The Wow Package Philosophy: How to Get Anyone's Attention With a Handwritten Card, Pinata, or a Single Shoe with Joe Polish, Dean Jackson, Featuring Tony Jeary - I Love Marketing Episode #483

Hello, everyone.

As we're welcoming everyone here, today's topic is, well, the question nobody asks, the WOW package philosophy. It's an implementable, doable, very unique marketing model that I think everyone— no, I know everyone in this audience can benefit from. Dean Jackson, my man, how are you doing this morning?

Fantastic. I'm excited to be here.

So here, let me say this early on. Sitting next to me in— and I'm sitting in his headquarters right now, Tony Jerry. He has the Results Center here in— let me show you this thing. So, this is Results Center.

This is—

I just walked into this place less than maybe 30 minutes ago. And I saw it last night. And it is the coolest freaking building all built around what everyone here wants, which is results.

Mm-hmm.

And so, I'm going to have him introduce himself in just a moment. But he's— I met him through Peter Thomas. Many of you know Peter. He's really amazing, most ambitious 88-year-old entrepreneur that I've ever met. Him and Tony have been friends for many, many years, and he's one of my— he's my oldest 100K member. And we're getting ready to go to the Bahamas on a boat and hang out for the next few days. But I flew into Dallas so I could see this incredible place that you built.

Yeah, Peter and I have been doing this summit now for like 10 years. And he tells me about 3 months ago, well, I sold all my yachts, so we can't do the summit on the yacht anymore. I'm like, well, Peter, you have a lot of money. When you have a lot of money, you're like 90, just charter a yacht. Oh yeah, we could do that.

Yep.

So he charters this big yacht and then he goes, there's 4 staterooms. I think we should invite Joe. Do you think Joe would want to come with us? I go, that'd be so cool. So that's the way I got Joe to come to the Results Center. I'm like, why don't you just swing by and then we'll fly on down and meet up with Peter.

Real quickly, how many books have you written at this point?

133.

133 books. And you have a meeting right now. He came in here to do this sit-in with us, and he's got 16 people that are part of a company that he coaches and got. What do you do here at the Results Center? There's some, I mean, I've walked around a little bit. It's pretty insane.

Our main thing is this right here, guys, is almost everybody wants the results they want and they want it faster. So we built this think tank, if you will, here in Dallas to bring people, cool people like you guys that really are into thinking better. Uh, I own part of about 10 different companies. One of those companies is a mortgage company, and we bring our loan officers in 12, 15 at a time, and we help them think better. And the next day might be another company and another company, another company. And so we just are all about helping people do exactly this.

Yep.

Results faster. Everybody wants that.

And how long you been in business?

I did my first gig, Joe, for the grandson of Hallmark Cards in 1982.

Of Hallmark Cards?

The grandson. Yeah, the grandson. So '82, so 45 years.

Wow.

Wow.

And it's funny because my friend John Butcher, who I was texting with this morning, owns Precious Moments, the largest collectible company, and Hallmark was their biggest distributor. So they did $13 billion in worldwide sales of those Wow. Of Precious Moment figurines. And I think at least probably 8 or 9 million came directly from Hallmark.

So today we were chatting about the wow package philosophy. And this is an interesting one because if you look at it one way, it's the kind of thing that Joe does. But if you look at it another way, it's a strategy that you can absolutely steal from Joe with his encouragement and with his direction. To get results, you know, which we were just talking about a few minutes ago. And, um, and it's, it's even easier in today's age of AI, today's age of Amazon, today's age of all these things we can do. So Dean, why don't you introduce us to this concept first? Hopefully the internet might catch a little bit more for Joe, and then we'll go from there. But what is the WOW package philosophy? And give us one field report for it, if you would.

Well, the big field report for me is over the last— I'm just today on episode 55 now, 55 daily videos that I'm posting on YouTube and Facebook of going through my 30 years of journals. And I've got such an excellent routine system right now of— I'm telling people I'm kind of entering my Regis Philbin phase where I get up And I pick up one of my journals and I'm going sequentially through them. We're 55 episodes in. We just started journal number 5. And I glance through, I pick one insight that jumps off the page for me. Then we turn on the camera and I talk for 10 minutes about that one thing. And they go live at 11 and they turn into a daily email. So this content creation system and— Really harvesting all the things. I was— I've been encouraging Joe that— you've seen the videos that Joe has posted up of this, you know, massive house that he has full of millions of dollars of marketing campaigns and sales letters and education courses and all that stuff. And he's going through trying to figure out what to do with it. I suggested, and this would be good, let us know in the comments whether this is something you'd like to see. I said, what if you treated this like Antiques Roadshow and you just got a simple table with a black cloth and then you go in and you pick one thing from the pile and you sit down and you talk about whatever is, whatever's inside it. from that, I think that that is a lifetime supply of super valuable content. So I would encourage anybody, if you've got anything you can mine for content, for creating insight, go for it. That's the amazing field report for me.

Let me jump into this. Nice. I just emailed it over to Gina and Paul. I don't know if you're able to pop it up. I could probably find the yeah, I'm probably find the video. But I was thinking of how can I create? How can I share something today? And by the way, there's this Texas barbecue that's just been dropped off for me and Tony, and I'm like, what am I supposed to do with it? Am I supposed to while we're doing this live?

Why wouldn't you?

I would give Jay Abraham shit because he would talk and carried his like expensive seminars. I'm like, well. Both me and Tony have food here he paid for. Like, I probably need to be courteous and eat some of it while we're doing it. So, which is funny. So, I have this archive of my $2 million plus library that I personally invested in. And it's my own courses. It's other courses I bought. It's like everything going back over 30 years. And I have not thrown it out because I'm obviously a hoarder, but I don't like hoard like lint and socks. I hoard like million-dollar marketing ideas and books and things like that. So based on my library and just being in Tony's office, he's got this incredible archive of wisdom. It has generated several billion dollars for my clients over the last 30 years. And it's— and we're scanning it, digitizing it. We're going to AI-ify it. And I have this idea of creating a marketing museum because I have one of the greatest swipe files of anyone and also an addiction recovery museum because I've got all this historical stuff and I love the tactile version of it. So as some of you know, one of the things me and Dean have been recently talking about is there's less noise in people's mailboxes than ever before in history. And we are teaching Genius Youth and our Genius Network members to handwrite personal cards, you know, going back to things that I've done for years. And one of the things that I've been suggesting is, yep, write either 1 or up to 10 a day handwritten cards. Brilliant.

Brilliant.

And you do it all the time.

Even after cards here. Look at this. Yep. So yeah, I'll keep them right here.

Perfect.

Look, I got one in the mail.

Turn this around so you can—

from Randy Brill.

I keep them right here. You guys see it?

Mm-hmm.

Right there. So it's easy, right? Right there, easy. Yep.

And so you got the one from Randy Brill.

I got a beautiful, like, first of all, Randy Brill has amazing handwriting. So to see that, it's almost like a gift just getting the thing.

Oh, look at that.

But a nice little card and then a handwritten note. Like, I pride myself, I'm a guy with, I have really good handwriting for a guy. And, but this is a really, this is exceptional. And it makes you feel good, you know, you know, even though you know that we're talking about doing this, but to get a handwritten note from Randy is a, is a treat. You always, you leave with a smile. It makes an impact. You know, 100% that AI did not do this. AI did not do this handwritten note with the actual sentiment that Randy was sharing in the, in the notes. And for the time that it takes, the impact of it is huge. How long have you been doing notes like that, Tony?

3 decades.

Yeah. And so amazing.

Why would you, why would you miss that? It's a blind spot if you don't do it. Yeah.

Right.

And then you could either say I'm lazy, right? That's one thing you say, I'm lazy. You can't really say it's a blind spot because we all know. But then if you bring it up like we're doing right now, then everybody go, oh yeah, maybe I should be doing that more. Like, why not? But you know what? What I found is this: if you have it where it's right there easy, and then what I have is I have many assistants, but I have it where I don't take the time to address it. I just write the card, stamp it, and they go. And I have my team put them in front of me every day also. Remind me, remind me, who should I thank? Who should I appreciate? Right? I got a cool book, by the way. Let me tell you about this book. I got a cool book on appreciation. Mm-hmm. And I find that most people never go to their loved ones, their spouse, their kids, and go, quit appreciating me. We never do, right?

