Phillip Stutts: Building An Audience Using The Secret Formula | The Tyler Wagner Show #1032

All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode. Today we have Philip Stutz with us, so welcome to the show, man.

Hey, man, I'm excited to be here.

Me too. We have a lot to talk about.

We do, we do. It's gonna be really interesting.

I agree. So can you start us off and tell us a little bit more about you and what you do?

No, no, I'm just messing with you. So I'm a, first of all, I'm a husband and a dad. Number one, number one, number one tied. Number two is I'm an entrepreneur. I own about 5 businesses. Well, not about, I own 5 businesses. I'm an investor in about 15 more. I come from the world of political marketing. So since 1996, I have worked on thousands of political campaigns. I've been a part of 1,407 election victories. And I utilized all, learned for basically 19 of those years, the strategies that get presidents elected. I've been a part of 3 winning presidential campaigns from, and then figuring out what it took to get senators elected, governors elected, congressmen and women elected. And so, I ended up having that midlife crisis back about 2014, 2015, where, you know, some people go cheat on their spouses and some people go buy Harleys. And I just decided I was going to reinvent myself and take all the lessons I learned in politics and go build a corporate marketing agency. And I figured I had a niche in the marketplace, and that was that, you know, businesses should be applying not the partisanship of politics, but the marketing tactics and strategies in politics to grow their business because we're in a very disruptive moment, Tyler. You know, 99% of all businesses in the next 2 years, they either change and adapt and optimize right now or they're going to be screwed. Right? And I figured I had an outlier strategy that could help businesses win. So I've written 2 books. Just like what you guys do, I self-published them. My second book is called The Undefeated Marketing System: How to Grow Your Business and Build Your Audience Using the Secret Formula That Elects Presidents. And I hit number 63 on all the titles on Amazon with that book. And we sold thousands and thousands and thousands of copies on it, all self-published because it's resonating. The ability for business owners to look as an outlier strategy in their marketing these days is penetrating. And they have to look at things differently. And I just take a weirdly crazy different approach, a risk-free marketing approach. That grows every business we work with that follows our formula. And, you know, you got a formula. I love that about you. And I do too. But, but mine has worked for every company we worked with. And really the pain point for almost every business owner these days is the fact that they've hired multiple marketing agencies and they can't get success and they can't figure out why. So they get rid of one, they hire another, they can't get success, they can't figure out why. And I saw the problem in the marketplace and I decided to solve it with my own political campaign experience. Now, we're working with publicly traded companies, Fortune 200 companies. We're doing startups and small businesses as well. And we've built a multimillion-dollar agency out of it.

All right. This is awesome. So, I have a lot of questions. What's cool is that we actually, I mean, we came at it from different worlds, but we actually saw the same thing. Like everything our company offers is risk-free guarantees, everything. And that's what I saw the issue in the marketing space being. And I don't want to say people, they don't always get burned, but it was in like these monthly contracts with like Facebook ad agencies, whatever. And they're just not getting returns and there's nothing.

All right. Can I tell a great story? Just people like stories. I got a great one on this.

Oh yeah.

Right off the bat. Okay. So we work with a Shark Tank company. And they came to us. And if you understand the way I look at the formulaic approach I take marketing, everything is rooted in analytics and data, and that drives each decision that we make. In fact, we have a partnership with the largest data collection analytics and AI company in America. In our database, we have 240 million American consumers, 550 million+ connected devices, We're tracking 10 billion purchasing decisions, online purchasing decisions every day and a trillion searches. So when I work with a client, the first step with us is we have to understand your customer base, just like I did in politics where I had to understand the voter before I really cared about what the candidate believed in. And we get incredibly, like if I showed you what I could show you with a customer base, it'd blow your head off. I can tell you the social media platforms they're on in a chronological order. I can tell you your customer's top 3 values in life. I can tell you specific OTT shows that they watch, specific shows. I can tell you publications they read. I can tell you the apps they download. I can tell you every single thing about them, right? Wouldn't you want to know that before you went out and spent money on a marketing campaign, right? Makes sense. So the Shark Tank company came to us and they invested in this data. You have to work— to work with us, you have to invest in the data first before we work with you because we need to know your customer. And I'm not just going to go, hey, we sat around a table and brainstormed on how to help you. You know, like I don't do that. I say the data says this. This is where we're going. So we ran this data. We called it a customer insights report. So we ran it for them. And we found out that Facebook was pretty much their 6th performing platform, social media platform as far as conversions, as far as where their customers were buying things. 95% of their budget, their ad budget was in Facebook. And I said to the guys, I hope this helps you not, you know, you've got to rearrange your budget priorities. Like Facebook is a branding platform for you. It's not a conversion platform because everybody's on Facebook, but they're not buying anymore. And there's a million reasons why. We can get into that later. And he said, oh, well, I hired a Facebook marketing agency and they told me I had to spend money on Facebook. And I went, but your customers aren't buying things on Facebook. So do you think that agency is ever going to tell you to stop spending money on Facebook? No, they're a Facebook agency. They're going to get everybody to buy ads on Facebook, whether their customers are buying there or not. And that's ultimately a metaphor for the frustration in the marketplace, right? I am screen agnostic. I go where the data tells me. I go where the customer or the client goes. And then I wrap my plans and my ad campaigns and my budgets around the customer, not based on the fact that I built a niche in Facebook and I'm going to push you there no matter what.

