things that was the most valuable that came out of it was a statement that she said where, you know, the best way to complete a project is to drop it.

Yes.

And, and if there's some projects or things, you have been just half, half, half, half, half. Because if something's half, you know, where your mind and energy is, it's half ass. Anything that's half in your business is going to get half ass attention. And, you know, anything that's half is always going to be half. You can't turn a duck into an eagle if you have a half person on your team and you've been relying on them. Now granted, if you've been half, if you're half ass about stuff, you can't, you know, you're only going to attract relative to where you're at. Right. So you got to look at yourself too. It's not a blame factory here. It's more like looking at people that are in your company and are they capable? Do they want it? Do they get it? And if they do, then support those people. But I'll tell you, like, if you have someone else in your life, you're probably giving them very little recognition and acknowledgement and you're probably squandering all of your time and attention on people that are the half people because it's like the squeaky wheel gets the oil. Well, Peter Diamandis who's also a friend and a genius network member. He has this great law, Peter's Law, where he's like, the squeaky wheel gets replaced. So if someone's squeaky in an annoying way, you know, sometimes someone's squeaky because they just need attention and you're neglecting it. But there's some people that are just constantly a pain in the butt. There's projects and there's activities that are that way. So part of developing a marketing plan is eliminating all of the things that are not elf and don't have a chance in hell of ever becoming elf. If you can get rid of those and replace those with elf ELF activities, then you'll be fully engaged in your business in a way that you've never been before. So which part of your clientele gives you the most money? Gives you the most joy? Which activities give you the most joy? The most money ones that are really fun. And how can you do more of those and all the things that are the opposite of that? How do you just get them out of your business and out of your life? As we go into a new year, it's a perfect time to prune and go into this with a. With a marketing mindset. So those are my thoughts. Is there anything else that you would think we should discuss before we wrap this episode up?

No, that's brilliant. I think that's really the. Yeah, you mean looking at cutting things off, the time and the psychic energy that that's going to free up for you is incredible. You know, and then when you couple that with, you know, leveraging, if we. If you do what we talked about as the very first thing, the thing that can have the biggest impact on your business immediately is, you know, doing the highest end thing that you do, offering the highest amount of value to the people who like you and want to do business with you the most, that's going to. That's going to raise your. Your energy levels. Right. You're going to feel better about that because it's all of a sudden now the most lucrative thing that you're doing. It's going to be the easiest thing that you do. And that's always a recipe for the most fun, you know, and so if you can replace the bottom, what a great thing. It's often very difficult, though, you know, because we're so married to. We're so married to things, you know. Right, right.

Totally. And it is difficult to do because you. We are creatures of habit and there's. But again, and we have this sense.

Of obligation at something if there's any going to be people that are disappointed that you're discontinuing a certain thing. You know, like you look at, well, Dan. Dan Sullivan talks about it when you know, he went from doing the signature strategic coach program to only working with people in the 10 times program. You know, we had to give up and maybe disappoint some of the people that were in master's programs or programs that were continuing. But then some of them, the right ones who wanted to continue then elevated up and now he's made the next jump up to his game changer program and pretty soon that that'll be the thing that the only thing he does is the game changer program.

Right.

And of course it leads pushing and keeping yourself up at the front at the highest level. So you're growing the most that way.

Yeah. You know, and here's the thing too, like the power of an idea mean you've done that episode on ideas versus execution. And like Dan Sullivan, you know, his latest book that he's going to do with Ben Hardy came from a concept from you, you know, where you've really taught, you know, who, who not how.

Right.

And who, who not what. And, and part of it is, you know, that's his new book and Ben's writing Ben Hardy are, you know, awesome guy, awesome dude.

Yeah.