Quit appreciating me.

Stop. I'm not—

I'm sick and tired of you appreciating me. It's just like you never do that. And so what I'm suggesting is, to your point on the handwritten notes, You could give a compliment, you can give a recognition, you can appreciate, and people dig it, right? And be genuine. I mean, it's like, it's a great thing to put out there. I was just bragging about Joe. He walked in, I introduced him to some of our loan officers about, here's a guy that gives, right? You give recognition, you give appreciation, and giving doesn't have to be money, you know? Yeah. A handwritten note. So cool, right?

Yeah. Uh, you know, I, I, I love that too because there, that is If you— Dan Sullivan has these referability habits, and the referability habits are show up on time, do what you say you're going to do, finish what you start, and say please and thank you. And if people don't say please and thank you, if they don't, then they don't come across as being viewed as one. Do they acknowledge you? Do they respect you? Do they appreciate you? And appreciation is similar to money. It eats things in assets. It depreciates or appreciates.

Yes.

And human relationships appreciate to the degree that you water them. You know, if you have a beautiful plant, if you have a beautiful garden, and all of a sudden you, you know, quit watering it, you quit, uh, tilling it, you quit, uh, you, you, you, you quit nurturing, uh, humans, it's the same thing. They wilt. These relationships wilt. Eventually they die. And so the constant touchpoints, and all of us, every one of us here sends out thousands of emails, uh, mostly daily. However, the 1 to 10 handwritten cards a day, 5 days a week, don't— you can take weekends off.

Mm-hmm.

Always get infinitely more personal response because there's a depth to it. Our goal here with doing the I Love Marketing Podcast Live is with all the AI slop out there, people can make anything sound good, but we're like going, let's connect with real humans. Like the handwritten card, just like we're doing today. This is all attempt to get as up close and personal as humanly possible. You can't get more up close and personal than live. The only thing more personal is to be in the room together, right? As much as we can be face to face and in a room together, but this is the second best thing.

So the takeaway everybody needs to be thinking, in my opinion, is put the cards in front of you.

I was just going to say that. Do you do that, Dave? Well, yeah, when you look at the system— no, I don't. I'm going to now from your cue. One of the things that Dan Sullivan talks about is his 3-question test of things is, is there— when you know what the result is, is there any way I can get this result without doing anything? And that's a— that's the first thing. So no, you can't get the impact of writing a handwritten note if you don't handwrite the note. But the reality is, is what's The most important piece of this that only you can do. And what you're doing is writing the note and putting it to the side.

I don't stamp it. I don't address it.

I don't put it in the mail.

Yes, that is exactly it.

I don't even order the card. Someone else does.

So when you create an environment where I'm sure you've got those right by, where are you going to be struck by the inspiration to write a note. It's probably because you talked to somebody on the phone, you got an email, or you were on a Zoom. If all you can do right then, grab the card, handwrite the thing.

Yeah, let me go a step further, Dean. Let me tell you what, I have my assistants think for me, who can I thank and appreciate?

Great.

And then I have them pre-address and pre-stamp and put it in front of me. So it's ready to go. And then I don't even take the time to stick it back in the envelope. I just give it back to them. But what I'm saying, those of you that might have team members, to your point on the system, have the team members help you think. Because I forget to appreciate people, right? And I'm pretty intentional. Yeah. And I'm sure, right, how many of you like would have other people in your life going, man, you should send a thank you note to that person. Appreciate it, right?

I love what Cliff just wrote. I'm writing one now.

Cheers, cheers to that, whoever that is. Good job, right?

Oh, Cliff. Good old Cliff.

Here's another one for you. To that point, I teach a concept called an elegant solution. And the concept I teach, Dean, is you can oftentimes do one thing and accomplish 2 things at once.

Yes.

Sometimes if you have the cards right here with you, you can be listening, observing, you could be enjoying music, and at the same time be writing. So Chris or whoever did that, love it, right?

There was a book years ago called The 90-Minute Hour by Jay Conrad Levinson. And that was the idea of doing things while you can do something else.

Wow. Wow. That was like a long time ago.

That's an opportunity to create a 90-minute hour that you're listening to a podcast while you're doing this or you're watching something.

Well, you know what?

Let me say, go ahead, Paul.

Go ahead, Paul. There's something important here that we need to say. Speak to because there is this general goodwill feeling we're all getting right now. Like, like mom would be so happy that I'm learning about writing thank you cards right now, you know, and it's, it's a good proper thing to do. You know what's interesting here is I'd defy anyone to spend an hour on an email campaign and to spend an hour writing cards where the cards does less than the email campaign. I mean, this is a map. issue. This is a time issue. You know, whether or not, you know, you're in a situation where you can have your assistant pre-write them for you, or you have to— poor guy, poor gal— rewrite them yourself, this is still a strategy that needs to be played.

Mm-hmm.

And it's the strategy of rising above the noise to make that motion. My desk is full of crap. There's no way I— you know, if I showed the camera right now, everybody would be, you know, you know, disgusted. But at the top is the stuff I've got from Randy because that's the stuff I play with. That was the stuff that was personal and that kind of thing. Let's face it, everybody in this room has Amazon Prime. You can get a 99-cent item from Amazon. You can pay the $3.50 for the gift wrapping. You can have somebody— something on somebody's desk right now, you know, for, for, you know, $5, $6. It's just not that big of a deal. So Joe, tell us about your little wow experience to Richard Branson. And for those of you know the history of Joe, he's had a long history of Richard. Because we're doing pre-roll. I'm like, Joe, we don't need the 15-year-old story. Joe's like, no, that was this week. So, so give us a wow connection here, Joe, um, you and Richard.

Well, so one of the things— and I was recording here on, uh, and here's what's funny. I picked up my phone when you were talking about Randy. I started recording it because I don't think Randy's on with us today. And it— my brain immediately goes to when people hear other people talking about them. People like— go back to Dale Carnegie. People love the Yeah, right. And one of the things— and I love Randy. Randy's awesome. And I wanted to shoot a video of you talking about how you got this car from Randy because Randy does a lot of stuff for me. She's a Genius Network member. She's an important relationship to me. She's very creative. She's very helpful. So I was just going to send her the video. I was going to repurpose something that's already been done. Same to the one you talked about.

Yeah, I love it.

I love it, dude.

Love it.