Jeff Lerner: No, I love it. It almost seems like a, well, it doesn't seem, it's like a doctor approach. Like I have a functional medicine doctor down here.

5.

Yeah, yeah, I told him my symptoms and he's just like, okay, cool, we're just— we're going to take your blood and then, and then I'll tell you what to do. It's like, I almost don't really care what your symptoms are because the blood doesn't lie, you know?

Like, you know, I give this in my book, I give this exact story. Exact story. Yes, my functional doctor ran 126 blood tests on me, came back and said, here's what your diet needs to be, here's what your supplement intake needs to be. Like, literally, he laid it all out because the data told him where to go. He didn't just say, hey, Phillips, take some vitamin C. You just say that, right? Yeah, yeah, it makes total sense.

So, so let's, let's go back a little bit, not all the way to the beginning, but I want to— like, what were you doing before, uh, politics? And then how did you get into that, that realm?

I was just in college. I mean, okay, you know, I'm really one of the first generation of ADD kids. Like, it wasn't even ADHD, Tyler. It was ADD, right? They didn't have— they had— they hadn't had— they had not added the hyperactivity to the ADD. Like, and I was diagnosed in the '80s, and I was, you know, put on Ritalin and told that I was a defect and that I wasn't very smart and I needed to be in classes that were slightly, slightly above special ed. And ultimately, you know, I now know my ADD is a superpower, but back then didn't know that. But I did know this. I couldn't do a job that I wasn't passionate about. I had to get into something I was passionate about and really only cared about two things growing up. The game of marketing and politics. I was super, super curious how political campaigns were run. And then I loved college football. Well, I'm 5'9", 150 pounds. So the college football thing wasn't going to happen. But eventually, you know, when I graduated college, I just started working on political campaigns.

Got it. Okay. So then let's talk a little bit about that. So I don't know how much you can share about the actual people though. Like the three presidents?

Yeah. Yeah. So the backstory is I've been a part of eight presidential campaigns, three winning ones. So Been plenty of losses along the way as well. The first one I worked on was Bob Dole in 1996, and I worked for Dan Quayle. He ran for president in 19— he did, he ran in the campaign, was the 2000 campaign, but he dropped out before 1999 ended. And then I ended up working for George W. Bush in 2000, so we won that. Then I worked for his, uh, I was a senior leader on his reelection campaign 2004. And then my agency I did work for Donald Trump in 2016.

Okay, cool. Since that's the most recent one, as I want to talk about Trump, because it seemed like— I, I get what's your take instead of me trying to guess. Like, you worked with them on it, so I thought the branding and the marketing was brilliant and it really stuck. Um, and yeah, so what, what was the game plan? Like, what's behind the scenes on that one?