And you know, so you gave Dan this concept which he's totally running with and his, you know, I've been in strategic coach since 1998. I'm still the highest referring person in strategic coaching. And by the way, as a follow up to this, one of the episodes that me and Dean are going to do is ELF referrals. How to as part of your marketing plan, you know, how to develop. I got a lot to say about that. Oh yeah, totally. And because if you sit and think about identifying, you know, the clients that are, you know, your very best clients that are giving you money if you can just get them to refer other people just like them, that's one of the smartest, most effective ways to build and grow your business. And it's also going to be the most profitable because you already got the built in know like and trust with your existing clients. But when Dan came to his first Genius Network meeting within the first session that we did at the beginning of the day, I talked about if you don't make at least 10 times return on your money by being a Genius network member, I don't want you to sign up for the following year because you're clearly not applying anything that we're teaching because I want everyone to get a 10 times return. And so Dan heard me say that, and he's like, I got it. I'm going to do a U times 10 program. So he started the U times 10 program and that was his big jump. And that went from whatever they were charging 6 to 10 grand a year to 20,000. And then he joins 100k and then launches the Game Changer program, which is a $50,000 a year program. And so part of it is just being around. Like, one of the things that I would recommend people for their marketing plan is being in a community where you're around other people. When I had, when I had dinner with Bill Phillips, we were talking about obesity is contagious, where there's some studies that he was telling me about that if you are hanging around, if your best friend is like obese or overweight, there's a 56% chance that you're going to be obese or overweight. And if you're successful, there is. And you hang around successful people, there is a much greater chance. So it's very similar to the environment that Ben Hardy writes about. And willpower, does it work, the community that you hang out with. And one of the things that happens with genius network members, they can hear an idea of us talking about it on a podcast, but if they heard that same idea in an I Love Marketing meetup group, you know, and me and Dean are going to recommend if you've never attended an I Love Marketing meetup group or you want to start one.

I've been doing one in Winter Haven here.

Yeah. Okay, let's talk. So the people that come there, even though they may hear the concepts or read the concepts that you talk about and that maybe they'll hear it on an I Love Marketing episode, if they're there around other people all focused on it, you have just dramatically increased the chances of making it happen. And so those that are doing I Love Marketing meetup groups, if you want to use this episode and you want to talk about marketing plans, if you meet in person with a community like that, you just dramatically increase the depth of where you'll go with just us talking about this stuff. And so I just wanted to mention that. And so part of Dan Sullivan, when he hears an idea in a group of other people, of his peers outside of Strategic Coach, he's able to then take something back. And so one of the values of the rooms that you go in, if you're a person that attends seminars or goes to educational events, I would highly encourage you to go to the ones that have the very best people. Sometimes, you know, people are like, well, why do you charge $10,000 for an event? Well, my $10,000 event is better than any thousand dollar event I've ever been to. And there's plenty of amazing thousand dollar person events. There's plenty of amazing free events. You just got to, you know, know what to look for and all that. But the point is if you're going to charge higher dollars for whatever it is you're doing it, you want to.

Make it relative to that.

I mean, if you're going to, you know, if you're going to be a personal trainer that charges $300 a session versus $40 a session, you better do something really amazing and deliver results for people. And so it's, it's, it's the same thing. So put yourself in a room of result leaders, not just thought leaders. Because this whole concept of thought leaders, any moron can come up with a thought, but the ability to produce a result. So if you really want to create results in your business, put together an elf marketing plan, identify all the things that are producing results, do them in an elf way and drop everything that doesn't produce a result and is half. And if you do that your business, you may have the best business year you've ever had. So anyway, all right, I'm done rambling as usual. Dean. It's been fun and me and Dean will talk to you on the next episode and would love to hear about your results you get from this. Go watch the episode or I'm sorry, the 10 minute talk with Cameron Herold that I'll put on ilovemarketing.com and you guys can watch it and you'll be off to hopefully an amazing year.

Thanks for listening to this episode of I Love Marketing. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event, go to geniusnetworkevents.com that's geniusnetworkevents dot com if you would like access to the complete presentation, the show notes, the links and the special resources for this episode, please visit ilovemarketing.com 3, 4, 2 that's ilovemarketing.com 342.

Sam.