The One About Your “Before Unit” - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean jackson - Episode #43

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. And here we are.

We're live in Atlanta, Georgia, together in your hotel room. Yeah, this is very exciting. If only we had this on video.

You can see we're cuddled up in the bed.

Not per se, but we're here and.

It'S kind of close quarters.

I mean, this is funny. We've got the. We got a, you know, my Apple Air kind of propped up a recording, you know, on a. On my luggage, so that we can kind of have it really kind of high up so that me and Dean hopefully get the best sound recording. I personally think I'm a little closer to the mic, so I probably sound a little closer. You should. I think you should do this for the benefit of our I Love Marketing. There we go, audience. And so, yeah, so today we're going to. We're going to talk about maybe clarify some confusion that some of our listeners have had on the recent ad clinics and talk a little bit about, you know, going back to, you know, before units, during units.

Well, that's the thing. I think this, I think this would be a great time for us to kind of talk exclusively about the before unit. Talk about exclusively.

Are you saying we're not going to.

Talk anything about nothing about during, nothing about after? Just like thinking about this as just the before unit. And, you know, I was telling you that what I see when I'm looking at the ads, when we did the ad clinic episode, and it's not uncommon, I mean, I see it all the time when people bring their ads, that the before unit really makes up the first three profit activators. Select your single target market, compel your prospects to call you and educate and motivate them to meet you. So the thing that I see a lot is that people in their ads are putting number two and number three together. They're trying to compel people to call, but they're also trying to educate and motivate them to buy or to meet or to do whatever the next step is. They're trying to do too much in the ads.

Yeah, and let me say something to that, too, because, I mean, I had to go through that process in the beginning and still have to remind myself continuously because even the best trained marketers, you know, they're. They're impatient. One thing that about a successful trade of driven entrepreneurs is that they operate out of a sense of urgency. They want to get results now. And of Course, you know, a great definition of marketing is the quickest path to the sale. But, you know, it's kind of like, you know, you want things to go as fast as possible, but not so fast that you undermine the effectiveness of the promotions. And that's exactly what you're talking about where, you know, I used to, you know, test running ads where I would drive people to call a free recorded message as an example. But on the free recorded message, I would find myself getting into selling.

Right.

What it is that they're calling the free recorded message for in that particular case. When I first started doing this back in 1992, is when I first ran my first free recorded message ad way before the Internet and all that. Just to remind everyone that's like, you know, 20 years old or whatever.

Remind everyone that we're old.

Yeah, yeah. But the point is I would start going into selling what was being offered in the free report. And you have to kind of step back and say one step at a time. Because even if you have the greatest product or service in the world, you have to engage the person and they have to identify themselves. So why don't you take everyone through the psychology of that process, maybe explain again, cheese and whiskers.

Yeah, because that's really. That does apply the most to this, that, you know, in the cheese and the more cheese, less whiskers episode, which I would recommend, if you're thinking about your before unit. That's exactly. That's one of the best episodes that you could listen to to get that mindset that often the desire that people have is to use the ad for so many purposes. I mean, they think about the, you know, they think about the ad as their opportunity to get their name out there and, you know, their, their way to let everybody know who they are. And I mean, even. I'll give you a couple of examples of just doing some consulting with, with a gentleman who was running an ad in a lifestyle magazine. He just sent me the ad to, to comment on because the advertiser, you know, we did a, you know, a completely blind, just cheese ad and the magazine sent a, an email to the guy saying, are you, are you sure you don't want to put your company name and logo and stuff in this ad? Because most of the time people find that's a good brand building thing, you know. Yeah. Like the ad people are, the magazine people are trying to get them to, you know, to brand it. And I have. This happens all the time.

I gotta say something about this too. When you start using Contrarian to what the advertiser's MO is or what they typically see, which is usually ineffective. Brand building. No offer sort of advertising In a lot of places, if you're doing offline space ads where there's filled with copy, you'll start hearing things like it's too cluttered anyway. My point is that you have to be careful whose advice you're taking and when it's coming from the person or company that you're actually giving them money to. And they start thinking maybe with good intentions that they're giving the advertisers good advice. If you're new into this, you have to put blinders on to what other people are saying.

You can't second guess it, right?

Yeah, because you will. They will try to talk you out of doing effective advertising. In some cases, they're not even trying to do it on purpose. They just don't understand. And what I learned early on is there's a huge difference between someone who's effective at selling advertising versus having advertising that is effective and that works. They're two different things. I know yellow page people from way back when. Like one of my very dear friends from high school was one of the top sales yellow page reps, you know, in Arizona. I mean, she like for years made six figure income selling yellow page advertising. And she was a great person. However, she had no experience in direct response. I mean, the best thing for her is a client that would run name.

Rank, serial number like everybody else. That makes it easy.

Then all of a sudden you see one with a free recorded message. Even yellow pages would hate warning anything that's contrary. So to your point, not to completely go off on a tangent here, the point is, I really want to highlight what you just said because you know, you can construct great advertising just to have it undermined by someone who doesn't know what the hell they're talking about saying, are you sure you want to do that? And then all of a sudden you start second guessing, you're saying, well, yeah, maybe I should put my name in there somewhere, maybe I should squeeze it in there. And then all of a sudden you've just ruined what could potentially be a killer ad.