Well, it kind of goes back to 2004. I walk through the story in the book because I think it's a history. The Undefeated Marketing System, my book, is really a history lesson on how we came to this formula. It started in 2004. In 2004, George W. Bush's campaign, which I was part of, the top leaders in the campaign sat down and said, hey, we want everybody on the campaign to read the book Moneyball. Moneyball, and we want, we want to treat this campaign like Moneyball. No political campaign had ever been run something like that. So we ended up basing the whole campaign on consumer data, modeling consumer data and voter data, and then developing profiles of voters and then running all of our ads on those profiles, if that makes sense. Now, this is before social media. So this was done through phone calls, direct mail. Door-to-door messaging, stuff like that, right? So, and it was called microtargeting. So you microtargeted specific voters on just a subset of issues we knew they cared about based on their purchasing behaviors. So it could have been taxes or guns or abortion or whatever it was, right? By the way, I'm staying policy agnostic when I talk about this stuff. I'm talking about how we marketed. So you may hear abortion, and I'm not going to go on some tangent on abortion. I'm just telling you it's been a political marketing tactic in every campaign of every president, both Democrat and Republican, right? So just understand that that's where I'm coming from on it. Okay. So after the end of the Bush campaign in 2004, we won Ohio. The state of Ohio was the deciding state in the Electoral College. George W. Bush won it by a margin of around 60,000 votes. So the whole presidential campaign came down to a margin. It was 120,000 vote difference. But if 60,000 of those people had switched their vote, John Kerry would have won. And we were really identified as the most innovative political campaign that had ever been run in the history of American politics. And I was the national get-out-the-vote director for that campaign. So I was very intricately involved in sort of the Moneyball microtargeting aspect of that. And then in 2008, Obama basically stole— and I say that as a compliment— I mean, he modeled us or he stole our model. On the microtargeting side, but then he added in social media to it, right? And in 2008, and then again, he did it in 2012, it was— those two campaigns were considered the most innovative marketing campaigns in the history of American politics until 2016, when Trump took our model, data model from 2004 that Obama had taken as well. He took that and he married it with social media And he married it with branding, Make America Great Again. Love him or hate him, it's a great brand. And so for example, and I tell this story in the book, but it's another example of how they did it. One of the, in step 4 of our systematic approach of helping businesses, this is how it works in politics. We do a lot of testing, right? Every marketer does testing. But what we do in the testing phase is we take all the, different things we find in the customer data or the political data, and we test those concepts. We don't just sit around a table and say, hey, here's 10 concepts, let's go test them and see which one works. Like, we're actually diving deep into the voter data, or in business, the customer data. The Trump campaign in 2016, you can say Facebook was— we made fun of Facebook when we started, and now I'm going to tell you it was the most influential platform that helped elect Donald Trump. And I don't mean it— well, there are a lot of books out there that talk about the nefariousness of it. That's not what I'm talking about. They were just really smart. The Hillary Clinton campaign ignored Facebook, did not use Facebook the way the Trump campaign did. And ultimately, I think it really cost them the election. But one of the things the Trump campaign did in 2016 is they would find in the voter data one issue that they knew would work. They didn't know how effective it would be, the message. So they decided to test it. But here's what they would do. They would test it 162 different versions of one ad. They have a green background, a red background, a purple background. They have a man in the ad, a woman in the ad. They have different fonts, different font sizes. The font would be in the left side, the right side, the middle. They literally ran 162 different versions of one message. And they ultimately would find 8 or 9 or even 10 of those tests would blow through the roof and they could not tell you why. It just did. And then they knew exactly what to spend their money on. Those 8, 9, 10 ads were all— they were going to triple down, 10x down on those ads. And they did this with everything they did on Facebook, right? And, you know, they didn't just go out and guess a bunch of concepts and test them out. And they didn't run 2 test ads or 3 test ads or whatever. They ran 162. And so I'm obsessed with that concept. We've actually, you know, when people work with our marketing agency, we actually have a tier to work with us where you can get up to 1,000 test ads on one single ad to see which is the most powerful version. So before you go spend big money, you know what works. And that's sort of how we modeled and emulated that. But we learned that from the 2016 campaign.

Now, is there a way, say if you did the 1,000 ads, like what's the budget necessary to test those 1,000 ads?

Typically. You typically have to pay us a retainer and then it's covered in the retainer.

Okay, gotcha. And then you're saying, so it seems what I gathered so far, so it was like data, Testing and branding are like the 3 things.

