Today, I'm talking with Jim Hart. Jim is in Arizona and has had quite a career in both the newspaper business and direct response marketing, as a consultant and now working with small and medium businesses to help counsel them on their marketing.
We had a great conversation about the future of the newspaper business. We talked about how, despite the common narrative, there's still a lot of juice left to squeeze from the newspaper orange, and the unique opportunity Jim has with his skills as a direct response marketer, his knowledge of the newspaper business and his connections in the newspaper business, to bundle up his skills and create some really great opportunities for small businesses all over the country.
We progressed into talking about the deeper idea of picking one business and really going deep in providing solutions for that one business that could be syndicated to all the other service providers in the same business.
You'll see we started talking about dentists but the conversation narrow to end talking about chiropractors. This is a great demonstration of the focus you can get helping any kind of businesses, in the same way I have specific focus on being able to help real estate agents. We talked a lot about how this could apply to his situation.
I think you'll really find this an interesting episode, developing the idea of a working, scaleable example.
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Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 040
Dean: Jim Hart.
Jim: Hey, Dean Jackson, how are you?
Dean: I am fantastic. How are you?
Jim: Couldn't be better.
Dean: That's awesome. It's a good day to hatch some evil schemes.
Jim: Well, I'm 75% higher, so it's like got so much going for it I can't believe it.
Dean: Perfect. Well, I've got ... we're recording right now. We've got the whole hour here that we can hatch some evil schemes for you, so why don't you tell me what's going on, what you're doing, and what kind of evil schemes we can hatch today.
Jim: That'd be terrific. I've been out on my own as a direct marketing consultant for 13 years. Started working in the newspaper industry in Chicago in 1981, and followed a pretty interesting path in sales in very competitive situations. Started up the database marketing department here in Phoenix at the Arizona Republic 20 years ago and did thousands of direct marketing projects and database profiles. For the last 13 years, I've been helping newspapers be more targeted and more direct marketing like ...
Dean: With independent newspapers?
Jim: Washington Post, Tribune Company.
Dean: Oh, wow. Nice.
Jim: New York Times. A who's who, everybody, but they're going off the cliff. This cow's been getting skinny for a long time, and as they gobble each other up and figure out how to get out of print, my job has turned more into hospice than warrior. Not fun. About a year and a half ago, my son Dan has been working with me for five years and doing the data work, and he's a film school graduate, and we joined the marketing consulting network about a year ago.
Dean: Oh, wow. Okay. I know that.
Jim: It's similar in the structure of delivering ... I know the marketing, strategy, but it's changing so fast and the tools are so powerful, and right now the newspaper thing is pretty well dead. There's a little cash flow coming from that, but right now the biggest thing that we're working on, Dean, is without a lot of testimonials and without a lot of small medium business digital clients to say we created these results for this guy and these results for that guy, we're working hard to ramp up our marketing and to ramp up our cheese, in your language, and to get in front of people, say the right things. We know we can help them. We're very good at setting up small CRM or funnels for small businesses to help the with their after unit and their during unit. We just need to get in front of the right people and say the right thing.
Dean: Right. What kinds of businesses are you focused on? Who's the business that you've got the best results for?
Jim: It's a great question, and it's the one that we're sitting on right now because the counsel we're getting is the more focused and the more specific we are, the more powerful ... like your thing with realtors.
Dean: Yes, definitely.
Jim: What you're doing with them might work for all kinds of different verticals, but the fact that you specifically branded it and talked about the mechanics of a realtor makes that group of people say, "He's talking to me."
Dean: Right. That's exactly right.
Jim: Right now, we're kind of stepping back saying, "Okay, do we say that it's for chiropractors?" We're actually in that, excuse my language, that horror state where we're like, "Hey, we're not sure what we do."
Dean: Right, exactly. I get it.
Jim: It's just not specific enough.
Dean: Let me ask you this then. I always start with that, that if you were only going to get paid when your client gets a result, what would that be? Who would you pick, and what do you have a track record in? What do you have confidence in that you can do?
Jim: Well, the track record part is part of the problem, and what we thought of, we know we can help dentists get more patients quickly.
Dean: How do you know?
Jim: We're very confident in the process of how we do that; Facebook advertising, we've done enough research on who to target, what the message should be, and all of that. We really feel, and what we thought is ... Fortunately, we know at least one dentist, the one that we go to, and say, "Hey, if you'll cover the ad costs, we will help you bring in new patients for you. We know you need then." All we ask is that when we start to generate business for you, if you want to keep doing it, you start paying you, but if you serve a reference, then you refer us to couple friends.
Dean: Kind of a subtle way to start off, but I think that's ... What do you think about that?
