Episode 248: Marketing for Quality Clients with Paul Gough

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Hello, friend. You can find us on itunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Tunein, radio, Alexa, or entrepreneurshipelevatedpodcast.com and please leave us a comment, review and subscribe wherever you're listening.

Yep. And you know what? Go on to mikemicalicz.com or mikemotorbike.com is the super shortcut for my secret friends. Go there. And at the very top, he'll say, get your free copy of Surge. The entire book you can get for free right now@mikemicalicz.com and this headset's disconcerting. So it's happening to both UJ Bone and Ucalis. One ear is, like, dead, right?

And then it'll, like, pop in all of a sudden sometimes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When someone gets something really loud, it pops in and starts working again. I gotta figure it out. So I tried to reboot the system that does that, and it was to no avail.

Just start screaming really loud.

It's a fun game. I like it.

Yeah, the fun game is. How annoying is this? Cals, before we get into our fun game for the day, what have you been up to?

Well, we're going to Nashville, so I'm leaving tomorrow. It's the first time I've ever gone there, and I'm super excited.

So you're going, I'm going. Paul's going. Billy Ann is going. And so I made the biggest faux pop, but, you know, I am so lame. So we're going to Don Miller's story brand training, which is going to be phenomenal. I know Don personally. It's a phenomenal group. I also put tremendous value in company time. Like last time, we did, like, we had fun. We did tequila tasting together and stuff. Just. I think that when a. When a business is like a family, that there's a much greater level of trust and efficiency that comes about. So I wanted to spend time with. The four of us are gonna be down there just doing whatever they. Don Miller and his team were so gracious to invite us to an activity, basically a welcoming party, a reception party for when we arrive on Sunday. I respond to Kelsey saying, let's skip on this unless there's a real compelling reason to go. Well, I included the entire Don Miller team in my response.

After I had already responded to them all saying that, yes, we'll all be going.

We can't wait to come. Except for Mike, the king of all tools.

We're super excited.

We can't wait. Everyone's raving about it. Hey, Kelsey, there's a compelling reason to go. Okay? But otherwise, let's Ditch these a holes. I almost put a holes in there too. No, I didn't. I didn't. All right, so listen, last week I tried a little game where I choose a common phrase.

An uncommon phrase. You chose an uncommon phrase?

Uncommon phrase. Because I thought it'd be too easy. So I picked I eat turtles also, which was so stupid. Now I've picked a phrase that is used in the common vernacular of English. Now the challenge is you have to hear it in a different language and tell me what this phrase is. You can pick three languages. Spanish is one of them. Because I know you have some slant there, but you cannot speak the language is the only thing you can. You can know some words. You can't speak it fluently. Jbone, you went last, so you have first. Now, either of you know what this phrase is, speak up quickly because you win the prize.

All right, Spanish.

Okay, you ready?

The Spanish was automatically a default one.

What do you mean?

No, that was his made up thing.

Esperanto. Here he is. Un pedazo de la torta. One more time. Un pedazo de la torta. To. To try to pronounce it.

Pie. Is that torta? Pie.

I. I don't know.

Okay.

I don't know what torta is.

Cal, what do you think torta is? Pie. You're pretty close. Yeah. No, you said torta. Yeah, well, pie. We accept pie.

Okay.

Okay. So you got some of it already. Cal, what language do you want? Do you want the international non recognized language?

No.

Of Esperanto.

Awful.

But it is a language. You found out. It is a real language.

It is. It does not belong to any. What do they call it? Linguistic family.

All right, shut your torch. All right, what's your.

That was perfect.

What's your next.

Let's try. Let's try Italian.

I thought you were gonna go for.

Africana for 100, please.

Italian for 100. Here it is. The answer is un pezzo di d' orta.

Un pezzo di torta.

Un peso.

A piece of piece.

Oh, you nailed it. We have a winner. A piece of cake.

A piece of cake.

Yeah, but a piece of pie. We will take it. Kelsey, you are the winner. Congratulations.

Thank you.

Here's. This is in your honor. Kelsey nails it Nice. Jbone, I thought you would nail it because you're a chef.

I don't know cake in every language.

Well, you should. You make a lot of, like, pastries, don't you? I.

So I. I did used to know German, but when I worked in Switzerland, I did know German. And then I took. I actually am ashamed. I took four years of Spanish, but I forget everything.