No, I would tell you it goes like this. Data first before anything else. You can't put a plan together. You could put— why would you spend money and send people to your brand if you didn't know it would resonate already before you send them there? So it's wasted money. So we do the data. And again, the way we do it is very sophisticated. There are other ways you can utilize data. I talk about it in the book. But the way we do it is we wanted to be the best in the world at it. And so we do that first. The second thing is we write a plan, a strategic marketing plan. Now that we know what the data says, the customer data, and we go to the business owner and we go, what's your vision? We got to marry the vision and the data together. And just like, you know, Tyler, you have a probably a business plan in your business. You don't just wake up and go play a bunch of tactics all day long. No, you have a vision for your business, right? Why wouldn't you do the same thing for your marketing? Probably same thing you tell your clients, right? Like we have to build a vision for your book. Like, we, you know, like, and so many marketing agencies don't get that. Before you go spend money, you need to build a budget, you need to build a timeline, you need to build targeting segments, you need to build messaging that you know from the data will already work. Third is you then build the brand because you know what the data says and you know what the vision is, the business owner, and you marry it to build the brand. I would never, ever, ever, ever build a brand first and then send a bunch, build a bunch of, you know, spend a bunch of money on a website send people to the website and not know that it's going to work. So we build that, you know, in there. Third. Fourth is we go test all the concepts that in the different categories, different segments that we're going to test. And then the fifth step is now that you know what works from the testing, now that your brand is set up to receive the customers that want to see your message, then you go and spend money on your campaign. So those are the 5 steps in a nutshell. And like I said, every company that has worked with us startup, small business, Fortune 200, they've all grown their bottom line by following it.

So you had said earlier too that like a lot of businesses in the next 10 years, um, like could, could fail because they, they're not keeping up with the times. Is the main thing there— like, to me it seems like it would be the data, right? Like the companies that have the most data, the— you won't be able to compete with them. Because their ability to target and get down exactly to it, it's just incomparable.

I would tell you that that is, you know, 75% of it. The other 25% is the difference between the way I look at marketing, probably how you look at marketing, same with me, but 99% of marketers don't. And that is they sell the get-rich-quick pill. Marketing doesn't work that way. It just doesn't work that way anymore. There's no get-rich-quick pill. It's too hard. And what we use data for is to constantly optimize to see how things are changing and where you need to go and how you need to adjust and how you need to adapt. And, you know, for example, we work with a national background check company. So they work with like the fast food industry to, you know, there's such a huge labor force that they work with the fast food industry to do background checks on the people they hire. To hire. And when we— they hired us and we were going through our process. But one of the things we do is we audit these businesses' marketing. Like, we'll go in and do a full audit on the business to figure out what's working, what's not working, and what they need to stop. Well, we found out that 3 years ago they set up their SEO and keyword search. Google had changed the rules on them, changed the rules in general on how keyword and SEO was set up. And they shot an email to the company, but the marketing agency they had didn't alert them. So they ended up for 3 years spending $10,000 a month bidding against themselves and their own keywords. Oh, marketing is hard, man. Things change. The way I'd utilize Facebook a year ago is totally different than what I do it today because of the iOS changes, because of the privacy concerns. Facebook is now a horrible conversion platform. It's a great branding platform. People are still on Facebook. They're just not buying anything right now. We're seeing in our data Pinterest is blowing through the roof right now, especially with women, as a platform that they feel safe, that their privacy is going to be protected, and that they'll go on and make purchases through. And so these are little nuances that we keep finding in our data every single month. And so what we do is work with our clients to optimize where the changes are going, where their customers' eyeballs are going, and change constantly. We have— and for example, we have 3 clients. We have one client, a national pest control company, They've been around for 37 years. And 6 months into working with us through our Undefeated Marketing System, they had the greatest month in the history of their company. We work with a regional furniture store. It's been around for 107 years. In 2020, after working through our system, they had 9 months, the greatest 9 months in the history, 107-year history as a percentage, not as a total, in the history of their company. And then we work with a law firm out in New York and they're a 27-year-old law firm. And in the past year, they've had 2 months that were the best in the history of their company or their law firm. It's not me. I'm not doing anything special. I'm just eliminating their risk, following the data, and optimizing it constantly. But it didn't happen overnight. It didn't happen in month 1. It didn't happen 2 weeks into the contract, right? It happened 6 months, 7 months, sometimes 12 months in because we're constantly looking at the data and optimizing performance. And ultimately, we just, we just hit an escape velocity that gets them to where they want to be.

So this data, because I think if I remember correctly earlier on the conversation, does anybody have access to this or are you kind of working privately with a data company? That's—

Yeah, I have an exclusive partnership with the largest data collection analytics and AI company in America.

Okay. So—

And I pay about half a million dollars every 2 years for that license.