Jim: Well, that's a great way to start up, right? You got to start with more cheese and less whiskers, right? You start out with the things that they want that sounds like a win-win. When you look at it now, then you've got something that you try to lay the pass for that now the second dentist that you start to work with will be much easier than the first one because you've already blazed the trail. You know that this ad to this audience works, and then you're sort of syndicating a solution that you've figured. Syndication is really one of ... That's the wonderful thing. It's like having a franchise, in a way, where you can sell a or license a system that gets a result, and you've cracked the code on how to make it all work.
Dean: Yeah. I remember the first time I thought I had this idea, that boy, you could teach this to carpet cleaners, so I went out searching and that's when I first became aware of Joe.
Jim: Right, exactly.
Dean: I was like, oh shoot, somebody's doing this already.
Jim: Right, and doing it big. That's the thing, is when you figure that out, then it becomes a matter of just getting in front, because you know how it's going to work out. That level of certainty that you know that somebody is going to get the results.
Dean: Yeah. Did you have a background in real estate?.
Jim: Yeah, of course. That's how I started out, as a real estate agent, and then I started figuring out marketing for my own business, and when I read The E Myth by Michael Gerber, that was a big shift for me. That was a vector changing book, and I got the idea of building something with an eye to duplicating it 5,000 times. That became my winning formula. I would do something, I would create my guide to Huttonville's real estate prices, and the whole system of the ad to run to get people to ask for it and the newsletters to send to follow up with the people, and how to prepare the guide, and the whole thing, and that became a system. I licensed that to 40 real estate agents around Toronto. I was in Huttonville at the time, so I created my guide to Huttonville real estate prices. Then I created a guide called Toronto and Beyond, and it was for the great places to live within an hour of the city.
I licensed this system to one agent in each of the 40 areas around Toronto. That was my first syndication, because I had spent time perfecting that system for my own business in Huttonville with an eye for doing that I knew it would then be easier for other people to just do what I did.
Dean: That's great. I remember, I had been already walking in and out of small businesses for probably 15 years when I read the ebook, and it hit me similarly, and I thought, oh my gosh, I wish I had known this all those years that these people were that in need. I was never really intimidated by them, but I thought they knew more than they did.
Jim: Right. About marketing, and systemization is everything, and they had none. It became a number one book. I suggested to newspaper sales reps to better understand the people that they were calling on. It is interesting getting started again from scratch. You go from ... Everybody talks about authority, and I was it. In my space in the newspaper industry, I attended 10 or 12 conferences a year, and got a bunch of clients from there. It was somewhat humbling to be like, how do I approach a dentist?
Dean: Part of it, there might be a way to bridge the two, because print ads still work. Print ads are I think one of the most under used gold mines, you know? I'm a big fan of print. We've got lots of print ads running all over the country. Maybe there's an opportunity to syndicate specific ads. If you figure out an ad that a dentist can run to get new patients or that any business can run, then being able to syndicate that through lots of different newspaper. You can license the right to run that ad in this publication, you know?
Jim: That's a great idea. One of the people I partner with, I used to help papers sell millions and millions of eight and a half by 11 glossy stock flyers to targeted industries, and now that the newspapers are so digitally focused that they've turned their back on that opportunity, I partnered with a group that actually brings sales people into the market to sell, and if I came up with verticals like that that these guys were armed with, had an exclusive for a dentist, had an exclusive for this category and that category, it would create that same level of engagement.
Dean: I would look at thinking even in terms of you packaging that up. If you had something that was like a small business suite of different ads that would work to create something, to be able to work out with a newspaper to buy a signature, to buy one four page piece, to have different... Then you could really create that whole opportunity for people, that you've got the distribution and the actual ad.
Jim: That's great.
Dean: It's interesting because you can provide the content. I think that newspapers would be very open to right now especially selling you remnant signatures, you know? I say signatures. Is that what you call it? Like a four page ... What would you call it, a sheet?
Jim: Yeah, sure. Print and deliver. There's a couple different names for it, but I know what you mean.
Dean: When a newspaper is folded, that one sheet of the paper creates four pages of the newspaper, right?
Jim: Yeah.
Dean: Part of the challenge or part of the thing for the newspapers is balancing their content and ads, because they have to maintain a 60% content rate to get their periodical distribution or whatever out, however that works out. There's an opportunity if you were able to package, to add one full sheet to their newspaper incrementally, cost them virtually nothing, right?
Jim: Certainly. I use that a lot.
Dean: If you come with a fully packaged thing that is in that 60/40 ratio that you're providing the content, because the content becomes a cost for them otherwise.