I took Spanish too. And yeah, I wouldn't have known that. All right, cows, why don't you just give us a little listener shout out. I know we got one.

Oh, we do. This one comes from Jesse T530, iTunes subscriber this. Right. I read the book Papa first and was inspired to learn more about the system to use in my startup. The podcast is a great way to flesh out the theory of the book with real application. Keep up the good work, Jesse. Thanks, Jesse.

Jesse T530. I wonder if Jesse's a robot. The T3, the T530 model.

That's a good argument.

The next email comes in. Hey, it's Jesse T6000. Oh, the advanced model. Mm. I'm. Ever since. Ever since I saw the best movie of all time, which we all know is T2, I have concluded that many people on this planet are probably robots.

Huh?

Yeah. From the future. Yeah. But then I read Stephen Hawking's book and he says that you can't do time travel in reverse. And he makes a very eloquent argument. I mean, Stephen Hawking's after all, on why you can't. He believes time travel to going forward is possible, but in the reverse, it. It can't be possible.

Huh?

Yeah. And he explains why.

Interesting.

Okay, so I think it's a robot anyway. Okay, Kels.

Yeah.

I want to thank our corporate partners, Nextiva and Receipt Bank. They make the show possible. And we'll give you more details on those fine folks in a little bit. Let's talk about Paul. Go first. He is a two time best selling author who grew his own physical therapy business from one clinic to four, zero to a million bucks in record time. Here's what's most impressive though. J Bone, think about this. He did this in a country with completely free socialist health care systems in place, which means he was providing physical therapy for a fee where you can get the same thing for free from residents. His main competitor was free and he kicked his ass. We gotta find out how to do it. Paul, welcome to our show.

Thank you, Paul.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Paul, there's a saying here. Besides, it's a piece of cake. There's another saying that you can't beat free. But you did.

Yeah, it was. It's a challenge. You know, people think that if you have something that is certainly a competition that's lower priced than you, that the average person on the street will always want the free thing or the cheaper thing. And I refuse to believe that that's the case. If you take the time, figure out a few things that are slightly different to what your competitors are doing, people will generally pay the price that you command. So it's just a matter of figuring out what that is and then putting it into a system and growing your business from there.

They're not going to invest the time in discovering how you're different unless you're able to stand out in front of them for them to discover you. At least, how did you make them even consider something as an alternative to free?

So it's marketing, exactly what you said. And the key, the key is marketing with the growing of any business, really, certainly to get it started and to keep it moving in the right direction. And for me, I faced a huge national health care system, obviously back in Britain, I mean, Orlando now where I live, back in Britain, everybody knows you can get free, free physical therapy. So I had no option but to figure out marketing to try to get my message to the people of my town that something else existed. And the secret really was that a lot of business owners, for whatever reason, think that they can grow a business without marketing. And they try to kind of grow a business and whether it's a pride thing that they think it's all about word of mouth or all about referrals, and often that gets businesses stuck. So the sooner you face up to marketing and understanding what marketing is and how to get a message out there that you're in terms of outcomes, you can provide something very different to people. And my experience is that people will pay it.

You know, I think there's this perverted pride. To your point, in word of mouth marketing, I speak with entrepreneurs like, oh, we get 90% of our business from word of mouth. We get nearly 100% from word of mouth, which at first blush sounds pretty impressive. They're not putting any dollars into it. They have a reputation. But what I'm hearing from you is they could gain a lot more clients, perhaps a lot more quality clients, a lot faster if they concentrate on marketing.

Yeah, it's not just about the numbers. And that's what I try to get across to business owners is, yeah, you may be getting the phone to ring, but what does the customer know about what you do? And if you've had no marketing in advance of them giving you a call, then it's not possible for them to know anything. And all they'll ever know is what the current customers are saying about you, which is Fine. But given that most businesses and most business owners are miserable and they're whinging about their customers and they're not happy with their profit margins, it's obviously a vicious cycle that they're getting into. The patients or customers that are coming through the door are paying a certain fee or expecting a certain thing and kind of go away to other people and telling them that that's what the fee is and that's what you get, therefore, that's what they're attracting. So to break that cycle, you have to delve into your marketing and change the meaning of what your service is. To be able to provide the same level of, or to be able to provide a service that people are happy to pay for in spite of potentially being able to get what could be perceived as a similar thing around the corner.