Okay. So, an idea for you, because I was just thinking as you said the Pinterest thing, like, I would opt in for this. You know, like, Tim Ferriss, how he does his like Five Bullet Friday? I'm like, if you did something like that, and obviously, you know, you wouldn't want to give everything away necessarily, but like, the Pinterest thing, like little things, whether it was weekly or even monthly, I think a lot of marketers would opt in for that.

I do. I have, so I have a podcast called The Undefeated Marketing Podcast. And every episode I give away what I find in the, I give away some tips that I find in the data. Now, I haven't put it in a weekly newsletter. It's not a bad idea. And then, and then the guest has to come with some tactics that are working too that don't cost anything. You can just do on your own. Like you can flip over to Pinterest and create that platform. Little ideas like that where, in fact, I use the Pinterest tip with Heather Monahan when she was on my podcast a couple weeks ago. Oh, that's a mutual friend of ours. So everybody listening. Yeah.

Okay. No, that's perfect because I was just, I was like, I think you could grow a massive list with that. So yeah.

Thanks. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's really interesting.

But, um, so I think, and you said this earlier too, like stories I think are the best way that people learn and really they're the most shareable things. Um, so as far as the, and then we'll get to the businesses, but the politics, what are the like best stories or craziest like that you could share from the governors? Like, just curious, like, uh, not just necessarily from a winning or losing all the time, but just more from an interesting standpoint.

In, in like, in what way? There's a million things. That's a road that could have a thousand different, uh, forks in it.

Um, so let's go with like, what was What was the most shocking maybe thing that you learned from one of the campaigns that like you didn't see, you didn't see it coming, like it was a really surprising thing that you learned from?

Yeah, so in 2000, right before the presidential election of Al Gore versus George W. Bush, I was in the target state of New Mexico getting out the vote. And about 3 days, 4 days, 3 days before the election, the vice president candidate, Dick Cheney, comes to town and we do a rally with him. And I'm in the green room, you know, right before he's getting on stage to give a speech. And it's me, Dick Cheney, and his aide. It's just 3 of us, right? And we are in this green room and there's a TV in there. And then, and the people, I'm old, so this is a story people may or may not remember, but, 3 days before the election, it was announced somebody had uncovered that George W. Bush had a DUI when he was 25 or 28 years old. And by the way, like, that would be a whole, like, laughable offense now, but back then it almost cost him the entire election. So it was revealed he had this DUI and it was huge headlines everywhere. And he, George W. Bush, had to come out to a press conference and say, it is true. I never told my family. I never told my kids. I mean, it was like a big deal. And it was broken in— it was during the— I was sitting in the green room with his vice presidential candidate. And I looked over and I'm like, did you know that? And he goes, nope. And I went, how do you think that affects things? And he goes, well, we'll see. And I'm like, oh my God, like this is the biggest news in the entire campaign. And I'm sitting here with the vice president. The future Vice President of the United States in a green room while the news is breaking. And, you know, the analysis of the election is Bush was up about 5 points going into that weekend. And he obviously, that was the closest race in the history of American politics. He won by, I think, 527 votes out of almost 6 million cast in 2000 out of the state of Florida. But it affected the election, that story. And I just had a front row seat to it.

So I'm going to ask you a question. You can tell me if you want to skip it, but you would be a guy that I feel like would know, so that's why I'm curious to ask you, but obviously, just if you don't want to speak on it, that's fine. But this last election, right? I think I saw a poll that over half the people in the US thought that there was some shady stuff that happened with it. From you being behind the scenes on so many of these things, I guess the two-part question is, one, do you think it's possible that there was something behind the scenes that went on that was— I guess I'll use the word corrupt. And then also, with the way the media handled things with blowing up some stories and minimizing other stories, I just feel like we're in a crazy time right now where trust has kind of been broken. So I know that's not about marketing, but I feel like you'd be a guy that might.

