Thinking Out Loud with Dean Jackson

Good morning.

Day four of Profit Activator week, and we're into number three.

Educate and motivate your prospects to meet you.

Everything up to here has been about getting the right hand in the air. Now we've got a bundle of people who raised it, and this is the most valuable part of the whole thing.

Let me set the context first, because I don't want to be misunderstood.

I am not saying take the long view. I'm not saying ignore the people who are ready today.

If somebody's ready to go right now, that's perfect. Let's go. I want to convert people as soon as we possibly can.

What I want you to see is what you're actually holding.

Because most advertisers approach this like a slot machine.

Pull the lever. Did somebody buy? No? Wasted money. Pull it again.

And if the machine pays out before the credit card bill is due, it was a good month. If it didn't, the leads were no good.

That's the whole model. Return on ad spend, measured by Friday.

Back in 1997 I was working out how to generate these leads, and I found a study that changed the way I look at all of it.

There was a company doing inquiry handling at an enterprise level. Millions of leads a year, across every industry you can think of.

And they ran what they called did you buy surveys.

They'd take a cohort of people who inquired about something eighteen months earlier, call them up, and ask exactly one question.

Josh, you came to the home show and asked about faucets. Did you buy any faucets?

Here's what they found.

At the eighteen month mark, just over half of the people who inquired about a thing had gone and bought that thing.

More than half. People eventually buy what they raise their hand about.

But only 15% of those buyers bought inside the first 90 days.

That's the number that reorganized my thinking.

85% of the value of the leads you generate today is 90 days or more away from you.

Now, 90 days feels like forever when you've just spent the money.

I saw it most with realtors. They wanted to run an ad, have somebody call this week, go and look at a house on Saturday, and put a sign in the yard on Monday.

Then I did this for enough other businesses to realize everybody's like that. Everybody wants the right now business.

I mentioned time travel the other day. Let's go back to it.

Imagine we could leave tonight at midnight and land a hundred weeks ago, and we could carry with us the list of every person who's going to sell their house over the next two years.

Everybody loves that idea.

But look at what you'd actually be holding. The person who sold last month? The moment you land, they're still 23 months away from doing anything about it.

You'd still be waiting. You'd just be waiting with certainty.

And certainty changes everything about how you behave in the meantime.

So the question you need to answer is not are these good leads.

Good lead is an emotional phrase. What people mean by it is somebody who's ready to buy right now, and anybody who isn't feels like a disappointment.

The objective question is what happens to this bundle of a hundred people over the next hundred weeks.

The studies say over half inside eighteen months. I like to be conservative, so I stretch the window to a hundred weeks and I round the number down to 50%.

Fifty people. Go and do that math on your own number. If your thing is $10,000, work out what that bundle is quietly worth to you.

Now, about the first hundred days.

I think of it as the Van Allen belt.

If you're going to space you have to get through that band of radiation and pressure first. That's the hard part, and it takes everything you've got. But once you're through it, it's effortless. You can go all the way to Mars.

Same here. Get through the first hundred days with a bundle of a hundred people and the rest of it costs you almost nothing.

Most people never get through the belt.

One of my quiet delights is looking up the people other advertisers gave up on.

They run ads for our sell your house for top dollar book. Leads come in at $5, $7, sometimes $10. Then they start calling everybody, looking for a listing today.

Around the 90 day mark they get antsy. Nobody's listed. These leads are no good. We'll spend the money somewhere else.

There's a fellow in Texas who did exactly that. Generated 130-odd leads and walked away from them.

Real estate is public record, which is the great gift of that market, so I can just look them up on Zillow.

At the eighteen month mark, 30-something percent of the people he abandoned had listed, or sold, or have their house sitting on the market right now.

He was standing on it the whole time.

And this is why I think in bundles and never in individuals.

One person is unpredictable. There's no useful way to say what one person is going to do.

A hundred of them is arithmetic. Fifty are going to do something over the next hundred weeks. Eight of them are going to do it inside the first hundred days.

