The One Where Dean Gets Off The Hamster Wheel - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #3

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.

I feel like your sidekick here, Dean. There we go.

It's perfect. That's just the way I like it. It's a power play.

Yeah. I thought we had discussed this early on. This was going to be like Batman and Robin sort of thing, but now I'm starting to feel a little bit like Robin. But maybe that's not a bad thing. But I did all the talking on the last I Love Marketing podcast. And so now it's your turn to bedazzle all of our listeners with some hopefully amusing instructional and money making storytelling.

Well, here we go. Because last time when we were talking, you were sharing the idea of how you used your consumer awareness guide and you hired a copywriter for $1,800, all the money in the world at the time, to have them write this consumer awareness guide to carpet cleaning and answered all their questions and overcame all their objections. And you started using that in your, in your marketing, as your marketing approach. And we were talking about this whole idea of using the concept from the E. Myth of creating things that could work without you. That was the biggest lesson that I got from reading the E. Myth the first time. It really dawned on me that, you know, boy, there really is some leverage if I can create something that works without me. Because before I started, before I read that book, I was doing, you know, I was very successfully doing cold calling, calling people on the phone and. But it was, it was very effective, but it took a lot of time. And I started really realizing that it was like a hamster wheel where it works when you're doing it, but if I don't do it, then I'm not generating new business. So it was kind of like a one to one relationship and I was the hamster on the wheel doing it. And when I read this, read the E. Myth and really got like, I can still remember the feeling that I got reading that book and having an epiphany about this concept of the franchise prototype and creating something that could work without me. And I know that that's the same driver that you had for creating your consumer awareness guide. So at the time I mentioned that my focus was on townhouses and on first time buyers, that was who I was really kind of focused on. And so I started thinking, well, how can I, what could I do to leverage my time? What can I do to create something that would be a duplicatable system that I could do it again and again. And so I, I had, in the local real estate board golf tournament, I had won a half page ad in the local real estate publication. And so I decided, you know, I'm going to use this half page ad to do an ad for a seminar for a first time buyer seminar. And I took, I prepared all the stuff for the seminar and called it Six Steps to Home Ownership. And I created kind of the outline taking people through all the basic things that they would want to know. I mean it's surprisingly parallel to the idea that you had of thinking about all the things that people are concerned about with carpet cleaning. All the myths, all the things that they, all the kind of questions that they have and the things they need to know. So things like how much can I afford and what's the actual process of buying a home and what's the time timeline and you know, talking about home inspections and all these kind of things that anybody who's going to be buying a home would need to know. So what I did was create from that seminar I created a booklet called Six Steps to Homeownership. And I gave this to everybody who came to the, who came to the seminar. And so the seminar on its own was a system that I could duplicate. I could do that again and again. I could do it every week or every month. And sometimes in the spring I would do it twice a month where we do it on the first and third weeks of the month. But it was still sort of a one to one system. And this is where I had the idea. I saw that an article about the local cable company and realized I didn't know this, but the local cable company's mandate was to provide local access to people in the community to get. So it was to serve the community. And so I took that to mean that anybody could have a show on this, this channel. So I called up the guy, called up the guy who's running the, the cable channel 4 in Georgetown. And I asked him, I told him, I said, you know, I've got this homebuyer workshop that I do and I'd like to create a show called Six Steps to Home Ownership, a 30 minute show. And he said, oh yeah, that's a great idea. So we come on in and they took care of everything. They had the, they had the interns, they had the camera people, they had the editors, they had the whole, the whole situation was there. And I got, for $500 is all this whole thing cost. I got a half hour show produced and run Twice a month for a year on Channel 4, on the cable channel. And it was a infomercial, basically. I mean, because I would, I would start out, I would do the same things that I did in the, in the homebuyer workshop. And I would, instead of having them just kind of take notes, I would say right to them. And I got this like two or three times in the actual show that I would tell them, you don't need to worry about taking notes because every. Everything's right here in this workbook. Six Steps to Home Ownership. And you can get a free copy of the workbook by calling this phone number. And I would just have a, you know, it was an extra line that I had gotten in my house because this was kind of before the free recorded messages were available in Canada. And so I just used an answering machine and people could call and ask for the Six Steps to Homeownership Guide. And every time I ran this show, I would get people who called up and asked for the booklet. And so the show was running every, Every other Thursday and it was on at 7:30, which was leading into, at the time, what was NBC's, you know, Thursday night lineup, the must see TV, you know, where we had Seinfeld and Wings and Cheers or not Cheers. Matt, about you. Those shows were all like in Fraser. Those shows were kind of the ones that were, that were all on at that time. And so what I started to do was I would do everything I could to schedule a listing appointment for 7 o' clock on that Thursday so that I could say to people, we'd be talking, we'd go on a little tour of their house, we'd sit down at the kitchen, I'd start to tell them about our marketing plan. And by this time, it's 7:30. And I would say to them, you now that while I'm in here talking to you about selling your house, I'm also out there trying to find a buyer for your house. And I said, let's go to your TV for a second. And we go and I turn this on on Channel four and there I am, I'm sitting in their living room with them. We're watching the television and I'm on TV looking for buyers for their house. And it was such like a magic thing that people would just be like, that's amazing. You know, that's great. What do you think of that?

