The One About Contests - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #103

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast. Hey, everybody, it's Dean Jackson and Joe Polish, the space traveling adventure traveler. Joe Polish.

Yes, yes. And look, I do want to say something here. We got to make this obvious to everyone. This recording is not as high of quality as our normal ones for one reason. Dean Jackson was having computer problems. It really was.

This is like. I've never had this happen because you know how I always talk about how wonderful the Mac is, and for the first time ever, I'm baffled. My MacBook will not boot up. I don't even know what to say about it. I push the button and it starts to boot up, and then the wheel kind of spins and it never gets to the. Never gets to the home screen.

Well, here's what I understand. A rich guy like you, I know, doesn't have a backup.

I've got.

I'm sitting in front of.

I don't ever really use it. I've got my MacBook Air. But then we're on a. You know, I just discovered this at the last minute at my house. I had to run back to the office, and you've got an appointment, and we're like, good grief. Just all this stuff.

Yeah. So we may cut this podcast a little shorter than the other ones, which will, maybe for our listeners, will be painful or because of us having to record this over a phone line and use the phone recording instead of merging together and splicing our typical recordings, what we normally do to get a better sound of recording, that's what we got to put up with today.

I guess that's it. I may keep talking after you leave just to fill your gap here.

That's fine. Fine with me.

Okay, fine. There you go.

Okay, well, tell me about your adventure trip. All right, well, I just got back from my. A couple days ago from the Xprize Connection and Adventure Trip, which had approximately 50 people that paid 25,000 a person. It was my idea to have Peter Diamandis do this originally, and I even paid to go on this trip because the money goes to help fund X Prize, which started, you know, back in 2004 when he put up a $10 million prize for the first company to do a suborbital space flight. And a new Shanisari actually put up the $10 million, and it was the Anasari X Prize, and that was awarded to Burt Rutan and Paul Allen's team. Over $100 million from 26 teams, I believe was spent in order to win a $10 million prize. So it's this incentivized competition that works really well. And since then XPRIZE people can check out xprize@xprize.org has had a bunch of different prizes that they have done in order to really create solutions to oil spills and energy and medical communication. Yeah, yeah. And it's pretty fascinating. So very similar to the trips that I do to Necker island to raise money. I'd shared with Peter, who's one of my closest friends. Here's kind of a way we do it. And so they do decided to put together this adventure trip and there was like amazing people in the group. Seth Green, the actor who I thought was just a funny guy but actually very smart and just a cool dude. And you know Ricardo Salinas who's one of the richest people in the world. He was on the trip and I had dinner with him one night, me and Renee and about 10 people on the trip were 25k members or people from strategic coach. Brendan Bechard who's in my 25k group was on the trip. And Vishen Lakhiani from Mindvalley and who else if I don't. Mike Klein. Yeah, Mike Klein. Yeah. Definitely from tech guys who get marketing. Steve Sims. What's that?

Steve Sims.

Steve Sims from thebluefish.com he was there. You know what? Here actually I've got a little app on my phone. Paul Bigham, who's brilliant from the Bigham Agency. It's a direct response agency. Let's see, of course, Stan and Natalie Dubin, who I'm going to be an emcee for their event. It'll be the largest event for professional cleaners. And Stan and Natalie have Harvard Services which is the largest privately held contract cleaning company in the United States. Who else would I. There's a bunch of people I just wonder if I would mention.

What did you do?

Oh, Jim and Alexis Quick, you know, they were on the trip. What do we do? So let me go to this schedule here. There's actually a schedule that I have on the phone. So first night we actually went to Qualcomm and they. I still am confused with everything that Qualcomm does, but they manufacture chips and they are like an intellectual property company. They're putting up a $30 million or not, I'm sorry, they're putting up a $10 million tri quarter xprize. So basically breathe into a phone and it'll give you a better diagnosis than a group of board certified physicians. And so whoever can create an app that does that. So we had dinner at Qualcomm, which is pretty awesome. And then the next day we went to. Let's see where we went first, Sylvia Earle. We went to Scripps Observation and Exploration Research. And there was a ship that flips, if you can imagine, a gigantic ship like an ice cream cone that flips where the cone goes in the water. And so the deck, there's two decks, if you can imagine. That's the only one in the world. And this thing was fascinating. I took some videos of this. I'm going to have to get them edited and maybe pop them up on ilovemarketing.com or something. But Sylvia Earle started speaking and let's see, we had. Trying to think, just bear with me here. Admiral Byrd Buss was there. He was awesome. And then we went to Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome. We went over to his facility and we just went on ships and listened to things about the ocean. And one of the guys who was on the James Cameron Deep Sea Dive, the world record that James Cameron just did a few months ago, showed video and footage of very, very far, deep into the ocean. And then, let's see. Then we did a zero G flight the next day. Here's the funny thing, maybe we can pop up a zero G YouTube video of me on zero G. And it was everyone has a really dumb look on their face.