Which gives you a real goal, and a much better one than chasing everybody. Find the eight.

So phase one of Profit Activator 3 isn't a tactic at all.

It's realizing what you've got. Treating a hundred people who voluntarily told you what they're thinking about as a capital asset, not an expense you have to justify by the end of the month.

Tomorrow we'll get into what you actually do with those hundred people.

Here's your nudge for today.

Take your last hundred leads, whatever they cost you, and do the arithmetic. Fifty of them buying over the next hundred weeks, at your price.

Then look at that number and ask yourself honestly whether you've been treating those people like an asset worth that... or like a lever you pulled that didn't pay out.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/087-100-leads-are-worth-more-than-you-think-heres-the-math/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

Day three of Profit Activator week, and we're still on number two.

Yesterday was the invisible half. The people you can't point at.

Today is the other half. The prospects you can actually make a list of.

Here in Winter Haven there are just over 2,000 lakefront homes. That's the whole market, and it doesn't move.

About 4% of them turn over every year. So somewhere between 80 and 100 of those homes are going to sell in the next 12 months.

And here's the part that should change how you spend your money.

Every single lakefront home that comes on the market this year is going to be one of those 2,000. It can't be anybody else.

So you don't need to get known by everybody. You need to get known by 2,000 people.

Better still, you'd love to know which 80.

Look two years out and that's 200 homes. That's a long runway. Long enough to plan to dominate.

Now, what do you actually say to those 2,000?

There are three levels, and most people never get past the first one.

Level one is shining the light on yourself.

Dean Jackson, top lakefront realtor in Winter Haven. Call Dean. Postcard after postcard where I'm the star.

You see it everywhere. Name, slogan, what we do.

Level two is shining the light on them.

Thinking of selling? Find out what your home is worth. Sell your house in 90 days guaranteed.

It's better, because at least it's about them. But it puts them on the spot.

Because if I ask what my house is worth, I've revealed myself. I'm going to end up talking to a trained salesperson. And I'm not ready for that yet.

Nobody is impulsive about something this big.

They don't wake up one morning and say let's sell the house, call the realtor.

What they're actually thinking is... this house is too big for us now. Maybe we should move out to the country. Maybe it's time to downsize.

And every one of those thoughts eventually arrives at the same question. What's my house worth?

They want to do the math quietly, in their own head, before anybody knows they're doing it.

So here's level three.

Don't shine the light on yourself. Don't shine it on them.

Shine it over their shoulder, onto the thing they were already looking for.

The August 2026 Report on Winter Haven Lakefront Home Prices.

That sounds like objective data. Everything that sold, and what it sold for.

And I'm smart enough, as a lakefront homeowner, to know that's the teacher's edition of the algebra book.

But I'm also smart enough to know that report is already written. Nobody's going out of their way for me. I'm not obligating myself to anything.

I'm just having a look.

And the moment I have a look, you've turned a visible prospect into a visible prospect with intent.

Now you're getting known, in advance, by the people most likely to do the very thing you help people do.

It works the same way anywhere there's a list.

We did this for a financial advisor. What he wanted was people heading into retirement with a couple of million dollars, trying to turn assets into income that lasts the rest of their life.

There's so much data available now. We found married homeowners, 62 to 67, living in a million dollar home, with one to two million in investable assets, conservative voters.

4,300 of them, inside a 20 mile radius of his office.

Think about what that is. A thousand people with a million dollars each is a billion dollars under management.

Most advisors are hoping to get to a hundred, a hundred and fifty million. The pool was sitting right there in a 20 mile circle.

The other way to find visible prospects is to look for inevitabilities.

Where can you see a group of people all marching toward the same outcome?

Roofs. A shingle roof lasts about 15 years. In that 13 to 16 year window, 80% of them get replaced.

When I was a realtor in Halton Hills, there were a couple of thousand homes built in a two or three year stretch. All of them arriving at the 15 year mark together.

