Building a Predictable, Sustainable and Profitable Business with Joe DeMaria | Marketing Expedition Podcasts

On this week's episode of the marketing Expedition podcast, Joe polish said that Joe DeMaria is known as one of the top course, creators on the planet and has unique talent with ticking expertise and packing. It Joe DeMaria started his career at just 9 years old running an illicit back alley, soda, and candy, cartel at his Elementary School in, Willow Glen California, and of course within two weeks he had employed three, other hard-nosed dirty face nine-year-old. Tenants paying them just 25 cents per unit. Sold the Sugar Rush Syndicatewas brought to an abrupt end, Wendy Murray's, childhood best friend, and wartime consigliere was caught selling an A&W root beer on tape by one of the school's CCTV cameras. He was brought to Justice. Just five weeks into the school year, netting, an impressive nine hundred and thirty seven dollars and 75 cents he refused to return.
The money and now you're gonna hear a whole lot more from Joe. But first, it's time for the marketing Essentials moment, the basics that you need to help you build your brand and your bottom line. And this week's topic, we're going to share all about how to accelerate your word-of-mouth advertising. Or as sometimes, I like to call it world of mouth advertising because now, it's all over the world that we do business with each other and can from all the
Way to Ireland, to Iceland to Nampa Idaho, right? So world of mouth advertising and I want to share with you some things that you can do to help accelerate the number one. Best way to get new business is By Word of Mouth advertising, right? Word of mouth and sharing and getting those referrals. So what can we do to accelerate it? How can we trigger those moments when people want to talk about you to other people and ideally in a good way, right?
Here's some things we want to think about reach out and reconnect with your loyalists, the people who are your loyal fans, the Evangelist your loyal fan, who wants to share all about you because they are just in love with your product or your service or doing business with you. Right? People want to do business with those that they know like and trust. And so building, trust is a major factor in being able to accelerate That Word of Mouth advertising. So reconnect with Them reach out with them. And then, of course, reward those who will refer you recommend you rang, curate, you and celebrate it wildly online to the world. Let people know about the fact that you reward those who talk about you and want to continue That Word of Mouth advertising. It's a ripple effect. When one person talks about you to 10 people than those 10 people can talk about you to their 10 people and it continues on and on and on other things you can do is
Light, your current customers, the people who are already purchasing from you, what can you do? That's going to be unexpected that they can then talk about and share with their friends because they, they had like a surprise or they were delighted by something that you did or said, or, you know, acknowledge them, right? So check in with your current customers asking about how their day went asking about their daughters, and sons, or granddaughters and grandkids and all of the the The people that surround them and who are important to them, learn about them, become friends with them. They're not just your customers, they are people who buy from you, right? They they are your, they can be your friends and you want to learn from them and you want to understand what's going on in their world. What kind of concerns or problems? Do they have that? Maybe you could help them solve be resourceful and then they'll going to they're going to know to come to you. The expert in whatever it is that you're an expert in because you will be the one that helps
Save their day or solve their problem, or even, you know, give two shits about him, right? You, you were genuinely interested in concerned and humble with your current client base, then they're going to continue to be your Advocates and want to continue to help you build your brand. And then, of course, think about ways that you can reconnect with them on a consistent ongoing basis. And then the more that you can consider Port them and help them and be available. Able to those who can love on you and help share your brand the better you're going to have accelerating That Word of Mouth advertising. What can you do to help them? And then in turn they're going to want to help you and then ask continuously ask what it is that you can do to make your product or service, even more valuable to them than what it already is. Sometimes those ideas that come from your customers, just the sheer fact of being able to listen to them and hear what they have to say, Can seriously
We put you above the competition, they're going to become loyal because you gave the time of day to them, and so, give them incentives to interact with your brand with other people, encourage them in in to get them to engage and like, and share and tweet and speak about you and post about you, what can you do to reward them and incentivize them to do that? Maybe, you know, if they retweet this or reshare this or hashtag this, then you can interim for a chance to win something or you can even reward them by simply being a parent online and talking about you and and continuing to incentivize them on an ongoing basis. Because if they continue to refer you then you want to continue to reward them. And of course other things that you can do is give them bonus codes or just different things that kind of make it special and make them feel special so that they can make your brand special to create. Wow, worthy service.
A project or something that they can talk about give them something to talk about like that song, give them something to talk about. If you've got something that you're working on that it's going to get that. Wow factor in front of them, shout it out, let him know and let them shuttle about it. To pay attention to who those influencers are on a regular basis. Who is it? That is shouting at all about you and who are you getting your recommendations and referrals and rewards from? And then make sure
Sure that they continuously want to do it. Make sure that you follow through, if they've given you a referral, make sure that you follow through, right? You want to make sure that you do the best you can do. So they continue to want to do it even more and make it super easy for them to talk about you give them some talking points and give them some triggers. Some natural triggers. Pay attention to what those triggers are, how are people talking about you, and why are they talking about you and then make some more triggers. Easy for them to talk about those talking triggers, can Really helped Fuel That Word of Mouth advertising that were talking about. And think about what we're what we're going through in this day and age, be unprecedented times. That Our Generations have seen all of the things that are happening right now. What can you do to help ease people's pain or their burdens or concerns? Are you being socially conscious? Are you being inclusive? Are you doing things that are going to sustain where we're at? And
Having sustainability and what kind of movement can you be a part of be where your people are at be concerned for them with them? And they're going to want to buy from you because you are a part of them, you're empathizing with them, you're stepping into their shoes, you are where your people are at. And if you're not, then get there. Where are your people? Where are your customers buying from? How are they finding out about, you understand what it is to be able to continue?