Who knows how to look when you're zero G?

Everyone's like going, oh, Joe, you look so happy. You look like a little kid and all that. Which is actually because there's like a big gigantic stupid smile on my face. But when I look at the video, it was really cool, but it was more just freaky and weird. So you just got this big smile on your face because you've never experienced floating without gravity. That was a trip. And then we had a re gravitation party. Then we went to Mojave. In Mojave. The cool thing about that was Stu Witt is the guy that basically runs the Mojave Airport, but it's really not an airport. It's like Silicon Valley for people in the space industry. That's where Virgin Galactic is. And scale deposits. We did tours of these different companies that basically are in the space industry. And then we got a private tour of Virgin Galactic and that was pretty awesome. And we went and saw SpaceShipTwo, Richard Branson's big gigantic spaceship that's going to fly people out there. Yeah.

When's that going to take off?

No one really knows for sure, but they're thinking next year, that's what they're hoping for, which it probably will. And then we went to a movie screening at Fox Studios. It was a long day. I mean, you know, basically, you know, we went to Mojave on private planes and then we flew to, you know, we went from San Diego to Mojave and then. Yeah, you know, actually we went to San Diego to LAX and then hopped on private planes and then went to Mojave and then from Mojave we went back and then we went and saw a private screen screening for the new Die Hard movie, which by the time people listen to this podcast, it will probably be out. First off, I have nothing but great things to say about Jim Giannopoulos, who was kind enough to host that the movie was just not good. I really like Bruce Willis and I like the past Die Hard movies. Brendan Burchard, who just totally got off on, he was like all excited. Car crashes and all this. So if you like seeing tons of cars get destroyed in mindless action, then yes, but in terms of any character development or anything story, yeah, I can't imagine that this movie is going to do well at all. But anyway, and then we went to. On the last day we went to SpaceX, you know, Elon Musk. And then Elon came in and had a presentation and did Q and A with everyone. Nice guy. I actually thought he was cool. And he really went out of his way. To want to answer questions for people about this facility was mind boggling, really. It was really close to LAX. It's a 500,000 square foot warehouse where they have like 2,500 employees and they're freaking building rocket ships. I mean, like in the middle of. I mean there. They build everything and manufacture it there. And I'm like thinking, my God, with the taxes in California and everything, the how he's pulled this thing off and.

He think about that, you know, 500,000 square feet is, you know, 12 or 15 acres.

It was gigantic.

That's a big, big building.

I mean, if you could imagine like six or ten Best Buys all open with gigantic rockets in them and Falcon 9 twice. Yeah, yeah, it was huge. And I wish I could have taken pictures, but they literally don't allow any pictures from anyone. Really high security. And there was a photographer that shot a bunch of pictures and if we get a lot of them back, you know, maybe we'll post some, we'll see how they come back. But you know, Brendan asked him a question about taking risks because, you know, he's the. I mean, that guy's an incredible entrepreneur. He's the, you know, made a lot of money with, you know, past companies and including PayPal, but he had literally spent all his money trying to make it work. Brendan asked him about taking risk and stuff because here you got a guy who's running three massive companies. SolarCity, which is a public company, Tesla and SpaceX. How many entrepreneurs? Probably the most impressive thing I've ever seen. I have no idea how a person like that could have thousands of employees. Three different massive companies and all of them seemingly working really well right now. I mean, just unbelievable. People think they have a big, kind.

Of like Richard Branson with 300 companies.

Yeah, yeah. But it's completely different though, because Richard isn't like the CEO of these things.

Oh, I see what you're saying.

You know, he's literally running these things.