2,000 homes needing a $15,000 roof is a $30 million pool of people who are inevitably going to buy the thing you sell.

Same with the air conditioner. Same with the furnace.

So if you're a roofer, go and find the homes that were built 11 years ago.

And then do the counterintuitive thing.

Nobody looks forward to a $15,000 roof. So don't stand at the finish line waiting for them. Show up early with a way to extend the life of the roof they've already got.

Now you've got a roof under management. And when it inevitably needs replacing, you're not a stranger with a postcard. You're the person who's been looking after it.

Here's your nudge for today.

If your prospects are visible, go and count them. The actual number.

Then write the title of the report you'd shine over their shoulder... the one they'd read without ever having to raise their hand to you.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/086-how-to-find-a-1b-honey-hole-of-your-best-future-customers/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

Journal number six, day two.

Yesterday we selected a single target market. Today we compel those people to call you.

That's Profit Activator number two. And the whole thing rests on one distinction.

Compelling is not convincing.

We are not trying to talk anybody into anything here. We're trying to get the right person to raise their hand.

So the first question. Are your prospects visible, or invisible?

Lakefront homes in Winter Haven. The people who own one are visible. There's a list. It's fixed. I can point at every single one of them.

The people who want to buy one are invisible. They could be anywhere. Sitting in an apartment somewhere, wanting to be on the lake, and there's no evidence of it anywhere.

Same with chiropractors. There's a public list of chiropractors, so if they're your audience, they're visible.

But if you ARE a chiropractor, your prospects are invisible... because nobody publishes a list of people who twisted their back on the golf course this afternoon.

Two kinds of audience. Two completely different approaches.

For the invisible ones, Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram are the best bargain that has ever been known to man right now.

I think of them as digital postcards, dropped into somebody's digital mailbox... which is where all of their attention already is.

But you're in front of them for a split second while they scroll.

There isn't time to convince anybody of anything in a split second.

There's plenty of time to let the right person put their hand up.

Here's the example that made this click for me.

A party rental company in Toronto. Tents, generators, tables, linens, the luxury porta-potties, the whole deal.

I asked them the usual question. Who's the dream come true?

An outdoor wedding. One booking takes everything they own.

And an outdoor wedding is an invisible prospect. Nobody's wearing a badge.

So we went backwards along the timeline.

Somebody having an outdoor wedding this weekend is no use to us. Every arrangement was made months ago.

What had to happen before that? And before that?

All the way back to... we're getting married. And then, when and where.

The date and the venue come first. Everything else hangs off them.

Nobody is lying awake wondering which party rental company to use. Nobody puts a party rental flyer in their hope chest.

So we didn't offer a party rental company.

We offered a directory. 100 great places to have an outdoor wedding in Toronto.

This company had been around since the sixties. They knew every spot there was.

The leads started immediately.

And every one of them came with a head start on every other party rental company in the city, because we got there at the moment the decision was being made... not the moment somebody finally went looking for tents.

We never mentioned the party rental company in the ad. That's not what the ad is for.

That's what separating the compelling from the convincing actually looks like.

And if it feels like time travel, that's exactly right.

If I could go back two years, collect the list of everybody who's about to have an outdoor wedding, and come back here with it... the job would be easy.

We can't do that. So we do the next best thing.

We plant time capsules.

We find people at the earliest moment they express an intention, and then we've got all the time in the world to bond with them.

Directories. Catalogs. Books.

We've done a fence and gate catalog... for people who intend to get a fence.

An ebike catalog... for people planning to buy an ebike.

Books are my favorite, because the title does so much of the work.

Right now we're running one called Stop Your Panic Attacks, with a doctor who has a wonderful program for exactly that.

Anybody who wants a book called Stop Your Panic Attacks is a person who wants to stop their panic attacks.

That's the whole test. Does wanting this thing tell me what you want next?

And the arithmetic is lovely.

Two hundred and fifty dollars. Five hundred dollars. Whatever it is you put in... and what you've bought is a bundle of a hundred people who raised their hand about this exact thing.