And of course, those follow-ups are very, very important. The reconnections, ask somebody to Coffee cocktails conference calls. Heck, maybe we can even go to Cabo all of the three C's that we want to think about, when we continuously reach out and be in touch, with the people who matter. Most other things you can do to help accelerate That Word of Mouth advertising. What kind of coopertition can you have or Co-op Partnerships? If you are Are partnering with somebody that's got a similar audience that you do. Maybe you're not competition with them but maybe you both have the same type of audience. Now what can you do to partner together? Do an event. Do a bring a speaker in that has relevancy to your audience. Then what it does is it basically doubles your reach because now all of their people who are influencers and love their brand now are exposed to your brand and vice versa. All the people who love your brand, now are also exposed to the
Now, power numbers, right? And being able to accelerate That Word of Mouth really can help when you partner and do any kind of event or co-promotion or whatever. The case might be, it's super helpful. When I put on events, we always do culture and brand camp or we do new marketing trends for the new year. I absolutely love having other speakers in our industry. Come and be a part of it even if it's a like or a industry that's you know similar and who were targeting, maybe not come. Petition necessarily. But people that we want to expand our Network to that, they want to expand their networks to, and so partnering with these people, and then being able to give them all of those easy trigger points to be able to share and spread that news to all of their audience just as much as ours, it's great. But yeah, be where the people are at and be where you want to be to meet them, then you're going to be able to help accelerate that word of mouth. And then, of course, don't forget, or just simply remember to ask for
Referrals from people, you know that are your loyalists ask them ask them, don't be afraid to ask for those referrals and again if you want to take those people to Coffee cocktails and have conversations or conference calls, do it together. Sometimes I love to be able to when I refer somebody, I want to have the two people. I want to meet in the same room and then I can introduce both of them. And then what it does for me is it makes me very resourceful and they want to come back and maybe they even want to return the favor to me which is awesome.
It's a reciprocating function, right? Givers go givers to give more and then ideally it'll come back in abundance so helping you and your tribe continued to accelerate That Word of Mouth advertising or otherwise known as world of mouth advertising. Hopefully you got some tips from this. We're also going to write a blog post about it, so be sure to go to the marketing expedition.com to get the full information. And there's a lot more that you can learn from this. So but what Further Ado, let's get into the interview with Joe. You guys are in for such a treat. Here we go.
Welcome to the marketing Expedition podcast and auditory Journey Through the latest in marketing, branding, and advertising. Now, here's your marketing Expedition guide, Rhea Allen. Welcome to the marketing Expedition podcast. I'm your host Rhea Allen. I'm the president and CEO of Peppershock media, and the founder of the marketing Expedition community. And today's guest, we have Joe DeMaria say your last name. For me, Joe DeMaria days Berea. Likely you did it better. Oh, you know, I'm just making up names. Now, you and telemarketers. Those are I know, right? Nail it. That's how I know. Somebody doesn't really know me because they say is Rhea. They're like no, no, she's not right raised here empathize. Yes, exactly. Why don't you tell our audience a little more about you and just your background and just all the fascinating things about why and where you came from and how you got to where you are now? That's
So long story. But you know, I'll give you the short ish version. There's sort of two chapters of my career, that have kind of developed on their own. And the first half was starting an agency. When I was 18, I moved back to the Bay Area from New York and started working with tech companies. This is back when we were still, you know, Whispering about Web 2.0 and how that was going to change everything, so that was a little while ago. And then, as I work with
Those companies and I got, you know, keyed into people at PayPal or I started meeting higher-end entrepreneurs. That I would work with like, Daymond, John and people like that. My business started to shift on an accident and I became really responsible for heaps of companies stepping into online education. And I'm not talking like, you know, you to me and kind of these little grab-bag, edutainment things like masterclass, I'm talking really using Education as a strategic initiative so that they could build better relationships with their customers that they could train employees better.
And after I did that for a few years, I actually created my own online learning methodology that's now used in a bunch of universities. Like the California state school system, the UC system, Cornell University, Portland State, Oregon State. There's you know, the Los Angeles Unified School District. So, you know, those two chapters of my career in marketing and in education of kind of come together now with some of the new things I'm working on. So that's that's kind of my my background. Lots of fascinating things to uncover and unpack and discover, but I want to know kind of you before we started recording here. You are saying that you have scaled companies from 1 million to 50 million and done some pretty amazing things. Let's get, let's just dig right in and and share a little bit more about some of the things that you did to help make that happen. Yeah. So it's actually, you know, I think my career has been marked by many happy accidents and good bits of timing and good mentorship.
And so, one of the things that I've gotten to see a lot of over the past decade or so is just being involved in companies that are stuck at that one to two million Mark and they just keep hitting their head against the ceiling. Nothing they do ever get some through that wall. They might have, you know, the year where they decide to double, what they spend on advertising, and they might hit that ceiling and immediately regressed back to where they were, or they might decide to hit the road and start speaking everywhere. And they might get through the ceiling for one month and then the right back under it, you know, they just they can't break through and a lot of the companies that I've been involved with by the time I get there, they might have had their head against that two million dollars ceiling for 20 years. Now, you know, the interesting thing is as I've gone through and worked with all these different people, I started to realize that there's a genuine sort of flow chart like a decision tree, really that we can follow that shows.
Us where we get stuck. And so when we talk about what happened at that company that went from 1 million to 50 million. It's really, it's simple stuff. The first thing is understanding, you know, if your business model is actually empowering you to be successful or if you just chose it because you saw other people doing it, I'm looking at you continuity, marketers. And you know it if you don't have a business model, aligned to whatever the Strategic intent of the company is, it's very hard to be successful.