Oh, he's like hands on running them.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And, you know, and I got some. And I won't say it on, I won't say it publicly because I don't want to, you know, share certain things. You know, I just had an interesting conversation about, you know, people that work with him there. One guy that gave us a tour and just about how he is such an attention to details, you know, and just getting into the mind of a guy like that is very interesting. And so Brendan asked him about, you know, how do you manage your time and you know, what's your thoughts on risk? And he said, you know, part of it, you know, I was willing lose it all. I mean, he goes, he's like, SpaceX just succeeded on a hair. He said that I was borrowing money to pay my rent. I literally went through all my money. And he's like, had the last flight not been successful, the company would have been done. Everything would have been done. And so it's just showing you how much of an edge walker that someone is willing to be. And he said, I just have a high tolerance for pain. He said, several years I was wr the middle of losing all my money, going through a divorce. He's like, it was just agonizing. But I have a high tolerance for pain. I thought that was very interesting. But all in all, met some really cool people and it was a great trip. I really liked Sylvia Earle. I thought she was super cool. And Stu, who runs the Mojave Airport, I'm going to fly down there and do an interview with him related to all the different space projects and startup companies and fascinating things that are going on there. And that was just incredible. And I really liked his perspective on business and taking risk and things that he said. He's got a TED Talk that people can watch if they want. His name's Stuart Witt. Witttt. And yeah, it was a really interesting trip. And the big takeaway that I got from it from perspectives is just the ability to think big and work on things that can impact a tremendous amount of people and realize that having success in business, there's lots of complexities and there's lots of capabilities that are needed to be resourceful. And you know, when it comes to genius networking, which is one of my favorite things to do, I mean, all of the people that were successful that we met with, I mean, they just had a network of very smart people that they interacted with. And you know, Elon just had a no bullshit attitude. You know, he just didn't have any tolerance for mediocrity and wanted just everything to, I mean, even the, the facility, it was just becoming stellar, just how beautiful it was. There's some real interesting, amazing stuff going on in the world that people don't have any idea of. A good insight for this. For people that would want access to it, check out Singularity University in the San Francisco area, Mountain View, it's at the NASA ames Center in SingularityU.org or just type in Singularity University. And that was founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil. And you'll get a perspective on some of this stuff. So yeah, that's what I did.

That's awesome. What do you think is the driver behind that? What made the XPRIZE work?

Well, you know, Peter talks about, I.

Guess what I'm looking for is what we can take away from that. That would be, how could we use that in a smaller business context?

Well, I guess in a lot of ways the same way that I used incentive competitions for my better your best contest for my platinum group. Over many where I gave away cars, the elements of a prize are giving people an opportunity to be rewarded financially and publicly in a huge way. So that you create a deadline, you create a competition, you create an unbelievable goal, but something that truly is achievable. But XPRIZE is really about massive breakthroughs. But of course they're offering multimillion dollar incentives and it gives people an opportunity that want to change the world to have a reason to do it. It's literally crowdsourcing. It's crowdsource, incentivized competition. So what will end up happening is in order to win like a million dollar or $10 million. There's a $30 million Google Lunar X Prize sponsored and send a lunar thing up to the moon and land that bad boy and go and do all kinds of cool stuff. But it just gives. It creates a platform for people to spend far more money figuring out how to do something than what. In many cases, even the prize was like the $10 million X Prize. There was $100 million spent to win it. And look at all that on the.

Winning team or collectively?

No, all of the teams collectively spent over $100 million. Even Paul Allen spent $26 million to win. His team won the $10 million prize, but with licensing. And then Richard Branson came in and licensed the technology a week before for the winning team. Even though Peter had asked him twice to put up the $10 million to sponsor the prize, which he didn't. But he gave it license, the technology, the winning team, even though they spent more money than the $10 million, they made their money back many, many times over from that. And of course, an industry was created, starting with Virgin Galactic. Right. But, you know, part of it as it relates to our listeners is, you know, how can you crowdsource and incentivize people to do business with you? You can use it on any level. I mean, if you look at some of even the 99 designs, I was.

Just thinking that it's almost like there's an element of gamification in everything. That's something that just had some conversations with Dave buck, who owns coachville.com about that whole process of gamification, of making something, you know, competitive and making something where there's a score and incentives and that kind of thing really kind of amps up people's. Maybe it's intensity, the way they compete, I guess.

Right? No, that's the way that I described it. Because when I was doing consulting for Bill Phillips, even before the book Body for Life was written, he was doing these physique transformation contests at the time. He was offering, and I mean, we've talked about this on past episodes of I love marketing, but he was offering, offering a prize at the time. You know, his Lamborghini, that was more valuable than the highest paid prize for winning the top bodybuilding, you know, like.