So another example, I did a full page ad in a big newspaper for a realtor in Kansas, a real estate company. And it was, you know, most of the companies run ads that look just like everybody else is that they got the big banner at the top with their company logo and their slogan and then all the houses underneath it. And you know, so we did A full page ad that looked like a feature article that had, you know, all kinds of compelling stuff on there, featured some houses, but in a format that kind of looked like the newspaper was doing a feature on these great deals that you could get. And so the guy, you know, he ran the ad, got more calls than they'd ever gotten on, on any of their real estate ads. But he got a call from one of his, is that dude, you spent all that money on that ad. You didn't put your logo in there. Nobody even knows it's your ad, right? Nobody even knows it's your ad. Yet more people called than any other ad they've even run. And you have to get used to bypassing that, that you don't care that people know that it's your ad. All you care about is that people who are your prospects call because it's all cheese. It's not about you at all.

Well, see, that goes back. If you want to be the most effective as a direct response person, as a marketer, as an advertiser, as much as you can leave your ego by the door when you go out, the better off you're going to be. Because brand building, name recognition, advertising for the most part, first and foremost feeds the ego of the owner and the company, the people that work for the company. And great direct response really feeds the value, benefits, pain of the marketplace. And you want, you know, you want to give them cheese. That's what they want. And yeah, when, if you were to hear comments like that from your friends, from other people, you start again, you start second guessing yourself. But at the same time, you know, you're in the arithmetic business. And if your conversion is great, if your response is great, if you're making money, if you, if it's the highest response you've ever gotten, then who cares what anyone thinks, right?

Let's see there you said. So I want to go off now on something else that you said that you look at. If the return on investment is there. That's really what this is all about. That's the whole point of doing it, is to create in your before unit a money multiplying system, a process that you can use predictably again and again and again to deliver people to your during unit.

Yeah, you call it bankable results. Yeah, we've mentioned that on some episodes and stuff, for the most part. Am I being picked up okay here on the mic? Yeah, absolutely. Because bankable results. If we could wave a magic wand on everyone that's listening to. I love marketing and out of all of the conversations we have, all the strategies, all the examples, all of the tangents I go on. I mean, at the end of the day, what we want is our listeners to have bankable results. Because that's awesome.

I'm going to put up that video of us at my evil scheme hatchery where we were talking about bankable results. We have a video about that too.

Perfect. Then go to ilovemarketing.com if you're listening to this on itunes and watch that video. So what do you mean by that? Bankable results? Because this, you know, when I said, you know, you're in the arithmetic business, that's something I heard Gary Halbert say years ago. And that's the beauty of direct response. It's not just getting your name out there, it's getting a response back. And it's something that can be trackable. Because if you can't track it, if you can't measure it, then you really don't know. And there's nothing worse than playing blind.

Well, I look at it. So did you see the video that I put up about predictability versus probability where you put money in a vending machine and you know exactly what you're getting. And the context that I set for people is just like a vending machine. You know, if you go to a vending machine, you've got lots of choices. You could put in your money and you could get a Coke or you could get a Root Beer, or you could get a Sprite, whatever you want.

You have a really healthy bottle of water, but for the sake of example, is still good.

Or you can get a bottle of water, but you got to push, you gotta, you can only push one button at a time. So it's that same kind of thinking that you want to take into creating a system, you know, where you, you select a single target market and then you have an ad or a postcard or a display ad or anything that's going to compel them to, to identify themselves. That's all you're looking for, right? So when you look at it, if you do it right, you've got almost like you're, I use an analogy that you're setting up little oil wells, you know, that will continue to pump and work on their own to bring new prospects into your business. And so when you do that right, you know, the good news about creating before unit systems is that you can use automation, you can use technology, you can use other people to completely remove yourself from that process. You shouldn't have to be doing any of the work in your before unit to deliver people to your during unit. But you're looking at it as a money multiplier. So we do for realtors, we have a company called moneymakingwebsites.com and so we do an event every year with all of our clients come together. And what's amazing to me is that they're all using exactly the same website because I've created it to be a lead generating template, a system where you duplicate, just like Michael Gerber would talk about creating a franchise prototype that you can duplicate. And it works the same in Orlando as it does in Phoenix. You know, same kind of, same kind of results. And it's driven by buying visitors from Google AdWords. So we buy visitors from Google AdWords, they come to the website, 20% of them leave their name and their email address and then we're building their list of people who they're communicating with to educate and motivate them to want to meet with them. So we've got all the drip email campaigns and. But what drives it is the more visitors that you send to the site, the more leads that you get because the percentages are the same. So we've got people in the same room, maybe at the same table sometimes who are sitting and they think about their advertising as an expense or a budget that they have for advertising. So a lot of them spend $10 a day, for example, on their AdWords budget. So they're spending $300 a month and they're generating 30 to $50,000 a year in, you know, commissions from deals that they do from their, from their website.

Right?

Then they're sitting at the same table with people who are spending $20 a day or spending, you know, $600 a month and are doing 70 to $100,000 a year. Same website, same thing. Just that they're spending twice as much money. And then they're in the same room with Tom Cook in Toronto spending $6,000 a month and doing a million dollars with the exact same website. And don't see the complete elasticity between the relationship between the amount of money that you spend on the front end and is what you get out on the back end. It's all, you know, so when you, when you start looking at that, what you're looking for is what would this look like if you push the accelerator pedal? What does it look like if you do it right with your before unit? You got a predictable system that you know that if you send out a thousand postcards, you get X response and you convert that into so much money, or you send out 10,000 postcards. You should, if you're doing, you get 10 times that amount. It's all completely your choice. When you set up a before unit system that's based on direct response and you've created the asset that gets people to call you and you've created the assets that convert those leads into appointments. We talk about the bankable results. Those are the only things that you can do that are bankable results. The things that you can see as progress leading towards more money are leads. You can generate leads, you could generate appointments, you can get contracts, and you could get closings or money, you know, whatever is coming from that. And we adapted it for when we were doing the example on the whiteboard, we were talking about carpet cleaners. So you get leads, you get appointments, you get jobs, and you get checks. That's really the progression that you go through. And you can do that at whatever volume you want.