For then there's the assumptions that we make, right? So for making assumptions and we are now not really with our finger on the pulse of what our customers want, or what our Prospect is looking for. In the market, we can make very expensive mistakes that stop us from scaling, then it gets into monetization. Now really, really interesting for me. Having been involved with a lot of companies now is everywhere. I go, everyone is focused on monetization first. Everyone wants to know how to make more money, how to, you know, make more sales out of sell a higher tier of client or become more profitable, period dealer, or whatever. And the reality is every time I see companies that are stuck at that one to two million point, it's because they
Almost universally too focused on the monetization side and they don't have architecture to actually support it. So we call that the difference between growing and scaling companies grow to death all the time because they don't have a scalable architecture to sustain it. So that's something that when we go through all these Transformations with different companies like you know, we've done that with law, firms with Healthcare practices with You know, any number of things. Almost universally. Everyone is so focused on the actual conversion that they're not looking at. How do we support that throughout the entire architecture of the company? Can you give an example of an architecture strategy or what you call? What you were saying? What's an example specifically if something that you helped do too, and I like what you said so that a company doesn't grow to death.
Yeah, of course, I'll give you an example of one from last year. A friend of mine is a very successful intellectual property attorney but over the last 20 years he'd never really broken past that you know, 1.5 million Market in very stable, very successful, very well respected. He's not lazy. He's a good marketer. He invest incredible amounts of money in growing the business. He pays the right people who brings right people in by the books, you would say that this person should be past that number. They should have, you know, beat the ceiling. But year-over-year, he would get to them Mark where he's on Pace to break that one point five. I think which was his ceiling and it would all look good and it would fall apart at the last minute, or he would be way short of it all year. And in the last quarter, all of a sudden, things would click, and he'd hit 1.5 million, like, no matter what happened, it was just that number over and over.
And over again. So, when I went into the company, one of the first things that I looked at was not the monetization, which was originally actually what he wanted me to look at. It was the model was the model allowing him to be successful. Okay. If the business models right then we have to look at the offer strategy is the offer strategy allowing you to be successful. So for example, if he's an attorney and this is a silly, you know obviously a silly expert example here.
If you're an attorney and you're trying to do a free plus shipping offers to, to build your, your book of business, it's probably a bad strategy, right? It's just the wrong, offer structure, the wrong methodology. If you're trying to do cheap, like low dollar service and you're competing against LegalZoom, that's probably a bad strategy. So what we did is we wanted to reposition him as a more premium brand which he already was you just wasn't conveying it. And we reject his offer structure to be what we call a Halo model, which is a four-tier offer structure and the reason we did that was to introduce more profitability per deal. So that we didn't have to close more, you know, more deals by volume. We were just more productive with the, the leads that we already had. So rather than
Spending tremendous amounts of money on marketing which she'd shown does not work for him as well. We just reject the architecture of the front end of the business and let it run. And he grew 54 percent for the year, which is the first time that has ever happened for him. Wow. And to grow a law firm 54 percent. In one calendar year is unheard of. So, you know, that was just a system as simple as
Aging is business model a little bit and changing his offer structure so that he could reach the goals. He set out to do, right? Because usually lawyers only bill by the hour and your kind of tied to the, you know, the dollar that you make that within those hours. So by creating offers and content, right? He served up content that people could download and pay for is that right? Yeah well we ended up doing is we created for 40 years that ended up being packages. There were That rates working with an attorney rather than the typical hourly and we brought in a sales person instead of just having folks call into the office and our reception staff. Chatting with them, we actually brought in a, you know, a guy from Lehman Brothers formerly who's a business strategist, and he became our sort of head of sales and we started generating leads sending them straight to him. And just using a very, very low touch, sort of consultative sales.
Oil. So in a month or two, we completely transitioned the way the business Works to be totally different from the way all of our competitors were doing it. And it felt much more premium, much more bespoke. And we were able to charge a much higher price for the same level of service which made us more profitable without investing more money in. You know, any of our normal human capital or marketing resources, right? So how did you go about getting the lead?
Then that were coming in when we walk me through that a little bit on how that all worked. Well, you know, my background as a marketer has always been in, you know, advertising and sort of digital marketing. What we see a lot of is with these business, especially brick-and-mortar companies always are under utilizing things like SEO and localization strategies. So that was a huge factor for us is building a better localization strategy. So, we geo-fenced off the tri-state area and we geo-fenced off, you know, are things that were within a few miles of the offices that we had and we went and really got focused and targeted. We brought in SEO experts to support that and make sure that we'd localized a lot of our pages. And then we turned around and we built very purpose-built, sort of middle of the funnel campaigns that were designed to reach a more mature.