That's more credibility than a guy like you even deserves, right?

But I started thinking, you know, that that kind of, that was really just the very first really leverageable thing that I did, because right around that same time, then I started sending the business reply postcards into apartment complexes and offering them the guide to six steps to homeownership. And people would send back, you've used these little. The business reply postcards. It's like a trifold postcard. And so I would have the information about the guide, and then it would have a little. A business reply card that people could fill in. So for people listening, it's like in magazines how they have, like, those little subscription cards where you can fill in your name and just drop it in the mailbox and the postage is already paid well, so I would send the postcards with those. And I remember still, the very first time that I mailed these out, I mailed about 1500 of these postcards. And I remember pulling into the office. Our office, our real estate office at the time was a round. Was in an old house, two houses that had been joined with kind of an atrium in the middle of it, so you could pull in and you could see the receptionist there. And so I pulled in, and as I'm getting out of my car, I could see the receptionist, Joanne, and she's waving something over her head and smiling. And I couldn't see what it was. But I go in, and she has in her hand this little stack with a rubber band around it of these cards that people had filled out and sent back for this guide to six steps to home ownership. And there were like 11 of them that very first time. And I was looking through these things, and people had left their name and. And their address and their phone number. And so I went into my office and I started calling these people. And it was such an amazing thing to be talking to people who remembered asking for this guy that they were thinking about buying a house. They were happy to talk to me compared to, you know, I mean, to get 11 people, 11 prospects like that like you, you'd have to do cold calls for three nights in a row to find that many people, you know, and so to have every person that I talked to be a real prospect was just. I mean, it was crazy. And these were people who were friendly and cooperative, and they wanted to buy a house, and so they were happy to talk to me. Did you find that. That change when people would call about your consumer awareness guide, that they would be in a different mindset?

Well, you know, the whole thing is really about positioning, and it's kind of like, do you want to go out on a blind date where, you know, Nothing about each other. The person knows nothing about you and you're just kind of showing up and they're skeptical and they're worried and they're, you know, they have a fear and they don't know if they can trust you. Or would you rather have someone that's pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and pre disposed to give you money and to hire you and to do business with you and to meet with you and talk with you. So yeah, I totally found that practically this sort of education based marketing which I started calling elf Easy, lucrative and fun because for one, it's easy to work with someone that's positioned like that. It's lucrative because you're going to close a heck of a lot more business. It's fun because you're not spending your time getting rejected and talking to people that aren't interested. You're only talking to people that have a genuine interest versus what I call a half business. Hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. So you can have an easy, lucrative, fun business elf or you can have a half business which is hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. Or even if you are making money. It's hard, annoying, lucrative and frustrating. I totally found that people would no longer after I took them through a similar process, they wouldn't ask how much do you charge? They'd ask when can we work with you? How can we start working together? See, a lot of people listening to us might be listening to you, really listening to us. See how I snuck myself in there neith to kind of make it sound like I was giving some sort of grand advice here. If people are listening to this going well, yeah, but you know, you have to write stuff and you have to do this, you have to do that. I always say back to them, well, you're going to spend the time anyway. There's only three things you can spend that I'm aware of. Time, money and energy. And people can say attention, but I would throw attention into energy or effort. You know, I mean time, money and energy. And you're going to spend all of those things in one way or another. And the more that you can leverage your time, which is your most valuable asset. You're so much ahead of the game, you're so much ahead of your competitors. And so implementing this type of education is just going to provide a much different sort of interaction with the client. And what's cool is you're talking about doing all this before the Internet, you know, I mean business reply envelopes, like.

Cable TV at the time, I mean that was like you Know, that was something, I mean, literally, people like, you could see their, their reaction to it. You know, they're, they're on TV and you're in my living room. You know, it was kind of a, it was a game changer. It really was funny, you know.

Yeah, can I say something there too? Because even, you know, although the methodology you're explaining about the origin of the marketing and how it developed for both of us, we've talked about these same sort of delivery systems can work today also, a lot of people have abandoned a lot of offline marketing, a lot of direct mail. I was just in Anchorage, Alaska, and I literally visited one of my professional cleaning clients that they're still running an ad in the Anchorage, Alaska phone book for carpet cleaners. And anyone that's in Anchorage could probably pick up this phone book and it's all, you know, it's all education based call. A 24 hour free recorded message. You know, reasons why, you know, of course they have a drive to their website now. But, you know, she was telling me it's still bringing in multiples to one of return. And most people, you know, have abandoned using yellow pages in exchange for something else. Because she's like, oh, why would I ever quit using? People still call me out of the phone book. We pay, you know, we bring in multiples of what it cost. And so, you know.

Yep.

All right, so continue. Because if I keep talking and it won't be about, it's gonna take over.

You're gonna take over.

There you go. You see that? You caught me there. I was, I was going to, I was like, this is my time. I could, I can get right in there and position myself.