Being Mr. Olympia or whatever, right?

Yeah, yeah. The Olympia at the time, Mr. And Ms. Olympia, was $100,000 if you won. And he, you know, comes out and offers, you know, giving away a car that was valued at $220,000. So all of a sudden, you know, he offers a prize to anyone that just, you know, can transform their physique for a prize that's, you know, more than double what the highest paid. You know, it's like, you know, what do you win for the, for winning the Super Bowl? And then you come out with a prize and you double it. Now, obviously, you know, like, the US.

Open in tennis is, you know, $2 million. So it'd be like having a four million dollar prize for something for your.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so what I learned with him on that is that. And I was very involved in that for like three years with him until he sold eas. I saw literally tens of thousands of people that had been working out. You know, many, many people, you know, they're brand new to working out and other people have been working out for 20, 30 years and they had, you know, they weren't in as good a shape as they wanted to be. Some people were literally morbidly obese. And, you know, you see people literally in 90 days absolutely transform their body at rates that no one had ever seen before in masses. What was the commonality? Was it the supplements? No. Was it the exercise? No. Was it the amount of reps they were doing? No. Was it the amount of weight? No. Was it the amount of sleep they were getting? No. It was the fricking contest. It was a contest that. That triggered all of those other things. I would always play this trick on people and say, okay, if you work out three days a week, an hour at a time, and you can't change your exercise, you can't change the time of the gym, you can't change the amount of weight, you can't change the amount of reps, you can't change your stress level of what you do outside of the gym. Same food, same workout, same amount of time. What's one thing that you can. If you can't change all those things, but you could change one thing, what would the one thing you could change that would have a biggest impact on your ability to get in better physical shape. People would say all kinds of different answers. The answer is intensity. If you can change your intensity, you'll get more out of that hour in the gym. If someone wants to devote three hours a week to focusing on marketing, if they can increase their marketing intensity during those three hours, they're just going to get more done, they're going to get more accomplished. What the physique transformation does is it gives everyone a measurement system. When I say physique transformation, let's scratch that and call it any trackable Measurable incentivize your business gets right. Right. So like when I did the better your best contest, starting with carpet cleaners, I had two categories. Increase your gross and net profit or systemize your marketing and advertising. I gave people a three month period a year prior to a current year where they would be able to compare. Here's what I was doing during this three month period last year and during this three month period this year and they would compare the two and it was called better your best. I started it in 2001 and we gave away the first. Yeah, I gave away a convertible Jaguar to a guy named Dave Kiter who was the winner of my very first contest. And he was a former music teacher that started a cleaning and restoration company and he had done I think approximately 975,000 in revenue the year before when he joined my contest and he lost money, he was literally thinking about shutting down the business and going back to being a teacher. And he joined my platinum group and entered the contest and one year later he did $1,375,000 and grossed several hundred thousand, I mean netted several hundred thousand dollars out of it. So I mean a complete turnaround, not only just more gross but like much higher net. And he won the convertible Jaguar that I gave away and he became the Piranha marketing spokesperson ambassador to the industry. That's what I actually called it because actually competing for a spokesperson position that happened to come with a car legalities of all of this change. But back then you did spokesperson prizes and you could give vacations, you can give cars, whatever. And the winner this year, the better your best contest actually gets a trip to Necker island where we go to in April. And the Lobsingers, you know, that's a.

Dramatic improvement that they made too.

