The SECRET To Getting Results & ACHIEVING SUCCESS! | Phillip Stutts

And I think one of the big lies of marketing agencies out there, Stephen, is that they'll come to you and say, we got to build the brand first.

You know, you share so many different amazing stories. Throughout the book, I got to thinking about the entrepreneurship journey of my own and the businesses that I've had and the importance of understanding who it is I'm trying to serve, what it is I'm trying to serve them, and all that kind of stuff. You talk a lot about in the book about the importance of a target market. And I think a lot of us entrepreneurs get that wrong.

What are we most likely doing wrong as we're trying to assess our target markets?

Oh, something I've done a million times wrong as well. So let me lay out how we all get it wrong.

You know, Stephen, you have created all these businesses and you're probably really proud and passionate about the things you've created.

Fair. Fair.

Yeah, I am too. And everybody listening right now, if they've created a business or want to create a business, you start something from. You know, I've started all my companies at zero. No outside money, no outside investors, no debt in all my companies, no debt, no outside investors, no nothing. I've bootstrapped every one of. I've got five businesses and we're about to create a six, and all of them have been bootstrapped. So of course my wife wants to kill me because I roll my profits into mine too. Yeah, there you go. We have another bo.

I roll my profits into expanding and growing because I know eventually I know where I want to go, and that will stop at some point. But when you make all these kind of sacrifices, you get really proud of what you do. And so the problem. And I talk about this in the book, but I'll tell you now and again, I'm really guilty of this as well, though I've gotten better at it. We love to brag about our product or service. We love to tell people, this product is for you. It's the greatest product. And of course you are. You're proud of what you've built as an. As a business owner or marketer or C suite level executive. Yeah, you're proud of it and you go out and you do it. But what if you found out that your customer or client didn't give a crap about the things that you're sitting there screaming and hollering passionately about?

I've done it.

What's that?

I said I've done that.

Oh, me too. Yes. We're all guilty of It. Right. And what I can. Here's. I'm going to. Here, I'm just going to lay this out in the first question. Okay. The marketing game is rigged for 99.9% of business owners right now, 100% that the game is rigged against you. Let me give you a great example and then I'll tell you why. Go back to your. To answer the question. We met with.

A prospect the other day for our corporate marketing agency, and they are one of the top 10 background check companies in America for big companies that, you know, maybe they supply the fast food industry and they do criminal background check. Okay. And they came into us and I mean, these guys make, you know, mid eight figures, close to nine figures. And we did a data analysis of their target market and we were looking at everything. And then we went into their Google account and we found out that they were bidding on three keywords that were actually. Google had changed the rules and they were now bidding against themselves. And they had been doing it for two years. And they. No idea. They literally had been throwing money away for two years bidding against themselves, and they had no clue. And this, there's a great stat I write about in the book, but Forbes has a stat out right now that we are seeing up to 10,000 ads a day online and offline. So you're not compete, if you're still in shoes, you're not competing against other shoe companies when you're running online ads. You're competing against computer companies, microphone companies, desk companies, furniture companies, what coffee company. Like you're competing against 10,000 other businesses for attention and every business owner. I'm telling you, this is what happens every time to me, this business owner comes into my, you know, into our company, you know, as a prospect, and they say, philip, we ran three months worth of Facebook ads and got destroyed. We can't figure out why.

Yeah.

And this goes to your targeting question.

Yeah.

Why did you do that? Well, because Facebook or YouTube is where everybody tells me I need to go. Well, I appreciate that. What if the product or service you're selling, your market isn't on Facebook, they're actually on Pinterest?

Yeah.

What if you knew that? Would that change the way you spend the money and target your audience? And what if you found out that, let's say you're selling shoes, they don't care that you're giving 50% of your profits away to charity? What if they care about the quality of the product more than they care about your charity? Oh, okay, so maybe you're, you know, and by the way, we can get into the weeds of how we know these things as marketers, but we do. And so I wrote the book and I look at targeting and totally like, I am trying to unrig the game.

Yeah.

The game is, hear me out. I'm not just saying this. I'm not trying to get attention. It is 1000% rigged against every business owner. Not everybody. The big tech companies, when we work with Fortune 200 companies, they get it. You know why? Here's the big key. They're data companies that also sell product or service.

Yeah.

Coca Cola is not selling soft drinks. They're a data company that sells soft drinks and water. Uber is not a ride share company. They're a data company that does ride share and food delivery service. Facebook is not a social media company. They're a data company that also has social media and all the other things they do. Same thing with Google. Google's a data company that does this, you know, that does search. I'm telling you right now, that's what every big company in America gets right now. But if you're 100, $100 million, no one gets that. And so for me, when you're targeting and when you're talking about the targeting and you're talking about what would people get wrong is that people automatically start out doing the wrong thing, which is they talk about how great their product or service is instead of finding out what their customers think is great about their product or service and meeting them where they're at.

Well, I mean, that takes us to a next step. I mean, so far. I mean, just be truly candid, honest with you. I love the book.

Thank you.

Right. It's a highlighter book for me. I'm like, oh, we're doing that really well. Oh, crap, I'm not doing that very well. Ooh, we're doing that really well. We're not doing that so well kind of thing. But one of the key determining factors is how do you acquire enough data, especially in an early venture, to then assess where you should be investing with that data.

Yeah. So, couple different ways. First of all, let me explain why the first step, everybody asked me in the five step undefeated marketing system, right. What is the most important? And I'm like, step one, like, not even close. Like, if you don't understand your customer or client, like intuitively understand them, and with real data, you're going to screw up from the beginning. So that is the number one thing, you know, because I have this background in political marketing and this Book has not, as you know, Steven has nothing to do with politics.