Exactly. So I'm going through my whole archive of stuff at this, at this home that I have rented just to process and digitize all of these things. And I recruit people into helping me with this pretty big project. And I found a whole bunch of magazines with Richard Branson on the COVID because at one point in time I was Richard Branson's largest fundraiser. I started doing those trips to Necker Island that I ended up eventually turning over to a guy named Yannick Silver. And he does these Necker trips. But I started all that. And before that, even Virgin didn't even think to package Richard up as part of renting the island. I'm the one that came up with that in 2007. So I've interviewed Richard probably more than anyone. Just, I've spent 6 weeks of my life on Necker Island, and I had, you know, dinner, lunch, and most breakfasts almost daily with Richard and with a small group anywhere from you know, 25 to 28 people. And so I have hours and hours of stuff, and I collected all these things. And so in the process, I started finding magazines with, you know, Tony Robbins on the COVID Richard Branson, you know, different people that I know. All these magazines that I used to run ads in, from Inc. magazine, Fortune, Forbes, Success, etc. So I have this huge collection of magazines, predominantly because I was running ads, or there was articles that I wrote in a lot of these magazines, everything from my carpet cleaning magazines to Bill Phillips, the Body for Life author, who I was his marketing consultant with for, you know, over 13 years. So the Richard Branson thing is I have a bunch of magazines that I had taken pictures of, and I sent him a video saying, Richard— and I now have to stop this video to pull up the email. So this goes back. So I send Richard— I pulled up the email. Richard, look what I found and watch this short video if you want me to send you this stuff. And it was a picture. Now the Playboy magazine is because they interviewed him. So Karma Electra is on, on, uh, that one. And then there's covers of him on these magazines. These are the first 3 that I found. And then he wrote back, how kind, that would be great. Not sure if it's the picture of myself or the pictures of the girls in Playboy that has attracted me. Much love to you. Richard, and then I wrote, you know, Richard, it might be both. If you want me to send you the magazines, I found a whole bunch of them on the COVID and I can just send them or scanned a PDF, whatever you prefer. And then he writes back, only send if it's not too difficult. Otherwise, a PDF works great. Thanks, Joe. Typically kind of you. And I wrote, I can get my team to scan the covers and the articles and have them emailed over. The other option is I send them to Necker Island. I keep finding more magazines with you on the COVID because I collected so much stuff during the period of time with all the stuff we're doing. So I'll create a cool collection. And I wrote, you sure have created one heck of a PR machine. Beyond that, I hope you're doing amazing. He goes, a scan would be great. Not sure why you're taking on this role, but so kind of you. Now, so then I sent more and he wrote, and then I wrote, Richard, here are the scans of the magazine so far. If I come across more, I'll send you. And he, so I think, Jeannie, you can probably show some of the magazines, but why am I showing you this? Now, a lot, most people don't know Richard Branson. Most people are not gonna email Richard Branson. I know that. It's not intended to be like, hey, just send this. But the point is, it's repurposing. That's the whole thing. The video that I was recording when you were talking about Randy Brill is repurposing. It's taking something that you have and reusing it. Last week, before I headed out of town to come on this trip here, and in a couple days, we're going to be off the grid in the Bahamas on a boat. So, all of our Genius Network members, I wanted— Oh, that's awesome. that we have current and past Genius Network members, and it is Alumni August is what we're calling it. And we're doing special things for people in Genius Network that have been alumni members. And so we had done this, this book in 2017 called Moonshots and Multipliers. And I did it because I think that year I had— I think I was interviewing— I don't know if that was the year where I was interviewing Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis together. But we had done this whole thing on moonshots, and we had asked our members a bunch of questions of what's their moonshots, what some of the best business decisions they made, what are 3 books that they think every Genius Network member should read, you know, how they create value, etc., etc. And I found this book in the archive of stuff. So I ripped out each individual page of our members and shot a video. And between me and Eunice recorded 90 personal videos to our members. We then are taking that single page and we are physically mailing it to them. I highlighted the things that I thought were important. I wrote notes on some of them for the people. We recorded a video. Then we took that video, we're sending it to them via email or text. I'm not doing this. I just, like Tony said, he writes the notes, then it's out of his hands. So, Eunice, you know, recorded it with me. It could be Gina, it could be anyone on my team, but Eunice was doing this one with me. And then we're scanning them, then we're sending it to people and we're asking them to update their thinking from 9 years ago and we're creating a new version of the book. And so, we're repurposing. So, how does this apply to you if you don't have a book, if you don't have that sort of thing? Okay. Robert Cialdini, who's been a friend of mine for 30-plus years, he wrote the book Influence. I think most of you here have probably read Influence.

One of my favorite books in the world.

Oh, it's amazing.

Dude, let me tell you about this story real quick. I'm in Toronto. I'm giving a speech, 500 people. I'm bragging on Bob's book, and a lady in the back of the room is waving her hands, waving her hand. I'm like, yes, ma'am. She says, keep bragging on Bob's book. And I'm like, of course, I love it. Bob's my husband.

Is that funny? Oh, Bob Betts.

Yeah.

There we go. Yeah.

I got, I got to send that. I started recording here because I'm like, I'm going to send this to Bob Betts and Robert Cialdini because we're talking about his book.

His book, Consistency, Liking the Social proof. Social proof, scarcity, and the authority principle, right?

Yep.

Yep.

And reciprocal principle. That's all 6 of them.

And the newest one in the updated version is unity. He added a 7th principle called unity. Yep. And it, but here's the point. He writes about in the original version of Influence and of course the new updated version, which he added a couple hundred pages to this. I mean, it's, that book is endorsed by Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. I mean, they've sold—

That book is so— Yeah, it's, it's just like one of the best 10 ever. It's just unbelievable.

If you're in business and you've not read Influence, you got to read Influence. And I've got some great interviews. Uh, we've had him on our podcast, so you guys can do a search for that. So, but here's the point. He, he writes this thing about how he started getting Christmas cards, uh, from someone that they didn't even know.

Oh yeah. Then he started writing them back, right?

Writing them back.

And he's testing that out.

Yeah. It went on for years. And they never even knew who each other was, but they're like, well, someone's sending a Christmas card. Let me send another one back. And then it was, I can't even remember the story now, but at some point they were in another country and they're like, one of their grandkids was going overseas and they had written about in the cards about this other location. So they asked this family for a favor that they've been exchanging Christmas cards with that don't even, didn't even understand how or why. They're on each other's lists and they ended up making a connection. I believe that was— I could be completely butchering it. So, you know, someone did a simple, I'm sure, search on AI. You could find the exact story.

Validating the reciprocal principle. Is that what he was validating?

Yeah.

Yeah. I think it would actually cover several of them.

The Whitman inconsistency. Yeah.

Yeah.

How many people have read that book? Can we see?

All right. I guess put in the chat if you've read the book Influence.

Let's do that. Dean, do you love the book, Dean?

Oh, yeah. It's one of my top 5 that I would put. I just did a video about it. Like, I was writing about it. I interviewed him, met him for the first time in 1997. And I was talking about that just the other day.

When did that book originally come out, guys? Do you remember? Is it 25 years old?

It's over 30 years old.

It was, I think, 1980s is when it came out. 1989 or something.

How old is Bob now?

He's 78.

Wow.

Yep.

Best.

I had dinner with him last week.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Me and him went to Amelia's. Amelia's restaurant in Scottsdale is seed oil free. I am friends now. Well, here's another thing too. Think about your life. Build your life and your relationships around the things that matter to you. If you're into yoga, if you're into health and fitness, if you're into kite surfing, you know, whatever you're into. So, I'm seed oil-free. I have become personal friends with the owners of all the top seed oil-free restaurants in Arizona. That would be Amelia's, Tarbell's, the Ends Restaurant in Old Town Scottsdale, Sapiens Paleo Kitchen in North Scottsdale, Tandy's, Sexy Burger in Tempe. I mean, like, PETA Jungle has got a lot of things in Arizona, and I used to clean those guys' carpets when they were totally broke. Back in when I was totally broke, we're all broke, and their restaurant's been seed oil free. They just use olive oil. And so yeah, there's um there's a lot. I mean, you can get French fries.

A lot of people don't know that. So um let's bring some math into this, shall we? Okay. Cato asked, and this is really good. He said UK stamps are two dollars and forty-three cents each. How do you decide which relationship justifies? that kind of high-touch follow-up rather than trying to systematize the approach?

Here's what I would say. Let me give some context first. For one, it's a good question, uh, because, you know, especially when I was a broke carpet cleaner, I didn't have the money to spend on— I mean, I could— I, I was going into debt on credit cards just to pay my bills. I've always tried, as has Dean, to always make I Love Marketing around, uh, methodologies that people can test easily. They're not gonna, you know, they're not gonna risk their whole bank.

Yeah.

We teach ELF marketing, things that are easy, lucrative, and fun. So everything that we've taught in I Love Marketing is very doable, very obtainable, very easy, very inexpensive to test. But you have to test. In the real world, it's called failure. In the marketing world, it's called testing. And so you're going to fail and there are certain things that are not gonna work. But in terms of what to invest in something, it goes back to lifetime value of a client. You don't know how much you're gonna afford to spend until and unless you know how much that person is actually going to be worth to you. And so, for sending out mailings and for sending out stamps, you know, the real business we're all in, like whatever business— I want to do a little test here. Write in the comments what business you are in, just your category. What business are you in? And let's just see what people write down. Med spa. Life insurance, real estate, waste hauling. We're going to talk to the waste hauling guy in a little bit because he's kind of cool. AEO SEO marketing agency, family office, financial education, merchant services, fashion manufacturing, education relationships, paint, beer line, cleaning chemicals, and mobile apps.

All the SIC codes, haven't we?

Most of them, yeah. Artists, training, consulting, electronics, wellness consulting, copywriting, hospitality, motorcycle. Healthcare startups, digital transformation, legal studies, tax education, backyards, chicken. That's yours, Paul. I'm not going to read it. Revenue recovery.