I'm happy to share my hair. Share. The funny thing is Joe, our carpet cleaner here in Florida, he came in, he was cleaning our carpet. There must have been some picture of you and I somewhere or some picture that you had sent me of some kind of card or something. And our carpet cleaners, like, do you know Joe Polish?

Seriously, how funny is that? Not knowing that you're Mr. Marketing Guru in your own right. Here's the funny thing I got to tell you real quick and then go back to the Dean Show. Joe Sugarman, who is the inventor, founder of Blue Blocker Sunglasses. I mean, just a marketing legend. Just made hundreds of millions of dollars and sold $300 million alone of Blue Blocker sunglasses. And you know, he's a good friend of mine, you know him too. And he had a carpet cleaner, I don't know, maybe two, three years ago, come out to his amazing home in Maui. He owns a couple of amazing beachfront houses in Maui and was cleaning his carpet. And Joe said, hey, do you know Joe Polish by chance? And he said that the carpet cleaner all of a sudden, like, you know, Joe Polish? And started asking him all these questions about. And Joe's like, going, I felt ridiculous.

Because, you know, I'm thinking, I'm the.

One that's written all these books on marketing and everything, you know, and the guy was all excited to hear about me. And I'm like, yeah, that's just kind of how it works, Joe.

It's funny. Yes.

In the carbon cleaning industry. I cannot recall once being a guru in the carpet cleaning industry has ever gotten me a date. However, there's always, you know, we'll see, we'll see. All right, so continue on, my friend.

All right, so, you know, I think that the distinction. Because you were talking about something, how you can spend money, you can spend time, you can spend energy. That the shift that you have to make, the shift that I noticed in this is that when you're doing something like cold calling or like you were doing, handing out flyers and meeting people and you're physically doing something with your time, you're trading your time for attracting business. It's a big shift to spend time doing something that isn't going to pay off today, like putting that TV show together and putting that guide together took time away from time that we would normally have spent doing the prospecting. And you're investing that time ahead of time, you know, ahead of actually getting paid for it. Because you can't. You can't get that out into the world until it's done, and it can't make you money until it's out into the world. So you're investing all this time up front kind of invisibly to anybody. Nobody knows what you're doing. Nobody sees any of that. But once you get that done, once you're spending that time up front, you are now able to turn that loose and it continues to work for you. I call it the difference between, like, between a hamster wheel and an oil well. You know, like when you're digging an oil well or you're setting up an oil and oil well, you've got something that will continue to pump again and again and again while you're not. While you're not on the wheel spinning it, you know, and that's really.

I like it. I like that analogy.

Yeah. Like when you put that whole. You have to put all that effort in and that's at time that you're not on the hamster wheel. Because the hamster wheel can be profitable too, you know, I mean doing the cold calling worked just like I'm sure handing out your flyers and meeting people worked, but it was very time consuming.

You know, and here's, here's, I think along those lines, whenever, you know, I hear someone say something that I think is a really profound analogy or distinction or insight, you know, I want to highlight it and emphasize it. And I would encourage people to do a search on the Internet and find a picture, an image of a hamster wheel and an image of an oil well. When you're spending your time, you want to really think about what's the outcome that you want if you're cold calling or you're doing anything where you're not doing marketing, which is selling in advance. The marketing that me and Dean are talking about is really selling in advance. Again, when we did the very first. I love marketing podcasts. One of the ways that I describe selling is selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody and marketing is what you do to get them on the phone or face to face with you. Again, this could be in the virtual world in your shopping cart too. Pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and predisposed to do business with you. And in this instant gratification world that we live in, people are creatures of habit. And if they're so used to cold calling or doing things a certain way, it's not in the beginning. It's very weird, very hard psychologically for some people to say, oh, let me write a sales letter, oh let me sit down and create some sort of multi step process to sift, sort and screen people and let me stay on the hamster wheel. But if you can step yourself off the hamster wheel and build yourself an oil well, once you've got it done, the amount of time and effort and energy that is going to save you in the long run, the more you're going to attract better clients. It's just, it would make no sense once you really see it, to do it any other way. I mean, it changed my life, it changed your life and it's changed the lives of thousands of our clients and many people that have adopted this. And I think it's simply the most ethical, non threatening way that you can set it up for a prospect or a buyer to do business with somebody. That's right. Yeah.

I mean, you know, that whole at that time, you Know, all the effort that I had been putting in was really about my time, you know, in doing that hamster wheel prospecting. And this was the first opportunity that I really got to see of spending money, using money as a way to turn into more money. And that was, you know, a big shift. Because when you really get this idea of sending out your postcards instead of making phone calls, Instead of making 100 phone calls, you send out a thousand postcards that are a lead generation postcard, offering something valuable to your prospects just to get them to raise their hand. And seeing those people, now you're only having to call the people who raised their hand. That was a huge breakthrough because you'd have to find one person who was friendly and cooperative and knew what they wanted. You'd have to maybe face as many as 20 rejections on the telephone in order to find that one person. So to have a stack of 11 of them in my hand and be able to talk to six of them that first night, that were all A and B prospects, that was really, that was life changing. I still, I can reconnect with that feeling that I had in my stomach. Like I was, I was almost giddy about this, you know, that it was just. I knew that I would never have to make another cold call again. Because it's almost like you're doing this, you know, to carry that, that oil well analogy. It's almost like you're doing this exploratory drilling because you're doing all this stuff. You're writing this postcard, you're creating this, you're taking them to the post. You don't have any idea whether it's actually going to work yet when it does, it's like, it must be the same kind of thing as when you're digging and you hit a gusher. You know, you got something that's going to work again and again and again. Because that really is the greatest thing about marketing, is if you solve the problem once you've solved it for a very long time.