No.

Nothing to do with Trump. Trump tweets Obama. It doesn't have anything to do with that, but it has to do how we market politicians and how businesses should be following this. Met the systematic approach that we use in order to grow their bottom line. And so the first thing we do in a political campaign is the candidate sits down with me, and that egotistical candidate, like, she. She or he will come to me and say, I believe in 25 things that I want to talk about on my campaign and I care about. Right. And you're like, oh, no one cares about your 25 things. Like, they don't care. But what we do is we take those 25 things that they've listed and then we go out and we take a poll. And I'm giving a very basic description of this is much more sophisticated, but we'll take a poll in that state or that district and we'll find out amongst the 25 issues that that candidate loves, which ones rise to the top, which ones the voters are so passionate about that they would literally cross party lines. They'd vote for a candidate they never heard of. Like, if I knew that candidate believed in X, Y, Z, I'm voting for that candidate. Like, that's what I'm trying to get to. This is a metaphor for business owners. I hope everybody's realizing the metaphor. Right. I'm trying to determine not just like, I'm trying to find alignment in politics where the politician and the voter has a total alignment. And from that point forward, I'm only running my marketing campaigns on that alignment. I'm not doing a misaligned campaign. It's the same thing for business owners. I must find out, first of all, what does the business owner marketer, C suite, what do they really care about that business? I want to find out all of it. And then I want to do a deep dive into their customer. We talk about how that looks, but if you found out that you're out there singing the praises of your product or service, like, 10 different ways, but only two of them resonate, then you're only getting about a 20%, you know, success rate, Right?

Yeah.

And so what I'm ultimately trying to decide is what does the customer. I love the politician. I love the business owner, but I'm ten times more obsessed with the voter and the customer.

Yeah.

That's where the gold is. That's where the magic is, and that's where we always get it wrong.

Yeah. And the other thing you mentioned, too, I think a lot of us entrepreneurs as a whole, when I say us, because we both obviously are entrepreneurs ourselves.

We kind of get lulled to sleep from time to time. We put something on autopilot, or we think it's on autopilot. We're not paying attention. And then one of the things you mentioned in the book is this importance of knowing that the status quo leads to business death of a venture. How is status quo so destructive to an organization when you're trying to actually maximize? Maybe, you know, for me, it's not about maximizing revenue. That's a byproduct of maximizing impact for me specifically. But how do you leverage that piece of knowledge to then shake yourself awake and then kind of get back to doing the right thing?

Well, let me give you. Maybe it's best to tell you through a story. By the way, that's how the book is written.

Yes, it's very easy to read.

The whole systematic, formulaic approach is all told through story. So if you're looking for a textbook, this is not your book. If you want to know some fascinating political campaign stories and fascinating corporate marketing stories.

Behind the scenes stuff, guys. The behind the scenes stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

So.

From basically about 2015 to the beginning of 2020, we were marketing. And I'm telling you, I could market any client on this. It was basically on significance and status. The customers wanted. The data told us. The customers wanted to buy products or services that made them feel significant and gave them status. It made them feel like they were in charge. You know, it's basically. I always said it was like the Instagram economy. Like, hey, look at me on the beach wearing a watch with half my clothes on. Buy the watch, right? And by the way, you can say, well, you know, I don't have a sexy business like that. I'm telling you, we did this for pest control companies, we did this for organic food companies. It was all about how to make people go, yes, if I buy that, then I get this, right?

And then the pandemic hit. And again, about 95% of business owners didn't know, but we did, because we were tracking. And I'll tell you, like we had one of. We have probably the most sophisticated data operation of any marketing agency in America, which is why I'm on your show, because it's different and unique. And we have 200 million plus American consumers in our database, 550 million connected devices. We're tracking 10 billion online purchasing decisions every day. And I'm trillion Searches every day. Every day. We're the largest data. We have a partnership with the largest data collection and analytics and AI company in America. And this is what we do. First step with anybody we work with is a deep dive understanding of the customer or the client. B2B. B2C. E. Com. Doesn't matter. Well, what we found during the pandemic, when the pandemic hit, was that we went out and started looking at all the data immediately in early March of 2020. By the end of March, it became very clear for the first time, and I'm talking decades, the messaging that every company was utilizing in marketing. I talk about how Coke did it. Like, Coke was like, you know, I mean, and I don't have the examples in front of me, but it was like Uber had an ad that was like, live the black car lifestyle. You know, like, that was in December of 19. 20. 19.

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden, in. In, like, early April, it was like, we're all in this together. Be safe, you know, and like, oh, yeah, that sounds obvious to everybody. But if you. That's the great way. You want to know a freeway. Model what they're doing, model what the big, you know, trillion dollar, billion dollar companies are doing because they have their data companies, they're looking at their customer markets. Facebook pivoted to a safety ad. Coca Cola had an ad. Instead of, like, kids frolicking on a beach, it went to stay apart so we can stay safe. That was literally their ad campaign. And I write about this on the book, but I saw something in the marketplace change I'd not seen in 25 years of marketing. The messages that converted customers literally flipped overnight.

Wow.

And the only messages that work were your product or service. Had to prove safety, trust, and how it helped others. What we were finding in our data was that people were more concerned about the health of their families than they were of themselves. So they only wanted to buy products that they knew would help others. We also saw this huge thing where people immediately started buying out of need not want. So in late night 2019, people, ooh, I want a vacation. I want a car. I want a watch. I want. Everybody wanted things now. It was like, do I need it?