How are you guys? What's up?

So small business consulting. Now, honestly, a lot of stuff. But here's the business that we're all in. We're in the arithmetic business when it comes to making money. Whatever you do, you're in the arithmetic business. So you want every mailing, everything you can to not be a cost. to have it be an investment. When you spend $2.43 or whatever the amount he said in the UK was, I think it was UK.

Yes.

What you're doing is you are really looking at being thoughtful. When you can send a free email, when you can post a social media post, when there's no cost to it, you know what happens? People are very lazy. They can be— when you have to pay To communicate, you think about the most important thing out of all of this, which is the list. Then the second thing is the, the offer and the, you know, the third is the copy. Now, a lot of people, I don't try to sell anything to them with cards. We just want to show appreciation. We want to say thank you. Now, you can mention it. You can set it up as a sales pitch. But part of it is it depends on the depth of the relationship. And your competitors are very shallow. If you go very deep today, even a little bit deeper than everyone else, you know, the only time you lose a customer or a client or a patient to a competitor, if what you're providing is good service and value, is when you allow them to pay more attention to your customers than you do. So, for instance, Tom Rowe Motorcycle. Let's take Harley-Davidson. We used to talk about Harley-Davidson years ago when they were one of the first companies that the clientele would tattoo the name of the company on their bodies. So, you know, that's, that's pretty insane brand loyalty.

For sure.

However, if the brand they're loyal to has— so Bob Parsons, who is the founder of GoDaddy, owns a lot of the motorcycle places in North Scottsdale. He owns the Harley dealership there. In Chandler, Arizona, which is where I live in the Phoenix area, there's a Chandler Harley-Davidson. There's different dealerships. They're loyal to Harley-Davidson, but they're going to go to the location that pays the most attention to them. And if someone pisses them off in Chandler, they may go to Scottsdale. So you got to be careful about people are loyal to the quote unquote brand. People are loyal to the people that they— that show them love, show them attention, show them appreciation. People do business with an individual, not with a company. And so that's the advantage you have. So how much is it worth it to spend?

How do you know?

You got to really look at the value of the relationship. The value of the referral.

I got a text I need to run about five minutes. I want to give something of value to everybody before I leave. This is one of my favorite books. Do you guys remember John Rulin?

Oh yeah, John was a dear friend. He was a union.

He passed away a year and a half ago. Yeah, he and I wrote a book called Strategic Gifting, and I'd like to introduce the concept, Paul, and and and think about this, everybody. You know, when you when you make an investment for a gift. How intentional are you to make it of something of value that could stay with that person for a long time? One of the things that I've done, uh, Dean, is I created a, a, a deck of quotes cards that I produce for about $2. And I not only give the quotes cards away, I give a holder with those quotes cards. So it's about a $3.50 spend before mailing.

Mm-hmm.

And I see people having that on their desk for years. And my, my give to everybody today is, has anybody got some great ideas you might could share on how you strategically gift? And is that something that's a blind spot for you? Anybody?

Well, I'll let someone else start.

I do it all the time.

This whole idea, what you, everything you just talked about, Tony, when we were talking about doing something physical like this, sending Physical mail, a gift, or a note, whatever it is, is— I'm going to say it might be the only thing that you do that touches all 5 of the love languages that we have. If you think about the 5 love languages, the way people feel love, they feel love in one of 5 ways, or a couple of these.

Right.

But number 1 is physical touch. Some, some people feel loved that you physically touch them, you hug them, you're, you're close to them. 2 is words of affirmation, that when you say nice things about people, that they love to hear that and they feel loved when you're telling them that you love them. 3 is acts of service. When you do things for nice, uh, you do things for people. 4 is quality time, that some people feel love when you spend quality time with them. And the 5th is gifts. Some people's love language is when you buy them gifts. Now, everything you just talked about there fits all 5 of those in one thing. You're physically sending something they can—

Never thought about that, Dean.

Brilliant. And it's gonna be in their proximity.

Brilliant.

I, I think that's really brilliant.

Yeah. That, that was a really good insight. Like, I, you know, what's funny is Gary Chapman, who wrote The 5 Love Languages, I was talking with him years ago. I actually write about it in, in my book, What's in It for Them? And he had said to me that if you wanna know what someone's love language is, listen to what they complain about.

Yeah.

Because if you can help eliminate the complaints. So, one of the things I learned from, what was his name? Jerry Wilson years ago wrote a book called Word of Mouth Marketing. And if you want word of mouth marketing, you got to give people something worth talking about. And you have to impress them and you have to wow them and you have to genuinely care. And he said one of the best ways to turn around an unhappy client or someone that's complaining or had a bad experience, or even if you didn't cause it, they're just for whatever reason, they're moody, they're, you know, is to give them a gift. And he goes, the moment you give them a gift, it starts the switchy mechanism. Can't always cure all ills, but if you have someone that's unhappy, how many times have you done— like, when someone complains to a company, on some level, uh, most of the time they're only complaining because they think on some level they're going to be able to do something about it. Because all of us have had a bad experience with someone, some service provider, and we just never said anything because we knew they wouldn't give a crap.

crap.

But the people that we do offer a, like, can I give you some feedback? Here's a bad experience I had. How they handle it has everything to do if you're ever going to do business with them again, or if you're going to become all of a sudden, you're going to tell everyone how horrible they are. And that's why it's so important to be conscientious about how people experience doing business with you. And if you have like a person who's referring you, That's for the person that not only you spend $2 on, that's the person you might spend $500 or $1,000 or $10,000 on, depending on the, you know, how big the value of the exchange is. But the thing is, if you want to be in the transaction business, you're always going to be really cheap. If you want to be in the relationship business, in the transformation business— I had a 90-minute Zoom with Joseph Pine, who in 1999, they wrote The Experience Economy. And his latest—

fabulous book.

Yeah, totally. His latest book. Yeah, yeah. And, and that's where they give the Starbucks example that was about commoditization.

I preached that book for many years.

The same here. And when I finally met him, I like, I was like, I've been quoting your freaking book for years. And his new book is called The Transformation Economy. And I told him, you know, I, I said, Joseph, you know I own transformation.com. And he's like, oh my God, that's a great website name. And So right now we have it directed at Genius Network, but we're in this new space with AI that so many people are going to be sounding and looking smart and coming up with stuff with AI. What AI will not do is give somebody a hug. What AI will not do is genuinely show up as a human. And what we even tell our members, and I'm suggesting this to everyone here, if you do take us up on our recommendation of writing 1 to 10 Handwritten postcards, personal cards, letters every day. Take weekends off. So, between 5 to 50 a week. If you do that for a year, your network is going to change enormously. And don't use AI to help you write the letters. Use your brain so you turn it into a meditative process. And I'm going to keep saying this. I'm going to keep saying it. So, some people are going to get bored of me, the redundancy of it. But it's so true. Just like use it as a process to just think and not let your brain get lazy because that's what's going to happen with so many people.

All right.

I need to get back to my guest.

Can we all give it up for Tony? Did you get— on a scale of 1 to 10, did you find Tony valuable? Let's post in the chat so he can see this. Give me your thoughts.

Say nice things, please.

Let's see where we go. There we go.

Look at that. Look at that, baby. 101. 11.

Yeah.

I love you guys.

That's fantastic.

Love you guys.

Awesome.

Thank you, sir.

See you back here.

Fantastic. All right. Let's, let's look at the math. Let's look at some math in this. Um, I went to Amazon while y'all were chatting, and to get a bag of pickleballs, which is literally plastic that's taken pickles and used one of those melon ballers to ball it out, so I can send a bag of pickleballs gift-wrapped overnight to your office, what do you think my total cost is, Joe?

Boy, a bag of pickleballs, I don't know, uh, $12.

$6. $6 to go on Amazon Prime, and this includes the gift wrapping and the card, you know, at the office tomorrow. Now that, now that's one end, you, you know, you could listen here. If you got a bag of pickleballs, would that, would that change your, your mind about someone? But let's talk about, uh, let's talk about this on a, on a higher level. Many of you— and Joe's not— we're not going to do this video because you can go out and see this video. But many of you have seen the video with Mike, Mike Divick, right? Did I pronounce that correctly, Joe? Is your mouth full of food?