Yeah, totally, totally. So the point behind it increases marketing intensity. So what I learned is that I can sell the best marketing strategies that I can create, come up with, test whatever, and we can offer them 100% guarantee the package that we sell, which I've done for years. I mean I've sold thousands of proven packages in the carpet cleaning industry. There's nobody that has the level of testing proven strategies, amount of clients, etc. That I do. I can say that all day long to people that are clients and oh yeah, you should use this, it could transform your business. Many people have built million dollar businesses with this and all of that's true. However, that doesn't, that doesn't motivate everyone always to do it. But the moment I say, oh, here, I'm going to give away a Mercedes, which I've given away two Mercedes. I've given away a couple of Corvettes, I've given away three Land Rovers, I've given away a brand new Hummer. Once you start offering a car that even if people could afford it, but they probably wouldn't go out and buy that car on their own, something happens in their mind. It literally changes. I always tell people, if you want to get in great physical shape, enter some sort of contest. If you sign up to run a marathon six months from now, what's going to happen is you're going to change the way you sleep. You're probably going to not go out to bars. If you go to bars and drink and eat wings and drink beer, you're probably going to not do that as much, or maybe not at all. You're going to throw away much of the junk food that's in your cupboards and quit eating Doritos and that sort of crap and drinking Liquid Satan, which is what sodas are. You're going to change a lot of things. You're going to hang out with different people, you're going to sleep differently. You're just going to do things differently because, you know, you have that contest, that deadline. There's something you got to do, but then you layer on, like a massive prize if you win. I mean, it just triggers something. So what I've learned is that everything measured improves. So if you want to improve anything, start measuring it, and everything measured and reported improves exponentially. So I created a reporting mechanism for my clients to have to report back the progress that they made using my strategies. And here in my office, I've got over 100 contest binders of people that were finalists and have gone through 10 winners over the last decade. And if you were to take all of these contest binders and what's in them is all of this the marketing strategies that professional cleaners and restorers use to build and grow their business. I toured Stan Dubin, who owns the. He's in my 25k group and he owns the largest privately held contract cleaning company in the world, with a lot of building service contractors running his company's $265 million a year in Reven, 6,500 employees, you know, and there's, there's. He's going to hold this event in August of. I'm sorry, April of 2014, where he's bringing together the top, you know, cleaning companies in the world. And I'm going to Emcee the whole event. I'm, you know, doing all the marketing for him and with him and you know, I showed him all of the binders and I mean, this is a guy that is, you know, he's successful as hell and he's blown away. He's like, wow, you know, I mean, I said on these two shelves, if you were to take every carpet cleaning franchise in the world and take all of their best marketing strategies, you wouldn't have 5% of what's sitting on these two shelves of Proven, tested marketing strategies. And that all came out of doing contests for our listeners. If you can sit and think of how could I crowd source wisdom of my clients? How could I incentivize clients? If you're in an information publishing business, that's a smart thing to do. If you just need to solve a problem, you know, how do you do it? I mean, Peter came up with the X prize by reading Charles Lindbergh's biography and how the Spirit of St. Louis, how they put up a $25,000 prize to fly across the Atlantic and he won. And what happened? And you think as much time as I spent with Peter, I would have all this memorized, but I don't. The amount of tickets that were being purchased for commercial flights after he successfully did that flight, I mean, increased by multiples. And it literally created and fueled an entire industry because of that competition. It's not just winning the competition, it's what happens to the people as a result of it. I mean, you look at Bill Phillips now, he had a very successful metrics EAs, all of the different myoplex, all the different things he was involved in during his run. But he sold a billion and a half dollars worth of Phillips branded stuff, books and supplements and all that sort of stuff. Muscle Media magazine, which was his magazine back in the day. But the bigger issue is that.

All.