No, it totally feels like you made a discovery that is life changing. I mean, it's better than winning an award because you know you can win the award any darn time you want once you've cracked the code. I mean, Gary Halbert always used to say, you know, the moment you get your first check in the mail, the moment someone responds to a sales letter, and the moment that you know, you know that you can actually generate business without you physically being there to sell, you know, all the better. Because, you know, Gary Kind of learned marketing by, I mean, he did door to door sales of encyclopedias, you know, the classic encyclopedia story. And he was a Pitney Bowes salesperson. And you know, there was all kinds of different face to face selling things. And I think, you know, both me and you selling newspaper subscriptions and whatnot, I think set the stage for us to kind of be in the world of selling. Although every single human being, even if they admit it or not, is a salesperson. You know, because like, like we talked about earlier, you know, everything that comes out of your mouth is either going to attract or repel someone. It's part of being able to parlay that into a system that. Yeah. Allows you to. I have, I have the analogy of a slot machine where if you can imagine having a slot machine, every time you put a dollar in, you pull the handle and $5, you know, pops up, back out. You want to shove dollars into that slot machine as frequently as humanly possible. And it really is like winning a lottery or a prize in an environment where the odds are in your favor. You're not gambling. You're literally intelligently going out there and mining for gold and you know how to find the gold. You're not just sifting mindlessly and. And most people are running around with no real strategy except the power and persuasion of their desire and in some cases, desperation to get somebody to buy something because they need to survive. And I think in a lot of ways, Dean, both me and you probably figured it out in the beginning because we needed to. You know, I mean, I know for me, my pursuit of marketing wasn't some sort of, you know, inspiration motivated desire. I mean, that was, I had that in me. The real drive was I needed to survive, I needed to eat. And you know, I wasn't any good at, you know, running a business and simultaneously having time to go out and do cold calling. I mean, I was living a pretty miserable sort of business existence when I, you know, had had my mind opened up to the fact that there's a better way, a better way that's not taught in schools. A better way that most people have no clue about. A better way that if you go and ask most your friends or your family or co workers or whatever, not only will they have no clue what the hell you're talking about, they'll try to talk you out of doing it because they think they, you know, people, what people are not up on, they're down on. I want to throw that in here just to prepare people. If you start going down this path, which of course we hope you do. Because if you do, you'll love marketing too. Because, hey, how could you not love this, right? Once you go down this path, or decide to in the beginning, you won't only have to make some shifts in how you go about prospecting. Instead of being the hamster on the wheel, you're going to have to step off and put some time in to create the oil well. People that don't understand the psychology behind it, the method to the madness, you know, they may tell you to forget it. Oh, that won't work. And they'll try to talk you out of it. Because what people are not up on, they're down on. It's just human nature. So you need to be up on it for yourself and learn it and test it and, you know, go from there. So continue on. Dean, I'm trying to take over this.

Call again because when you, when you talk about this, it's like the, you know, we came at it from, from different sides. Like you were just describing how you really came out of kind of desperation. You really had to do something. And it wasn't out of desperation for me as much as out of realizing that, that it really was a hamster wheel doing the cold calling. You know, it came really out of my, again, desire to do the easiest thing, you know, and so realizing that the cold calling works and I was good at it and successful with it, it was just getting. I was finding that I was having to really kind of psych myself up to do it more. You know, it wasn't fun, it wasn't something that I looked forward to, you know, it was, it was a disciplined effort. I mean, I really had to play a lot of games with myself to get my. To continue to do the cold calling. Like, I knew that. I mean, it's absolutely predictable. I knew that If I made 100 calls a day, that I was going to find between five and 10 good prospects. And I was committed to making those hundred calls. But I started realizing that I would start to avoid doing them, you know, like any little thing would take me off that task, you know, like anything could, could get in the way. I could be derailed from that. So I really started doing, having things like playing games with myself. Like I would pretend that I had a radio show and that I had to be on the air, is what I called it, on with my headset on, making my phone calls. I had to be on the air from 10 o' clock in the morning till 12 o' clock and so that. Just that game of setting it up, like that kind really made me block that time off. But. And. But it was a temporary fix, you know, and so I don't know whether you had a. You had a. An easy time going out and knocking on the doors and meeting people, like, whether you enjoyed it or did you enjoy it or what did you find it like.