Buyer. So we didn't quite want the person that came in saying, you know, I think I have an idea. Can you help me? Because that person is more likely to go to a LegalZoom anyway and our prices were a little too steep for most of them self self selecting. I mean they have to self-select right away. Absolutely. Yeah. We want the people that are asking questions, like, what can I patent an algorithm right? Or how do I actually profit from a patent? Those are more mature set of buyers rather than people. That are asking things like, can I do a patent myself? So all of our SEO is targeted at a more mature, level of conversation. So that when we did draw people in on that front end, they kind of were already raising their hands and interested in what we had to do. And then the other thing is we abandoned the free consult that everybody in the industry gives and we moved instead to an IP planning session, right? It's a it's a basically, an intellectual
Planner in your meeting with an actual license, business strategist, which is our sales person and he actually goes through and talk to you about the business plan and tries to help you understand how to profit from this thing before you ever actually pay us. These are differences in customer success. That I have completely changed the makeup of their business. So I think this is good information for people that are listening and kind of trying to go through Through their marketing Journeys and maybe they are stuck. Maybe they are trying to get past that wall that they keep running into and you know, like you said beating their head against the wall kind of thing. What kind of advice would you give you know, what's the next steps that they need to take to break through and in either work with you? Or if they are trying to do something to move beyond that? What would you say to them? Well I mean I would say the first thing is always taking a look at what our overall business model is right. I mean, I and
Why would take it back even even further than that. The first thing is really understanding. What your vision is for this business. I can't tell you how many times I walk into companies, where the only literally, the only reason they're not growing is because nobody knows what the definition of growth is at that company. And everyone is working against each other or they're just biting off more than they can chew because they just don't have a really Clear Vision of where they're supposed to be. Now, if I asked you, right? Like, what's your vision for 25 years, down the road and you start telling me you want 10,000 employees and you want, you know, you want to own a building in Manhattan. And this have the other thing I would just ask you,
Why write, what is it? What is it fundamentally do for you to reach those goals? Because if you can pick very clear goals like where you want to be in 25 years, you can work backwards and understand what your Gap is. The biggest issue for most of us with vision is we can't, you know, like we might know where we want to be, but we have a really, really big Gulf of understanding between what life is going to be like in 25 years and what are the component parts? It's of actually getting there. What are the Milestones with our clients? I always say, where do we want to be in 25 years? What's that going to look like in your personal life? I do, you know, you can do a lot with 10,000 employees, but if your goal is, you want to have a two million dollar home in Lake Tahoe and you want the business to be automated. You want to spend time with your kids, and you want to take up, paddleboarding you could do that with less than 10,000 employees. You could do that without owning
In a building in New York. So why make that part of the goal, right? The business has to solve a problem for you the entrepreneur, or you will become burnt out and you will be bored by it. So I'd rather you focus on your personal goals and then I'd say, where do you have to be in 10 years in your personal life? What life do you have to be living to know you're on track for 25? What life to have to be living in 52? Know you're on track for 10 and where do you have to be in three years to know you're on track for five years? What I end up looking at is the difference between three years and today, that is our Gap. That's what we're looking to solve. Everything else will self aligned. But that three-year window is such an important thing for entrepreneurs to look at. Because in three years at that's on average, how long it takes to sell our company's right from the moment. We decide to sell to the moment. We actually walk away is typically around three years.
Three years is basically a season and Entrepreneurship, right? You'll go through three year, Windows all the time. It's kind of an evolution cycle for the average small business. So three years is a perfect window if you can establish where you need to be. Now you can start looking at your business model and saying is this the right model for me to employ to get to that. Three-year number. And you know, I think it's crazy to think that people would want more employees like that to do all the all the, all the work that needs to get done. When you can automate things and set yourself up for success with you fish in seas and by the, by the way. Right now, I just don't even think it's feasible for us to get 10,000 employees because everyone, it was, you know, there's not the employees that are available, right? We're going through this crazy, Great Recession or a resignation and you know people are job hopping.
All of the recruitment efforts that are going on. It seems like it's kind of a volatile situation for people to be in. What do you think? Yeah absolutely. I mean the whole reason automations become such a big deal is because we want less human capital, right? I mean human capital. I'm I am always a humanist but like people are variables. That's what makes some wonderful things and it also makes them a threat to to a lot of business owners that need Need incredible amounts of Manpower. If your goal is you want have 1,000 employees. There's almost nothing you can do with 1,000 employees that you couldn't do with half of that. And automation I mean a lot of business goals that entrepreneurs have are frankly vanity goals. You tell me you want to make ten million dollars a year I'm going to ask you why. Right? Because listen if your goal was that two million dollar house in Lake Tahoe, you could probably do that with a million dollar a year business. So why are you writing down that 25 years?
You want to 25 million dollar business, you need to have really, really clear understanding of what your life needs to look like and how the business is going to serve you. What job? Are you hiring the business to do otherwise? You're wandering, the desert for 40 years. Yeah. Yeah well and it's really fascinating because the different Generations that were now seeing you know, Mass Exodus of people who are retiring retiring early, you know, maybe not wanting to work the same way that they worked before and then the younger generation they have a different way to work and so we're seeing quite the, you know, interesting times with with all of the workers that are available to us now.
Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, this is something I'm extremely interested in, I've invested a lot of time and money and is, is sort of where the market is going. You know, whether that's the employee Market, the actual labor market, whether that's the actual academic Market, you know, are people going to invest in college, all these different things. I'm a really big education, person. Funny coming from a College Dropout, I know. But, you know, I've done a lot of work over the past. Past let's say eight or nine years. With different institutions to improve the way they do, online learning. And one thing I can tell you is that really the future for your marketers. The future of marketing is 150 years old. It's it's you know, education, marketing. If you can go all the way back to the earliest advertising in the 18 you know, 1860 70's 80's 90's and almost universally. Historically the
Campaigns of all time, we're all education focused. The reason was before the internet and I think we've all been really seduced by internet marketing over the past 20 years. But before the internet, the biggest thing that we could do is relationship building, right? I mean, we wanted to win incumbency and people's homes. And we did that by building a bond when the internet came around, all of a sudden we had the ability to play a volume game, that is marketers we never had before. For and we got seduced by it. So we started making lower-tier offers and trying to win five six dollars at a time with these microtransactions and when you're doing that and you're making $6 you don't need to build a bond to have somebody pay six dollars. So we moved away from relationship but now with covid I mean you said it yourself
12. It is really shifted. The perspective that buyers have right, but pre covid. For as long as I can remember, we were always advertising along the tone of Lifestyle, you know, Freedom, you know, feed in the sand laptop on the beach. Like, it was always about personal Liberty, personal freedom umbrellas in your drink. So yeah, totally. But then during covid you might have even seen this but Was a huge article that came out. I forget, who did the study was probably like McKinsey or somebody, but over 500 billion dollars in advertising was spent during the first few months of covid and the message immediately shifted away from those things. Let you know toes in the sand marketing to trust safety helping others, right? You know Nationwide is on TV telling you, we're with you in this tough time. We know how hard it is. We're going to get through it together.