Over the next hundred weeks, many, many of them are going to buy it.

They're going to buy it from somebody. You may as well be the one who knew first.

Tomorrow we get to Profit Activator three, which is what you do with them once the hand is up.

Here's your nudge for today.

Take the target market you picked yesterday and decide, honestly, whether they're visible or invisible.

Then write the title. Of the directory, the catalog, the report, the book.

Not a title about what you sell. A title for the thing they already want... before they know they need you.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/085-get-more-leads-how-to-choose-the-words-that-get-you-all-the-leads-you-need/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

Journal number six. Summer of 1997.

And this is the one I've been waiting to get to.

Because this is where the eight Profit Activators start.

I wasn't calling them that yet. There were only seven of them at this point. But the seed of the whole thing is sitting on these pages, so I'm going to break the fourth wall and call them what they became.

Here's what I'm going to ask of you this week.

Mark off this time, wherever you're watching this. One Profit Activator a day, for the next eight days.

If we do this right, it's a foundational shift in the way you approach your business.

So. Profit Activator number one.

Select a single target market.

And I always put three words in brackets after it... at a time.

Because this isn't about limiting yourself forever. It's about picking one, dominating it, and then going back and doing it again.

Now here's the biggest insight on these pages.

The broad term you use to describe who you serve is convenient for exactly one person. You.

The tri-county area. Buyers and sellers. Health services. People make up a category to describe what they do, because it feels like being specific means leaving somebody out.

And I understand the instinct. But selecting a single target market is EXACTLY about leaving people out.

Leaving everybody out except this one very specific person.

Because that person knows precisely what they want. Somebody looking for a lakefront home is not the same human being as somebody looking for an inexpensive condo.

So here's the first exercise, and it's the opposite of what you'd expect.

Make an exhaustive list of every single person you could possibly serve. Knock yourself out. Leave nobody off it.

Then we evaluate.

The question everybody jumps to is who's the most abundant. Where's all the action.

But you have to hold that up against a second question. Who's the most profitable.

Here in Winter Haven, the condos turn over at 10%. That's where all the movement is, so that's where everybody points.

The lakefront homes turn over at 4%. Less than half the action.

But the condos sell for a fifth of what the lakefront homes do... so the total yield from the slower, smaller market is far bigger.

Most abundant and most profitable are not the same list. Look at both.

Now, the riches are in the niches. You've heard it. It's not just a saying, it's arithmetic.

The best company in the world at this is Procter and Gamble. 23 individual billion dollar brands, all operating independently.

I was reading a book about them around this time, written by one of their executives, and the principle that still resonates the most with me is number one on the list.

Plan to dominate.

You almost can't say those words without changing your physiology. They never enter a market to dabble, or to pick up a little share. They go in to be the number one brand by a large margin, because the leading brand in a category carries about a 28% premium.

Which is why they don't treat laundry detergent as one market.

They have at least five billion dollar brands in that one aisle. One for getting things as white as possible. One for tough stains. One for clothes that come out smelling great. One for softness. And one for just not ruining anything you put in there.

Because nobody buying laundry detergent wants laundry detergent. They want the one thing their laundry needs.

My favorite example right now is a company called My Metal Business Card.

And guess what's at that website.

Now would you be surprised if they also had My Wooden Business Card. And My Plastic Business Card. All independent. All focused on exactly that one segment.

Because somebody who wants a metal business card feels so much more like they're in the right place when the entire website is about metal business cards.

Same thing with a Winter Haven lakefront home price report versus a Central Florida real estate report. Those are not remotely the same offer.

And it works even when the product is identical.

I have a friend from Canada who'd come down to play golf and stock up on Excedrin Migraine, because they didn't sell it up there. We went to the pharmacy one day and they were out of it.

The pharmacist said "just get the extra strength, it's the same thing."

And it IS the same thing. Same pill. Same ingredients. Same amount of caffeine.

The identical pill, in a different box, carries a 30 cent premium... because the box says the exact words somebody with a migraine is looking for.