No, no, I thought. I thought it sucked. I mean, to me. To me doing any. I mean, I probably convinced myself because I was listening to, you know, a lot of motivational tapes and things like that.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, in a lot of ways, I think that's one of the reasons that motivational tapes exist, because there's, you know, the. You know, having a positive mental attitude is at least better when you're doing drudgery than a negative mental attitude. However, when it comes to making money, having a positive mental attitude is no different than having a negative perspective. Making money and doing things is doing things. And so we have an entire industry, I think, built up around keeping people excited for doing drudgery. I never really liked it. I liked it when I made a sale. But all of the. It's kind of like the whole thing with shortcuts. I mean, there's a lot of truth to the whole statement of if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And that you're going to have to. If you want some fire, you're going to have to put in the wood first and you're going to have to put in effort. I mean, yeah, you're going to have to do work. I mean, something doesn't become an elf business in the beginning, right off the top, unless you're really lucky or you just totally get everything right. Once in a while that happens. And I would just call that luck. And in some cases, obviously, a little bit of intelligence. But for the most part, there are shortcuts. The best shortcut I ever learned.

For.

Making money is learning direct response marketing. I have a good friend who's been in a wheelchair for over 30 years. His name is Dave Kekich. I've interviewed him for Genius Network a few times. I've told a lot of people about him, and he wrote these hundred credos called Kekich Credos. And one of them has a statement where life's easy if you live it the hard way and hard if you live it the easy way. You can use that analogy with exercise. An example. Exercising is hard, but if you do, makes your life easier in other ways. Well, in Marketing, learning and writing a sales letter and doing some of the setup is hard, but man, does it make everything else easier once you do it, not doing it, you won't have to learn this stuff. You won't have to get into the psychology of your clients. You're going to go up and promiscuously spend money on different forms of client generation. And if you're not spending money, you're spending time, you're spending energy. But, but it doesn't make things easier. The easy stuff is what makes life hard in the beginning. It's a lot easier to maintain momentum than it is to create it. Because after you got that first response, I bet your entire life just totally shifted.

Oh yeah, because I knew then that now I could just spend money, that it was just a matter of how many of these do I want? Because I knew that I could buy them for. I think I ended up getting about 28 responses that first mailing 1500 postcards and 28 responses from that. So it was really great response and a great roi. And so you really start thinking. And that was my first kind of realization that, boy, it is a lot easier to spend money than it is to spend time, you know, or energy, because it's really, it's. It's effortless to spend money, you know, and they're, it's just as valuable. I knew that I could trade that whatever it cost to send those 1500 postcards and, you know, trade that for an ongoing supply of people who wanted to buy a home. And the same thing was happening with the, with the Six Steps to Home Ownership TV show, you know, and the seminars. And the great thing is like every single thing that you do builds on the last, because the effort that you put into building this oil well is going to pay off long term. So now you've got all these things going for you that. Now while I was working on, you know, while I had that TV show going now I was working on putting the postcards together to send to the apartment complexes. So now I had two oil wells working. You know, I had the, the TV show that was on every other week. I had the postcards that I could send out at any time and get people calling in. And then I started working on another system that was a kind of became the real home run of this. But what was your. The next thing that you did, let's say after you did the, the consumer awareness guide, I mean, did you find that now you could dedicate some time to doing additional things that were, even though you didn't know what to call them oil wells at the time. Did you have that sense that you were working on digging other oil wells? Oh, yeah, totally.

I mean, because once you plant the seed, then it grows and all kinds of other things develop out of it, which I never would have known what those things would have been until I started down the path and started doing it. But once I had the consumer awareness guide, then, like I mentioned, I paid the copywriter 250 bucks additional of the 1800 I'd already paid him and had him take the consumer awareness guide script and turn it into a free recorded message, which I talked about. A script for a 24 hour free recorded message. And then I started putting that free recorded message on the back of my business cards. I put it on the side of my van with a magnetic sign in the beginning until I actually had my van lettered with it, actual vine open on the van. Then I started going to carpet retailers and giving them stacks of consumer awareness guides and business reply little cards where it said request this free guide and blah, blah, blah, and it would be perforated. Where they actually could take one piece with them that had the consumer awareness message on it and another bottom piece where they could fill out their address, drop it in the mail, and I would mail them a consumer awareness guide. I would always recommend to the carpet retailer that here's a few consumer guides you can have on hand, but please just have people drop them in the mail. Because I wanted the name, I wanted the lead. And then I started going and doing joint ventures with different people. One of my first joint ventures was a dry cleaner of clothing where we offered a free room of carpet cleaning up to 200 square feet and then a carpet audit, which I believe I talked about that in one of the previous podcasts. So I started doing that, started doing monthly client newsletters, created a free room offer for past clients where I would send them a letter saying, it's been six months to a year since we cleaned your carpets. And then I, you know, everything. I had letters that we would drop off on neighborhoods and I would have them delivered on doorsteps and on neighborhoods where we literally, there was no quote unquote soliciting or entry. And I wasn't doing this. I'd pay other people to do it. A lot of people have their kids do it. Other people hire delivery services to do it. I mean, we started putting, I remember a pizza delivery place that actually put the flyer on top of their pizza boxes that I would pay them to do that. So I went from not even ever spending money on direct mail to spending a lot of money on direct mail. And to go to your point about people spending money to this day, and I think it is the most idiotic justification of stupidity that exists for many business owners is they'll be like, oh, I don't spend any money on advertising. You know, they brag about it. It's like, well, I was just going.