Of the spin offs as a result of it. I mean even you'll even see some of what was created by Bill Phillips and beachbody.com and P90X sort of profiles and all the bodybuilding magazines and how many people knock that whole thing off because it's a successful contest model. And I used to speak at all of Dan Kennedy's seminars In the late 90s, early 2000-2001-2002-2003 was the last Kennedy event that I spoke at. And I actually me and Tim Poulson got up and talked about how to run contests in your business. Many of the people were information publishers, information marketers and Everyone that was there wanted to do it. We just gave this great presentation at a coaching and consulting conference. And so dozens of people in the Kennedy world just pretty much knocked off the ones that modeled it and came to us to, you know, hired us to teach them how to do it. Did much better than the ones that tried to knock it off. Because the big misconception was they think it's a gimmick. You're like, oh, let's just give away a car and bribe people to buy our shit. And I would tell people, you know, no, you really gotta, you gotta have a system that works. You know, you don't, you know, you can't say to someone, you know, follow this plan and path and whoever does the best job and reports it. I mean, the plan and path actually has to work. And I've seen so many people try to use gimmicks and prizes and they don't have good training and good methods and good strategies. It's kind of like if you hire a personal trainer, all of them are not created equal. Right before this call, Bob Serling actually does a thing online for Success magazine called Ask Success, the Success magazine website. He interviewed me today and I don't know when it's going to go up, but the question was, what's a good way to build clientele as a personal trainer? And that could also apply to a broad range of local businesses. My answer was, well, before I tell you how to do that, the caveat is you've got to be good at what you're doing. I can give you marketing strategies, but you can't be a lousy personal trainer. You actually have to be able to perform a great service for people because like what we talked about in the last profit activator, you want to be able to orchestrate referrals. And that's not going to happen if you don't deliver a good system. And then I talked about education based marketing. Identifying a single target market, who do you want to service and then creating an irresistible offer. All of that stuff applies. But the bigger thing is incentivized competitions work like gangbusters. But people have to have the ability to be able win them. Even if they're outrageous, it still has to be doable. I've seen companies incentivize people to do things that they simply cannot and will not have success with. Either they can't win the prize because it's too difficult to win, or they're just selling lousy training and they're trying to hide behind some fancy Car or whatever. There are ways to do it. And I'm in the process of putting together a really elaborate how to do contest package with Tim Poulsen, who. Yeah, because so many, you know, I mean, so many of my 25k members want to do this and some are doing it, but it's just, you know, there's so much that we figured out how to do over a decade of doing these. And like, you know, I mean, even Peter Diamandis, who I've told him, I said, man, your secret sauce is the X Prize competition. I mean, you just know how to design these guys. Grandiose challenges to solve some of the world's greatest challenges. That's his deal. Peter's thing is, how do we solve some of the world's greatest problems with incentivized competition? There's smart people out there. When they did the oil cleanup, they had the Wendy Schmidt sponsored oil cleanup. I think the oil technology after the BP oil spill, I think the winning team created a system that was eight times more efficient than the system that had been in place for over 30 years. Like, they discovered that no one has figured out how to advance this shit. It's the same stuff they're doing 30, 40, 50 years ago. And one of the teams that was one of the top finalists, they literally met each other in a Las Vegas tattoo parlor. And that team doubled the rate at oil cleanup. I mean, they met and there's like this short video that Peter shows and it's like they're interviewing this guy, like, how long have you been in the oil industry? And he says, counting today.

Counting today.

Yeah, it's like the guy, all these smart people that just know things, but there's never been a reason for them to get behind it and try to figure out how to solve these world problems. So. So XPRIZE is doing it with literacy, they're doing it with medical stuff. You think of all these human problems, from artificial intelligence to education to poverty, you name it. They've got these grand challenges that they're offering. So I would really encourage people to check out xprize.org and if someone. I just finished doing an audio program not too long ago with Peter Diamandis that's going to be packaged and sold through Nightingale Conant. And Peter also has his version. I spent two days in a hotel room with Peter and interviewing him and then we edited me out of the whole thing. I just wanted to prompt the questions, just to create all this package version as an ad addition to his great book Abundance, which if people Want to pick up the book Abundance. They can read all about it. You know what we can also do if someone wants to buy our I Love Marketing book? Trying to think what we can incentivize.

People with, what we can incentivize them with. We've got our volume two coming up. That would be an interesting thing. Last year with volume one, we sent the book up into space. Maybe we could do something with volume two. That would be an incentivization.

Yeah, well, we still have the breakthrough blueprint and we have the I Love Marketing conference that we did. I mean, what we could do, because we can actually bonus people that I'm saying this live, off the cuff in a podcast. How the hell do I. What's that?

This is how we brainstorm right here.

Yeah, we brainstorm live and then we put it out as a podcast with people with unclear on what it is. But if it was our own stuff, it's much easier to bonus it and give it away. But I know I can package. I mean, I did put the package together with him, so it's not like this thing would have happened without me. So, I mean, I've got a little bit of arm twisting I can do to get stuff. For anyone that wants to get our stuff, love it. So we'll figure it out, and then maybe we put a link on there, and if not, if anyone's interested in it, just post a comment on underneath this podcast saying, I want that stuff. And we'll figure out a. We'll figure out a way to get it.

I want that stuff, whatever it is.

For a fee for. I don't know what I have to.

Do, but I want it, and I'm willing to pay anything for it.

So, you know what? I've got an appointment that's going to show up here soon, but you say something smart, and I'm going to text the person that I'm supposed to meet with and just tell them to text me when they get here. And then, you know, we'll wrap up talking.

Until then. Well, you know, I'm listening and I'm trying to think about how all the different ways that you could, you know, use this kind of a model for. So it would apply to almost any business, you know. Right. Like how they can use it to have an incentive type of program, wondering, do you think what would be the characteristics of a company that it would work the best for? I mean, how do I decide if this would work for me?