Yeah, right?

This is in March, March and April 2020. I was like, do I need that? So, like, for my clients, we immediately pivoted because we knew what the customer wanted immediately. And so we started instead of, let's say we work for a national pest control company. That's one of our clients. And instead of running Ads which we have run for ever for them on spring and summer bug season, which is their biggest moneymaker of the year. We pivoted all their messages to saying, hey, you, you're quarantined in your home. You're going to have, it's spring and bug season. Spring bug season is coming out. You're going to have, you're eating all your meals in your home. Bugs and pests are going to come into your home at record amounts. We're here to help you. We'll wear gloves and masks, face guards. We'll make sure your pets are safe. We'll, you know, we'll do whatever it takes to make sure that in this moment you have high immunity and you don't have.

Bugs and pests in your home. And oh, by the way, you need to keep your immunity high. You need to do all these things. And we ended up having something like a 2 or 3x return on that campaign compared to previous years where it was bug and pest season. And that's because no one was running ads. So we had a free marketplace. And two is we changed the message immediately based on what the customer wanted to hear from the client.

Yeah.

And that's what people get wrong so often. And that changes. We are in a very volatile customer marketplace or client marketplace. People's needs and wants and reasons for buying change all of the time. We did data. We call this the customer insights Report. It's our first step. One that when we, when people work with us, when we were delivering one to a.

A like a gym chain the other day and they wanted to look at two different marketplaces, they wanted to look at 18 to 34 year olds. They wanted to look at 35 to 55 year olds. Well, 18 to 34 year olds were only buying based on what I call friction of transaction. They wanted an easy process to buy, like the Amazon model. Right.

One or two buttons.

Yep. They cared about price, but they didn't care about it as much as friction of transaction. The 34 to 55 year old cared about quality over price. And the guy was literally, literally throwing discounts on everything. And we're like, stop running discounts. Price ain't your problem. The problem is you got a big friction to transaction with the 18 to 34 year olds. And you also, you're not touting the quality of your gems to the 35 to 55 year olds. And he went, whoa, that is fundamentally different than I ever thought about. And I'm like, yeah, I'm here to unrig the marketing cabal. I'm here to change the game and really what I'm trying to do is take the guesswork out of business owners marketing and make it a more scientific approach.

Well, I think that's why I love the book so much is because it does just that. I mean, I think you're achieving your goals. It takes the mystery out of doing this. Well, the five steps are very clearly laid out. They're very easy to kind of identify. Okay, am I doing this well? Am I not doing this well? I got to be honest, I think we're doing about that, maybe a third of it. Well. And the other things we can definitely use some help on, especially with a personal brand kind of scenario where people are coming to you for, you know, it's basically a knowledge industry. Hey, look, these are the practical principles that we use to help you kind of really overhaul and take control of your life kind of scenario. You know, we noticed the shift in. Even just in. Not even in the purchases, but in the way in which social media was responding to different things. You know, whether or not you were polarizing or not, whether or not you chose to side on this, that or the other thing during all this, you know, I think that's been very like instrumental in trying to understand the customer data market. You know, I think the tricky part is especially if you're early startup, you know, and you're trying to get the data and the data drives the behaviors or the, you know, the transactional behaviors that will follow and the messaging in the middle that. It seems like the tricky part is just getting that data to begin with. And if you're a brand new company, you may not have any data to go off of other than I only have a product or service, so how.

Do I. Yeah, so you had. Who wrote. So James Altucher wrote the four to my book. You've had him on.

Oh yeah, he's. I love that dude, James.

One of my dear friends and I love him to pieces. And smartest guy ever. So tattooed, crazy. Yeah. Go back to listen to the show with James and you. It's. It's a fabulous episode.

Thanks, man.

Yeah, but James and I were on. So I went on James's podcast when the book came out and he's like, same question you just had. Okay, Philip, you have this big sophisticated database. Not everybody can afford that. How would you do it? And I said, give me an example. And he goes, okay, restaurant industry. How would you do it if you're starting a restaurant? I said, great. First thing I do is I'd be recruiting people to come into the restaurant. I'd be handing out flyers, giving people and then send them to come to the restaurant. Then when they come in the restaurant, the first thing I'm going to do is everybody's going to be trained to ask questions of the customers. What dish did you like? What are you buying? You're going to look at the data after the end of the day. What did people order the most? What sold the most? Why did they like that product? The waiters and maybe even the people at the front desk are seating people and be like, what did you like best about this? Oh, what did you like least? Oh, okay. And all of a sudden, over amount of time, you're going to get a significant amount of data on what works and what doesn't for your business. Yeah, that's a free way to do it. That didn't cost you anything. Obviously, there's Google Analytics, there's Facebook Analytics. You can see what people are doing and utilizing any data is good to work with me, I would not consider that. But, but it's. If you have, if you've got, listen, I've been bootstrapped where people with significant means looked at me and laughed like, I get it. Like, you got to do what you got to do. Right. The way we do it, and I'll just explain it that way, is we've done these for, I mean, this is the same data report that like Amazon and Disney and Hershey's and TurboTax and a bunch of other companies have utilized. And what I did was I went to the data partner and I said, everybody should have, every business should have an opportunity to do this, but no one's going to pay six figures like the big companies do. And they said, good, then you pay us a six figure licensing fee every other year and then you can sell it at whatever price you want. And so I said, well, is this going to be my business model? And I said, I believe in it so much that it is. So I put up the money without any clients and I started it that way. And what I do is we then sell it for, you know, between, I don't know, 6,500 and 7,500 bucks businesses. So if you're a business owner and you're about to go spend $25,000 and you're about to spend that money before you even understand your customer market or client market.