So narrower is better. You cannot get too narrow.

Pick one target market at a time, take it all the way through the eight Profit Activators, and what you've built is a little prospect vending machine that vends exactly the kind of prospect you want.

Then go back and build another one.

Here's your nudge for today.

Make the exhaustive list. Every group of people you could serve, no filtering, nobody left off.

Then put two columns beside it. Most abundant. Most profitable.

Pick the one you'd plan to dominate... and we'll pick it up tomorrow with how you compel those people to call you.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/084-why-you-make-more-money-when-you-stop-trying-to-sell-to-everyone/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

Closing out journal number five this morning. Spring of 1997. About to open number six.

And the thing I love most about going back through these is spotting the very first scribble of something I now know turned into a million dollar idea.

I was tallying them up in my head over coffee. Counting them like platinum records.

At least ten of them. A couple I'd call diamond... ten million and up.

Two have already surfaced in the journals we've been through so far.

The Guide to Halton Hills was the first one. A model that gets a result without me in it, that I could hand to somebody else and install in their business.

I'm still using that idea thirty years later.

And then the first inklings of the eight Profit Activators, which is exactly where journal six picks up.

So sitting there this morning, here's the question I kept circling.

How do you actually know when you've got a big idea?

Because at the start it's only a proposition. I think this might work.

Here's the good news. You can find out for almost nothing.

You can test an idea cheaply, and you can test it quickly, and what you're testing for is simpler than people make it.

Can you get somebody to raise their hand and say, hey, I'm interested in that.

That's the first gate. That's the whole thing.

Then you bookend it. The raised hand at one end. The result they actually wanted at the other.

And everything in the middle is the marketing. Telling the stories, sharing the information, building the case that lets somebody experience the result before they've got it.

But work it out on paper first.

You have to be able to see the whole path. How you'll find the people who might be interested. How you'll educate them on what it looks like to have this. How you'll convince them you're the one who can help.

See all three of those, get it to work once, and from there it's infinitely scalable.

Now here's the second gate, and this is the one that quietly kills good ideas.

It can't depend on an extraordinary person.

If it only works when somebody remarkable is running it, you haven't got a scalable idea. You've got a job that happens to be going well.

What you're really building is a package that lets ordinary people get extraordinary results.

And once you've proven that, you're on the line.

Then... and I wish I'd learned this thirty years sooner... find somebody who'll take it and run with it.

Because the curse of being wired the way I am is that novelty is the drug. A new idea is always more exciting than carrying the old one all the way through.

I've been listening to the Founders podcast, and David Senra profiles Todd Graves, who started Raising Cane's.

The entire business is one idea. Chicken fingers for everyone.

And he has done nothing since but execute on it. The chicken finger dream, run all the way down.

That's the part I'm still learning.

Some of my ideas have been thirty-year pursuits. The seven things everybody spends their money on, and that whole advocacy idea sitting on top of it. Big, and I've only ever come at it from the top down, because there's never been an easy foothold.

I think I finally know how to get one. We'll get to that.

Journal six opens with the eight Profit Activators, and we're doing a video on each one of them.

If we're talking about million dollar ideas, that one is the crown jewel. Because it's the idea that makes other ideas.

And here's your nudge for today.

Take the idea you've been carrying around and run it at the first gate before you build any of it.

What's the cheapest, fastest thing you could put in front of people to find out whether anybody raises their hand?

Do that this week. It'll cost you less than you think, and it'll tell you more than another month of thinking about it ever will.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/083-how-to-know-when-you-have-a-1-000-000-idea/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

Wrapping up journal number five. My first year of journaling, spring of 1997, about to start number six.

And looking back through it, there are a couple of things I wish I'd known then.

Because the ideas in here were good. Fully formed. And most of them never got past the first stage.

My friend Joe Polish describes it as running a relay race where you carry the baton to the first handoff... and then go back and get another one. And another. Until there's a pile of batons sitting at the first stage and nobody has run the second leg.