Yeah, to whatever degree your, your ability to manage it. I, you know. Yeah. And the thing that, that Gary Halbert would always drill into people's heads is that if you want to get rich, you know, he would talk about it in the example of sending out letters. You know, you send out a thousand letters and you get X number of results. You take whatever profits left over.

And Dean's like taking a two dollar bottle of water.

I don't like that guy because he reaches over right in the middle of me trying to.

Look, it says, who's thirsty? Oh, purified water, complimentary. So there you go. I'm taking your complimentary water.

Yeah, real complimentary now because it's my last one. All right, so basically right behind you, Gary would say that, you know, I would reinvest the dollars that the profits that he would make off like the thousand and put it into, you know, as many more letters as you can mail and ramp it up until you're mailing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands.

The snowball, you'd call that. Yeah, yeah.

And so, you know, that is the place that you want to get to. And it's a place that very few people ever get to. Not because the strategies aren't available to them. As a matter of fact, we explain the strategies and have given away not only the strategies, how to do it. Yeah. The exact templates. And anyone that came to our I Love Marketing conference, you know, got a whole book of examples throughout the training. And anyone that wants that stuff, you know, just get our I Love Marketing, you know, training program, which is the videos of our I Love Marketing event. You know, the thing is, still, people don't do it. And I think the big reason a lot of people don't do it is, for one, they haven't quays yet. So we need you to create that if you're going to get that. And secondly, you know, they just don't quite understand it. So you're going to hear us say things that in many ways are redundant. But the biggest thing that I've learned about trainings, listening to ongoing trainings, reading books, is just the continual reminders of the fundamentals. And one of the fundamentals, you know, it's like I've done a lot of work in the. In the world of exercise and fitness. I've had a lot of clients that do that. And like, you know, how many different ways can you write articles like in a muscle magazine about, you know, how to lift weights? But there's like, you know, there's some fundamental moves like, you know, bench press, squat and deadlift. Those are like three basic strength moves. And if you want to be a powerlifter, if you want to be strong, if you want to be a bodybuilder, you're going to do those. And so the more you just foundationally become more effective at those moves, the better everything else is.

Yeah, you don't need new, fancier moves. Right? Yeah, that's kind of. That's exactly right. And I forget which book it was in, but I was reading years ago about learning and about how, you know, PBS and Sesame Street. And then there's a show called Blue's Clues for kids where what they do on Blue's Clues, they run one show all week. They run it the same episode all week. And the kids get more into it the more that they see it because they. It's a kind of a interactive show in a way, you know, where he. They're talking to the. They're talking to the kids from the TV and they're supposed to shout out the answers and they build, they learn better, and they like it more when they know the answer. So by the third or fourth time that they've seen the same show, they're able to call out the answers and they learn that way. So, you know, when you look at what you were just saying about, you know, repeating stuff and, you know, the basic moves, what we talk about, the DNA of all of these profit activators is, you know, selecting a target market that's not going to change and compelling them to call you is not going to Change and educating and motivating them to meet you. Those are the basics, the baseline of your before unit. And it just the more depth that you can get of the understanding of the basics of that is going to be so much more profitable. But I want to say something else. What you were saying about Gary's idea of snowballing things that I look at them, I talked about as oil wells, where you're taking your R and D money or you're taking your development money and you're developing an oil well that's going to produce hopefully gallons and gallons and gallons of oil barrels of it. Same thing with your, you're going to gush leads from this particular target market. And when I talked about the budgeting for stuff, if you, if you do it where you pick up a target market that's going to have a long term sustainable need, that so you're going to be able to continue to market to them. You don't want have to think about having all of the money at once to run a campaign for a whole year. All you really need is, I kind of call it the seed money. Because at some point, whatever your buyer life cycle is, the ads that you're spending money on are going to start working and start generating 5 times, 7 times 10 times the amount of money that you spend on them. And as soon as you get your first transaction in most places, you've recaptured the money that you invested in the first place to get that. And now once you recapture that money, it's like it becomes this self funding oil well that's funding itself from the money that you are generating from using it. That's the point where you let that continue to pump and you go over, you take the initial money and invest it in creating another oil well which could be your second target market. Because that's one of the big confusions that people have when they talk about narrowing your focus to a single target market. And I always say at a time, one target market at a time. You're not saying that you're going to limit yourself to one target market forever. You're going to limit yourself when you're creating an oil well, that you're creating one oil well at a time and then you go on to another one. You can have as many as you want.