It'S worth investing. And I, and I walked through a story in a book of a company that, you know, they basically had been marketing to discounts for years. And what happened was their customers had changed their preferences and they saw discounts as cheap and they didn't realize it.

Yeah, I remember that story.

And they didn't realize it. And they spent another year marketing to discounts and they lost over 2. They spent $1.8 million in marketing, lost 2 million in market share because they were marketing to a message that turned off their market. Yeah, but in fact, their customers didn't want discounts. That was cheap to them, that was unsafe to them. What they wanted was to know they had high quality, that they had green products, that they had, you know what else did they, they donated to charity, that they were a family owned business. These were things that drove the conversion. They had never even told those stories. But once we looked into the data and we looked into the customers, we found out what drove and motivated them and what they wanted to see. We were able to reconfigure their entire marketing campaign. And yeah, they had to spend some money up front. Guess what? They had lost one point. They'd spent $1.8 million. Flushed it down the drain. So you have a choice as a business owner. Do you, do you want to burn your boats and do it the right way or do you want to burn your boats and run not towards the island, but towards the water?

Yeah, yeah, I know which one that I would choose or want to choose.

And by the way, you don't have. I'm not saying you need to hire me. That's not the point. The point is you need to understand your customer. And if you're a business owner, you're innovative, figure it out. You know how to do it. I lay out other ways you can do it in the book that don't cost you anything. But I just gave you a couple right there. Facebook, Google surveys to your customers or clients, These types of things, they're better than nothing and they actually give you some pretty good insights. And then as you get more sophisticated, then you can invest in better opportunities.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, you also mentioned in the book there's this, and I'm trying to get this exactly right. But your brain isn't built on one sided wins. Your brain isn't built on one sided wins. What were you trying to help people understand there? Because that seems like a warning statement like beware. What do you mean by that?

And what do you mean break down that question a little bit more?

Yeah, so my takeaway from the book was that if your brand is built on one sided, one sided Thing, Obviously there's a lot of political examples on how many of your techniques have actually led to full fledged presidential wins. Yeah. People are in office because of some of the efforts that you put into place or have been in office because of the efforts you put into place, not to mention, I think 1400 other, other types of races. So, you know, you know what you're talking about. No hands, hands down. And my takeaway from that statement was something along the lines of your brand is multifaceted. There's, there's different pieces to your brand. I think you've kind of been articulating like the, if the customer cares about the quality of your product, but doesn't care about the price of your product.

Okay.

You need to know that. So you're not. We stopped dipping discounts, but if the customer cares about the price of your product.

Correct.

Okay. We're working, worrying, you know, not worrying about so much. The quality kind of, for lack of a better word, please don't get mad at me. Walmart, but Walmart, like, you know, that's, you know, it's more of a high volume, low ticket item. Yeah, right. Because that's what the buyer demographic is kind of searching for. You know, in the, in the book you give lots of examples of, especially in the political side where you talk a lot about what needed to change in order for that candidate to even be successful. So my takeaway was the one sided approaches is like what you think your brand might be or what you think your message might be. There's a high likelihood it's not that at all.

And I think one of the big lies of marketing agencies out there, Stephen, is that they'll come to you and say, we got to build the brand first.

Yeah, I hear that all the time.

Tell me what you're passionate about. Let's go build the brand. I will not. As an ethical duty, I will not build the brand until I know what the customer thinks. And then why would I spend any ad dollars sending people to your brand if it doesn't resonate with them? And I'll give you an example. And this is the ones that went. We worked with another pest control company and I knew the founders and they were super great guys. A little bit unsophisticated, but I have a sweet spot, I have a soft spot in my heart for just good dudes or good women, whatever. It doesn't matter. If you're a good person, I want to help. Right. And these guys said, man, we don't have a lot of money. Well, We've been in this industry forever. We know what we're doing. Will you help us? And I said, yes. And so we did the data report for them and then we built out a strategic plan for them. And they said, look, we don't have the money to do our brand yet, but let us, we'll do it internally. You don't need to help us there. And we're like, fine, that's not what you want. And so they're like, but let's start doing step four, which is the testing of what we found in the data to figure out what messages are really going to resonate with our customers. I said, okay. And because they were literally paying me nothing, I just didn't pay attention to their brand and I just kind of said, okay, you need to do it. Okay, my team will do it. And then all of a sudden we ended up running a test campaign which we weren't even supposed to get conversions. It's just supposed to be, find out like, what people are interested in, right? And we ended up getting something like 283.