Yeah. So do I think there was cheating in the election? And the answer is 1,000% yes. But there's— hold on, hold on, hold on. You got to hear me through. If you're like, I'm going to death right now, or if you're like nodding your head yes or no, like, hear me out. The cheating happened before the election. Not on Election Day. The cheating happened when Facebook, Twitter, all the social media platforms decided not to run Hunter Biden's story, which actually was proven to be true. The cheating happened when they started shadow banning in the last month of the campaign, people that were advocating for Donald Trump, and they shadow banned them. The tech company, Do I think it was cheating? No, but I know that Mark Zuckerberg invested about $500 million into Democratic precincts around the country helping get out the vote. Now, in a nonpartisan way, but when you go into the only places where Democrats are registered to vote, you would have to think, was that cheating? No, that wasn't. But what did I think the fix was in? Pretty much yes. Now, on Election Day, which is what everybody, what's your question about, Do I think there was cheating? Well, there's cheating in every election. Do I think it cost Trump the presidency? I haven't seen anything yet to sell me that happened. Here's the deal. If things were so nefarious, they should have done stuff ahead of time to prevent it, and they didn't. So that's kind of on the Trump campaign itself for not fixing the problems, not the ones I just talked about, The social media platforms absolutely 1,000% conspired to ban stories that were unfavorable to Joe Biden. They absolutely banned people that were putting news stories and trying to spread the word to elect Trump. They banned those people off social media platforms. And so do I think that the fix was in? Yes. And then obviously Zuckerberg and his initiative to get out the vote in only Democratic precincts. Do I think the fix was in? Yes. Do I think there was mass cheating on Election Day? Until I see the evidence, I don't think there was. Does that answer your question?

It does.

Yeah.

And thanks for answering it, because just again, with all the things you've been involved with, I figured you're probably the best person I know of to ask that question. So now, what do you think, though?

The—

because I feel like the trust has just been broken. So as far as the media goes now, I feel like people, like, they can't— I feel like the media is dying because there's like, whatever you hear, how do you know? I mean, I'm a Fox— I like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, but even sometimes they can go a little far, I guess, in one direction. So I get the question is like, where do you think we're heading towards like the next election? Like, will more people vote? Will less people vote? Because I think a lot of people right now look at it as like, oh well, well, it was fraudulent in some aspects. So what's the point? Like, I don't know. I just feel like America got messed up.

We're in some dark, dark territory right now. I was just on James Altucher's podcast today. I don't know if you know who that is, but— Yeah, yeah.

Big fan.

He asked the same question. I said, look, has our politics in the last 30, 40 years, has it gotten better or worse?

I'd say worse. Yeah.

It didn't get better. There's no improvement. I mean, maybe you get a short-term improvement in the partisanship after 9/11. Hell, that was 20 years ago. So you're not seeing anything get better. And all things being equal, in 2022, in the midterm elections, Biden's going to get wiped out. I mean, the Democrats are going to lose majorities in the House and the Senate, barring something I don't understand or see right now. it is going to be a bloodbath for Democrats. So that's going to ratchet up and make the Democrats, you know, the Democratic voters scared to death. And oh my God, Trump's coming back and all this stuff. And Trump's, you know, his tentacles are everywhere, whatever they can do to align with Trump. And, you know, the Republicans, you know, are not ceding any ground and the Democrats are not ceding any ground. Meanwhile, There's about 50% of the country that probably would all get along with each other, but they have kids, they have families, they're not paying attention to politics, they're going to soccer practice at night. And then you sit down with them and you go, "That guy's right. Oh, that guy's left." And you sit down with them and you realize you agree on about 80%, 90% of the things, but because they're the silent majority, that's not where the movement goes in our political system. It's the extremes that move the needle. And that's about 20% on each side. And it's really scary where it's going. And I wrote a year and a half ago, I wrote that I believed we would have— states would eventually secede and we'd have some kind of civil war, not the civil war where there's like guns and bayonets and things like that, but a civil war of a digital kind or something that would split this country apart. I would not be surprised in 10 years if our country looks more like Europe than it does like the United States of America.

I could see that from living in Florida. It seems like Florida could be the first, one of the first.

Texas.

Or Texas.

The reason I say Texas is there are 3 main power grids in this country. There's one in the West, there's one in the East, and there's one in Texas. Texas can literally secede and have their own power grid and be set up, right? They've got ports because they are on the coast. They have a lot of different infrastructure items that could that could help them do what they do. But here's the other problem with it. Florida is trending to the right. So if there's a secession based on the fact that there's a Democrat in office, you're right, Florida may be one of the outliers, or maybe Florida partners with Alabama and Mississippi and Tennessee, and maybe part of Georgia and creates their own country. The thing about Texas is they've had so many people move to Texas from blue states, that it's gonna be hard to secede from a state when you have a very moderate voter base that goes very, almost evenly between red and blue. So I'm not saying all these things are gonna happen, but people do need to understand that we're in very dangerous times right now. And I'm not sure what's gonna happen. And I know that with each election, it just gets ratcheted up and things don't get better. And I'm in the middle of it. And the reason I'm in the middle of it is because I feel a duty to do my best to fight for the things I believe in.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, it makes sense. And also, so another question, and I'm not sure— the reason I would think you'd be a good person to ask this is due to all the data that you have. So very luckily, I had a friend back in 2016 that introduced me to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stuff. So with— I feel like it is kind of in the realm of politics. Like, do you have a prediction, or has the data shown you— like, are you working with any cryptocurrency companies that you would have any, uh, foresight into this? Like, because you hear all these—