Jim: Yeah, absolutely. As long as they're continuing to go out six days a week, they could put two or three of these in any day of the week and to your point not have it cost them a nickel.
Dean: That's exactly right. You're providing an opportunity for a win for them, right? Where are you primarily focused? Geography wise, where are you?
Jim: I'm in Phoenix, Arizona, and my son is in Seattle, so we thought we would focus geographically around those two places.
Dean: Okay. When you look at even an independent newspaper or some of the smaller community newspapers even, that you could potentially work that kind of relationship with, do you have any relationships with the newspapers there?
Jim: We do. They both have been our clients several times over the years, and we've got my gears going to the point where I've got a rolladex and relationships probably second to none, and if I were to build us out, I could get the right people, pick them off a few at a time, but whole teams of small cities and then market the concept in that. If I'm hearing you right, let's say you got this little [inaudible 00:18:50]. You may have 12 papers in small communities, and they say, "Yeah, we'll do that. Wherever you can sell that, we'll make that space." Then we would market the concept. Let's say we take those 12 cities and we could do a targeted Facebook ad, we could do a postcard, which would be a little bit more expensive, but if it hits just the dentists I those 12 cities, then we have this helpful lead generation program and it's going to go to one person in this market. Is that what you're thinking?
Dean: Yeah. The way that you start with one dentist and you create that platform, then you've got a winning formula. Then you've got a scale-ready algorithm. You've got something that's ready to go. You've cracked the code on it. If you look at that as the win, I think there's big opportunity there.
Jim: The ability, once you've got that going, to do it with a realtor, and then to do it with a chiropractor, and to do it with a ...
Dean: Hey, you stay away from my realtors though.
Jim: Yeah, there's only so many of those and they only have so much money, right?
Dean: I'm just teasing you.
Jim: I know you are.
Dean: Yeah, yeah.
Jim: I get a kick out of it where somebody will say, "I'm working on dentists." "Oh, yeah, okay. You've got the market cornered. Go ahead."
Dean: Exactly. Yeah. "Oh, I'm sorry. Let me step out of your way."
Jim: …that vertical on you.
Dean: Yeah.
Jim: This is terrific. I never even had thought about that, but it's funny, half of my consciousness is still on, "How can I leverage this in newspapers," because I sure have the relationships.
Dean: Well, I'll tell you what. There still is a lot of juice left to squeeze in that orange of newspapers. They're not going away in the foreseeable immediate future. They're still committed to that print. People still read the paper. It requires some change. It requires some different ways of thinking, but I think that that would be a nice bridge for you.
Jim: My gears are going 100 miles an hour because I've had great relationships with printers. We could take this to the point where it also costs them almost nothing to put a glossy flyer in there, and if we created a great piece of content that works ...
Dean: I think that that is inserts in newspapers are a whole other situation. I think that the whole FSI world is another great distribution piece.
Jim: Yeah. They really should, if they're getting this just showing up on their dock, I should be able to get that into the paper for $8-10, a thousand, especially where I have relationships and the conversation is about I'm not going to flood you with business, but eventually we're working with a number of verticals and you'll be on the distribution list, and when I get somebody in that field and your locale, you're going to get the business.
Dean: I think that's it, right? The more that you can collaboratively solve more people's problems by creating opportunities, it becomes a big win, and it also logistically distances you from anybody else who's in that market as well. You uniquely have those relationships. You've uniquely got that inside knowledge of the newspaper and the printing world, and you also then couple that with direct response knowledge. That's a very rare talent stack.
Jim: I'd be one of 25 people offering to do Facebook ads for dentists.
Dean: Yeah, that's exactly it.
Jim: Yeah. I think they're getting hammered with that. Have you used EDDM in anything and see ...
Dean: Of course, yeah.
Jim: That could be.
Dean: It could, absolutely, because that's a great way of getting specifically to a very tight geographic area. It's a great possibility. I do a lot of postcard work and a lot of print ads. I just love the targeting ability of postcards, but I always do them with an eye to bridging to online, like sending from a postcard to a website.
Jim: Oh, you bet. Offline, online, offline I think is the biggest thing newspapers are leaving on the table. What else do you have that's that local and that powerful and that efficient to drive traffic? What, are you using Google Adwords in a three zip code area? Not that you can't do that, but anybody can do that. Yeah. Couldn't agree with you ... It's funny. I'm going to flatter myself and say our space. I'm not going to put myself in the same space that you're in, but the direct marketers, especially those that have been at this for awhile, are not turning their back on print. The newbies or the wannabes that think that everything about direct marketing is digital, they're just leaving so much powerful opportunity on the table because they think that everything is digital now, and ...
Dean: I agree.