Clicks that went straight to their website. And they converted three customers out of 283 that called the clicked on. You know, you can do this thing now in the Google Ads where you like, you click on the ad and it calls the business, right? So that was the AD and 283 phone calls. They got three. Now what happened was that these people went to their brand and on the brand were the two guys. Now they're heavyset men who I care about, but they're heavy set and they're in T shirts and they're leaning up against the car without uniforms on and they're saying, we'll come to your house, these two heavyset dudes. And like the brand was. Oh, not only that, it wasn't mobile friendly. The brand. Oh, gosh, yeah. And the text went to the very ends of the phone so it bumped up against the ends of the mobile device. Right. And I didn't know this, I just looked at my team, presented the results and I'm like, 283 leads, that's awesome. Three conversions. What? And I went, I go, hold on, what's going on here? I clicked on their website, it was a disaster. And the customer liked the message. The data backed that up. But when they came to the brand, they were scared shitless. I bet that's what it is. And I was like, I was like, oh my God. Now they could go on to, let's say a Terminix as a Alternative. They looked at these guys that looked at let's say a Terminix or some other pest control company. And it's uniforms and it's a car that's got the logo on it and the brand is on point and it's beautiful. And you're like. And you know, one of the clients that we had in the pest control industry, they spent the first campaign they ever ran before they hired us and they did this really well. They ran a campaign not to get customers but to get five star reviews. They got over 50,000 five star reviews. And then we ran a campaign when they hired us about how they were had 50,000. Now if you're gonna hire a pest control company and you click on three, you're on Google and you're like, I need my bugs killed. And you go and you look at three companies. Now you got two guys over £300 leaning up against a car in T shirts with unfriendly. Yeah, exactly. Well, you already kind of are getting the geographic region right. And, and I love them. And I'm from the south too. I'm, I'm from, I'm from Alabama, so. But, but, and then you've got Terminix which has uniforms and safety and cleaning and the brands on point. And now you've got 50,000 five star reviews and the other one has zero. Five star review. Who are you going to choose?

Yeah, yeah. I mean my wife hires people all the time with reviews all the time. My wife hires people all the time with reviews.

The number one performing ad I see in the marketplace right now for women are five star reviews.

Yeah, absolutely.

No doubt. I tell this story in the book that we're working for an apparel company and we did in the testing phase, which is our step four, we ran a five star review ad was the number one performing ad for women. And the number one performing ad for men was what the chapter I call comparatizing in the book. So I take the art of the political negative ad and then I apply it into businesses in a way that doesn't offend, doesn't make fun of people. It's not hurtful, it's not negative. It's actually called, I just call it comparison. I kind of coined the term because people were so scared when I said negative ads, they went, oh no, those negative ads. So I just call it comparison. Right. The comparison ad for this high end T shirt sweat company. We said in the data that we found out their customers hated, you know, cheap athletic wear. So we said in our ad, don't buy your T shirts from a shoe company. Just.

Just don't do it. So now you, you're you laughs and no one's offended.

I have to laugh because I'm thinking to myself, Nike and Reebok are all.

Just don't do it is obviously Nike, but yeah, it's Reebok, it's, it's under armour. It's all those things. Right. That was the number one performing ad with men, the five star review. Number one performing ad with women. But the men. Now this is going to shock you. Just going to blow you out of the water. You're going to be so shocked by what I'm about to tell you. You ready?

Yeah. Let's do it.

The men converted in about three visuals of the ad. Right. So it was a more.

They basically saw an ad, they laughed and they bought.

The women needed to see the ad, our ad, 10 times before they bought it. And I know this is the most shocking part. Women are more thoughtful than men.

Yeah.

Thus they take their time. They look at this, they look at the reviews, they do it. They're just going to be more thoughtful. Like men are like, just put the T shirt on my back. And women are like, hold on, before I buy that T shirt, I want to know, did other people like it? Did it match? Is it credible? Am I buying something that, you know, I'm going to, you know, it's going to come from China, it's going to take eight weeks to get here and all of a sudden it's going to be some cheap crap. I'm not buying that. Like they were just more thoughtful. What if you knew in your business that that's how your customers acted? That some bought impulsively, some bought more thoughtfully, that some buy, some bought from a five star ad, some bought from a funny ad that kind of compared yourself to another, you know, big player in the market and endeared loyalty. That's what I'm trying to get people to understand. Like we all are buying for different reasons and you got to figure that out.

Yeah, I mean it's all, it all goes back to an authentic connection with the consumer. The tricky part is, I can tell you from just personal experience with all the businesses that I do own, I mean, even with this on the thought leadership side of the business, right. That's been the most difficult to cut through the noise because there's lots of people that are trying to, you know, make their way. And here I am, you know, someone with a message that actually has been experienced and felt and hold on, I'm interrupting.

You've done it. And the people that create the most noise are the ones that haven't done it. And you've got to break through those people. And it's got to be so frustrating or mad or maybe not frustrating. It's maddening.

I mean, you know, there's. Look, my rest of my life is going to be focused on helping people. I'm a big believer that the purpose you have in life is serving the person you used to be. I mean, even your book, even now does that.

Hold on, I'm writing down. That's a good quote. Go ahead.

Yeah, so, I mean, you know, you look at everything you got here. I mean, even, even you were trying to basically help entrepreneurs, other business owners, understand that the system is rigged. How you got around the system or began to understand it so they can then unravel it for themselves, which I think is so powerful. The tricky part comes into like, it, like, even using my example of, in thought leadership side of things, trying to build an authentic connection when it's a world or a marketplace full of noise. How does one actually break through and actually build an honest connection when it's so stinking noisy in a variety of different marketplaces? Not just thought leadership. That's just the one that comes to the top of my mind.

Yeah, you have a deeper connection with your, with your customer base. It's that simple. So the Customer Insights Report we've done, we've done for James, we've done for Jay Abraham, we've done for John Ossarov. I don't know if you know who.

John is, but I don't know John, but I know everybody else.

What's that?

I said I don't know. I don't know John, but I know everybody else.

Oh, yeah, well, we've done him for a ton. He's got, he's a New York Times bestseller and he's got about a million people in his thought leadership groups. And we've done it for Marisa Murgatroyd. I don't know if you know, she's another one, but these people just have incredible.