So let's talk specific strategy used in your business. So you did marketing, got people in the door willing to pay you a premium who could have done free.

Yeah.

What do you say in your message to convince people to consider you?

Yeah. So let me give you an example. In my, in my profession, typically PT physical therapy is very misunderstood and people don't really know what we do know. Often say things like, do you give exercises? Or do you help people who've had a car crash? Or do you help people with massage? Like, they're just not really quite sure what we do. If you ever push them on it, they'd probably say that you help people with pain or to restore function. So with that in mind, my competition is the National Health. And their kind of marketing message, if you like, is if you've got back pain, come and see us. So anybody with back pain may go and see somebody in the National Health. My marketing message became, if you've got back pain but are worried about independence, a loss of mobility, spending the rest of your life on pills, or just not knowing what's wrong and you can't sleep at night because of that, then I'm your guy.

Oh, interesting.

So we changed the meaning. Yeah, we checked. Well, basically we changed the meaning. So instead of it being about $100 for pain relief, it became $200 for independence and preservation of self worth while we fix your back pain.

Interesting. So what about the service themselves? Were they the same?

Exactly.

Identical.

Exactly.

Exactly the same.

Nothing changes. Look, every business owner listening to this will think that their business is better in terms of the skills, their product and all that stuff, and that's rubbish. We all, you know, there's marginal differences between how good I was I spent five seasons as a professional soccer physio. Could I argue that I'm slightly better than other physios? I could, but it doesn't mean I am. And it really wasn't the game changer. And it was irrelevant for all intents and purposes because you only need to be good enough to be good enough to do the job. And most pts are. So the service was never, ever changed. Now look, we have improved the customer service and the experience and we've improved many, many things, mainly communication internally. But we certainly didn't go out of our way to go and be better at dry needling or any form of exercises. It was quite simply changed the way the customer understood what we did for them in advance of them arriving.

And did that ultimately change the customer's perception? If they went in with a different expectation based upon your marketing, did they inherently actually have a different outcome because they had a different expectation?

Exactly. So if you understand incredible, because the type of customer that we inherited, then our marketing got very specific to towards independence and mobility. And that meant we attracted instead of, let's say, your 25, 30 year old guys or girls, which is fine, but those people are not necessarily, by and large, as a general rule, going to pay $2,000 for physical therapy. However, when we moved to the marketing message being 55, towards the 55 and 60 age bracket, all of a sudden we attracted a different type of customer who valued their health a lot more and was bought insignificantly to what we were doing for them. So Instead of the two or three sessions for pain relief that a typical PT would get, my average customer value went from three sessions to nine sessions and $500 to $2,000 in one hit.

Okay? Because I think some skeptics listening, maybe even me, one of them saying, well, hold on, customers can get a certain service for free. You offer a similar, if not identical service for fee. Isn't that taking advantage of customers? Shouldn't they go to the free? But then I heard in the next sentence, but by charging a fee, the customer is actually more invested in a.

Successful outcome and they understand what they can get from it.

Well, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, that's like saying you could get the same bed in the Holiday Inn as you do, as you do in the Ritz Carlton. You know, that's, that's the whole, that's what we do. The same meat served in McDonald's as it is in Martin's, it's just fried differently and served up by a different person. So that, that to me is the Whole nature of the game, that is innovation, that we can evolve and mean something different to people. Now within that, there is significantly more money in my business that we're able to provide a better level of service which is unquestionable on the front end. For example, my office can spend half an hour with you on the phone on the intake, whereas the traditional PT clinic with slim margins may have you on the phone for less than a minute. So let me ask you, what, what service do you actually kind of value? Is it the time that we spent with you before you arrived, which a lot of people do. And they want to know that they've hired the right place and somebody that had time for them, that asked them questions, that got to know them, that made sure that they were a good fit for. And before we take anybody's money, we do spend half an hour with you to make sure that your time and money will ultimately be invested wisely with us. Now I can only do that because I make enough money to provide a front desk person for every pt that I hire. Now most clinics would have 5 pts and one front desk person. So what do people actually value most? I'd actually put it to you that it's time in business.

Interesting. So you did this in the uk, you subsequently have come to the US and now you're helping US businesses. That sounds like they're starting to experience the same phenomena, the socialization of health care.