To say that's the thing. They brag about it.

Yeah. As if that is like an accomplishment. The only time that would be an accomplishment of not spending money on advertising is if you're spending money on advertising.

That is not working.

But if you actually spent $1,000 on a direct mail campaign, an Internet campaign, a telemarketing campaign, it doesn't matter what it is. It could be direct response involving sales copy and reason why themes. Or it could be literally manual marketing. If you can cut a check and it costs you 1000 bucks and it brings in 1500 or it brings in 2000 or brings in 10,000, why would you not do that? One of the dumbest things that's taught is like a marketing budget or an advertising budget. I remember in Business School, 10% budget for marketing.

Well, the only time the budget you're.

Marketing is when it doesn't work so you don't go broke so quickly. Because if you, if you're running a business that's bringing in, say, $5,000 a month in sales, or let's say $10,000 a month in sales, why the hell would you budget 10% of that? Say $1,000 of your revenue is all you can spend on marketing. If you spent $1,000 and it brought in five grand, I mean, I'd spend as much as humanly possible that you can scale and that you can deliver the business without, you know, dropping the ball and having it, you know, result in bad, you know, delivery of your products or services to people. I mean, it's just insane, some of the crap that people believe and some of the stupid justifications they have for not getting themselves rich.

Yeah, because that's one of the questions that I always ask people, what are you doing with your money? Like, I mean, you know, the kind of person who's going to say, well, I don't spend any money on advertising, like, they're bragging about it. I would almost expect that logic to say, yeah, well, I just bury a hole in the backyard and I just throw my money in that to keep it safe, you know, I mean, it's just that same Kind of logic, you know, it doesn't make any sense. And you think about what else could you do with money that has the potential to three times, five times, ten times your investment in literally 90 days? You know, most businesses have a short sort of turnaround time, right? Like you can invest money in marketing today and within three or four months you're going to get the return on that, on that money.

Oh yeah. Well, you know, people will go out and they'll finance cars, they'll spend money on, you know, all kinds of, of everything from flat screen TVs to lessons for this or to this sort of gadget or this device. And they just, they're so chintzy when it comes to spending any sort of money on marketing. And it's like there's nothing that I'm aware of that could bring a higher return than that. There's no investment. And again, except for maybe these one in a million sort of things where someone invests money in the very beginning of a startup and they get super rich or whatever. But that's all guessing for the most part. And this is scientific. I mean, if you follow direct response principles, the beauty of this type of marketing is it's trackable, it's testable, it makes sense. It's not, you know, it's not, you know, hit or miss. I mean, you, there's response mechanisms, you know, because the stuff that we use, I mean, if it doesn't, you know, we can, when we do that, when we do our tracking, you know, we know to the penny if it produced a result or it or it didn't. And yeah, you just don't have those.

Yeah, I try and show people that math, you know, like to think about it. If you were, you were a rock star investor and you could annually yield 20% on your money, you'd be among the rock stars. I mean, Warren Buffett averages less than 20% annually. And look at the idea of even the most mediocre direct response campaign is going to Yield More than 20%, you know.

Right, right, right, exactly.

It's funny how people would get excited about a stock that goes up 20% and feel like they're winning, yet not invest money in something that could. Three, five, ten times.

When I first learned marketing, when I got my first Gary Halbert newsletter, I was $30,000 in debt. Small carpet cleaning company back in 1992. I've been working my butt off for a couple years trying to figure out how to make that business work. Working long hours. I was not just sitting around I was working really hard, I was trying to figure it out. Within a six month period, I went from $2,100 a month in gross revenue to over $12,000 a month with a single truck. I hired a part time person and you know, I mean 2000 to over 12,000 six month period. I mean what investment could I have ever done that would have done that? And plus I didn't have any money to put any money into an investment. It's not like I was sitting on 50 or 100 grand. I was $30,000 in debt, so I had to parlay. So I started out consumer awareness guys. I'd seen a lot of this. Even though I created the copy, I paid for it, kind of like, but I believed in it. And more importantly, I was always focusing on the prospect, not on me. Image advertising, which is the complete opposite of direct response. I mean it's such ego based advertising. And I think one of the biggest enemies of people using successful marketing is they have to give up the love affair with their logo, their brand, their perception of what they think they sell, and start really thinking about creating value for other people. What does the prospect want? What are they afraid of? Why should it matter to them? How can you make an offer that is so irresistible that they can't say no?

How can you?

You back it up with a powerful guarantee or some premise that takes literally, that obliterates the objections that they have for buying. Remember, if people want what you're selling, the only thing that stands in the way of them buying it from you or someone else is fear. Remove the fear and they will buy. This sort of marketing is really designed to remove a lot of the fears. Fear is they don't understand what you're selling. They don't understand the difference between you and somebody else. They don't know if they can trust you. So when people listen to your story of how you literally interacted with real estate prospects, what you were doing was.