Why do you think that is probably emotional connections? Yeah, absolutely. It's a shift to customer bonding same thing. Happens with now. Education, you have all these employees that are getting displaced by automation. They need to be res, killed. You have all these students that are no longer going to attend University because they've lost faith in the system, right? The way for you as a company to win, whether you're a small business or you're a massive company. Is to invest in becoming an education leader for your actual customer, your prospect building incumbency, that is built on more than just, you know, price and velocity, which is sort of what we've done for a while and actually invest in the people that you intend to hold as your clients for the future. Yeah, I think there is definitely something to be said about the thought leadership and, you know, even do
These podcasts and getting the opportunity to interview and meet other people and listen to what they have to say and vice versa. Like being it out there. Sharing this information has been a great tactic to take and it's had some residual side effects from people hearing you know, people on our interviews on my podcast and they you know, get new business from it or they get more interest or learning from it. And for me too. I mean as I get to Meet people every week and talk to him. So I think that there's definitely something to be said about being that thought leader being the speaker or author or you know a coach that can go on a stage and get that expertise because of what they're doing and how they're sharing it. Right? Yeah. Of course. And I would take it even passed just thought leadership. And I would challenge you to be action leaders. You know, one of the things that I think has been sort of anemic is as marketers when we think.
Customer education. It's always like a blog or a white paper or you know, it's a video that we made on the loom. The, the reality is people don't want to necessarily learn about how to use your product. They want to learn how to actually build skills. Now that can Encompass using your product but overall, if Adobe wants to win, so I'll give you a good example, right? You're familiar with canva. I'm sure. Yeah, okay. So canva when They came to the market, there have a very famous pitch deck. I would ask pretty much anybody that's interested in raising money. Like, we're raising around for one of our companies, right now to go look at canvas pitch deck because there's a really wonderful slide in there. That shows, the basically, the Pyramid of the market and Adobe is playing for the top 10%, professional graphic designers, professional videographers yada yada yada and canva is saying. Look at this.
The rest of the market that has no graphic design background. No video editing know, whatever. These are the people, we're going after the DIY wires, the do-it-yourselfers. Exactly. Now, this is why that's really interesting. Adobe has much bigger reach. It's got a much more Hardline. It's I mean, just so much more developed software package. It's a big company that can afford to to nurture people. You would think think Adobe would be able to win that battle.
The difference is the speed of innovation today means that smaller companies like canva can move faster and be more responsive to customer need. Then big companies, like Adobe, but here's where the rubber meets the road, if canva and Adobe are going to war. The person that wins that war is the person with the better customer Bond right now. What's a better way to do that? To just teach people how to use, Adobe or teach people how to use canva and a tutorial or what if you made the canvas Academy for, you know, graphic design, and you did a small educational thing that allows people to learn how to do this stuff that they would maybe traditionally learn in a university, right? But you're showing them under your brand, under your umbrella, using your product. Who do you think they're going to stay with?
You give them the skill, they will stay with you. Yeah, now I can definitely tell you my team, you know, it goes back and forth about canva and, you know, whether we want to support it as much as we because we obviously do do be products and have because it's, as you said, you know, it's like the more professional what, you know, trained and and, you know, schooled graphic designers use. But, you know, the but then again, half the majority of the people who need it will go to Canada because they can and it's, you know,
But they don't necessarily have the design background or the understanding of, you know, all of the different components that go into a design and why why it's like what we want it to be. Yeah, I mean it's you're talking about it a small scale, exactly what the biggest challenges for companies all over the world are right now. So I'm I'm in discussions right now with probably the number one and number two agency holding companies in the world, right? They owned thousands of agencies and And their big challenges are, hey, you know what, whenever Google makes a change to their algorithm, we need to re-educate thousands of agencies on how to, how to use this new thing. Properly. We need to do it quickly. Mhm.
Google has their own Challenge on the other side of it that they don't want to be in the education business, right. Google is actually removing a lot of their services around education because they just want to be the software provider they do not want to be the educator around it, right. Well, it creates sort of a vacuum because for the most part you're now putting Google's putting the pressure of you of like understanding how to use Google products on companies and Companies aren't adequately prepared to do that. So what ends up happening is the first company that has an alternative to Google Suite or any of the other tools that can actually build something that educates people on how to use it properly.
They win incumbency, right? They can now come out and say, like, let's say the game is slack versus teams have Microsoft teams comes out and does a whole Microsoft Academy on, you know, internal communication right, or how to be productive communicators and work from home. And we're using teams every single project manager, every single operations person that's struggling with work from home right now, and trying to redesign the way their company culture works. If they are taking that through Microsoft teams, guess what tools are going to use teams are slack, they're going to use teams, and they're going to be loyal to teams because teams gave them a skill. Not just a tutorial on how to click a few buttons and add some people. Yeah, this is this is the
Future. Every, every company has the opportunity to do this big and small to be an action leader and to help your customers, your prospects build real skills. That make them more, confident more capable buyers because no one wants to feel foolish. So, if we can give them capability and we can give them confidence. We have something that'll allow us to out-compete people, even if they're much, much bigger than us, even if they're much much more organized than us or financially, you know, more competitive and that really is how you break through those ceilings early doors.