Jim: ... it doesn't have to be like that.
Dean: Yeah. I agree. There's so much opportunity still. That's why I was saying there's still a lot of juice in that orange. There's still a lot of juice left to squeeze from it. It's becoming less and less competitive, and there's still people who every day reach for the paper.
Jim: Yeah. Now that the mail value is down as much as its down, you put a decent oversized postcard in there, it sticks out like nothing else right now. We can leverage that. Anything else that if you were stepping back and starting up a digital agency right now, if there are any bundles of tactics or verticals, it's really more about the people that you know best that you can create a compelling piece of cheese for. Anything where you look at it and say, boy, if I didn't have my hands full with all this other stuff, I would look at that.
Dean: What's your joy here? What's the thing that you are most excited about in this world, as a business, like the activity. What's the thing that you really like to do more than the other stuff?
Jim: Hopefully this doesn't sound too nerdy or unscalable, but right now the chiropractor client that we have, the part I'm most excited about with her is taking a simple CRM product, active campaign, we were with infusion software awhile, but it's just too hard, an building out all of the things to increase her after unit value. Okay, so you've got your stupid Groupon going. I'm not going to rain on your parade with that, but we're going to get the people in on Groupon, we're going to try to get them to come back, we're going to try to turn them into a chiro client, then we're going to sell them a massage, and to have the systems in place to actually monetize. The little guys that have to rely on repeat business of a moderate sized transact, like chiropractic, maybe pizza but I don't think I want to go there. I think that's a little too low. I really get excited about looking them in the eye and saying, "We're going to put a system in place that makes everything you do measurable, and we can refine it, and we can grow it." There is a lot of people that really want to do that.
Dean: I get it. You like to follow things through, right, like to get all the way. Would you be happy if you figured out for chiropractors specifically and you were to build that out to just focus on taking your scale ready algorithm that you figure out for the chiropractors for how to do that with your case study, and then build a nationwide or worldwide, even, community for chiropractors who are applying your models? Is that more exciting to you than cracking the code for one chiropractor and then moving on and cracking the code for dentists, and then do an original work all the time, or what's your initial thought around that?
Jim: The sexy thing is going in and doing the whole thing and handling the front end and the back end. I could get very excited. I think it's, to Gerber's point, I think it's the thing that pulls everything together for them and makes sense of everything they do. The lifetime value is the holy grail, and you don't have a prayer of even starting to quantify that if you're not able to do these sorts of things. That, I could get real excited about that.
Dean: And building the equity in the chiropractor ... The more that you do and the more that you figure out for the chiropractors to get a better result in their before unit and their during unit and their after unit, all of those things build on each other. You're building equity as it goes, and each new chiropractor that comes into your world, the path is already laid out for them, and you can scale the delivery of that result to showing other people how to get that same result once you've figured it out. That's the long term sustainable business, but it's a building process. You have to start with one chiropractor and you have to be patient to build that out.
Jim: Yeah. And to make it scalable and from there, we could easily do upsells and say, "Hey, have you been thinking about or had some struggles with using Facebook to generate new patients? For this a month, we can tack that onto the front end. You've got the funnel. We can put the funnel in place to manage the Facebook leads and convert them."
Dean: That's exactly right. You should check out GoGoClients.com, similar to infusion software for all of the automations and all of those tools. It would be perfect for a chiropractor to create landing pages and auto responders, and you've got the texting ability in there for somebody to build that out as a platform. That's what I've done with my real estate agents. I have the GoGoClients platform with all of those tools, and it's all built around the CRM, and I've created GoGoAgent.com, which is all of those tools packaged with all of my solutions for the real estate agents specifically. I've created a membership site and a community for the realtors, all based around deploying the things that I figured out for them to get the bankable results that they want, like our Getting Listings program to show them how to get listings and how to find buyers and how to convert leads and how to get referrals and how to multiply their listings.
There's all of these already-created, done-for-you, ready-to-use tools for them. I could see you doing that same thing for the chiropractors, once you figure it out. When you figure out the ad and the landing page and the email follow up or the pre-recorded message or the text activation for it, and are able to then build it around a platform that you can just install for somebody, that's a really great foundation to build a real scalable business from.
Jim: Not to get too nosy, but I think I've heard you say that you start this out by saying I will get you your first client before you have to pay me anything.
Dean: Yes. Both GoGoClients and GoGoAgents all start with a 30 day free trial. No credit card or anything. They can come in. They can pick one thing. I know that if a real estate agent, for instance, comes in, if they've got a listing right now, then we've got something that they can do right now to start getting new business from that listing, to multiply that listing, in that 30 days. We often have people go and deploy something and get the results before they're 30 day trial's even up.