You were robotically.

Creating trust and rapport before they ever met you. And you were totally setting the stage. You were creating a selling environment. And that's what this does. It allows you to create an environment that makes it easy, lucrative and fun for people to do business with you. And that's what you want no matter what business you're in. And even if you're in a business that like medical services, I mean a doctor still markets medical services, a model markets her beauty, a carpet cleaner markets carpet cleaning, a graphic designer markets design. So whatever business you're in and you Have a lot of people that just don't know why they should do business with you or even use you at all. Someone can go to a grocery store and rent like a rug doctor to clean their carpets versus hiring a professional, and they actually do good marketing and actually convince people that that's a superior way of cleaning carpets versus a real professional, which of course is not the case.

It's a joke.

I mean, you can't. No one would be out these carpet cleaners that are spending 15 to $20,000 on truck mounts and getting educated on chemistry and stuff. They wouldn't be doing that if you could get the same sort of results off some do it yourself thing that you can rent at Home Depot or whatever. But the truth is that unless the carpet cleaner is going to do a good job of educating his prospect, they're going to lose business to people buying machines on infomercials, on television that are just a crappy, dumb way to clean your carpets. But the consumer doesn't know any better until someone shows up and explains to them. And no matter what business you're in, it still applies. What else, Dean, would you say about your story and insights and going back to the E. Myth that you would kind of want to leave the listeners with on this episode of this podcast and then maybe some action steps you'd recommend for them. Yeah, yeah.

Because I think, you know, what I skipped in there, and I think this is a natural progression, and I'm interested.

To hear whether you went through this.

Too, is that between making the cold calls, which I was doing and doing successfully, and experimenting with direct response and having sort of a hit on my first attempts at that, what happened in between that was a period of time where before I knew about direct response marketing, I was getting, you know, still kind of thinking, I'm going to start using some of my money now to, you know, to generate business. But my initial thought was to spend that money on getting my name out there, you know, on getting famous. And. And it was really this idea of spending some money so that if people knew who I was, that would get more business from that. And so I started spending image ads in the newspaper and doing things that didn't have any kind of direct response to them. But I took the. I contracted to take the front page of the real estate section for a year. So it was really like I was. There was like pole position, you know, being the first Realtor that people see when they get the Wednesday real estate section or the weekend. One couldn't do that on The Wednesday on the weekend one that, that brought me a lot of fame. People would recognize me, but it didn't directly translate into people, more people calling me, you know. And so it was becoming very expensive to do that. And I was having to work a little bit harder at the cold calling to sort of keep up and make the money to continue paying for the ads and stuff, you know. But did you, did you go through a phase like that where you were trying to get. What was the name of your carpet cleaning business, by the way?

Well, in the beginning it was Superior Carpet Care. And then a person, another company opened up a Superior Carpet Care. Although I had registered, you know, DBA and you know, with the county recorder here in Arizona, you know, I had the name registered. You know, this company started using it and they were like a bait and switch company. And so in the process of, you know, fighting sort of a legal letters back and forth, even though you're in the right, you still have to. If someone tries to basically knock you off and you want to protect your name, you still have to spend time, money and energy on it. I ended up changing the company name to Fibertech because I had a good friend in California that had that name and he gave me all of the graphics that were really cool and modern and stuff. Just so you know, I really didn't care all that much about. And to this day really don't. I have a full time brilliant graphic designer that works for me. We actually have Piranha Marketing Design where we actually do full blown design for companies and stuff. But we do design that enhances and incorporates copy and direct response. We don't do image just for the sake of image. There's no reason to do any sort of illustrations or photos or graphics or logos if you don't have anything else that has substance to it. So, you know, I mean, I changed the name to Fiber Tech. I thought it was really cool and that was the name that I was using. But you know, in terms of kind of what you're saying, I certainly did probably over the years and probably even back then, I mean, once I really kind of took on direct response. I mean, I stayed pretty close to it because I spent many years, you know, being broke. And so I once, once I found a way of something that worked. You know, my whole thing was, well, you know, let's. Definition of insanity. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, not. Yeah, you know, you're absolutely right. I mean once I, once I discovered Direct Response, everything changed. But this was like on my path before I discovered Direct response. And I don't think that I could have appreciated direct response as much if I didn't have that experience of the institutional advertising not working. Like, I think that.