literally, this is— you're asking me— this is the same interview I had with Al Tucher today. Really? He literally asked me this question, and the answer is I'm not really seeing anything else on— our data has not really gauged on the crypto side. We're looking at consumer markets and what people are purchasing, not what they're investing in. I can tell you that the number one apps are all business apps. They're not gaming apps, they're business apps. So when people are downloading charlesschwab.com or Robinhood or whatever, or Charles Schwab's app or Robinhood's app or whatever, Coinbase's app, we can tell that they're on business apps. Is crypto part of that? Of course it is, but I can't gauge at this point because I'm not looking at financial markets, I'm looking at consumer markets.

Got it. Okay. I'm going to take that as a compliment because James Altucher is a smart dude.

Yeah, he's great. He's the best.

I guess one of the last questions, and then I want to leave the floor to you if there's anything else that we didn't cover that you want to share. We dove deeper into the political side. On the business side, any stories you could share of like just complete transformations, like the company was here and then with working with you guys in your system a year later, they, I don't know, like 10x or something.

[Speaker:ROBERT_LEONARD] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like I talked about this pest control company earlier, but I'll give you kind of the background. So they're a national pest control company and there are two stories. So I'll give you the first one's on the data side. The second is on kind of a guerrilla marketing campaign we ran for them. But they came to us in 2018 and they said, man, we've been running one marketing campaign for 10 years and it's worked like a charm. And all of a sudden it doesn't work anymore. We can't figure out why. So we said, well, what do your customers want? And they said, well, they always wanted— they've always run campaigns on discounts, you know, hire us, get a 10% discount, 25% discount, you know, pay for the full year, get a 50% discount, whatever it is. Right. And we said, Well, it looks like discounts aren't working anymore. And they said, but people like the discounts. And I go, how do you know that? And they said, because we've been running it for 10 years. And they had basically 4x the company until 2017 when the discount stuff didn't work anymore. And in that period, they had lost $2 million in market share after spending $1.8 million in marketing dollars. And though they couldn't figure out why, so we ran the data report and we found out that at that point, the economy had improved so rapidly that discounts were looked as cheap and unsafe. Why would I take this cheap discount pest control company and bring them in my home with my wife and my dogs, right? People wanted to pay for high, higher, you know, higher standards. The data bore this out. There, we also found out that their customer base was mostly over 55 and kids were out of the household. And so this company gave a lot to charity. Well, people over 55 that aren't paying for their kids anymore to be in the house, right? They give their extra dollars to what? To charity. So we said, let's find an alignment with a charity that these people are aligned with. And then the last thing is because they didn't want cheap, they wanted green products. They wanted to know that there were safe sprays in their house. They had a green product they'd never marketed before. So we reorganized. By the way, this company also, even though it was a national chain, it was a family-owned business. And we found out that that family-owned business was hugely important. So we focused their, their campaign on those 4 items. In the 5th month of the campaign, they had the greatest month in the history of their company. It was focused on family-owned, safe, green products. And we targeted an older customer base, which they had not been doing before. And again, greatest month in the history of their company. The other, the guerrilla campaign we ran for them, which was crazy, we realized how much trust is important in the marketplace right now. And this is more recent, this is in the last year. So we went to them, we said, we have a, we have a very expensive marketing idea, and then you're not going to get any customers out of it. Sounds great. But they were like, well, here's the thing though, if you're in the pest control industry, it's kind of like the car car, automobile industry, like car sales. Those people are running ads 24/7 or they're out of business. So they're very innovative. It's kind of like political campaigns. Like you're running your political campaign, you're running until election day or you're out, you're losing, right? So they're very innovative and they're like, let's go for it. So what we did was we ran a campaign to get them as many 5-star reviews as humanly possible. We ended up getting around 50,000 5-star reviews. Didn't convert anybody. It was literally marketing to their own customer base. To get them to write a 5-star review. Okay, so what happens? Well, now in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Topeka, Kansas, or Sacramento, California, or Fort Lauderdale, Florida, you have bugs in your home and you Google pest control company Fort Lauderdale and pops up 3 names. Well, we know we're always in the top 3 on Google search, and you're going to look at one and it's Jim's Fort Lauderdale Pest Control, and they have and they've got 125 5-star reviews. And then it's going to be Frank's Bug Killer Company and they've got 7 5-star reviews. And then you're going to pull up my client and they've got 50,000. Who are you going to invite in your home? And by the way, the reason we did that is because we saw in the data that we had to build trust. So we said, let's go run a 5-star review campaign. And they were innovative enough to know, By the way, that is an evergreen campaign. That campaign has been going on for like 18 months and it crushes everything we've ever done for them. It's made them 10x what they ever invested in to get the 5-star reviews. But you have to be innovative enough and understand the data to understand that you're going to get there eventually and have trust that, hey, we're doing— we're going to be an outlier company here. And that's what they did.