Jim: Then longer term, have I heard you say publicly that it's like $100 a month to stay on?
Dean: Yeah. That's it.
Jim: You need a lot of clients for that to ...
Dean: Yeah, but that's a model that there's a ... That is a baseline. That's where all the tools are there for you, but then we also offer implementation. If people want to do stuff, we have an easy button card that they can call where we'll actually execute the logistics of it for them. We'll actually do it for them. There's opportunity for people to get as much or as little help as they want.
Jim: That's great. That's funny, my son and I were looking at something yesterday called Marketing 360, which sounds kind of similar, and he said, "Boy, this is really a low priced product." I said, "Yeah, but they're just saying here's the tools, and we all know what'll happen next in those cases," which is nothing, and I'm sure the implementation side is where the real results and the larger money is sitting.
Dean: Right. Yep.
Jim: Yeah. That's great. Boy, this is ... to your point, it's much more scalable, and I think if you're the average ... I know with this chiropractor client that we have now, she was doing YP.com and she was doing Clipper Magazine that she was doing, and I just looked her in the eye and said, "You have no idea which of those things are really creating any long term value for you, do you?"
Dean: Right, exactly.
Jim: She said no, and I said so why don't we start with this? I'm going to put a system in place where you'll know to the dime whether the people that those things bring in come back, whether they refer friends, whether they become recurring clients, whether you can cross sell them a massage. Then we can decide how to create your new patient flow on the front end based on real math of what it's worth to bring a client in that way. She just said, "You can do that?"
Dean: See, that's the thing. Most people get so amazed when you show them an overlay, just even the concept, of the before unit, the during unit, and the after unit on them, when you overlay that on somebody's business. It's amazing.
Jim: I've listened to so many of your podcasts and having done similar things with papers, half of the reason that I asked for the data I asked for on the front end is to kind of create a little bit of discomfort. Not that I want to make people uncomfortable, but they're realizing that those are numbers that they should know and they don't.
Dean: Right, exactly, and even though they don't know them, that's part of it. I always look for standard metrics, like in the after unit, what we look at is your return on relationship. I look at you've got x number of clients. Let's use the realtor as an example, that they've got 150 people that know them, like them, and trust them, and I look at how many repeat and referral transactions did you get. How many of those people turned into another piece of business or referred somebody in the last 12 months, and that number, the percentage of that, is what we call their return on relationship. If they had 150 people and they got 15 repeat and referral transactions, their return on relationship is 10%.
Now, we know that the gold standard, what we're looking for, is to manage that for a 20% annual yield, so that I can show people that if they're getting less than 20%, they're missing out. There's a big opportunity there. If you can go into a chiropractor and take that same thing, if you overlay the after unit metrics on there and ask about their return on relationship, you look at maybe a chiropractor might have a thousand patients that they would have in their books. If you look at that back wall of file folders that they have with all the people, that they might have a thousand people who have walked through, but if you look at it over the last 12 months, how many people came in that were already on the books the year before? That's called after unit revenue, repeat and recurring patients.
Then the other measurable of how many referrals did you get from that group. If you figure out for a chiropractor what's the baseline, what's happening right now, that they had x number of patients and they got this many of them to come back, and they got this many referrals, that that creates a baseline to measure the improvement of everything that you are doing.
Jim: And it allows you to plant the seed of the value of the difference between the before unit and the after unit.
Dean: That's exactly it because you're able to go into the next chiropractor, and as you build that community of chiropractors, that you're able to go in and say when we started with Dr. Bob, he had d 10% return on relationship, and we were able to build that up to a 22% return on relationship. Let's see what your return on relationship is right now. The great news about it is these numbers, all of these things, all of the profit activators that we talked about are all universally present. They're in every business. They're there, whether they're acknowledging them consciously and trying to do something to affect those numbers, or whether they're just lying there dormant and they're not even measuring them or noticing them. Some number of the people that came into their business this year were referred by other patients. If they're not tracking it or measuring it as a number, a metric that they can affect, then that's the first awareness that can start the momentum for them.
Jim: Giving people a cheesy gift basket or a referral is not a referral program.
Dean: That's not the thing, right? When you get into that ... Yeah, no, exactly. When you look at for a chiropractor, it's really that ... we talk a lot about this, about the mechanics of how referrals happen, and they always happen in conversation. We just want to acknowledge that and know that all of the patients that are already on the books are involved in conversations every day, and what we need them to be able to do is notice when the conversations about back pain or about headaches or about jaw pain or about whatever, all the different things that a chiropractor can help somebody with, then we need to get them to think about Dr. Bob and introduce Dr. Bob to this person they were having that conversation with. All three of those things need to take place, and there's ways to orchestrate it.