Yeah, yeah, the same, the same thing is exactly that happening that most PT businesses now, their reimbursements just not at a price that they can actually make a living. And Some of the PTs that I'm working with all across the US are now literally making like $2 an hour. You know, if the cost of services $83, they're getting $85 off the insurance company. So any, any, you know, the weather's bad one day and this is like these guys are in debt, you know, at the end of the month as such. So it's just not sustainable a level of, of profit that the clinics commit. So their only option is to move towards a cash based service where they can get from $85 off an insurance company to up to 300, $400 if they market their services correctly. And that's no exaggeration.

So is the strategy the same here in the us it's all about marketing?

Absolutely. For full disclosure, I came here to learn marketing. I was coming over on flights literally every month to attend marketing conferences and seminars. And I took all of the Americanized kind of Marketing, if you like, back to England, unraveled it and made it work. And the irony is now I'm kind of selling it back into the US if you like.

So another challenge you face, Paul, with your business, is your name part of the company's name. And to me, that means customers want Paul, they want the owner. And if there's a problem because your name's on the door, you get that call. But when we were talking offline, you said, I've been able to remove myself from the business.

Yeah.

How do you pull that off?

Marketing.

Marketing. You won't slap me with the word marketing.

Marketing. I mean, I love marketing. It gives you. It's not. It's not the sole reason that you have a successful business, but it gives you a chance to have a successful business. And that's why many, I often quote to my clients that marketing just gives you a chance to start solving other problems, I.e. growth problems and profit problems and staffing, you know, hiring better people in your business and so on. But if you can't figure out marketing, your business is impossible. It's like trying to start a car without gas. Like, you just can't do it. And for most people listening to this podcast and in business generally, they just don't want to face up to having to go learn marketing because it's all about their product. So for me, how did marketing help me initially? If you think how most businesses exist in my profession, it's all about the person. So what that means is like, I'm looking out on the i4 right now, and I can see two billboards here in Orlando, and they're both lawyers. Now on the billboard is the picture of the lawyer and the lawyer's name, and it's all about the lawyer and the law firm. What my marketing became was about the outcomes that people wanted. So if you wanted to be able to be more active in your 70s, and if you wanted to get rid of pills, where the place to do it. And we switched from I can help to we can help. And when everybody asked, you know, can I see Paul? We would literally go back to the question that said, what do you want to achieve? Why are you calling us? And they'd say, well, I want to be able to do this. And we'd say, well, Johnny, one of the other physios is actually better than Paul at doing that. So the conversation became about the outcome and not about me. And again, if you really look at businesses, their marketing is often about themselves, their customer service. They're 25 years in business, and they're wonderful awards for whatever else. And that kind of bonds and binds the customer to the actual owner of the business. Like, he takes great pride in that or she takes great pride in it. And in doing so, you almost sentence yourself to a lifetime of people wanting to talk to you when it needs to be about what's the transformation you make for the customer. And just keep talking about that in your marketing and people will end up buying that from you. It's that simple.

I'm curious about the naysayers. I'm sure, Paul, when you said, I'm starting a business to compete with an industry that's totally free, your friends must have been like, you're bloody crazy.

I mean, I quit a job in professional soccer. I had a great salary. I was traveling. Oh, my God, I had a fabulous lifestyle. I had the dream job, and it was on the pitch and I was on TV and all that type of stuff, but it just wasn't me. It was just I was too entrepreneurial. Somebody telling me when to go to, when to be on the bus and when to be at work and all that stuff just wasn't. Just wasn't going to carry on. So I, yeah, I quit and I started the job. And yeah, people. My mother was like, what are you doing? And I was just like, just let me get on with it and I'll be fine. And. Best decision I've ever. I've ever met. And it's funny, I'm even going through it again. I've up sticks and left a beautiful life in England to kind of come and live in America and start hiring again. And I'm in a tiny little office in Orlando right now making my first hires, and I've left buildings behind with my name on the door and staff that kind of know me and make me a cup of coffee and what have you to kind of be on my own. But that's the entrepreneurial journey that I. That I'm addicted to and would. Wouldn't be any fun if I. If I had a normal job and, you know, things were just easy and the same thing all day, every day.