Audiences and they just want to get a deeper understanding of them and have a bigger connection with them. And so it's, it's unbelievable value, unbelievably valuable. And whatever you're doing right, you just like, whatever. Let's just say you've got 20,000 people in your, in your sort of umbrella. Yeah, I mean, I'd be, I would spend more money constantly trying to survey Them, give them free things in order to give you data in return. Surveys, anything you can do to figure out what's connecting with them. And then once you do that, you know how to market to the new people.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's great feedback. I mean, I just want to make sure that everybody has a. A better way to understand that data is not evil, you know, because with all the, you know, Facebook obviously just changed or not Facebook, Apple just changed their approach. The data collection, that's thrown a loop. And for a lot of folks who are trying to serve people through Facebook, of course, and other people, like, in other channels like that, the way in which it's acquired needs to be honest and full of integrity. I'm a big believer in that. How do we. How do we. How do, as consumers, do we try to figure out if we're being positively influenced for our own good or negatively influenced for us to get hurt in the process?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question. I just. This is. I know this. I'm such an oxymoron. I come from political marketing, and I want to do good. Right. I get it. Like, doesn't make any sense. But.

I just come from a world that, look, I was in college when email came out.

So I only know how important the connection, the human connection is. And so everything I'm talking about right now is not to manipulate. It's to build a deeper connection with other people. It's what we lack. You know, what is. Stephen, you asked this question earlier, like, how people are dying for deeper connection right now. They're dying for it, and no one is delivering it because everybody's being manipulated and transactional. And so what I'm trying to do and everything I'm preaching on this interview and in every other interview and in the book is here is how you make a deeper connection because it breaks through all the clutter. And in fact, in the back of my book, I give 20 tactical tips that you can use in your business. It's probably the most popular thing of the whole book, which is hilarious, right? Every interviewer, there's so much goodness in.

The book, it's not even funny.

Yeah. Many of the interviewers have come to me and like, all right, let's go over these tactical tips. But one of them I talk about is the power of the thank you note. What if you want to create loyalty and raving fans, write a handwritten thank you note to everybody that does a transaction. You could say, oh, my God, I got hundreds and thousands of customers Good. Yeah, it's a lot of work. It's also different than anything else anybody's doing. There is a clothing company called Billy Reid. They're in New York. And my wife loves his clothes. And I got her a gift card once, like for $1,000. She went out and bought a bunch of clothes. And when the clothes were delivered to our house, there was a handwritten thank you note from the manager of the New York store. And it said, here's my cell phone. Call me if you ever have any questions. She holds this thank you note up to me and she says, I'll never buy clothes from anybody else but this place.

Wow.

And there's another story I tell in the book about the thank you note, which is there's a company called Guidry's Organic Pe and they make pecan butter. Now, I have some health issues. I can't eat peanut butter, so I eat pecan butter. If you never had pecan butter, it's amazing. And it's organic at Gidry's. But when I ordered it online, I ordered a bunch of different pecan butters just to see which ones I like. This company sent me a handwritten note and it said, hey, my dad started this farm and I want you to enjoy the. It's, you know, we make it here. This is all a family owned business. And by the way, my dad just told me to tell you to put it on some vanilla ice cream. You'll love it. And I went. So I wrote to my subscriber list, I wrote an article about this thank you note. The next thing I know, the family reaches out to me. Now, we're all friends. They send me postcards from when they go on trips to Europe. This is pre pandemic. And they're like, they've invited me to the farm and all this stuff. And like, that's a. You're smiling, right? Because it's a connection. And by the way, now I'm telling their story for free on your podcast and I tell their story in the book. And they're getting all this free advertising, not because they're trying to get a transaction, because they wrote me a thank you note that touched my heart. And that's what I'm trying to get other people to understand. That's how I want to use data and I want to find deeper connections so that we can be a better society. And it's really what my focus and passion is.

Yeah, I mean, I think that was one of the reasons I wanted to ask my next question, is it's kind of a two part question. Why was now the time to write the book and to get it into the hands of so many people? And then the second part of that is, what are you ultimately hoping that we all get from the book and difference we get to make as consumers of the book?

Number one is when I started my corporate marketing agency, I had a theory and I thought this could be what makes, what allows businesses to break through this incredibly challenging and opportunistic time in the digital marketplace. But I hadn't proven it, couldn't write the book until I proved it.

Yeah.

And so I gambled, as we all do. Right. I bought the licensing agreement for the data and I started implementing, without any proof, all of these things with my clients. We have four clients who in the last three months had the biggest months in the history of their company. One is a 107 year old company, one is a 41 year old company. One is a 27 year old company. And the best months in the history of their business. I proved the model and I know I had a story to tell. I did write another book three years ago called Fire Them Now. And that was when I started the corporate marketing World, which was like five years ago. I went, man, there's a lot of unethical people in this business, dude, A lot. They will sell you anything. And so I wrote a book called Fire Them now, the seven lies Digital marketers sell because I wanted to expose the lies. And like one of them is you got to sign long term contracts with the company, with marketing agency. You work with me, it's a month to month contract.

Yeah.

Either I prove it every month or I'm out of business. And what do you think that does to my team and my employees that work on clients if they know their ass is on the line every month, they're focused on the win of the client, not the win of our bank account. Yeah, our bank account wins when they win. That's our whole mentality. Right. So that was my first book. And I try. I wanted to, I wanted to expose the lies in the marketing industry. And then I spent the last five years proving my theory. And then once I did, I said, man, I got to write this book.

Yeah.