Jim: That's great.
Dean: That's the kind of thing we do with the realtors, and all businesses, but I have something called the world's most interesting postcard, and that is just like a postcard newsletter that we send out, and then each month on the back of the postcard there's a graphic post it note where we put a custom message on there. We always follow the same formula, that's just a quick note in case you hear someone talking about this, and then a little bit of a reason why they might be talking about it, and if you do hear someone talking about this, give me a call or text me, and I'll give you this to give to them. It starts that cycle of now letting your clients feel like they're a hero. If they're saying, if we take a chiropractor for example, and we say just a quick note in case you hear someone talking about headaches or tension headaches that they have, that often one of the causes of headaches is tightness, which can be caused by a misalignment of whatever. I'm not a chiropractor, but I'm talking like I might be, but that would be something.
I know that chiropractors can help with headaches because being out of alignment causes tension, which causes the headache. If you hear someone who is talking about constant headaches, give me a call or text me, and I'll give you a copy of my book, the Headache Relief Factor, to give to them. It explains why and how headaches work and maybe offer some relief for them. That kind of gesture of if you're a chiropractor an you're a client, and sending that to a patient, that's going to plant that seed, that they're going to first ... Now, if they do hear someone talking about headache, that's going to jolt their memory that, "Hey, he just said that." Now they're aware. They notice that the conversation's about headaches. They think about you because you just sent them the postcard about that, and now they know what to do next. They get to look like a hero by saying, "I'm going to get a book for you," and they call or text the chiropractor or the next time they're in and they get a copy of the book to give to their friend.
When they call to get the copy, now you know that they've been in conversation with somebody and you can figure out how to connect the two of you.
Jim: Yeah, and the follow up from there that they get in this way, and you can send them a 9- word email that says how's your headache.
Dean: Exactly. You got it. That starts the whole cycle that way.
Jim: That's terrific. Do you mind if I ask, not to go into the weeds on this, but when you say that you've got all kinds of maybe done for you or we can help you with that, how did you scale that? Do you have VAs in the Philippines that know exactly what to do, or do you have a room full of people in Florida?
Dean: Both, yeah. The whole thing. With the real estate agents, for instance, and most small businesses but the real estate especially, the biggest block to them often is getting their top 150, getting the mailing addresses. They don't maybe have them. We've got it to a point where with the easy button, all they have to do is write out the name and the town, just first name, last name, and whatever they do know about it, the town, and the general age range of the person, and we've joined all these people finding sites and we can have somebody go and do the look ups and manual data entry to find their top 150 and load them up right into their GoGoAgent account, so that now, that's the biggest hurdle. Now they've got the 150 people here, they've got the addresses, now all we have to do is print and mail the postcards, which we can handle that for them too.
Jim: Those are the people that they already know that could be their best referral sources.
Dean: Yeah. The whole thing is for any business, for anybody, it's the people that if you saw them at the grocery store, you'd recognize them by name, and you'd stop and have a conversation with them. That's the relationship.
Jim: Right. Yeah.
Dean: If you're a higher volume realtor, if you have a contextual relationship, this would be like every single person who has been into that chiropractor. That would be a person who would be on that list because you are the incumbent chiropractor. You're the chiropractor that they last saw. You're their active ... you're holding the position of their chiropractor, so that relationship, you have that relationship with them. I make that distinction just different than sending it to a random neighborhood, or sending it just a list of people. The ones you have a relationship. You're the incumbent provider of whatever service it is that you do, or you would recognize them by name and have a conversation with them if you saw them at the grocery store. That's who make up the core of your after unit here, and that's what we're building that return on relationship on.
Jim: You help someone in a big way, and you get them the house of their dreams, and they get added to that list because now they're someone that should have an eye out for you.
Dean: Of course, because you're the incumbent real estate agent. They're living in the house that you helped them buy. You're their real estate agent.
Jim: This is interesting, how every time I listen to one of your calls, like I listened to the grocery store one.
Dean: That was great.
Jim: Yeah, that was amazing, and the dating and the dentist one. I had to keep pausing it. It's like, you could apply it to this field over here. You can apply it to that field over there.
Dean: That's the thing. You know what it is, is that's exactly what it is, because what we're applying is the profit activators. That's the unifying thread through all of this, and seeing all of these different businesses that we talked about, you're just seeing all the different ways that we're applying these same eight profit activators. There's so many variations, so many distinctions, that you can use. It's great because sometimes an idea that you hear when we're talking about another kind of business is like, wow, that would work for this.