Yeah, well, you are the epitome of an entrepreneur. You just can't stop starting. But what about that business you left behind in England? Did you sell that off or does it still operate on its own? What's the status?

It still operates. Yeah. I planned this two years in advance to be here to start my, you know, my second business in the US if you like. So I put in good people I'm a huge people person. I love my staff. I got savvy at numbers and understanding my spreadsheets and balance sheets and critical drivers and all those types of things. You know, obviously studied your stuff. And all of that has helped me to be able to be able to run a business from a spreadsheet really, with very good people that I can, you know, from the information that I'm getting from my team, tell them where I think they should go. And it's, it's one hour a week, I jump on the phone to them and I go back home every three months. And that's about it.

So anyone listening to that show that wants to leverage marketing to really start growth in their business, do you have a specific way of identifying where your marketing opportunity is? The messaging, how to position it?

Who's the. And this is, I teach this to my guys and it's the, this question. Who spends the most money with you the easiest?

Oh, I love that.

That's it.

That's gold.

Who spends the most money with you the easiest? As in, in our world, who just walks through the door, hands over their card and just says, fix me. I trust you, I get you. I, I'm in on this. And it's nearly always a specific person. And when I get them to do it, they're at first they will say, oh, but we've got lots of good customers. I said, I didn't say that. I said, who spends the most money with you the easiest? There is a mathematical fact in every single business that there is a customer who spends the most money with the least amount of objections. Figure out who they are, what are their pain points and just run all your ads to them and give it 6 to 12 months and watch your business be a completely different business.

That's a game changing question. When you first said it, I didn't hear the with you. I heard who spends the most money easiest. I'm like, oh, my wife. But then I heard the with you is like, oh, okay, that's interesting. And then, so once you identify who spends the most money with you, the goal is to clone that community to target that community.

We call mine. My perfect patient is Mary. She's 55. We looked around the office and literally said, who. Who's the one that just is the. We just love it. We can't wait for it to walk through the door. And it was this lady and we speak about her all day, every day. And if you sat in my office, you just see Mary, Mary's sister. Mary's best friend, Mary's cousin, Mary's auntie. Like it's just, it's just Mary like there's just clones of the same person.

It's not creepy at all.

Exactly. Some guy walks in, is like hi.

I'm like I'm married, I'm Mary's husband. Like that's, that's like literally it. So occasionally we get, we get the guys coming in but more often than not it's because Mary's booked the appointment for the guy and that there's something in that that a lot of my clients will actually try and get customers that just don't want to pay bills. I men or sports injury kind of guys and they're like, they're just not there. They're not going to spend enough money with you to justify growing a business. They're not going to do it. It's another 20 years before they're interested in the health enough to want to spend two or three thousand dollars. That's not my opinion. That's just like, that's just the way it is. That's what these people do in life. When they get to 50 plus they've start to value their health a bit more, got a bit more cash on, on their hip if you like and they can spend a bit more on the thing that they actually value.

Paul, I'm curious, did you choose Orlando because there's a lot of Mary's down there.

I chose Orlando because of this thing called at the sun and Blue sky and I come from England, remember And the second reason, I have a 2 year old and a 5 year old and I can see Walt Disney World from where I live. So two times a week, so that's it. And it's easy to get back home so I can get flights home every day if I ever want to go back home.

Well, I think you picked the right spot to be Paul, before we let you go, clearly I think you're a fan of marketing. So the only answer you're allowed to say is marketing. I have three questions for you and your only answer is marketing. How did you find the love of your life?

How did I find it? Marketing.

How did you find your long lost sibling?

Marketing.

How did you lose £50?

Marketing.

Paul. Thank you.

You crack yourself up.

I do. I thought that was funny. Paul, thank you so much for joining us. Before we let you go, I want people to engage for your services. Where can they find out more about you?

Yeah, my website is paulgoff.com and podcast and video show and everything is There all my books, which are Paul's marketing book.com and I've also got a book out on hiring called paulshiringbook.com and I'm literally just finishing my PaulsSales book.com which will be out in the next couple of months as well. So they're all there.

Amazing. Yeah, he's got a couple best selling books out there right now. Go get them. Paul Gough. It's G O U G H. We'll have it listed on our website. Paul, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate you.