Yeah, well, let me just jump in and interrupt you. There was a money mailer type. It was like a Valpak money mailer type dealer. That's what I was looking for. Yeah. And I actually signed a six month contract with them. And like literally first week I did, it didn't work. And the response was, well, the reason it didn't work is people need to see your ad over and over again so they know that you're a real company and they recognize you. They're saying that loosely based on truth. The truth is that repetition, repetition works to a certain degree, but you can't repeat zeros. If it zeroes out or you're going in the negative, seeing it over and over again is not going to dramatically shift response. And so the things to repeat are the things that actually are working or at least breaking even. Because if you're acquiring a client and at least breaking even with referrals and back end and repeat business, just the fact that you've acquired a client, you can usually, in some cases there are things in my business that I will go negative in the acquisition of a client because I know I can make it up in the back end. We should talk about that in future podcasts. We'll talk about the first sale, what to do after that, stick strategies, all those things that we'll continually talk about on I love marketing. However, I believe that the reason this wasn't working is people hadn't seen it enough. As if, if like in the case of carpet cleaning, Mrs. Jones is going to her calendar holding my coupon and saying, well, as soon as I get 10 more of these coupons and I know this carpet cleaner spent money on them all, I know that's a trustworthy company, then I'll do business with them. These advertising people, they lie or they're just ignorant. And there's a huge difference between someone that's really effective at selling advertising versus creating advertising that works. People take a lot of advice from people that are out there selling customer generating methodologies and advertising and stuff that don't know the first damn thing about how to create a promotion for you that will generate business for you. Not in all cases, but in many.

Cases that's the big shift is realizing that direct response is not about you, it's about them and really focusing on that. Totally.

Yeah. I mean, people have to put Their ego down. They have to get rid of their preconceived notions. I have a really good friend here that I won't even say the business he's in because I'm going to make him listen to the I Love Marketing podcast anyway, so I don't want to bash him too much. Running a huge company, I mean, like one of the biggest in the valley in Phoenix, Arizona, gigantic Internet presence, and this guy just insists on having his damn dog on his website and on the storefront and everything in this business he's in. And it's cute and he's learned some direct response things from me, but he's not fully embraced. It's really hard to let go of that ego stuff. And he really thinks I'm like, dude, you're not Budweiser.

I think people have to make the choice whether their advertising is to entertain them or to sustain them. And, you know, there's a big difference. People who want to put. When they do an ad and they want to be clever and they want to put their, you know, their slogan or their clever witty saying or their picture of their dog or call themselves some funny name where you're shining the spotlight on the business, you know, on you. It's completely the opposite. Like, you look at, you know, our both. Both of us, the first thing that really worked for us was nothing about us.

It was.

I mean, you did a consumer awareness guide for. For people about carpet cleaning, and I did one for people about buying their first home. And, you know, the truth is that could work in any business. In any business where people have to make a rational decision. I love what you said the other in a previous podcast about, you know, people don't want to make. Make irrational, stupid decisions. They want to make rational, smart decisions.

Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That's true in any business. In any business. I mean, so if we just kind of like look behind the curtain at that and see what the winning structure is that was in play on both of those. I think that would be a great place to pick up for our next episode, is to kind of like break it down and look at the elements that could be applied to any business and we can maybe brainstorm some, you know, how we would apply it to. Let's just name a bunch of businesses and kind of apply that same winning formula to. Because we're going to have people who are in any business. You can imagine listening to this. And so I think we don't want to get to where people think. Yeah, well, that works in real estate. And that works in carpet cleaning, but I'm in the massage business or I'm a chiropractor or, you know, it's like the mechanics or the underlying structure of it is really what makes it work, you know, because you and I, we were influenced by the same things. It was just. What did we apply it to? And it's amazing how this is everything we've talked about so far is before we ever met. I mean, it's the.

Yeah.

Got us on the right path. That's what kind of led us to each other in a way, you know?

Yeah. No, exactly. Yeah, it was. It was the same area of interest in marketing. And that's how we met. We met through, you know, being in this business. That's a great place to lead off. I want people to remember that. I had to figure out how to use direct response in an industry selling something that nobody wants to buy. No consumer really looks forward to hiring a carpet cleaner. It's kind of like one of those unnecessary things you do because you own the stuff. It's about as exciting as getting your oil change in your car, or for some people, going to the Department of Motor Vehicles and renewing their license. I mean, it's not something that you're jumping up. And I can't wait to get my carpets cleaned. I can't wait till the kids go back to school and the carpet's all crappy, so I can. People aren't thinking that. So if anyone listening has anything remotely more exciting than carpet cleaning or real estate or whatever, they can use these principles. This is the same stuff that I've taught to Bill Phillips early on in my carpet cleaning business. He was one of my first. First big clients that use direct response to the same sort of strategies in the whole fitness and exercise industry. This stuff works in numerous industries. No matter what, it just simply does. As a listener, don't ever think that your business is different. All human beings respond to the five basic human stimuli as every other, you know, human being. I'll start sounding like J. Abraham now, but basically, you know, sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. I mean, you know, human beings are human beings. They want to make an informed, intelligent decision. They want. They. They want to know what it is they're purchasing. They all have fears and concerns. Who can they trust? And that's. That's what this stuff does. And. Yeah. So, Dean, thank you for sharing. You know, we've known each other for many, many years, and just by doing these podcasts, I learn more about you every day, which in some cases is scary. In other cases it's really good and instructional. What do you think of that next week?

That'll be a great time to break it down. We'll talk about the formula and then we'll stop focusing on us and we'll start focusing on them.

Remind me too, because I have high levels of entrepreneurial add, so I'll leave it up to you to remind me. Good. Good.

Another good week.

Awesome. Thank you, Dean. Thanks everyone. I love marketing Dot.