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Let's start, let's talk a little bit about course creation because you have, obviously done a lot of this for yourself and for your clients and and, you know, being named as one of the top, you know, content creators course, creators right on the planet. I want to hear a little bit more about, you know, people who might want to go and create their courses. Tell us some some things that you've learned along the way that could be useful for our listeners. Oh totally, I'll give you a couple really big things. And by the way, you know, when Joe polish said that about me, I was as shocked as you are. So, yeah, I mean, I I accidentally got into online courses. Like I said, a lot of our marketing clients in the early 2010's wanted to start dabbling there. And I worked with a lot of online marketers and now you can't close your eyes and swing your arms in a circle without hitting 40 online marketers that have courses. So
The first thing I'll say, is if your goal is just to make a course to make money stop, okay. There's there are so many considerations to actually doing this successfully and if you're just you see someone on LinkedIn advertising the, how to make a course plan, or they're on Facebook advertising, the the checklist of things to do, stop. The the first thing you have to understand is again, why are you doing this? What are you hiring? The Online course to do, right? Because most of us, you know, I can give you a rattle off a few mistakes, but most of us were just making the thing because we see other people that are successful that are doing it but we don't realize that that is a pillar to their Parthenon. There's 50 other things that have to be stable for that to work effectively for them and you're going in copying the front end of something that's, you know.
Incredibly complex, and you're wondering why it failed. Mhm. So here are the key mistakes, right? If you want to jump into the world of content creation, as a as an educator, right? The first thing is doing your research. I cannot tell you how many people I have worked with and big and small, right. And I'll say this lovingly about, you know, Joe polishes, team Daymond, John's Team, all Is different amazing, folks. They come to us knowing what they want to make and then we have to tell them gently that they need to set that aside because I don't care what they want to make. I want to do the research and see what their customer needs and decide. If we are in Integrity to teach that, right? We don't want to just make whatever we think is important.
Because that's when sales tank, that's when marketing is totally misaligned with what the customer or the prospect wants. And we end up with a very, very expensive ornament that just sits on a shelf somewhere. So we how do you go about finding out what your customers want? Do you do a survey? Do you do like focus groups or what is it that you typically do? You're opening a whole can of worms here, okay? So I'm going to say something that is going to make people want to fight me on sight. And I'm Okay, with that, if you are spending money on surveys on focus groups or you're spending time on interviewing customers or prospects, you are wasting your money. So I'm prepared for the Salvo of hate on that, but the reality is, by doing any of these things, you are inherently biasing the results. You will get right. If you put a bunch of people in the room to try your products and to tell you about it,
If you are inherently getting a less honest result because of what? What essentially boils down to like observer effect, right in quantum physics or quantum mechanics. Right? So the idea is the more we're interacting, right? The more like the higher touch like a focus group or a survey or whatever. The more stimulus we're injecting into it, we are always changing the feedback we get, which is why. So many of these companies spend millions of dollars on market research
And they push something out into the universe and it totally flops, right? So, the way we do research instead has to be extremely light, touch, it can't be coming from this. This area of stimulus, it has to be secondary research. Not primary Incognito Incognito. Correct. Yeah. You want to be the fly on the wall? What we end up doing? Is we start looking for? Where does their ideal Prospect go? To have open and honest conversations with their peers or where they have community. And if we can find that and they have anonymity, we have way more likelihood of the data. We're getting being accurate, right? So if we're not pushing a stimulus into the market,
We're much much more likely to have our finger on the pulse and ever since we made that change, you know, our conversions on landing pages on funnels on email marketing, our completion rates on courses, our retention rates, are all up massively, right? The average online course in the in North America. At least I can't give you anything from. Let's say you're up or something like that but the average online course here in this includes.
Academia, which is terrifying but the average online course completion rate is somewhere between 10 and 15 percent. Well, I can probably be a part of that percentage to I've started a whole bunch and never finished them. So yeah. We all hide right? I'm proof. Yeah. We oh, I mean I've got a million that are sitting in a hard drive somewhere so you know that it's between 10 and 15% ever since we made those changes and we make sure that we're doing research to know what the prospect wants. Instead of just what we feel, we need to force into their hands. Mhm, our completion rates are between 60 and 70 percent. That's better. That is massive. Yeah. So by asking them what they want, doesn't necessarily get you the information you need. It's about having those conversations and being where they are at and then being able to, you know, kind of be the detective to uncover, what it is that they need and then bringing it, bringing it to them. Yeah. If you marketers mean, you're all bunch of
To. So, what we do from a tactical standpoint, is we go in and we collect hundreds of direct quotes from conversations that we've been on a fly on the wall of, and we're looking for things that they're celebrating things that they're lamenting, right? Fears failures frustrations misconceptions pains. We're looking for Solutions wins. We're looking for environmental stuff. So what they see and hear.
Right. Maybe that's, you know, they see Tony Robbins with the 32 million dollar course launch. Okay, that's external. But they might also see their friend who put twenty thousand dollars into video production and never launched the program. So we want to know how they're making that decision and all of these different things, become a behavioral language pattern that your buyer uses to make buying decisions. We use those to determine what are the two or three biggest pain points. And then we asked, very simply, we asked our client which of these three can you solve most transformative lie, because that becomes the Crux of the product line. Yeah. And what are some of the tools that you use to create these courses with that, you've done that have been really successful for you that you've got the seventy percent completion rate. So I'll tell you that.
I'm actually pretty tool agnostic. I've been doing a lot of testing on that over the past few years and I don't think there's any tool itself that gives you more juice than any other sure. There's some that allow you to do things like assessments, you know, could job, you'll do assessments quite a few of them can do little things like that. There's a couple that will allow you to gamify the, the reality is the success or failure of your program. Actually happens in the course, architecture, not in the platform.