Take care, my brother. All right. Callous. We got so much things to do now, so we're going to recap what we learned. We have another, sadly, another one star review rolled in. By the way, if you've young children listening, when we get to the one star review, there is a profanity this person used about my work. So just, you know, maybe want to skip that part. And we got some other things too. But first. Oh, that's not a good punch. That's too long. It builds too long.

Yeah.

But first I want to thank Anticlimactic, you know. Yeah, let's try this one. But first. Yes, better. That's better. But first I want to thank our.

Geez.

I want to thank our corporate partners, Nextiva and Receipt Bank. Now, I don't know if you heard about the new application. I actually shared last week about Receding Bank. A lot of people have been inquiring about that and didn't realize that that was a joke. So there is no Reciti Bank. That was something I made up as mythology. But thank you for all the inquiries I've poured in. Clearly we have a large listener base that likes to patronize businesses like JBONE does. So Receipt bank is a receipt for Jaybone. So just so everyone knows, Jaybone, you're this position here, you want to make a career transition. You're using this as a springboard effectively to some new career options. And you're like, this is probably a good choice to work here. If anyone listens to these podcasts, you'll never get hired anywhere. So this is our counter tactic to keep you here.

You can't leave.

Yeah, we do that.

Thank you for destroying my future.

It's all blackmail, so you're very welcome. So Receipt bank, all those receipts you have yet you put in the shoebox and all that stuff. It has a phone based app, you can scan it in. It ties with your accounting system. It's extremely efficient, it's extremely convenient and you Never lose a receipt. And trust me, you need those. If the tax man comes a knocking or you gotta check out what you've done in the past and do some analytics. It's all right there. Nextiva voice over IP phone system. You know, some people ask me, mike, this clearvoice, don't you know every phone does that? Yes, we do, actually. That's also a joke. Another horrible joke. So they are not the inventors of Clear Voice. I think Graham Bell was or whoever. But what they do make is a voice over IP phone system, jbone, that you can call anywhere in the world. Now, they're the first phone company to do this. Most companies didn't have worldwide access. You could only call a very specific community. Nextiva opened up to the world. So it's called Call the World Phone. I knew it.

I knew something was coming.

It's called Call the World. Yeah. So if you want that new innovation from nextiva, Call the World, you literally can call anyone else as long as they have a phone on their other side.

I believe it's Star 7. It's called the World option.

Yes, it is. They're coming out the new emergency system, too. I'll tell you about that next week. All right, Kels.

Yeah.

Let me hit a buzz sound effect here. Let's go into our takeaways. That was a good one. I like.

That is a good one. Too long.

Keep that one. So what's your big takeaway?

My big takeaway is I love his entrepreneurial spirit. I love that he pushes himself to explore new places, new territories in his business. I think it's integral, just for humanity, that you don't just kind of tread and eventually sink. Like, you have to kind of explore when there's all these shores you can navigate and learn new things from. Yeah, I just love that.

Yeah.

And I also. I just love his devotion to his customer. I feel like that is the crux of everything that he does, is understanding his customer and speaking to them. And it. It pays doubly. He serves them better. They're getting services they didn't even know they could get. And obviously it serves him and his companies.

My takeaway was when jbone asked that question, why Orlando? Because I really thought he'd say, oh, the most opportunity is here. Instead, his response was, because I want to take my family here.

Yeah.

Like, here's an entrepreneur who gets that. Business is here to support family, not the reverse, you know?

Yeah. I thought that was cool. That really surprised me.

Yeah, that was cool. And I like the. That. What A powerful question. Who spends the most money with you consistently? Yeah, like, that is such a great question. Once you know that, now you know someone that's resonating with you through their actions, they're showing the value they see in you. And why not target people just like them?

Yeah. And the easiest, right, like, why keep banging your head against the wall for these customers that complain or they don't want to pay?

You know, it makes me think about your jewelry business. That one customer.

I know, I thought the same thing.

They buy that. It's a lake design.

Yeah. So it's the same design. And now they expanded to do like four different lake, but it's still a simple design that I can easily replicate. And she pays me, you know, a good price and buys in bulk, so it's easy, you know.

Yeah. I hope you pursue that.

Yeah.