All right. As much as you're willing to share, Like, what did that campaign look like? Like the 5-star, like, how does that, how'd you get like that?

So, you incentivized, their salespeople brought it into their sales pitch, the technicians brought it in and did, you know, we're, you know, hey, we'll give you, again, it's funny, we went back to discounts during COVID and that actually worked. But it wasn't just a discount. It's like, hey, you know, we'll give, we upsold different services, termite services. We, if you gave us a 5-star review, we'd give you 10% 10% off termite. They hadn't invested in termite services, right? So we were doing these types of things. We also ran a campaign. We were able to actually get their millions of customers and directly run campaigns only to those people in multiple faceted, different platform. It could be direct mail, do whatever. And it was all about collecting 5-star reviews.

I love, you know, so I was on an interview like a couple of weeks ago and the idea of doing something like this for restaurants came up. Like, a lot of restaurants could have— I mean, how many people go into a popular restaurant in a city like Miami? Like, different people. Now, the only thing I thought was maybe it could annoy customers a little bit. I'm not sure. But like, at the end of the thing, just be like, hey, if you enjoyed your meal, you know, 10% off, whatever it is. Like, I don't think I've ever been asked to leave a review at a restaurant. Like ever.

So like if you incentivize them and then they have a choice, I can either do it or I don't have to. Exactly. Show me that you left me a 5-star review. If you don't, totally fine by us. If you do, I have a 10% off code I'll give you. You can walk out of here the next time, or a 25%. Give them a really good incentive, right? Yeah. Because here's the deal, it's going to bring in a ton more business and they're going to come back and spend more money there. And they're not just going to spend once, they'll probably come back multiple times.

It's a no-brainer, man. Like I, in a day you could get like 500 reviews.

Yeah. Like we were, we worked with an apparel company, an e-commerce apparel company. And you know, we asked them when we sat down with them, what's the lifetime value of your customer? And they're like, I don't know. And we said, well, let's go figure it out. We figured out it was $92. And so after running through our Undefeated Marketing System, our 5-step system, we ended up getting their average lifetime value to $192. Now, part of that was it cost probably the first sale, which was typically around $25, was the cost of getting it to $192. But you made $100, it cost you $25, you netted $75 per customer. Customer. Like, think about that, right? But they had to front the cost upfront. They had to pay that $25, which is basically what they'd come back and spend in the store to start with. But they were going to keep buying eventually. And it's called a loss leader strategy, but it works if you're doing it smart.

Mm-hmm. Interesting. Yeah, I love this stuff. Okay. So, yeah, I want to leave the floor to you. If there's anything we didn't cover you want to, please do. And then And let people know website, socials, and where they can get the book.

[Speaker] Yeah, and I mean, look, we've talked a lot about data. People are super curious about how to do things differently. We have a free data assessment on our, on my website, philipstutz.com/insights. Takes you literally 30 seconds. It'll, you'll fill out a form just about your company. And then my team will do a 30-minute call with you to go over your customer list and tell you what it looks like with our data. And that's free. It doesn't cost anything. You can go there again. You can go to philipstutz.com. You can buy the book at Amazon. You can subscribe to my blog and my podcast at philipstutz.com as well.

Perfect, man. Thanks again for coming on the show.

I enjoyed it, man. Thank you.