So the way you design, your curriculum completely is determinant of your success. Everything else is window dressing. Gotcha. So it's all about how you put it together. Not necessarily on what platform, but the way it's delivered and absorbed and finished and completed, correct, right? I mean, it's all a route decision. So, you know, they'll only thing we can control is what happens in the development, everything else. Once it passes out of our hands, you're relying on the behavior of your user. So if you want to make that process slower or shorter, I should say you need to
User. Well, I can give you a great example of this, which is, you know, every single one of you when you sit down and think about making an online course, you probably open up a Google doc or you pull out a piece of paper and you start making an outline like a college essay, right, you're thinking of it like chapters in your book and you start looking at that stuff saying, okay, well I would do, I would need to do this and here's all the things that go under that and, oh, here's something that I need to throw in there because I forgot it, you end up getting cotton
Angel and constantly adding things are moving things, like the floors of Learning and Development party departments, all over the country or entrepreneurs offices are covered in crumpled up pieces of paper with horrible, outlines on them. Well, that and you just don't want a number anything, because if you do move, things around your re-editing. You're redoing totally. And that's the thing, you know, when I work with people on the like, the curriculum side on average, by the time they get to me.
Been working on this for two years without making progress. I can't believe that two years. They work with us for three to six months and they have something live in the market. So it's not a function of, you know, you don't need like Joe polish always quotes this. I forget whose quote it was but he says you don't need the the brains of an Einstein, the muscles of a Schwarzenegger. The refresh reflexes of a Grand Prix, driver to solve a problem. You simply need to know what to do. And the reality is the minute you go into outline, hell, you're starting to think like a lecturer. You are not thinking like an educator. You have to build skills throughout the progression of the program. Not just lecture to people, not just cover off topics. If you are not engaging in skills based learning, you are going to be one of the many that are stuck at that 10 or 15 percent completion rate, right? And
Going to be boring because it's not gonna be anything. People are gonna want to continue. Every single one of us that has spent you like, you went to college, right? Okay. What percentage of those classes actually influence, what you do every day? Oh gosh, I mean, clearly not all of them. I mean, I think that there was a geology class that I'm still wondering why I had to take. I mean, it's important for me to know about geology, but it's not what I do every day. Exactly. When was the last time you stumbled across a sedimentary rock, right? It's all right. What is it, sediment? I don't even know. Yeah, which shows you exactly how useful that classes, but I guess it could come in handy if it's geography because I know how to geofences specific
Right, right. But then we have Google Maps so here, right? So you know, the thing is, there's all these things that you had to do to get a degree that were not germane to what you wanted to do is a skill or what you want to do in your life, right? And those things just derail your process. They ruin your enthusiasm is a learner and the only reason you might get through them is because they're social pressure and stigma around not going to class or not getting the degree. Right? You can't just skip things in the liberal arts education, unfortunately, but when it comes to online learning, there is no lecture. Hall full of students to hold you accountable. There is no sort of group dynamic that kind of keeps you focused and locked in. There's no Professor right in front of you, making eye contact with you, with the thread of making you answer a question or trying to force you to raise your hand, or in my case, making sure that they turn their
Numbers on. So that, you know, if we're doing a remote class, I know that they're listening to me. Totally. Yeah. Totally. I teach, I teach look like a marketing class. So, luckily, so I'm very familiar with the that scenario that you're talking about. Yeah. Oh yeah. And so like as soon as those things are gone all of a sudden the the lecturer you re in this case you lose all of the Power and positioning you had that gave you authority to teach the boring stuff right right now.
You're competing with Facebook, you're competing with Instagram, you're competing with YouTube, your hell, you're competing with. I hate to say it, but you're competing with PornHub. You're competing with all these companies to try to get them to move through your course. Yeah. It takes, you know, I just discovered this the other day. Tick-Tock if you go down a tick, tock rabbit hole, and you're on it for too long, Tick-Tock will tell me to get off. Tick-Tock he's been on your too long, get off until you take a break. Unbelievable. So your fight,
A losing battle if you're getting in there and you're trying to lecture so a lot of the universities I worked with. They'll have historically talented professors, incredibly High Pass rates. You know, just like amazing Legends of educating. But you go there because, you know, you're going to get a lecture and you know that that's the atmosphere in the position that you're put in. Whereas like you're saying yeah go ahead. Well in the crazy part is you can have these like storied professors that have been there for 30 years, teaching the exact same thing every day and getting incredible results and they move to online learning for covid. Trying to teach the same thing the same way and they're they're Pass rates, drop their Dropout rates, shoot through the roof and their their test scores.
Plummet. Yeah, you know it's a transition that we need to make from being lecturers to actually thinking about how do we process everything we're doing as skills based education because that is the only way to get people to path through something. It's when they know that okayed, the next lesson here is going to build on what I just learned. I'm going to be able to do something with it and take it away. Like there's there's always a next thing to do.
Online lectures or just to episodic right there. It might be like taking a series of 50 webinars instead of just slowly developing the skill, right? Okay, so one more question for you, Joe tell me if you had an opportunity to go back in time and tell yourself what, you know, now that you wish you would have known, then what would it be? That's that's a really interesting question.
I think if I knew now what I knew back then I would have started using other people's money faster. Yeah, I spent the last ten plus years, bootstrapping, everything and self-funding and you know my latest jump back into the startup World which I never thought I would do again. Is now as you know, I'm like the number two or number three person at this this company and we're raising, you know, 4 million And the fact that we can just walk in off the street, and raise 4 million is easily as we have is just absurd. And I think about the years that I spent trying to bootstrap building team and bootstrap all the marketing and you know wearing 50 different hats. It's absolutely incredible. That it's just it's this easy to go use other people's money to do a lot of those things. So I think that's a valuable one. The other one I would say is just too
Really get good at building companies. That would have been successful in the 60s or the 70s, without, all the technological help. But you have because then when you walk in, and you have all these tools at your disposal building, real transformative, businesses is a hell of a lot easier, right? So, I'm a big fan of studying people like Jay Abraham and things like that, that did such amazing work in the in those decades where they didn't have. Of all the tools that we are. Hey, could you imagine if they had what the tools that we have now? Oh my goodness. Yeah. I'm very, I think, all of us are really, really lucky that J does not know how to use any of this stuff because I don't think anybody would be employed anymore. I mean he's he these Titans that have been around technically the skill-wise are still so Advanced and what they do is still so far beyond a lot of what we're touching today is internet.