Well, see, and that's where the challenged creative artistic mind of many innovative entrepreneurs, the non innovators, are easier to actually get to do this than the creative ones. Because the creative ones like me, you know, I'm very, I would consider Myself, very innovative and very creative from the standpoint of I'm always. There's a side of me that loves just figuring out new things, cracking the codes. Yeah. And part of that is having, you know, having the ability to say, well, you know, it's just not that you're not going to be able to do all those things. You just can't do them all right now. Because like our friend Mary Ellen, who we just had lunch with, Mary Ellen Tribbey, she'll be a future guest on I love Marketing. You know, she has that great line, one thing done equals money. Five things undone equals no money. One selected target market really gone deep with shallow equals lots of money. Like that well, is going to be profitable to the degree that you can go deeper and deeper and get to because it builds up more pressure. And in some cases when you start going farther down the well to where most people are not willing to lurk, not willing to figure out where to go, that's where the gold is. Sometimes gold mines are very, very deep. But most people, they don't, they're so shallow, trying to dig up a bunch of treasures versus really going really deep. But see, here's the key difference though. And one of the things that I really want to make clear, you know, marketing doesn't have to be like that seven year bamboo tree where that's where image, advertising and brand building comes in, where you're like, oh, keep getting name recognition. You just funnel all this money and then one day, you know it's gonna sprout, you're gonna be well known in every once in a while that does happen. You know, it's like the persistence thing. Keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. Never give up, never give up, never give up. Which is good advice in a certain context, but terrible advice in like an advertising world because, you know, it's like the best way to get out of a hole is to quit digging it, right? And if you're digging a hole and it ain't going anywhere, go dig somewhere else. Dig with a different shovel, dig in a different area, you know, that sort of thing. So part of it is we want you to have the seven second tree. If you can run an ad and boom, you can immediately see on the Internet that, oh, people are visiting the site, people are opting in. But sometimes you take. I love marketing. We're at a marketing conference right now. There's about 900 people at this conference. And me and Dean, like so many people here know us, I would have to probably venture to say that about 600 of the 900 people here have listened to, to something for me and you in the past because we can't go 10ft without someone like, you know, saying something great. I mean, I like it, it's really cool, you know, and at the same, at the same time, I've had probably you know, 20 people ask me, so when you, you know, what's your monetization model for marketing? It's hard for them to hear. Well, you know, we're just putting good content out there. Yeah, we're just having conversations with people. We're just talking about stuff we talk about all the time. And at some point people will want to buy stuff from us. They can't figure it out. But we have the luxury of being able to put some time into something here that may not financially come back to us in many cases for a very long time because we have all these other wells we've already set up. You've got your money making websites, I've got Piranha Marketing, I've got my 25k group, you've got your ebooks. That's what we're talking about here. The thing is, no matter how creative and artistic you want to be, if you select a single target market, you get it right, you have it producing a great roi and you get that bad boy working, you just crank it out. And then once you got that machine running, boom, you can start another one. That's what we want for everyone. That's why we're going to continue to redundantly talk about some of the things. Because if you don't get the fundamentals right, it doesn't matter. See, the beauty of this is I had someone come up to who has been literally reading or listening to my stuff. He came to my very first marketing conference. He told me, he goes, I've been following you for 20 years. And the funny thing is that's not possible because I didn't start really studying marketing until 1992. And at the time we're doing this, it's, you know, almost at the end of 2011. Now we're getting towards the end. But I knew he'd been, you know, followed my stuff for a long time. And he said, you know, I've been listening to, I love marketing. I love it because I've heard all this stuff before, which he really hasn't heard at all before. But he said, I've heard all this stuff before and it's just reminding me of things that I used to do that I quit doing. Thank you so much. I love it. You know, and so in a lot of ways, you know, if this serves no other purpose other than just to continually remind people, that is huge value.

Yeah, it really is. What is. You know, it's like Chet Holmes says about the, you know, becoming a karate master, becoming a marketing master really is the same translation. It's not about knowing 8,000 moves. It's about the eight moves, the eight profit activators.

Yeah.

And doing it 8,000 times.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's what it really is about.

Yeah. I heard, like, the whole thing about. I don't know what. I can again, hear him trying to talk about things I know nothing about, like martial arts. I went to Tim through Tim Larkin's training.

Yeah.

Which is target focus training.

So you could kill me with your bare hands right now, supposedly, if you jump right over here, I may do it.

I do it. But then, you know, I'd have to find someone else to do.

I love working.

Or I'd have to do them all myself, which, you know.

And you know, dude, I gotta tell you, I did Leo, last week's episode all by myself. And it's.

Yeah, almost. That's because we had a recording problem.

Yeah.

Knew the real. The real story behind that.

But I gotta tell you, like, it's so much nicer doing it with you. Like, it's so much. It's so much easier to have the conversation than it is to. Because, you know, if you're doing it on your own, you gotta, like, outline stuff and, you know, kind of think through what you're gonna.

Yeah. And it's easy with me because I'm like a continual pattern.

Right, exactly.

Add tangents, you know, the whole squirrel thing. Yeah, yeah. So. Yeah.

So I'm glad you're back.

Well, thank you. Thank you. But what was I gonna say? I think. I don't remember. I think I was Tim Larkin.

You talking about killing me?

Oh, no, the thing about you can learn. You can try 4,000 moves once or you can try four moves 4,000 times. And what's going to make you better and what's going to have less complexity. And so part of this, too is not trying to narrow people's ability to do a bunch of things. I mean, we're really wanting to save time. We're wanting you to be effective. There's a big difference between activity and accomplishment. And I think most people spend their mired in tons of activities trying to do a bunch of stuff, but until there's nothing sweeter than when you have A marketing system when you have a process that you have put in place and it actually works. I mean, you know, every marketer that for the first time, when they, when they started having someone respond to their robotic marketing methods, like, you know, they say if you sell ebooks, you know, the first time you actually made an ebook, you didn't have to do any manual label. There's a switch that goes off in your head where you're like, ah, I get it. And the people that become great marketers that become wealthy in this sort of business, they have that moment. And once they have that moment, they either harness it or they don't pay attention to it, and they go off into their own habitual patterns and how they used to do things. I have a friend who I won't name her name. Wonderful person.

What does it rhyme with?