And so who do I hope it helps? Look, I hope it helps the 99.9% of business owners out there that don't realize they're data companies that have a product or service. And then I want to show them a five step systematic approach that no matter what rules change, no matter how much the technology changes. No. How many times Apple screws Facebook over the business isn't at the expense of those changes. They win no matter what. And it's, it's a. It is a. Not only is it proven to elect president, Stephen, it's now proven to grow businesses. So every business that we followed this five step formula on has grown their bottom line. Now, I am going to tell you the people that don't succeed in it and, and then, you know, go there and you're going to love this. Probably going to be your favorite part of the interview.

You're going to laugh. Hey, I love honesty.

All right, so the people that, that don't succeed in this five step formula are the business owners that chase shiny objects. Do you know any business owners that chase shiny objects?

Yeah, he looks at me every morning in the mirror.

Yeah, me too. And so I look, we've had plenty of business owners come in and go, man, I want that five step market system. I'm all in, let's go, let's go. And then about two months in they go, oh, this is hard work. You know, so John over here said he can run Facebook and get me a 10x return on $100. So I'm just going to go over there and I'm like, yeah, I don't have a get rich quick pill. I just don't. My approach is not a get rich quick pill. It is a get rich the right way pill. Yeah, that's all it is. It's almost like this. There are two types of business owners out there. There are business owners that take supplements and there are business owners that take the time Tylenol.

Oh. Oh, that's good.

I'm a supplement taker. Yeah, Yeah, I like the shiny object. Don't get me wrong, I love the shiny object. I'm very disciplined to not chase the shiny object.

What's that?

That hard work first.

That's right. So I take the supplement so I don't have to take the pill.

Yeah. You know, we've been talking a lot about, you know, this marketing concept and making sure you've got your avatar, making sure you've got everything kind of figured out, like doing the homework. I know you got a free assessment, some other things that I'm excited to talk to you about. But more importantly, I want to talk about the podcast that you alluded to at the beginning of the show, because I know I've got to go check it out personally, so.

Yeah, well, I appreciate that. And apparently, you know, I grew up in the State of Alabama. And they always said when I was in high school, like, if you can't get into any college, just apply to Ole Miss. Because when you drive by the campus of Ole Miss, they literally throw diplomas in the car. Right? Should have known that. No, seriously. So I make this joke because it's like, oh, you want a podcast? Oh, yeah. They just give them out. Just go get one. Everybody's got a podcast. So, yes, I have one. It's a companion to the book. It's called the Undefeated Marketing Podcast. We've already had Cal Fussman, who is a legendary storyteller and wrote for GQ and has interviewed Kobe, Muhammad Ali, Jeff Bezos. I mean, like, literally every transformative figure in the world he's interviewed. We did David Meerman Scott, who sold over a million marketing books.

And we got James Altucher coming up in just a few weeks, and we both love him to death.

So he's awesome.

He is the best, right? And so really, the podcast is about how I have. So you talked about this, Stephen, and I think it's really interesting that you brought this up offline to me. There are a lot of people that say, look, I'm selling T shirts. I don't have any money. How can I understand this marketing system and do it myself without having to hire a marketing agency? So the book is one way. I mean, you know, you spend 15 bucks, you get the whole system. The other is this podcast where we spend every week talking about certain aspects of the Undefeated Marketing System and with guests, how they utilized it, how they utilize certain steps within it. And that's been incredibly helpful. One of the fun things we do just so people, if they're interested, is we talk about marketing failure a lot where people have failed. So even the guests, I'll say, where have you screwed up?

I'm one of them.

It's important because they've risen to the top. How did they raise to the top? Go to the top? Well, they made a lot of mistakes along the way. So if people can learn from that, I think that's really important. And the second.

At the end of the podcast, we have sort of what's called the Marketing tip of the week. And the guest has to tell something that's really working well right now. I talk about things that are really working well right now. Things that don't necessarily can cost you money or you don't need a marketing agency for it. You know, like, one of them was, I talk about that. The power and marketing of a handwritten thank you note. That doesn't cost you anything.

Right?

And then I have people emailing me and going, dude, I put a QR code on the back of my thank you note. And anybody that that scanned it got 25% off their next visit with me. And I'm like, oh, my God, that's incredible. So we share a lot of the things that we talk about in the book and how to apply it practically. It's not long. It's 45 minutes long each episode. And I try to make it really fun and conversational.

You know, I'm looking forward to doing it because I can tell you that, you know, in the early days of all of my businesses, especially in the one of the thought leadership space, you know, those are the most difficult business, to cut to the noise and stuff like that in general, because there's so much noise. You know, I personally wasted hundreds. Let me say that again. Hundreds of thousands of dollars doing it. Wrong.

Yes.

Your book could have saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars had you written it 10 years ago.

My last guest, a guy named Todd Utterstadt, who was an Army. He was in the army, served in the White House. He advises. Advises founders now, and he's got a great podcast from founder to CEO. But Todd was talking about in our recent chat on my podcast, he was telling me he literally, during COVID came up, because, by the way, as founders, we're always filled with great ideas. So he came up with this great idea to help founders de stress from life because there was so much stress. And he spent 60 grand putting a product together, marketed it, sold it, and literally sold like $5,000 worth. And he said.

It'S what I liked, it's what I thought, but it wasn't what my customer wanted. They didn't want to de stress. They wanted solutions to their problems.

That's right.

And so he walks through all that. It's super interesting.

Yeah. I mean, when it's funny, because I'm glad you said that, because unproducts to you. I've already connected with your team while we've been actually doing this, and I've already set it up to do my own little assessment and actually understand about our ideal client. Because, you know, I mentioned this offline to you, but, you know, the world is full of gurus, and I don't want to be one of those people. Like, I want to be someone who is effective at helping somebody actually get results. I was stumbled across some other YouTuber over the last weekend, and what this one guy does is kind of guess it's kind of dangerous. But he pretty much rips on anybody who is.