Marketers a, I'm endlessly fascinated by people like Jay and all of these. These different famous copywriters and direct response guys. Yeah, yeah, okay. So, how can people get in touch with you? And, you know, if I said, okay, you can say anything you want to say, what would you say right now? Well, I'll subvert your question and replace it with something really simple, which is if I could say anything to any of you, I would say that your chief goal is marketers should be To empower, the people that are your end users and if you think through that lens, you'll always be more successful by rather that's education. Whether it's customer success, whether like whatever it is. If your job is to be an empowering group, you will find more success and you will find more incumbency in your Marketplace and you can out-compete now, when well, you can out-compete and win can out win anything, but that would be what I would say now.
If you want to find me and if you want to hear about any of the stuff, we've kind of touched on may be the tip of the iceberg for a lot of the way this process stuff works, but you can always go to teach to scale.com. Or you can go on Instagram, do at get more Joe and I do, you know, a lot of little teaching, sort of segments there, we're starting a new podcast, we're just going to be really fun. I'll be interviewing a lot of my friends, like, Joe polish, and people like that, that are sort of titans of the entrepreneurial Oil and marketing world. And we're going to talk exactly about what I call the, the process here. You know, how do you make anything more predictable, more sustainable, more profitable. And that's, that's where we are. Awesome. So what have you named your podcast yet? It's probably problems toy problems. Yeah, toy problems. It's something that I started. I mean, if you how I can explain the name at least very quickly, toy problems. It's
I think that when I was in Silicon Valley, I felt like I was really stuck, like, I couldn't progress anymore. I felt like I'd stopped to learning. I think most entrepreneurs have felt that way, you know, just burnt out like you're not making progress anymore. And everything I did in my business, just felt automatic like I you know, not to be arrogant but I just felt like a black belt at what I was doing and I was kind of bored. So I was trying to find a way to, to get back into creativity and I decided to do something there, was this like Japanese philosophy thing that I read one day. I wish I could remember where I saw that, but it was this idea of doing one thing every year that is so unbelievably difficult, the very nature of having completed that thing changes. The other 364 days I said wow okay that's that's really interesting.
What I wanted to do was I wanted to take take a semi-pro fight that year. I never done like mixed martial arts. I'd never done boxing. I'd never done anything all that stuff scared the crap out of me so it was something incredibly hard that I figured. If I could achieve this, it's going to change things for me. So that was the first one that I did and I put a ton of time into it and I found it as I was learning how to do. All these new things. Again I was I was responding those Creative Learning parts of my brain and I would I could get my butt kicked the night before and solve a problem. I've had for six months in the office because I had this plasticity back or something. So I came up with this idea and I wrote a lot about it called toy problems where we pick things that are inherently difficult, that we were going to be total novices at where we're totally
Okay with failing and we have very low expectations because it re Sparks our creativity and it allows us to solve more complex, more difficult problems in areas of Our Lives, where we might have been sitting with them for years. And so the toy problems podcast is, you know, me going and sitting down with world-class entrepreneurs and business. People talking about what are the things that that they've done or that they're working on? What are the barriers they
And how do they respond, right? How do they stay in creativity? How do they find those different bits of challenges that helped inoculate themselves against what are truly, the ups and downs of Entrepreneurship or business. I'm way more fascinated in people than I am in in hearing. Like, you know, the 500th take on how to do this particular Facebook ads strategy. So I'm always interested in In how the world-class performers maintain that for years and years and years. Because, you know, as well as I do that. You know, 97.3 percent of all businesses, go out of business within 10 years, right? Maybe even sooner than 10 years to the 5-year. Number is ninety three point six. Yeah. Well, and even I would like to see the numbers. Now that we're after this, you know, pandemic and restaurants and people are just struggling
Not because they're not getting the businesses because they don't have the staff to do it or the supply chain or all those types of things. So yeah, I'd imagine it will absolutely quick. Absolutely. Well, you know, the crazy thing and it should be encouraging for anybody listening while the market and the economy has been very strange for the past couple of years, the rate at which new businesses were started, has gone up almost 70%. From one covid started to now. Yeah. People losing their jobs and starting a business or quitting their jobs and starting a business or any of those things. Yeah, yeah. And long term that's going to be amazing for the economy itself and it's going to really change the way the labor market works. And it's probably going to take a lot of power out of the hands of universities and place it into the hands of employers like you guys. And you know, it's a, it's a heck of a way to start really rebuild.
What you want your company to look like? Yeah, it's going to be an interesting time to see what happens in the next couple of years, for sure. Well Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of your wisdom. I just kept going because you had lots of fascinating things to say. So no, it's great. And now when you do your show toy problems, then you'll have to reach out and I would be happy to be a guest on your show to that way, we can cross-promote, right? I will definitely do that. Will definitely do that better. You have somebody better start, creating some fun problems then. That's right. That's right. I'll have to, I have some ideas in mind. So we also from thank you so much, Joe and for all of you listening until next time everybody enjoy your marketing Journey. Thanks for listening to the marketing Expedition podcast. Want to continue the journey. Don't miss out on new episodes. Subscribe on iTunes Spotify, Amazon music or wherever you get your podcast.
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