Well, no, no. The reason I want to do this, she just had some very tragic things that have happened recently to her. And she made a comment, though, because she recently had a child, you know, and she said to me, she said, you know, I used to be on the road selling and speaking and traveling all the time. And, you know, having the child, you know, forced me to actually have to figure out doing a lot. And this is a very skilled marketer doing a lot more robotic stuff. And, you know, she said, she goes, and it forced me to have to figure out how to do, you know, a lot of online videos and things that I was doing, but I wasn't really going deep with them. And she goes, my profits this year are up 20%. Right. I'm traveling way less, and my life is just, you know, in that area, much easier. She's had some crazy stuff happen, you know, the last last couple of months. But it's like just that comment really, really hit me. It's like, you know, yeah, if you really, you almost have to take two steps back in order to go 10 steps forward with this marketing.

Yeah. You know, that kind of reminds me because one of the things that I do, I always look at leverage, like, where can you. Because my whole life I build my business stuff around supporting my lifestyle. I think I've had that stance. I mean, I've always taken that approach. And so that needs leverage. You need leverage to be able to do that. And so I was, look, there's four things I look at for leveraging. And the first thing that I look at leveraging is ideas. Like, a better idea is the ultimate leverage. If you're doing something like, well, we just had breakfast with John Benson and we're talking that we're going to actually do an episode with him today. But so. So we were talking about his. He's doing a regular sales letter for some of his ebooks and getting a 1% conversion rate. It took the same stuff that's in the letter, the same concept, and turned it into a video sales letter, which is an idea I'm going to try a video sales letter, and bumped his response to 6%. So six times leverage on the same amount of visitors that are coming without doing anything else, you flip it, you turn it into a video sales. Or just using that idea got you six times leverage that. It's profound. But it doesn't cost any more money to leverage ideas. Having a better idea, studying the things that we talk about on these podcasts, maybe going back and scouring the transcripts for the word for word stuff that we share with people, you know, and really taking that idea and applying it to what you're already doing is really a power move. I mean, it's really the ultimate kind of leverage. So I look at that, because ideas are the least expensive thing, but they're sometimes the most valuable thing that you could leverage. And the next thing I look at leveraging is technology. What can I do to replace myself out of this equation by replacing myself with technology that could be a recorded message, that could be a website, a video, something that you can capture your idea, capture your thought, whatever it is, capture it and duplicate it without you having to be involved in it. Then the next thing I look at leveraging is money. Because sometimes money is the easiest thing to actually leverage. But you have to have the idea and the technology set up to automate the process that, like I mentioned, all of the realtors, the easiest way for the people who are spending $10 a day on their, on their website and making more, you know, making money from it, making a multiple most times 15, you know, 10, 15 times the amount of money that they spend is what they get back when they follow the system. The easiest way for them to get double the results is to spend $20 a day on what they're already doing. And so I just had this conversation with a Realtor client who's, you know, running our listing system and getting a 10 times return on every dollar that he spends on, on doing that. And we just talked about, we were doing some planning for 2012 for him and made the decision that, you know, let. What if you send out twice as many postcards, you just pick twice as big an area. There's the fastest, easiest way for them to bank in advance on for 2012, doubling the results that they're getting from their. From their listing efforts. And then the final thing that you leverage is other people. Because if I can. If you can leverage with an idea, you can leverage with technology, you can spend more money and just do those three without having to get other people involved, that's fantastic. But the biggest, you know, if you really want to go even bigger, if you can get other people to do the parts of these, of this before unit that, you know, require a human element, that's. That's what you're going to look at there. And so that's. It's a big. It's a big thing. I've been meaning to ask you about your easy button because that, you know, when I talk about the leveraging with people, you know.

Oh, yes, yes. For years, you know, I've had, like, great, you know, people on my team, but for work, you know, it is funny because I actually came back from Bernie man, you know, people that don't know what Burning man is. It's kind of a freak show out in the middle of Playa, outside of Reno, Nevada, a couple hours outside of Reno. Burningman.com, if you want to see this nonsense. But anyway, so if you want to see a really funny video of me on YouTube, but one day maybe we'll take it down because it's kind of crazy. It's.

It's.

It is truly crazy. I mean, I'm wearing. I've never worn any sort of outfit like that in my entire life. But if you type in Joe Polish, you're wearing it. Yeah, I'm wearing it.

You got to see that.

Don't even say what it is.

We should put it on the.

Maybe we should put the video on. Yeah, that'll be kind of risque anyway.

Only for the people who listen and remember.

Yeah, yeah. You have to go to YouTube and type in Joe Polish, Burning man, and Annie A, N, N. There we go. I guess if you put those keywords in, because there's other videos up there. But anyway, that one's pretty funny. I came back and I was actually, you know, unpacking and doing a bunch of stuff, and I'm like, why am I doing this stuff? So basically, you know, you have this whole concept of an easy bucket where you actually hire someone. So I went out and I hired myself an easy bucket.

Yeah, there we go.

But we'll talk about that more in depth. I want it because there's something on my mind. That you said about, you know, money, spending money. And one of the things that I learned early on is that great effective marketing never costs anything. It always brings you more when you're talking about, you know, leverage and you're talking about rolling out. You know, used a bunch of analogies in the beginning of this episode. I've always loved the slot machine where. Yeah, you know, you talk about predictability. Well, like a slot machine that instead of it being gambling, which is what most advertising is for many people, they just don't know. You know that famous line, you know, 50% of my advertising is working, I.

Just don't know which half.