From his perspective, being manipulative in their marketing efforts. Meaning they have a new thing to sell every year after year after year after year. But it's to solve the same problem that was there year after year after year.

Right.

Meaning that the audience is not actually getting the result that, you know, the supposed product promises. And I definitely don't want to do that. So, you know, one of the things I'm going to be doing is actually partnering with you guys because I want to know, like, who can I help and how can I help them quickly, you know. But you figure in the book could have saved me $200,000. You guys can help me like clarify, like who needs my help so I can get in front of the right people so I don't waste more money. But more importantly, you guys get to help me make an impact. What can a business owner do right now if they're trying to decide, hey, look, maybe big media help me and that kind of thing?

Well, the same offer we gave you is the same offer I'll give to your list listeners, which is we do a free 30 minute, 30, sometimes 45 minute assessment on your data. So if you're like, I want to know my customer better, we do a three, really a free assessment on that. Here's how it works. You go to philipstuts.com insights, fill out a form that takes you 30 seconds and then my team sets up a call and they'll walk through how we look at data, how you should be looking at data, your customer data, how you can improve the results that you're looking at and it doesn't cost you anything. And same thing we did for you, we'll do for anybody that listening because we like you, Steven, and we want to help your listeners as well. And you're a friend of Evan Carmichaels and we love those guys and I'm just glad we connected. But listen, this is the same data that companies like Amazon and Disney have utilized. Hershey's, TurboTax, DaVita, Dallas Systems, even Mark Cuban recently gave me a quote. I sent this over to you. Yeah, I saw it about how our data looks when we gave him some information on his stuff. And so you have the opportunity to do this and it doesn't cost you a dime now to work with us and to undergo that data, it typically costs around between six and 7,500 bucks depending on how many customers you want to look at. But by the way, the big Fortune 200 companies pay six figures for this because they're looking at tons of different audiences.

Well, they also know that six figures is going to cost and. Or make them a million.

Make them.

Well, quite a bit more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like I said, I mean like, you know, look, everybody hates. There was a quote I read the other day. Hold on, let's see if I can pull it up for you. But you know, my thing is. Here it is. Oh no it isn't. Oh man, I had this the other day. Oh, here it is. I got it.

I found it. Okay.

All right. The companies that successfully market today aren't by accident. They use a systematic approach. They don't treat it as a hobby but as a professional systematic application. And that is the core of what we're trying to teach everybody is there is a, A systematic application of this marketing process. And once you do it, you will win every time. And that's. We want to help everybody with.

Well, it seems like the other thing, one of the benefits of getting that data early on, I mean how often somebody have to re. Engineer, relook at that data.

So if you work with us, we go back and look at it every quarter as part of our contract to work with the companies we work at. So it's already kind of included. They have to pay for a one time fee and then we work with them and under the, you know, if they're working with us and paying us, then we go back and help them for. I mean it's, it's, it's kind of covered in our contract.

Well, dude, I have enjoyed the conversation hands down. Like I've learned so much. Not just from the book, but just even our conversation.

Thanks.

So much so that I was like, I got to connect with her team which I did proud to announce that have no problem with that and I look forward to for a future friendship. Man, I'm getting, I'm. Yeah.

You know what would be super cool?

I'll put this out there. You're like, oh, don't do that. After we look at your consumer market, if you ever wanted to have a conversation and then like go through it on the pod. Yeah, that'd be. There's something that would be kind of cool with that. You'd have to be vulnerable and put yourself out there. I get it. But I don't worry about that. Yeah, me neither. I mean I'll tell anybody anything. So. But anyway, that would be kind of cool too. But yeah man, super grateful to you too. And I just like your energy, man. You serve in every conversation we've had, you talk about how you serve others first. And I just get that. And I appreciate it, man.

It's my heart, you know, I believe that everything that we've been through, everything that we're going through, everything we will go through, it has a purpose and a use. It may just not be in the moment, it might be in five or ten years from now. And as we continue to do that, I mean, even all the success that you've had, you know, a lot of that's been hard fought journeys and along the way to get to where you're at, including building, bringing out the new book and everything, I mean, it's amazing, dude, I can't, I can't wait to get to know you better as a friend and an ally and also get to know the company, dude.

Yeah, definitely, definitely looking forward to it. My man.

Where else can everybody find you? Where do you want, where do you want people to connect with you?

Easy. Philipstut.com you can get in touch with me there. You can subscribe to the. We have another way free way to get stuff. You can subscribe to my blog. I don't sell anything. I literally just write what I see in marketing. I write it every two weeks and there's no solicitation from it. So you can sign up. I'm not selling the list. I'm not renting the list. I just like to listen. The podcast and the blog are the things that I like to do and if it works, if someone's interested in that, awesome. If no one read it or listen, awesome. I do it for me. So if it's something you really like, there it is. I probably would get in trouble by a lot of the influencers out there that tell you, you know, need to have some kind of funnel in place, all that stuff. I got other companies, I'm good, but this is what I like to do, dude.

Love it, man. Love it. Can't wait to do this again, man. Thank you so much for coming on.

Awesome. Thank you for having me.

All right, buddy. See you. If you're ready to take your marketing to the next level, Philip Stutz is your man. But in the meantime, if you love that interview, make sure you check out this right here. Life's going to be brutal no matter what for the next 10 years. You might as well focus on what you do have. Focus on where you can go and be resourceful as hell because.