Yeah.

Yeah. So Mike did a— Mike sent Joe a package and we can look at this a couple of different ways, but Joe took that package and made a video about it and distributed it all over to his massive network and it got promotions and that kind of stuff. What do you think the value of that is? You know, and and if Mike would have sent Joe a note, hey Mike, you know, hey Joe, could you do a funny email? You know, video about me ain't gonna happen. But because Mike spent seven dollars at dollar store, and I got him to give me these numbers, we're gonna bring him on here in a second to chat about this. But because Mike spent seven dollars at dollar stop, a dollar store, twenty four eighty on priority shipping, then sent it full of postage stamps, he got all of this attention. You know, a little more than the six dollar pickleballs would have been. But it's— it was a pretty good impact, and I think it's a perfect example of the WOW philosophy, and it's part of what we're chatting about today. So let's bring on Mike. Mike is in the audience. Mike, what, what inspired you to do this, buddy?

Life gives to the giver.

There we go. We're gonna be able to see your face? We're just getting again the dulcet tones.

No, I got one of those computers from back in like 1980 that doesn't have a camera on it.

You know what, as, as I was looking at the list, actually, I could send you a USB video camera for about About $3 more than the pickleballs, but I'm generous. So, so Mike, what possessed you to send a piñata with 1,000+ postage stamps and then spend $25 mailing it to Joe? What was the thought here?

So it started back when I got Joe's book, Life Gives to the Giver. Now I'm a guy that likes bulk mail, lumpy mail, etc., and I got the package from Genius. It's a yellow envelope chucked full of stamps on it, 14 stamps on it. And so then there's always this rave about 10x, 100x, whatever. And I thought, how can you give something of value? And I thought, well, I do a lot of stamps. Maybe Genius can use those stamps and pass the book on to a lot more people. It was kind of just that simple. The piñata was just a way—

it was a delivery mechanism. How do you give people a whole bunch of stamps they've never received before?

So piñata was kind of fun.

Yeah.

And by the way, Eunice actually has a piñata there. She can probably show, or maybe Gina does. Gina has it.

Gina's got it.

All right guys, here we are, and I'm gonna talk so that I take over this. This is the, what, the $6 piñata from, from Dollar Tree, but it is super cool. And you guys want to see what's inside? Oh my goodness, I'm still letting people in here too. We are busting down the walls with so many awesome people wanting to be on I Love Marketing. Look at this, this is full, full of lots and lots of stamps. I can just keep pulling them out. These are rolls and rolls and rolls of stamps all over here. You want to see what else was in for the— from the dollar store there? Yeah, let's listen. And here, here's— no, thank you, Gina. And here's the point I want to make with this. It got my attention. It was a very— it was a handwritten— you see that? It was on like cardboard with a string. And it was, it got attention, right? Because the, to go back to Gary Halbert's A-pile versus B-pile, if people sort their mailbox, their mail over a wastebasket and it goes into the A-pile, which is personal or appears personal, or the B-pile, which is junk or appears like junk, that's where most email goes. That's where most social media goes. You may get a lot of likes. You may get a lot of views. You may get a lot of followers, but how much Does someone really want to go talk about you, do a video, that sort of stuff? Now, that doesn't always translate into money. That doesn't always translate into business. So there's a big difference between being well-known and being well-paid. So the key is to continue to hone your attention-getting first and foremost, because no matter how great your offer is, if it does— how great your letter is, if it doesn't get delivered, opened, and read, It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter your intention behind it. It doesn't matter how good of a person you are. You have to get somebody's attention. But once you've got their attention, then the real key is what sort of thing can you link them to as it relates to you and your business? Or, you know, a lot of this is this. If you're a single person and you wanted to actually get a partner, you could still use all of this methodology.

Hmm.

If you're a nonprofit and you want to get someone's attention, you could still use it in that way. What I do want to make sure of, because I didn't even notice this and I feel bad in the beginning, is Carla Zwan, who's sitting there with glasses and a hat. She's been Brian Kurtz's right-hand person. She's been at my— the home where I have all my archive museum. She's been helping me tremendously, along with my assistant Anna, who has helped with the house. And what's that quote that you texted me, Carla, that Brian says all the time about the mailbox at the end of the road?

Yeah.

Brian always says that the emptiest mail, um, the emptiest mailbox that we all have is the one that's at the end of our driveways. So just encourages people just to send something to somebody that you know and care about, and they'll definitely receive it. It won't get lost in spam or promotions folder. Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. And Carla, by the way, uh, she's a professional organizer on top of knowing a boatload about Direct response marketing, which I think is pretty funny. And what a lot of people look at their piles of within everyone's drawers and closets, anyone that's not a minimalist, I actually really respect minimalists, is all kinds of things that most the world would look at as junk, but it's attention getting grabbers that you could attach to or with or put in a package and you can send it to someone. There's this gym I work out at called High Fit. And this guy leaves these little, little baby Jesus figurines everywhere throughout the gym. And the guy comes up to me, I don't even really know this guy, and he hands me one of these because I know he's just trying to like, you know, get a laugh and be cool. And, you know, he's like this strong Christian and he hands me these and I'm like, where do you get these things? Because this guy has been leaving them all over this gym for the longest time, puts them in lockers. It's like really funny. And it's become this whole like funny thing. And the people that own the gym are strong Christians and stuff. And it's like Amazon. So I go on Amazon and I order a couple hundred of these things. And so when me and Eunice were doing our videos for our members, a lot of people have— were writing the Bible as one of the top 3 books. And so what I said when I was doing a video for one of those people is that, by the way, I'm going to send you a little Jesus. And it— now some people could get offended by this. I, I'm sure Jesus has a really great sense of humor. And so, uh, these things are really cool and people love it. It is like the most ridiculous thing ever. But the point is you can get, you know, anything. There's Gina with stickers, whatever. And it may sound goofy and childish, but the point is if you can get someone's attention, if you can make them laugh, if you can put a smile on their face, they are going to think favorably of you and your company. And the point is, it's got to get to them. And when I got that unicorn, I thought that was like really creative and really awesome. And so, I wanted to share it. I wanted to share the concept because when I was a carpet cleaner, I always say to people, if you have anything more sexy and exciting than carpet cleaning, you certainly can utilize these marketing methods. Because most people, when I asked you to write what it is you do for a living, what's your business? Most of those things are more exciting than carpet cleaning, and I had to figure out how to successfully sell something that nobody wants to buy. And one of the things that I learned from my friend— I haven't talked to this guy in ages, I don't even know what happened to him— Brad and Alan Anton. They were marketers. Remember those guys, Dean?

I do. Yeah, yeah.