Yeah, but what if you didn't know? Yeah, right. What if you knew, like where every penny was attributable to and you went to a slot machine. Not like the slot machines that actually, the odds are against you, but you actually had one that was rigged in your favor. And because you knew how to make it work, you put in a dollar and you pull the handle and five bucks, you would keep shoving dollars in there as quickly and as frequently as you could. And people that have effective marketing systems, and we know many of them have them in our own businesses, you can build it to a certain degree. You will create a slot machine and it will crank out X number of dollars. And I wish there was an endless one. I mean, I've yet to well be an example.

It's like, it's like having a vending machine that sells $10 bills for $1.

Right, right.

You put in a dollar and you get back 10.

And when I say an endless one, I mean, there are times where this is not like you're going to set one up and then set it and forget it always has a time limit, meaning ads will grow tired, things will happen in the marketplace. The dangers, opportunities, and strength of the prospects, which is Dan Sullivan terminology. The dos issues of your clientele and your prospects will change. So you always want to be on top of this. However, you really can create a slot machine that works in your favor and it's never spending money. One of the things that I literally want to slap people sometimes, or they're like, I just don't want to spend that much money. And it's like, okay, let me get this right. You implemented a marketing strategy that I taught you. It cost you about 1,000 bucks. You just brought in $10,000 this month, and you're hemming and hawing about spending or doubling that or tripling. Right. Take the 10 grand and reinvest it. It's like, I mean, you're just going to double or triple or quadruple. That's how you get rich.

Yeah.

And one thing that annoys the shit out of me, I mean, really annoys the shit out of me, is like, I have friends and so do you. Where we will give these people advice or we will give them connections. They will be within our sphere of influence and they will go out and they will make a lot of money. And these same people won't buy our stuff because they're our buddies. We met them. So, you know, or their colleagues. And they'll be like, you know. And I was talking to Eunice today. I was leaning over, and this person that got onto the stage that I made the introduction and this person got the speaking gigging, it's going to make this person six figures. And this same person already has reached, you know, a million dollars in revenue as a result of many things that I taught this person, great person, you know, nothing take away as the person. And, you know, I was. And there's a side of me where I'm like, I don't know if it's a reciprocity issue or whatever. You know, look, there's. I think I do plenty of random acts of kindness just for the sake of doing it. But there's other things where I'm like, you know, hey, I'm going to teach you something. And, you know, if you go a little deeper with what I'm doing, you're going to do better. And I said, you know, look how much money this person has made as a result of me. And this person's never given me a penny. I go, but what never occurs in their mind is, God, how much better would I do if I actually gave Joe money? I mean, he's already on the bat for me at this level. And it's not because I really need that person's money. What I'm like, what I'm annoyed by is just the moronic, like, fact that they don't understand that, like, and that's the biggest challenge when you like one. And we talked about. That's one of the biggest challenges with I love marketing for free is a lot of people, if they don't pay, they don't pay attention. And so, you know, there's a thing to be said that if you really want to replicate yourself, you really want to leverage yourself with what you just said, you know, ideas, technology, money and other people, as much as you can. In the money issue, once you start getting results from the marketing that you're using, reinvest more money into it. Because if you really set it up right, it's never going to cost you anything. That's the fastest. Like Dan Kennedy talks about it all the time. If you want to beat the pants off your competitors, the more you're able to spend money to acquire a client and go deep with that, that's how you buy speed. You buy speed. I mean, literally, if you want to grow, you have to invest that money. And so my message here, to the best that I can convey it, is don't be one of those people that's always trying to get a deal on growing your marketing or whatever. Look at what the ROI is. And if every time you spend X, you're bringing back more than X, then spend X as much as possible. Not recklessly, not foolishly, Intelligently. Strategically. Yeah, yeah. So. And then the other thing you said about other people, you know, I mean, talk about that, because one of the things.

Yeah, I talk about the easy button that, you know, it's funny as entrepreneurs, and Mary Ellen was talking about this today too, that as entrepreneurs, you have activities, and some of the activities yield money and some of them don't. That's the only real distinction that you make. But you're in complete control of when you will do those activities and what activities you engage in. You know, you look at that Most people have 16 hours in a day, a waking day, and it just, it's. It's painful to see people value or think strategically about the business hours that they spend and then be so, you know, recklessly blind about the personal hours that they spend, you know, and so they're spending time doing things that somebody else could do for $10 an hour. I mean, you look at the things that, that you, that you have to do to keep your life going, you know, like going to the grocery store and getting gas in your car and washing your car and, and going to pick something up or waiting for a repairman or, you know, all these things that are time that is completely, you know, not your best and highest use. You know, it has to be done and you do them most of the time. You know, I keep. People had this concept, I was talking with one of our realtor clients in Florida and saying, you know, had her go through a list of her times and see where she's actually spending her time and categorizing the activities as like queen activities, princess activities, and ugly stepsister activities. You know, where you're looking at, like the queen things are things that are what Dan Sullivan would call unique ability things where you're the. It's. You enjoy it. You're the best at it. It's the thing that brings the most value both in your personal life and in your professional life. Spending quality time with your kids, spending time on listing appointments or negotiating contracts. Those are all queen activities.

Right?

And then on the next level, there's things that you do that are things that you. Maybe you enjoy doing them. They're not the highest, best use. You could have somebody else do them, but you kind of enjoy them. And then there are things that are ugly stepsister things that, you know, like I just wrote.

I'm thinking the male version here. I'm making notes of this going, I turn this into a tool. King, prince, dipshit, stepbrother.

Exactly. Yeah. The whole, you know, the whole thing is just eliminating all of the ugly steps, you know, that are. That anybody could do. It's like, you know, this is where when we talk about. People say, money doesn't buy happiness. And you always say, you know, your idea is looking at money as freedom tickets. Right, Right. And I look at this, too. It's like I look at our. I look at, you know, I keep saying our easy button, because that's exactly the way we look at it, is just like those staples buttons. That was easy. You know, this, the whole idea. I should probably tell that story because I don't know whether I've even talked about. Have we talked about easy buttons?