Aggressively. And people like them. That's pretty amazing. All right, we also want to know your takeaways too. So if you do post a review of Entrepreneurship Elevated, we'd love to see that in the review and we'd be honored if you do review and give us the rating that you feel is appropriate. Talk about ratings. Kelsey. Yeah, I'm not always a five star guy. I found out, in fact, many people give me one star too many. And you know, when I get reviews of my books, some people at the very end will say, I had to give it one star because Amazon forces a star rating. It doesn't deserve this. Not even one star. It deserves no stars. I gave it one star too many. Well, this came in from Solomon D. Again, a warning. He says a bad word, starts with F, end with, end with and can.

You curse on Amazon reviews?

Well, he put F, star, star, star. Okay, but. But interestingly, when he read it off, he actually said the word. That's why I'm warning you. So skip for the next eight or nine seconds. Here we go.

Solomon D. Stupid.

What the fuck did I just read? Stupid. So that was Solomon D's review of Amazon, and I have to defend him. So here's my defense. I think Salomon's an idiot. Let's be honest. Seriously. No, I think. I think he's an idiot and couldn't consume. He couldn't consume what he's reading.

I think we should define what defend means.

I'm defending his idiocy. There's this lack of clarity he has, and I just. I just think we have to love him for that. And I think.

Your logic is just brilliant.

I like my new level defense. He's stupid. He's stupid. That's the defense. I like this better. Now it's becoming fun because originally I wanted to really try. Try to defend the person I like defending. Yeah, fake defense. I like this better. This is more fun this way. All right, that's Solomon D's. One star too many. Review. One more thing. We got this thing called an elevation point. Oh, these builds are too long. What's an elevation point? I should. I should. I don't know. I gotta work with these. I gotta be prepared for that building part. But an elevation point is a strategy that I think is really helpful for some businesses and something I want to share that maybe you haven't heard in my books or other work. The concept is this. You can leverage your weaknesses to become your biggest strength. As Solomon was talking, it triggered a couple ideas. Here's why I've used it. My last name is the most difficult to pronounce last name in the world. Michalowicz. Oh, that in the world.

Thanks.

I mean. Okay, okay. If it was an Esperanto, it would be really hard, but it's hard to pronounce. The first time you saw it, did you see it in an ad listed?

Yeah.

And you're like, what? What did you think? How did you.

Well, you put that pronunciation everywhere. So I saw it right away.

Okay, well, that's the trick. So the weakness is my name. No one could pronounce my name. And therefore, on the website, right on the homepage, there's a pronunciation, I think, on every page. But it makes fun of my own name. And by doing that, it engages people to learn how to pronounce a name. And the thing is, when you can pronounce someone's name, the trust level increases for that person. Like, if they're like, oh, I read a book by Mike. Then you're like, I don't know if that guy's that good anyway. But if you can nail down the name, you feel inherently more comfortable with them, therefore, more trust. So what is your weakness? Find a way to make it your strength. I made it into a fun factor, right. Motel 8 did this also. Motel 8. I don't know if you remember the commercials they used to run. They compare themselves to, like a high end Hilton. And they said when you come into Motel 8 and they show this, like, really basic room and stuff, and they said, it's just like a hotel Hilton. When you do this and they turn off the switch, it goes pitch black. And they're like, now you're in a Hilton Hilton. And I. That is such genius, because now you can have this economic experience staying in a Motel 8, but you can visualize that you have this luxury. Experience, genius. Make your weakness your strength. All right, Kels, I think that's it. Right?

I think. Oh, wait, we have a listener. Mail.

Oh, lay it on me.

Okay, so this one comes from Dalton, the confused turd herder.

A white herder.

Turd herder.

Like, seriously, I don't have the notes in front of me. I'm not trying to be a pain in the ass.

He currently works for a septic company, but he wants to start his own septic company in. Particularly in West Virginia, because there's a market that is super ripe for him right now.

Super what?

Right.

That's a good one, madam.

Thank you, sir.

Well, West Virginia is tons of rural communities. Right?

Right. And I guess he did the research, and there was only, like, one septic company per, you know, 80 square miles or something like that.

Mountain mama.

Yeah. But his trouble is.

Mountain mama, take me home country road to the place we belong West Virginia. Mountain mama, take me home country roads. Thank you. You didn't know that?

No, I never knew they said mountain mama there.

Maybe this would be better. Do, do, do, do. Okay, so what. What's this?