Jim: As I've mentioned like with the Korean school, I was driving over to San Diego and I had that playing in that car in between when the signal would drop out. It was frustrating because you were getting to a good part, and then I'd lose my 3G and then be like, "Oh, no." I was thinking, how is he going to apply this profit activator to an international school in Korea, and sure enough, you got to that and found a way to leverage it. It's fun to see it work in such disparate business situations.
Dean: Yeah. If you look in with a chiropractor, specifically, if you've got one in mind, it seems like that's what you're leaning towards ... am I right in that?
Jim: Yeah, yeah, I would say so.
Dean: Yeah, because if you've already got somebody in mind like that, that you would like to work with, that's really ... if you went through the product activator score card with them, that would open up their eyes to where they would self-assess what they see as a weakness, because they may not have thought about it like that.
Jim: Yeah.
Dean: That gives you ...
Jim: As we said, when they don't know that number and they realize that that would be an important benchmark to have and be able to improve, you're creating a compelling ... You're not convincing them, as you like to say. You're creating a compelling reason for them to engage so they can find out what that number is and they can improve it.
Dean: Yeah. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
Jim: I've been stuck in that, well, we don't want a niche until we've worked with a half a dozen or a dozen verticals and found something that we liked and found something where we can leverage the unique ...
Dean: What are those other verticals? The only thing that it matters, that it really comes down to, a chiropractor would really prefer to work with somebody who has a proven track record specifically of chiropractic approaches to this. That just makes it so much easier.
Jim: Yeah. And you speak their language.
Dean: Then you get more confidence too, absolutely, you speak their language and you've got the confidence of we started with this one chiropractor, and this is what happened, and that gives you now the confidence to go in and find 10 chiropractors that you do as a group to apply the same things that you learned with the one. Then the 10 provide the context for going to a thousand or 10,000 of them.
Jim: It's human nature, the first thing. It always frustrated me in the newspaper industry. I would actually, because of coming from a direct response angle, come up with things for them to try that hadn't been tried by other newspapers. As much as they say that they know they need to make significant change in order to stay relevant, you know where I'm going with this, the first thing out of their mouth is, "Where else has this worked?" Well, it's actually kind of a new concept for your industry. "Well, when you get it to work some place ..." You guys are really screwed because if nobody is willing to try anything that the other people in your industry aren't already doing ... but it's just human nature. Am I going to be your guinea pig, or do you have 10 references that have done this and it worked straight?
Dean: That's it. That's why by picking one and laying the foundation, that's the most important thing. They might have to be that first Custer, you know?
Jim: Yeah.
Dean: We're talking about-
Jim: Oh, gosh, yeah.
Dean: There's a guy. He spent all that money building and launching that first rocket which crashed, and then the second rocket crashed, and the third rocket crashed, and the guy, he went all in with his own money on the fourth rocket, and look at what he's been able to create now? It's amazing, but somebody has to be willing to fly the first rocket. You can do it on a small scale. That's the good news, is it doesn't cost millions and millions of dollars. You can test a postcard campaign to a thousand homes and get the same answer that you would get in sending it to 10,000 homes. You can't hide a winner or a loser in a thousand postcards.
Jim: Yeah.
Dean: Most people think, we want to test big, make bold moves, but it's silly, unless you know the answer. If somebody's willing to send 10,000 cards, then let's send a thousand and see if we test another concept with another thousand. Give me three shots at the play here, and we're going to find a rocket ship, and then let's mail the other 7,000 the winner.
Jim: Yeah, sure.
Dean: You just got to be willing to send up some rockets.
Jim: Then when you go to the next dentist or chiropractor, you can say we have this tested postcard campaign.
Dean: That's exactly it.
Jim: And boom.
Dean: You document everything. You show the ROI. You do the whole thing, and off you go.
Jim: Yeah. It's so attractive. You've got this palette of things you can do. Even if you do a great needs assessment and you're in there and you're designing your custom program for them, not only is it not scalable, it sounds just like it's not ideal or necessary. You're better off creating a profit activator in a box.
Dean: Nobody wants to be the first guy on the rocket that's never been to space. You want to be on the one that's proven and been there back and forth and reliably has taken people every day. That's how you get all the mass of chiropractors on there. I had to go through that same thing with the real estate agents. I'm not throwing blindly doing things. I've cracked the codes to real estate. I know 100% how this works and how to get the result, and I have 100% confidence that I can get the results for people. That's why I'm able to say, "Come on in. Try it. Pick anything. Let's try something for 30 days, and I know that's going to give you enough confidence to commit to 30 weeks," which would be six months, "and I know in that six months we're going to be able to have enough results that you'll stay for 30 years."