Well, you know, I've actually had that discussion with Peter about Who would this not work for? There's very few people that it wouldn't work for. Let me share something with that. People can go and do some research. There's a company called Freelancer and they had an Exposer logo contest for a $25,000 prize. And you can type in freelancer.com expose our logo. And they got so much PR by bribing people. I actually thought about doing this for I love marketing where you share our I love marketing. And maybe I'll just put this out there for people to brainstorm because I think we can incentivize people to share our podcast with some sor prize that could be cash or consultations with us or something crazy and whoever wins. So people would literally film a video of exposing the Freelancer logo and then they would upload it and the best one won $25,000. But what would happen is they got all of these people putting the logo Freelancer everywhere. Most of that activity, of course, was in Europe and Asia and stuff. But I mean, it's fascinating to see what they got in exchange for $25,000. Now that would be a situation because Freelancer already exists. It's a company that already has clientele and people have an experience with them that they could speak about. So it would be really hard to do it with a brand new startup company. But at the same time, I don't think there's any sort of company that could not incentivize people for using what it is they sell. Who does the best job with it, whoever has successful results, being a spokesperson. Unless the caveat being what is being sold is crap. I mean, it goes back to the thing earlier. I mean, you can't incentivize anyone to do a good job with something that doesn't work. It's like use our widget and report your success. Well, your widget doesn't work. The widget sucks. What are we going to incentivize? Then it becomes a gimmick. I mean, you might as well just run a lottery, which is kind of like it's the equivalent, equivalent of the other way to bribe people, as you call it gambling. You incentivize people to come and spend money on slot machines and various things, knowing that the vast majority in the hopes to winning something big are going to lose. So those are all lose win sort of situations. Many losers to have one winner. The thing with the way that we do contests is everyone that entered my better, your best, the only way that they ever lost is that they didn't Enter. They literally didn't enter. There are some people that will enter and then not complete it, but every person that went through the better your best contest and literally followed my plan and path, my documented stuff, even the ones that won the car, all of them came to me and said, you know, the car was awesome. But what I learned about my business, what I documented about my business, I've had people that have sold their companies because they, they literally tracked and reported and measured everything. And they had a blueprint of what worked and what didn't. And all of the people that stuck with that literally created a blueprint on what worked. For instance, my second year winner was Steve Cameron, who won a Hummer, brand new Hummer. He basically for 23 years grossed an average of $122,000 in his carpet cleaning business. 22 years. This is whole. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Well, in this case you actually can teach an old dog new tricks because the year he entered my contest, he grossed over $250,000, doubled his business over a 22 year period, literally by entering the contest and taking it more seriously and implementing. Now, last year I talked to Steve, he's over half a million dollars in revenue in Stone Mountain, Georgia. It's one of those things to where. I think anyone could do it. But again, this is not something where I literally had spent a couple years working with Bill Phillips intensely on physique transformation contest. That's an EAS contest to run than, you know, the one I created.

Because it's like, I mean, there's something you can intensify the effort that they're doing.

Yeah, well, no, what I mean though is easier to design that contest is like, well, you take a before and after picture and you write an essay, measure your body weight, that sort of stuff. But how do you apply that to an entrepreneurial endeavor? I mean, I literally had to figure out how to apply the same strategies that I was, you know, helping Bill Phillips with to like an entrepreneurial business. Like, well, how do you take a before and after picture of a carpet cleaning company? It's not like you can shoot a picture of the guy in front of his van and say, well, here's how it used to look before Joe's marketing. Here's what I mean, you can't do that. So you have to measure it and track it in different ways because you don't have the visual representation. I mean, for people in the weight loss industry or personal training industry, I mean, to not do contest is crazy because if you can get someone more muscular or more skinny or more physically, take before and after pictures, have them write about it.

How would a carpet cleaner say, as an example, a service business, how would a carpet cleaner use that in their business?