So, they wrote a book in the '90s called The Lost Art of Common Sense Marketing, and I was talking with him With Brad. I don't know, it's probably like 1995. And I said, you know, I've really cracked the code on how to teach carpet cleaners how to get into somebody's home by using a free room of carpet cleaning and couple it with a carpet audit. Instead of doing a quote or an estimate, which everyone does, let's come up with a different way to package what you do and call it a carpet audit where you evaluate the condition of the carpet. And by teaching The carpet audit system, every carpet cleaning company, over 12,000 of them that had become members of my Piranha Marketing back in and starting in the '90s. I built the largest training organization in the world in the '90s for carpet upholstery cleaners. They would increase their average sale 25%, 25% average increase in sale by changing the way that you present and package and deliver, not even the job, just What you're going to charge and why you're doing it, because it would educate people on it. And I said, I cracked the code on that. A free room of carpet cleaning is the best offer, better than price discounting any services, any of that stuff. And to this day, many of my carpet cleaners still use the same exact stuff that I started teaching them in 1994, is when I first started doing that. And, um, I said, but you know, we're having difficulty with commercial carpet cleaning because a lot of times it doesn't get through the gatekeeper. So the idea that I got talking with them is we would use a single shoe and we would, you know, have someone call up because there's no internet marketing back then. E-commerce was not— had not yet started. I had my first website in 1996. And then, of course, Dean Jackson, most of you know, invented the squeeze page in 1997, which became the modern-day opt-in page where people would enter their name and email. But that was not happening. We're using direct mail. We're using space advertising. We're using, you know, everything from You know, carpet cleaners were using Valpak coupons and money mailers and Yellow Pages, and there was all these commercial accounts they're trying to get into, and everyone's submitting bids. It's like the worst way to— like, just everyone's making decisions based on price. And so one of the things is, how do you get through the gatekeeper? So you find a time and a date where you can have an excuse to send them something, and you find out Mr. and Mrs. Bigwig, who are they? And you would usually call their secretary, call their assistant, and find some reason to send them a pair of shoes. And so the way that we did this letter was we'd find Mr. and Mrs., you know, important person in the company, decision maker. Was there an anniversary for the company? Was it their birthday? Was there a holiday? And the reason I'm bringing this up is Halloween's coming up. Thanksgiving is coming up. Thanksgiving cards are way better than Christmas cards. Because everybody sends Christmas cards. Very few people send thank you cards. And I'm giving you enough advance notice in August of this year so that come Thanksgiving in November, you will send everyone important to you a Thanksgiving card thanking them for being awesome. Way more important than Christmas cards because you have less competition with Christmas cards. So just put that to the side. So we would take a single shoe. We'd get, you know, back then it was like Nikes or Reeboks. Reebok was a really big brand back then. And we'd spend about $100 on a pair of really good shoes because shoes were cheaper back then. And we would have them sent either FedEx, UPS, or Uniform Courier. And you'd have to have Mr. and Mrs. Big Shot sign for the shoes. So you get their, their shoe size, then you'd get a pair of shoes, but you'd only send one shoe. And the letter is like, Dear Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so, I have something that could really enhance the look and quality of your indoor environment, and I would like to present to you something that I think could really make a significant difference with the way that your customers and team members can experience your business. And so what I wanted to do is I needed a way to get my foot in the door, so I thought sending you a shoe was a good idea. And I got next Tuesday or next Thursday, you'd give a couple of specific times that I would like to talk with you and meet. And if you can schedule that, I will bring the other shoe. And so you basically send them only one shoe. You make sure it gets through to the person where they have to sign for it. And what happened is I would say you're going to, you're going to spend probably, you know, $1,000 to $1,200 on the shoes and the mailings to send to 10 people. But you're going to get probably 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 calls depending on, you know, how specific it is and how much they need you, and you're going to get 1 or 2 appointments. The rest of it, you're going to— you're not going to hear from them. And sure enough, almost across the board, they'd get 1 or 2 calls and most of the time they would land a multi-thousand-dollar job. And it became this model for how to get your foot in the door. as a service business. Now, what's funny is I would tell that to 100 people. You'd be lucky if 3 of them did it because, you know, there's that Emerson quote, I think it is, you ask for a new idea when you haven't used the last one that they gave you.

Mm-hmm.

And if people pay me my consulting rate, which is $6,000 an hour, and I tell them this idea, they will freaking do it. If they sit and listen to it on a free podcast, most of the time they're like, oh, that's a good idea. They never do anything. And so, part of it Is I want to instill with all of these ideas, these ideas are— they work. This is not shit we just come up with. We've been doing this for years. We already know this works. It's just a matter of, will you use it? Will you utilize it? And people that are like, well, I don't— you know, my clients are different. That won't work for me. Worst way to approach any idea. It's always like, even if it doesn't make sense, how can this work for me? What do I need to tweak? What do I need to do? And that's the mindset that I had early on, which allowed me to go from knowing nothing about marketing, being totally broke, and finally figuring out how to connect. And was it hard? Absolutely, it was hard. And, you know, in order to get an ELF business, which is easy, lucrative, and fun, you often have to— the setup is not always easy, lucrative, and fun. You have to be willing to work through the burn, just like if you start working out and you haven't worked out in a while, You're going to be sore in the beginning, but those are just some of the ideas. So, I just wanted to share that because I think a lot of people here—

Let's take these ideas back to math. So, Dean, we'll ask you first for the math, then we'll ask Joe for the math, and then I'm going to stomp on the math, if you will. So, Dean, what percentage of your emails that came to your inbox did you look at today?

Me personally?

Yes.

Very few. Very few. I actually have a separate email. Every email that comes into me gets looked at, but not necessarily by me. The ones— I have a separate email that is only for people that I want to get personal emails from. So that's a great system, but it's overwhelming, right? And we look at it that it's like that, that feed is, you know, completely packed. But just like Brian said, my mailbox is virtually empty in terms of things that come that are interesting. We always talk about creating something that we call mailbox excitement, that your aim is to be the most exciting thing that arrives in the mailbox that day. Because Joe will tell you, Gary Halbert used to say, and it's still true today, that people sort their mail Over the garbage can, and only the things that are exciting or personal or important get through that first pass, and everything else goes in the mail. Look at— in terms of that mailbox excitement, look at this giant postcard. This postcard is like, you know, 18 by 12 or something, and this is a postcard I found in my archives here the other day that this is a postcard we did for Joe's house that he was selling on Camelback Mountain. And it's a giant, beautiful postcard that we— there's the house at the top of Camelback Mountain.

And that's where the circle is.

Yeah.

And we sent the postcard to everybody in the valley Who looks up at that house. And the headline was, an open letter to anyone who wonders what it would be like to live at the top of Camelback Mountain. It's awesome. Here's why. And we told the story about everything that Joe had done in that house to maximize the view and what it's like to be able to just walk out your back door and be on Camelback Mountain instead of having to hike. a mile just to get to the entrance to Camelback Mountain to be on the mountain. And that was a, you know, that I guarantee that would be the most exciting thing you get in the mail today. We actually, our postcard company, we call this the Dominator because this dominates your mailbox and it gets 100% attention.

Yep.

You know, and that's a whole— that's a whole nother story in and of itself that I'll have to share at another time because it also— the brief version of it is back then, it was really hard to sell homes in Paradise Valley.

Mm-hmm.

People were still— and that house, what's funny, if I would have just sat and let that house Do nothing, rot. You know, several years later, I could have sold it for about four million more than what I ended up selling it for after what happened. And it's funny too because the best message in the world, a lot of it depends on the season, the cycle, the wants, the needs, the desires. But the point is, is had we not done that, I never would have sold the house.

Yeah.

So you know, and and there were tons of houses that people could not sell, and that yeah. So it was. Very, very interesting scenario. That was also the biggest waste of financial purchase and energy of any material item I ever made in my life. I really never owned that house. That house owned me. And you know the story about that. And it was a blessing and a curse in a lot of ways. And I learned a lot from that. And that's, you know, people would drive by that house and it would be like their dream house. And I would be up on the balcony and everything. And I'd spent 2 and a half years and over $1 million remodeling that house.

Wow.

And it was one of the best views of Paradise Valley. But there was a lot of things that had happened from a breakup and all kinds of other stuff. And I had put so much energy into that that I was like, I couldn't enjoy it anymore. It was really weird and bizarre. And this is all my childhood trauma and psychological stuff that I'm obviously revealing right now as it relates to a house. And I know we're trying to decipher marketing lessons out of it.

Yeah.

But the point is, is like, you know, what you often think is great for someone, you know, it may not be great for them. And everything that we are selling, almost everyone here in business, what most of the businesses that we're in, and I got this from Dan Sullivan, I learned this from Dan Sullivan, is other people's bad news is your good news. Whatever, like if we were to go back to all the categories, I mean, there's Such a large chat here. I don't even know if I'm able to find them. But whatever you do for a living, you're usually transforming other people's bad news into good news. If you're hungry, bad news. If you're a restaurant, good news. You know, if you are a consultant and someone, whatever you're consulting on, is having bad news in some area, it's good news for you because, you know, the world has a lot of problems. People have a lot of wants, desires, needs, etc. And your job is to transform other people's bad news into good news if you are a value-creating business. Businesses that exploit people actually don't turn bad news into good news. They just keep creating more bad news, right? And they just keep making things worse. There's a lot of products that, uh, that, that, and services that are sold to people that is not about value creation. It's about value extraction. But no matter how good you are, At doing what you do, if you do not get somebody's attention, if you do not package and position yourself. So, that Dominator postcard, if you're in real estate, that is a very valuable tool to utilize because most people, they don't understand it, they don't think about it, they don't take the time to learn about it. And those are some of the ELF marketing strategies that we wanted to share with you. So, Paul, I think I've creatively avoided your whole question about math. But you know, the math is really knowing your numbers. Like, there's a guy named Greg Crabtree. You know, here, I'll do a little plug because I'm gonna— I'll send this to Greg. I'll do one of my little things here. So, all right. So, I'm sitting in Tony Jerry's office. We're doing an I Love Marketing Zoom Live with Dean Jackson, Paul Colligan, and we're talking about numbers. And there's a book. called— is it Simple Numbers? Is that, uh, Greg Crabtree? Is that title of his book? It's an orange book.