Jim: Yeah, absolutely. The whole mechanics of turning it into a reliable after unit and having the steps in place to ensure that happens much more often than it would if those steps weren't there, that's just something you don't turn off.
Dean: Right. That's pretty exciting. Let's kind of recap what you've come through here. We started out talking about one thing and we end up, I think ... You recap what you've come away with here.
Jim: Well, it's getting focused on a particular vertical, where you can gain the confidence that you can produce the results and you can demonstrate that you have produced the results, and systematizing it to the point where it can scale, but at the same time, work in individual markets and focus on that vertical, but then perhaps I can copy what I do with chiropractors and do it for dentists, and do it for plastic surgeons, and have a different website that's GoGoPlasticSurgeons and GoGo-
Dean: That's exactly right. Yes, that's exactly right. That's the whole idea. I don't know whether you've heard me talk about WeShootBottles.com, and we WeShootCans.com. Those are the photographers in the UK who they've completely narrowed their focus. Rather than being a general commercial photographer, they've got a website called WeShootBottles.com. When you go there, all you see is bottles, so it gives you that kind of confidence. Same thing with when somebody comes to GoGoAgent.com and everything is all about real estate, it gives you that sense of confidence built in.
Jim: Yeah. I remember some years ago here in the Infinity talk about taking somebody that sells hand cream and making a flight attendant hand cream and putting an ad in the flight attendant magazine, and it was the same hand cream. It just was for them now.
Dean: That's it. There's the thing. Narrowing that focus. I often talk about Excedrin, with their Excedrin Migraine and Excedrin Extra Strength. They're the identical product. Same ingredients. Identical pills. They charge a premium for Excedrin Migraine because you're speaking directly to what I've got. I've got a migraine. Rather than choosing all these other ones, I'm going to go directly to the one that says migraine on it. We're naturally attracted to the short cuts, to the thing that's most certainly what we're looking for.
Jim: Oh, you bet.
Dean: Yeah.
Jim: This has been enormously helpful. It's funny, as we're going, I'm an info junkie, I guess that's fair to call myself that, and as we've been going through this transition, I've been falling into the trap of I'm just one course away from getting it right, and if I hadn't had dug myself into that hole, I would've signed up for your thing in Orlando already. It's like, oh, I really should be doing that, and the back of my brain is like you're knee deep. You got to do something. You have to get out there.
Dean: I hear you. I'll be here. I have those all the time. I'd love to have you. I think you've got a great opportunity.
Jim: I can't tell you how much I appreciated this. We were at the chiropractor when the email from Lillian came in, and my son and I both noticed it come up on our phones, and we both looked at each other and our eyes got big, and we were like, "Wow."
Dean: Oh, that's great. Cool. Well, I'm glad it worked out.
Jim: I'll be able to see the recording of this in some way, shape, or form, right?
Dean: Yeah, of course. I'm in a little bit of a recording mode here right now, so it'll be a few weeks, but I'll be up on an episode very soon.
Jim: Perfect. Again, I can't tell you ... I don't know if you're Irish at all, but happy St. Patrick's Day if you are.
Dean: Thank you, yes, there we go.
Jim: Thank you so much. Great.
Dean: Thanks. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Bye.
Jim: Bye.
Dean: There we have it. I really enjoyed that episode. We got a lot of depth on this, and I really think that there's a lot of opportunity in really focusing and going deep on solving the challenges for one specific business that has sort of a local component to it that you can syndicate those solutions. It's my favorite model, because I think it takes that granularity of one business and creates an opportunity for you in multiplying that without really having to continually crack the code for business after business after business. It allows you to go deep and set up an organization that can help people get the result that you've figured out how to get.
If you've got a business where you'd be able to syndicate things to people, I would love to have that conversation with you. I mentioned on the call that our GoGoClients.com tool can create a great platform for you to build on, to package the solutions that you have. We talked about the baseline tools of landing pages and auto responders and email broadcasting and pre-recorded messages, text marketing, all wrapped in a really great, robust CRM with all the automations and all the tagging and flagging and automation tools that you can wrap around. This could be a great foundation for you to do similar to what I'm doing with GoGoAgent, where it's packing up solutions for other businesses.
If that's something that fits for you, take a look at GoGoClients.com. It's a great opportunity for you to take a look and see what all the tools are about. Even for your own business, it's something that would be a fantastic toolkit for you. There we go. If you want to continue the More Cheese, Less Whiskers conversation, you can go to MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com. Download a copy of the More Cheese, Less Whiskers book, and if you'd like to be a guest, click on the be a guest link and we can hatch some evil schemes for you. That's it for this week. I will talk to you next time. Bye bye.