What a lot of my cleaners have done is they've actually used it to raise money for charities. We also had a restoration company where once a month they would go into the community and they would actually donate their services to a family that had a flood and didn't have insurance or didn't meet their deductible. And they literally would incentivize. They would write about it in their newsletters. Whoever books a job by this certain time, we're going to donate X number of dollars to make a Wish foundation and things like that. So there's, there's different sort of spin offs, but even like the Expose my logo sort of thing, you can incentivize people to share this with your friends. Whoever gives us the most referrals is going to get a free house of cleaning. We're going to make a donation of $500 in your name. So if you're in a very local, mundane business where there's not a ton of excitement around it, you can always put it into community sort of services or causes. If there's someone in community that has a terminal illness or someone that had a family member pass away, that was a firefighter or a police officer or something, there's all kinds of ways you can use your relationship and your rapport with your client base, which is a little different than incentivized competitions. The only reason I bring it up is more than anything, I'm just trying to get people to think outside of the. I don't even want to say outside of the box because it's such a cliche saying. It's just wanting to expand different ways that they think about motivating people because all it is is simply motivating people at higher levels than you've done before. If someone should do business with you because your stuff is good, then how do you make it really good? How do you make it amazing? To get more about this, people really should read Abundance. All my carpet cleaning conferences. For instance, if someone gets the I love marketing DVDs that we have recorded where I'm offering the incentivized competition, they can watch the video of us basically offering the contest, explaining what it is, how the prizes work. They can see the top 10 finalists up on stage sharing what they got out of applying our strategies so people can if they want to really study this and learn how we do it the best way. And I'm not saying this is what's the catch, Literally study contests. How are people doing it? How are their clients responding to it? At our last I Love Marketing conference, they can watch the 10 finalists up on stage, four minutes each, sharing what they did to build and grow their business. And then they can see us award. You know, I gave the winners this year the opportunity. Either they had a Land Rover, my Land Rover, or a trip to Necker Island. So the winner chose the trip to Necker island with Richard Branson. So that's one way to learn it.

It's interesting because one of the things I really noticed about using that kind of a contest type of thing was in Toronto, Nike had a big run to type of. I'm not sure whether it was a contest or it was leading up to a race or. But essentially all of the runners in Toronto were like, gathering around this run.

To.

You know, movement where everybody was kind of gearing up towards this race. What Nike was doing, the brilliant thing was they were kind of gathering all of their great target audience, you know, gather everybody, that everybody was gathering. And it was like a huge meetup type of thing for groups, training and preparing for this race. And it wasn't necessarily about, you know, wearing, wear your Nike shoes, but it was Nike that was, you know, sponsoring and driving the whole thing. And I thought, what a brilliant one way of gathering their audience, you know, so if they're thinking two or three moves ahead that now they've got this community of runners as their, you know, visible. They've made visible prospects out of all of the people in Toronto who are runners, identified themselves to register as to be part of this runto type of. Of organization.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So, you know, so what I would suggest is kind of like a takeaway from this is everyone to remember everything measured improves. Everything measured and reported improves exponentially. And if someone still, if this doesn't land, like, they can't quite figure it out, track how you spend your time for the next two weeks. I mean, I'll say this, everyone will agree it's a good idea and virtually like 1 out of 100 will actually do it. That's listening to this podcast. But if you took the next, just say week, you know, weeks is too much. Two weeks would be great if you did it. I've done this for many, many entrepreneurs over the years. The ones that think they're really clear on how they spend their time and where they waste their time. We have these coaching sheets where it has two weeks and every hour on the hour while they're working, we have them write down just a note, even if they're eating lunch or working out at the gym or made a phone call, was on Facebook for 30 minutes or whatever, where you just write everything that you're doing, no matter what business you're in. If you're a carpet cleaner, cleaning carpets during this time, managing staff, whatever, no one really realizes how much insight they will get out of doing that until they do it. We can talk about it for two weeks and it won't do the same thing. Just track everything you're doing, measure it, and then see what happens to your thinking and your perspective and do that. And then everything we talk. Then listen to this podcast recording again about contests layered with like tracking your time for a couple of weeks. And it will have a whole different meaning because you'll hear the same words and you'll hear me babble about all this, but just with that perspective of measurement, then you can realize everything measured improves. Everything measured and reported improves exponentially. And then figure out how to cross that sort of system for yourself. Yeah. On an ongoing basis. And yeah, you know, so Dean, I have to run. I have a guest.

I like this whole hearing all about this. I think that's get people thinking about their incentivizing and contest models to see in the comments what people are thinking, how maybe crowdsource some ideas around that.

This. Yeah, totally. And you know, we. And if anyone has a crazy contest they'd like to see us do or any topics you want to see us cover, then let us know and we will certainly fulfill that.

Give us ideas for volume two. Yeah, perfect.

And that's it.

All right, man.

Over and out.

Over and out, as they say.

Awesome. Have a good day, everyone. Good day. Good evening wherever you're at. And tell everyone you know about ilovemarketing. Com.

Perfect.