Yep.

It is absolutely phenomenal. And if you want to understand the math aspects of your mind, not marketing math, but just how to run your company and how to look at making money, read Simple Numbers. It's an easy read and the guy's very smart. And I've actually hired him to come out. He came and spoke to our, uh, $100K group and he was phenomenal. And so, I'm now bringing him in. He's really great. So that'll be helpful for everyone. So I figure one of the things we should do also as we're talking about stuff here is make recommendations that will continually help you guys. And the reason, like one of the ways that me and Dean sell stuff, because some people will join Genius Network, some people will buy our books, some people will do stuff, is we rarely do a dog and pony show. I mean, if we're ever going to really set up a pitch for something. I mean, in the 16 years that we've been doing I Love Marketing, we've maybe done a couple of webinars. We still have a report that doesn't even sell anything. That's one of the most valuable things that you could read called Breakthrough DNA that you can download on ilovemarketing.com. It goes over the 8 profit activators. And if you have not read that, read it. If you've read it before, read it again. We hear all the time people like, "Oh my God! I haven't read this in five years, and I realize that it's just here's what you need to do. It's not timeless. It's time. It's it's uh it's not timely. It's timeless is what I meant to say." And by the way, Celia Black, I I just saw you here. I'm an idiot for not. She's a rock star. Maybe we'll maybe we'll have Celia. She's been Ray Kurzweil's who's like a super genius. She's been Ray's right-hand person for oh God. 20, 30 years.

She's awesome.

So, and she knows a lot about tech and the future and all kinds of crazy stuff. So that's another ADD moment there. But the, the, the thing is, like, um, me and Dean, when we first started doing I Love Marketing, I said to, uh, Dean, I said, let's not try to sell, uh, anything until people start complaining about it. And how, how unique to do a marketing podcast to teach people how to sell and market, but not try to get them to enroll in a course or buy something. And sure enough, if you go and read the original comments from back in 2010, people are like, I don't understand what you guys are doing on this podcast. Like, like you're teaching us all this stuff on how to market and sell, but you're not asking us to buy anything. And I said, the moment people start complaining that we're not trying to sell them something gives us permission to try to sell something. And so, the reason I bring this up is I don't have any pitch. I'm not setting anyone up for a pitch here. I'm just saying that one of my favorite ways to sell things is to demonstrate value. Just demonstrate it. Just be useful. You know, not everyone's going to like you. Not everyone's going to get what you're saying. I know there will be some people that are watching this right now that are like, I haven't learned anything today. And there's other people like, oh my God, this has been transformative. I've learned something really valuable. But we're going to keep doing that, you know, and we're going to keep doing that because it is, uh, it's fun, it's enjoyable. I get a really real joy. I fortunately, uh, have built successful companies. I, I don't have to sell something today in order to have a good day, and no one needs to buy anything from me. You know, I already have a successful company, but I put years into doing it. There were some times where if I didn't go and make a sale, I didn't eat that night, right? And so I understand what that's, that's like. And so some people will want to write a book or they'll want to start a podcast and they'll come to me and Dean and say, how do we start a successful podcast so I can make a lot of money? And I'm like, don't start a podcast if your immediate need is make a lot of money. It is a long game. It's not a short game. And I play, I play the long game. I don't play the short game. And so with all these people that you can send postcards to, hopefully you have some staying power. Hopefully you have some marketing stamina. And in some cases, we've done a lot of, we've done a lot of events where we would take our members to prisons and we would, you know, go and do things in the prisons to help people with through Genius Recovery. And there was a guy that was in a Houston prison where we spent all day and we took a few of our members and some really smart people to this prison in Texas. We didn't get paid for it. We just volunteer our time. We spent all day with the people that were incarcerated, and one of them sent a letter over to Akira, who I've made movies and films with. And he's out, and he's like, you know, I'm really struggling, and I'm working on writing a book. And Akira said, you know, go to askjopolish.com. Figure out what you can sell and what you're— which I would encourage all of you to do. There's no charge for it. Askjopolish.com is free. It's my AI companion. It has all my books uploaded into it, over 1,000 videos, that sort of stuff. And, you know, if you're trying to write a book and you don't have a backend, or in some cases, it's hard right now for people to get jobs in some— in many industries that don't have a criminal record, right? Let alone that in some cases, you just need to do the job or do the thing you do while you build out the other, you know, long-term sort of thing. But what all of this requires is relationships with humans that know, like, and trust you. And so, continue to nurture and build and harvest that garden. And that's really the whole point of what we're talking about today. What we talked about over the last few episodes is to really just Be more intentional of your sphere of influence, of the relationships that you have, and offering really simple and often overlooked ways to connect with people. Like nothing that we've talked about here is rocket science. Nothing that we've talked about here can everyone here not do in some way, shape, or form. And as far as the math, I mean, take a look at what's your signature result? I'm sitting here in the results room. What is the result that you are most equipped to deliver to somebody? Who are the people that would most likely be interested in getting that result? What do you need to say to them? What do you need to talk to them about? How do you bond with them? And, you know, when's the last time you called 10 people that didn't buy from you and say, you know what, I'm not even going to try to sell you something. As a matter of fact, I will send you whatever it is you offer.

Yeah.

If you just are honest with me and tell me what could I have done that would have caused you to say yes, because you obviously said no, and you'd you'd be surprised the feedback you can get from people that have not responded as to why. And yeah, and be careful if you do that with if you've asked someone out on a date and they rejected you because they made or mean. But either way, but it's good feedback, and so. Listen to people that like you, that are very responsive, and communicate with them and thank them and stay in touch with them because those are the people most likely to, you know, do business with you again. But also reach out to people that used to be clients that dropped out. That's one of the things we're doing right now with past alumni is really, you know, in Strategic Coach, Dan Sullivan is one of my best friends, right? We do a podcast together. We've done it for many years. They have a term called in-out-in. It's when someone's in, they drop out, and then they come back in. And we have the same thing at Genius Network. We have people that all— and what predominantly happens is when someone drops out, their life crashes. It's a wreck. It's a total disaster. Everything goes up in flames. They join Genius Network again. It starts getting better. I'm exaggerating a bit. So, the thing though is that there's periods of time where people are going through difficulty. And one of the best ways to think about the people that are closest to you that you appreciate the most. I bet you those are the people that were there for you when you were going through the hardest times. And I'll tell you, there's a lot of anxiety in the world right now. There's a lot of angst. And if you can be a little bit of sunshine to people, you will have a very, very unique advantage that Most business owners don't take the time to do. And so anyway, that's, that's a little bit of my rant. I wanted to share that. I hope, I hope that is somewhat useful just to think about. So, Dean, Paul?