We have a little bit, but go ahead. Let me save from. When we're done with that, I'm going to make a note. We're going to talk about Operation Money Suck.

Right.

See, I did everything I can to divert you from the original mission here, but I think we've covered what we.

Well, but Operation moneysuck will fit right into it. And the easy button and fits right into it. Because, you know, so my, my. One of the guys that works, the guy who does all the design work for. For. I love marketing, Jesse got me an easy button one year for Christmas. And I had it in the house, and we kept it by the door. And every time we'd walk in and kind of press the button and go, that was easy. And so I was saying one day, wouldn't it be cool if we actually had a real easy button? You could just push the button and it's done. And so I started thinking, well, what kind of things would I have them do? And, like going to the grocery store and I don't even think about it as the activity of going to the grocery store. I think about them in terms of what I call them vignettes. Like, I think about that. What I always want is the bottomless supply of water or drink that Fiji water. So right by the fridge, it's always stacked.

If you really cared about the environment, you wouldn't even be drinking that much bottled water. You have a nice filtration system.

Oh, there you go. So the water is always there that. There's always the foods that we like in the fridge at all times. We never run out of anything. You realize how quickly something goes, that my car would never run out of gas or be low on gas. I'd never have to get it. It would always be clean. It would always have all. No stuff gathered up in it. My office would always be tidied and clean and have this, you know, all the bottled water and the snacks and the, like, these mixed nuts and. And all that stuff would always.

With food, everything has to be.

And so we found Courtney, who, you know, for. She was. She was not happy at her. At her job. She was, you know, looking for something to do. She's a great girl. And so, you know, Courtney does everything.

No, no.

I mean, he's looking for something better to do.

Yeah, yeah.

But, I mean. But that's the thing, is that there are people who, like, they're. She's just so. She's thrilled to be a personal assistant. She loves that, and she's, like, proud of that. And. And. And it gives her a variety of things to do. You know, I'm building a little project at my office, and she's running around getting fabric samples and ordering things. So you start to think about all the things that you could eliminate, things.

That you just want to basically offload all of these horrible things to someone else and pay them less money than you would make to do.

Exactly. Even if you're not doing anything productive with the time, doing nothing is better than spending. Let me say something, because nothing gives you the space to think about what you could apply to your before unit, how you could create. You know, if you take that time. Most people are so busy in their during unit doing the business that they don't have time to invest in creating a before unit that can, you know, completely change the course of their business. It could change their life, but they don't have the time or the space. But if you start eliminating all of these things, that's really a great place to start. And, you know, you think about. Well, people think, why I'm not in a position where I can do that. But you know, good grief, if you, if you can find, you know, five hours a week of stuff that you're doing right now that you don't have to do, you spend $50 a week to have somebody do that stuff and use that five hours instead of you doing all of those things, investing that time in creating a before unit. That's really where it all comes from.

Well, yeah, and one of the things I was going to say because I was kind of like joking about you're making someone else do all this work you don't want to do is if it's like lesser mortal stuff. And the reality is that one thing I learned from Dan Sullivan early on is that there's no bad work in the world. There's bad work for certain people doing it. Meaning. Now that's not to say a lot of people don't hate their jobs, hate what they do. Want something better. You made, you know, I made that joke, you know, I want to point this out where you're like, since she was looking for something to do, and you're like, no, no, she's looking for something better to do.

Yeah, well, see, that's, that's we're all.

Looking for something better to do. The whole reason you're listening to I Love marketing is you're wanting to better your best. I mean, even if you're doing awesome, you want to do better. You know, it's just one of the things about an achievement, accomplishment oriented individual is they want more and they want to do things better. And people that try to, you know, every thing in life is about more. And anyone that wants to deny they don't want more love, more money, more growth, more happiness, more, you know, better weather, I mean, you know, whatever it is, more entertainment, you know, you want more. And so the thing is, one of the traps that entrepreneurs get in is they compare what their level of success is and they're like, well, I would never want to do that. So they feel guilty about actually other people doing it. And so they end up doing it themselves. I mean, that's one of the traits of the rugged individual is, well, you know, I don't want to clean up. You know, I can't. God forbid I would make someone else do this. Whereas someone else doing that, that might be a godsend to them. They may love it. You know, Dan Sullivan has the same person who, he always told me, she just loves to clean. And I've stayed at Dan and Bab's home a lot of times. You know, when I go to Toronto and stuff, I'll stay with them. And this woman, it's true, I mean, she like wants you to leave laundry. I mean, she wants messes. She really enjoys cleaning stuff up. And I mean, she is happy as can be being the caretaker of their home. And some people, you know, I would never want to do that work.

Dan elevated my thinking about this whole easy button too, because his, you know, when we were talking one time and he was sharing how his. The, the vision, the framework that they work from for creating their support environment is that they didn't want to do anything at home that they would do. They wouldn't do if they were staying at the Four Seasons.

Right?

That's their whole. Their home life is based around not doing any more than they would do if they were staying at the Four Seasons.

And not.

That's kind of great because it totally fits. They got beautiful environment, they've got great.

Support and they work well and they function well in that environment because they're.

Allowed to think better.