Any who's. So the trouble is he recently filed for bankruptcy, and the truck to do the pumping is integral to starting the business. So his question is, what do you recommend he do when he doesn't have. He doesn't make enough money to put aside the $7,000 to $15,000 he would need to buy a truck?

Yeah. Yeah. So, first of all, Dalton, you're not the first person to face a dilemma like this. Right. Where you need equipment. Don't you dare. Don't you. I mess up one word and you just start losing your mind. So, but, Dalton, if you don't have the money to do it, I always look into rental or borrowing. So you bet you can rent machines not on the market. You can't go to Home Depot and say, hey, do you have a poop truck by any chance? But you can go to another septic tank company and say, listen, can I get a rental and some disposal? And they may say, yeah, for 500 bucks and do it. Or more often through a revenue share. You could say to them and say, listen, I have some opportunities areas. Could I rental, rent something for an extended period of time, and I'll give you a revenue share. The goal here is not for you to make tons of money. It's to build a Customer base. So you are going to lose your shirt. This is not a good long term financial strategy, but it gets you traction in finding clients you want. Once you have a big enough client base now you have some negotiating power, you can go to a septic tank truck company and say, hey, I have a customer base of 50 customers or so. Can we strike out some deal? So you gonna laugh again? Are you gonna laugh? It's building.

No.

Mountain. Mountain.

How did you know?

Because I could tell your face because.

I was trying to figure out what I thought that they were saying there.

No, you know, your tell is your lips start moving like you have a little quiver. You ever see Shock a lot that movie?

Yeah.

You know when the guy gets a little piece of chocolate there and his tongue comes out and starts flipping his. That's what you do great. When you start thinking, I could tell you like mountain mama, what do you think they say?

No, I don't know. That's what I was trying to figure out.

Country Roads is like one of the most famous songs of all time.

But I notoriously just make up my own words that are close the reality.

So I used to go down to Morgantown, Virginia, West Virginia. I'm sorry? Morgantown, West Virginia.

Mountain mama.

They. Well, if you go to West Virginia University, every bar throughout there will play that song at some point during any given night. And the whole crowd goes silent for a second and then everyone sings it and it's. It's awesome. It's an experience to have.

How far is VT from West Virginia?

About three hours, four hours. Yeah. So I go up there, you know, in my. All my VT gear, in my orange and maroon and in all the West Virginia folks are there with their navy and gold and it's pretty intimidating when there's that many fans. I will tell you, going to a football stadium like that is a little dangerous because it gets a little bit confrontational. People are hyped up about a game. But if you go to West Virginia, to one of the bars during a non game or before or after and you're the only person from a different school there, you are embraced, you are welcome and you are guaranteed to be wasted within like 10 minutes. It is the. Some of the best times I have my life is at West Virginia as a Virginia Tech fan.

Wearing the gear.

Wearing the gear, but not to a football game. That's when like people threaten to kill you. Literally like I'll kill you, man. Because that's very, very competitive scenario. So I.

They're that big rivals.

No back in the day. This is. This is like back in the day. 90, 89, 93. Listen. Football gets pretty intense. And this is true. Any school. This is true. Any school. West Virginia, dude. They would take couches after a game, throw them in the streets and start burning couches. Pretty insane. But the bars. Awesome, Awesome.

I love that.

I love West Virginia. Actually, drive through it regularly because if you take Route 81 south, you peek into West Virginia for a second. Beautiful part of the country.

I'm gonna go down, dress up like a mountain mama.

Evergy Attack.

Yeah, whatever mountain mama looks like, that's what I'm gonna dress like.

Oh, well, yeah, Okay. I don't know what. A mountain.

A mountain.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

All right. We're totally. We've lost the plot here. Let's get out of here. C. Take us out, please, everybody.

Leave us comments, ratings, and subscribe on whatever podcast you're listening to us.

Yeah. And yeah. Is there anything else? Oh, of course there is.

Serge.

Serge, have you read Surge yet? Jbone?

Yeah, not the full thing, but yeah.

You'Ve read a little parts of it. Serge is a book I wrote that's kind of a sleeper. And I said, you know what? I'm gonna get out in a new way. I'm gonna give it away for free. This is the. This book in its entirety is available right now. This moment for you. If you go to mikemotorbike.com or mikemcalitz.com and just click and sign up. Alright, let's get out of here.

Bye, everybody. Sam.