Paul, I can help with the math of this because this is something that is one of the most— one of the most overlooked things, one of the lowest hanging fruits, the biggest opportunities in your business. is in the after unit of your business. These are building and nurturing lifetime relationships with the people who already know you, like you, and trust you. They've done business with you. They're currently doing business with you if you have an ongoing membership or something like that. One of the things that we measure is something called Return on relationship. That's the key metric of your after unit. And it's pretty simple to look at just at a top level. If you take all of the revenue that you brought in last year was brought in by some knowable number of transactions that you had, so many people bought so much volume, if you go through and you look at where those people come, some of the revenue that you've generated is going to come from people who had already done business with you a year ago, whether they're continuing to do business with you or whether they are referring somebody to do business with you for the first time. And when you take that and you divide And then you divide it by the number of people that you have, those transactions represented by the total number of people in your after unit, you get something that we call return on relationship. And in our real estate world, and for any business really, just set a guiding metric. For our realtors, let's say that they have 150 relationships with people who they've helped buy or sell a home. And if we look at that, our gold standard is to be able to manage that relationship portfolio for a 20% annual yield. And what that means is if you take that, if you just take one person of like that and you were to nurture a relationship with them, is it likely That they would do one more transaction with you or refer one person to you in the next 5 years. That's what 20% means. That one time in 5 years, when you do that math for yourself and see what would it be if you were firing on all cylinders there, what would it be worth to your business if you were getting, let's just set it at a 20%, uh, annual yield from your relationship portfolio. And then you take the number that you actually got and you subtract that, and that number is your opportunity. That's the gap. That's how much you are losing by not having a systematic way of nurturing those relationships. You know, when you take that idea, we were so used to spending money in the before unit of our business to advertise and get the word out and attract new people. But if you look at the after unit, it's the lowest cost of adding new revenue from the people that you already know. So that Looking at the, uh, you know, looking at the cost of $2.43 to mail, uh, something to somebody. If you look at that, even if you sent that to 1,000 people, that's $2,400. And maybe you do that 3 times a year, that's $7,500. That— what would be the impact if you have 1,000 people? Surely that's going to be worth more than the amount of money that you would spend.

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say, Dean.

There we go. There we go. So one of the things that's really interesting for me this year is I've had to make a very specific decision on what events I go to and what events I don't go to. Not necessarily really budget or anything like that. It's just an issue of focus and attention and And what is it I need to do? And the one at the top of the list is Joe's annual event. And the funny thing is here, everybody really— I mean, let's be honest. When Joe does the annual event, a couple of months later, the best talks are going to come out on YouTube. So if you can't attend, don't worry about it. You'll get the good content. But what's amazing about Joe's event is the hands-on, people-oriented, experience-wow economy that the event is. We talked about the pop-up for the Marketing Museum. We talked about the people that are going to be there. It's funny. Actually got a actually got a thing in here from Mike Dimmick wanted to know. Okay, Paul, what are you putting in the gifting suite? Joe has a gifting suite, and the gifting suite is is where people you know get a lot of stuff, and and you know I literally pack a second bag to take the gifting suite stuff. Well, I'll tell you what's in one of my things in the gifting suite. Sneak peek: it's the code for our email triage AI. You know today during the event, I probably about 45 pieces of email. I ran triage. 2 were left. And then over the course of an hour, you know, 43 pieces of email went away. Um, um, that's gonna become more and more and more prevalent in what it is that we're doing. And I'll tell you, um, while I'm on this call, the doorbell rang and there's a very expensive, uh, package that has arrived. I had to text my kid to go get it. I'm gonna open that up the second, you know, that I get done with this event. Um, wow, just works better.

Mm-hmm.

You know, it just does better. And then you take Gene's math to it. You know, so if it's more fun, if your mom or your grandma would feel better about you doing it, and you see better results, how does this change your marketing strategy for the rest of the year? That's what I'd love to have you put in, in the chat that you have below. So this wow idea, what are you going to do differently as a result of what we chatted about here? We're going to have 5 minutes of commentary from Dean and Joe on what you guys said, and then we'll close this one up. But, um, wow marketing— how are you going to do things differently? You know, you don't have to shove 1,100 stamps into a piñata from the dollar store. You know, um, what are you going to do differently? That's the question for today. Um, Gene, are you—

are you—

I love that mug so much. Are you going to be doing anything differently between now and the event? Joe, are you going to be doing anything differently between now and the event?

Well, Well, one of the things that I am constantly thinking about now is similar to what you just said about content. Content is king is what a lot of people have preached for many years. I believe context is king. And at this particular stage, I need to create— there's a couple reasons why people come to Genius Network. It's not just for who's in the room and we have— this year, I'll have surprises like Like, I, you know, Dr. Phil, who's a friend of mine here in Dallas, I'll probably meet up with him later while I'm here. And he was a surprise guest last year with no one knew. And the year before, you know, we had surprise guests without telling anyone even after the event was sold out. So, I always like doing surprises. I'll have a famous rock star there this year, which is going to be awesome. And it's one thing about who's in the room, but the other reason is who's not in the room.

Yeah.

Because one of the things that I try to do is make a room full of givers. And there's something about social proof is not the right word. I just don't know how to describe it any other way. It's there's like a frequency that humans put out. And when you take ambitious people that intermingle with each other, it somehow. Tends to increase ambition. Our job at Genius is to take people that have ambition and aspirations and help those things become a reality by curating an environment that allows them to be better within that environment. And that's what I do. All the speakers, all the talks, everything else are just an excuse to get really awesome people in the room. And even if you are not able and don't qualify, you're not, not a million-dollar-plus-a-year business to come to Genius Network. Any problem in the world can be solved with the right genius network. Any problem, challenge, or opportunity can be solved with the right genius network. And so, the key is to have relationships in your life that make a meaningful difference. And so, every year, we're trying to take what is currently relevant and how do we talk about it? How do we have discussions about it? No one's pitching. That's not allowed. We don't have anyone selling from stage, including myself.

Yeah.

The only time that we even talk about enrolling in Genius Network is an optional breakfast session at 7:00 in the morning on the second day, and I'm not even there. It's a panel of other members that get to talk about it. So, we purposely do the complete opposite of what happens at a lot of other events where people go in there and they feel like they're going to be turned upside down and have their wallet shaken out of their pockets or something. So, the part of it is demonstrating it. And, what I hope today was is just a way for you to Identify the most important relationships in your life and keep communicating with them. And this is not a one-time thing. This is like, we're going to talk about this sort of stuff in different ways, shapes, or forms until you're able to really hone it and hopefully create some mastery around it. So, that's what I would have to say, Anne. And so, Dean, I'll turn it over to you.

Yeah.

Focused on creating this habit, this system, this routine of creating this, these valuable content by creating this engine, that daily habit of every day, just turning on the camera for 10 minutes and sharing some insight, I'm going to be excited to see By the time the annual event comes around, that'll be over 100 days of daily, daily content. So I'm already seeing the momentum of this gathering. And so I'm excited to watch it all unfold.

You know, I probably should say, because I mean, I could put it in the chat, but yeah, if you are interested, it's geniusnetworkevents.com. I have to, I have to balance out not being the sales prevention department. You know, to actually telling people that they— you got to apply though. You have to apply. And if you are ready for having your mind blown, then take a look at what we're doing, geniusnetworkevents.com.

So, what Dean said about, you know, this perpetual getting the content out, this is one of the reasons why these guys started with podcasting back in the day. And this is one of the reasons why I'm so excited about podcasting still to this day. This is the live event. Keep coming to the live event. These are fun, but some had to go someplace. Some had to go to a meeting. If you go to ilovemarketing.com, there's the ability to subscribe to this show. All these live events that we do are put on the iLove Podcasting feed. Grab it when you want it, where you want it, on the device that you want it, at the speed that you want it. You've got that capacity. Uh, Dean's jumping on that with his own personal thing. And as you know, Joe has a bunch of his podcasts as well.

Yeah.

That's what we're doing here. So thank you. Um, we've got another one coming soon. If you're on the mailing list, we'll follow up with you on this. If you want to catch up between now and then, you've definitely got the ability to subscribe to the I Love Marketing podcast. If you're, uh, coming to the event in November, we'll see you there. Uh, sure to check out that, uh, very hands-on, very well-featured gifting suite. And, um, from there, you know, I'm gonna say, say good night. Good night, Joe.

Hold on one more. I want to do something that's really sort of because you're you're right at the end. I want to find that Instagram silly Instagram post of me doing the direct mail thing, which I think will give people an example of a lot of demonstrations. The link so that people can go to Instagram and comment on it. And by the way, if you guys ever get bored and need something to watch, polish.tv directs to my YouTube channel. Paul, thank you as always. Gina, thank you. Dean, and yeah, and I appreciate all the awesome members that we have that are on here today. And I hope you guys got a lot and got and send a letter to someone you love. And go to my Instagram right now and just make a make an obnoxious comment in the chat. Okay, peace out.

Bye guys.

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