Kind of like what you're saying. And so what Operation Money Suck is, is a term that John Carlton came up with and it's used in a marketing context and we talk about it on our interview with John Carlton. So if you want to listen to that episode with John, just do a search for John Carlton on ilove marketing.com. the one thing that I will say though is like, if you want to make 100 bucks an hour or a thousand dollars an hour and you find yourself doing $10 an hour work, then it's not just that you are doing $10 an hour work, which really isn't a good use of your time. For every hour that you spend invested in that $10 an hour work, you're ripping up. If, say your goal is a thousand bucks an hour, you're ripping up $990 an hour. So it's not what is costing you for the easy button. It's what you throw it away. It's what. It's the opposite.

It really is what it is what it's costing.

My point is it's like, you know, people are like, oh God, you know, I can't afford to do this, hire this person, run this market. Can you afford not to?

Right.

If you really want to reach the goals, is it really an expenditure? So part of what I hope this has done for everyone on this episode is really, you know, jarred their thinking, given them some perspective, really helped them to, you know, select a single target market. It really is about about focusing on roi.

Yeah.

What is, what is your advertising really producing? Because like you do not know how much you can afford to spend to acquire a client until and unless you know how much they're actually worth. That's something that Jay Abraham always talk about. And the same thing goes with your own human time. You know, how much is your time actually work and the ultimate leverage. And you kind of said it. I mean, everything that we talk about can be looked at. These four types of leverage, you know, ideas. So hopefully we've given you some ideas and some technology. Different ways to do things. Money, the uses and leveraging yourself through.

Other people, which is really money too. I mean we think about that with other people. It's just a little bit more of a step involved in finding the person. But it really comes down to money. I mean it's, you know, that's just another way of leveraging money. But I always, look, if I can, if I can leverage money that's not attached to other people first, that's, that's a, that's a win in my mind. Totally. Yeah. And so that's why I put them in that order.

Yeah. Yeah. So we're gonna put some accompanying videos with this episode.

One or two, whatever. Yeah.

And, and then, you know, why don't you kind of wrap up and we'll go full circle and then we'll do as we do follow up episodes. We'll continue to, you know, talk about. We're gonna talk about the same things over and over again.

We really are. But one in different levels like this one. You know, I really wanted to kind of set the stage philosophically about what your before unit, what the role of the before unit is in your business. And it's really your first level of freedom. You know, it's the level of being able to create as much money as you want in your business. It's whatever is going to drive your business, nothing is going to drive the profitability more than deploying a killer before unit and spending as much as you possibly can on that because you're looking at it that it's a money multiplying machine. Now, you know, all that said, the, you know, the prerequisite for really ramping up your before unit is that you've got a during unit that can accommodate an increase in business. So, you know, so maybe one of very soon a new episode we could do is talking about the during unit and the importance of really creating a high speed, speed, low drag system that can process all of the new business that you are capable now of generating because it's so often the biggest, the biggest thing that people, you know, spend money on, on ramping up their before unit and then their business kind of blows up because they can't accommodate. I can't tell you how many times, you know, we've had people, you know, run an ad, do a campaign, get more leads than they can handle, and feel more overwhelmed because of it.

It's a beauty of like what the one joke I would always say to my Piranha members when they would join is one of the big issues is they would all of a sudden start having management issues because all this business is coming in, right? And I would always say, well, look, you know, first, first I'm here to create some management problems for you along as some cash is coming in. But at the same time, you can get too many leaks, you can't get too much business. And in the worst case scenario, people have gone to jail because they've made promises and they've been unable to fulfill and they, I mean, you know, it's, it's now, of course, I don't think anyone, you know, unless you're, you're really not paying attention is going to use market. It's not the marketing that makes you go to jail. It's the ability to deliver on stuff. And a lot of people have great. You know, that's why it's a three tier thing. You know, it's, it really is. It's before, during and after. And if you have all those units of your business really solid, you have a very solid business.

Yeah, that's absolutely true. And that's when you said that too. And I, I don't know, we really talked about the, the distinction of the before unit of your business. That thinking of your business model modularly like that, like if you could almost imagine that the before unit of your business is completely separated from the during unit, that the, the before unit is really like operating and the customer of the before unit is your during unit. You know, they're a supplier to the during unit because a lot of times, you know, intermingling, getting people, you know, involved in running, both of them, you know, doing the before and the during and the after, it becomes kind of, you know, the during always ends up taking priority because that's where all the urgency happens. But you know, if you can imagine and start thinking about creating this separate unit, even if you imagine it either physically or metaphorically in another building, you know, that's the. If all they're focused on is doing their part. The part of the before unit is delivering, you know, leads or appointments to the, to the during unit. That's the, that's the ultimate win.

Exactly. That's what I'm trying to say. And so I will, I will end this episode because I want the last word and I don't want you to have it. I wind this up. We won this episode by reminding you to if you are new to I love marketing, go back and listen to some of the original episodes. Even most people will forget this. I will say it though. The stuff we talk about here is really principle based fundamentals. And 10 years from now, if you can remember this, you know, six months from now, a year from now, if you went back and listened to some of these episodes, you'll hear it in a different way and the transcripts are available for you. And you know, I mean just it would be smart for you to really reference these things. You'll be much better off instead of reading a book or listening to an episode to really master something. People I think would be much better served to spend less time reading and consuming tons of information and would be better off really mastering strategies, processes, methodologies. And so that's what our hope is for you. And so thank you for listening to this episode. Please give us your comments on Ilove marketing.com and tweet and Facebook and Google and whatever other carrier pigeon whatever, yeah, smoke signals, however you want to get.

This out to all of tattoos, friends.

Loved ones, you name it. Tattoos, whatever works. Tell everyone about I love marketing because you owe it to us. You really do. Ilove marketing.com.