That's this journal.

Here's the one staring at me this morning. Coastal Condo Guides.

A drawing of the whole coast of Florida, with a guide for every condo market on it.

And I'd already proven the model. The Guide to Halton Hills worked. Toronto and Beyond worked. Take a contextual wrapper, put a duplicatable model underneath it, and it works in the next market too.

St. Louis and Beyond. Nashville and Beyond. It absolutely could have worked.

So why didn't it.

Because of the way I set it up, the other person had to do the work.

And I've spent thirty years now cajoling people, supporting people, encouraging people, handing them every tool they could possibly need to do the work.

Here's what thirty years of that taught me.

People don't do what they could do. But they definitely do what they will do.

If I could go back, I'd take that same idea and build it the other way around.

We do the situps. You get the six pack.

That's the universally dream come true offer. Everybody wants the six pack. Almost nobody wants the situps.

And the remarkable thing is how much easier it is to actually deliver that now. The companies who have figured it out are thriving. In every category.

The other thing I know now that I didn't know then is that people are different.

Gino Wickman's whole Rocket Fuel idea. Visionaries and integrators. If you're a visionary, you need somebody who can make things happen.

Working Genius says the same thing another way. Wonder. Invention. Discernment. Galvanizing. Enablement. Tenacity. Different people bring different ones.

I didn't understand the real value of a team in 1997. I thought the idea was the thing.

What's amazing to me is how much of the context is still exactly true.

Everybody spends all their money on seven things. Home. Cars. Food. Health. Kids. Money. And me. Every budget is made up of those, and every business sits underneath one of them.

That was true in that journal, and it's true this morning.

But here's the part I had backwards.

You can't think from the top down. It all starts at the bottom and grows up.

As a visionary you see the completed thing. And then going and doing the individual things it takes to get there almost feels like living in the past... because you've already been to the future and you know what it looks like.

That's the reality of it, though. The completed thing doesn't arrive. It gets built.

And if anybody knows how to time travel, let me know.

Here's your nudge for today.

Go and find the idea in your own notebook that never got past the first stage.

Then ask the honest question about it. Does this need somebody else to do the work?

If it does, that's not an execution problem. That's a design problem, and you can fix a design problem from right where you're sitting.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/082-if-you-have-great-ideas-but-struggle-to-execute-them-watch-this/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

Still on the old school plays that work better today.

Yesterday it was the cheap stuff. Lead generation business cards falling out of a hole in your pocket. Yellow flyers on every bulletin board I could find. Somebody wrote in about windshields.

All of it doing the same job. Low cost distribution, because low cost distribution was all we had.

And now Meta will hand that exact same digital flyer to exactly the person you want it in front of, for less than it would cost you to print it.

Bottomless.

But there's a second half to this one, and it's the half people skip.

Here's what I was really doing back then with the Guide to Halton Hills, and the Toronto and Beyond Guide.

The print ad ran. People called the recorded message, or faxed the request form in, or mailed it.

And then every two weeks, I mailed them every new home that had come on the market. For as long as they wanted it.

I wasn't calling it educating and motivating at the time. That's exactly what it was.

Those people had raised their hand and said I'm interested in Halton Hills. So I stayed in front of them, and I bonded with them, and I was still there whenever they got ready.

The only tool I had for that was the mail.

I remember reading about Claude Hopkins and Albert Lasker and that whole crowd in the twenties, mailing letters for a penny.

And thinking to myself... if I could mail letters for a penny, I'd be rich.

Now we can mail infinitely. For zero.

Straight to one person, with their name on it, and they can hit reply and talk back to you.

That would have sounded like science fiction to me in 1997. And it's sitting there unused in most businesses.

Then there's Lucy Zillio.

If you grew up in Toronto you know the name. Tuned In With Lucy Zillio.

Thirty and sixty second blocks, dropped in between the evening programming on Omni and City TV.

Remnant space. The inventory the stations hadn't managed to sell to a real advertiser.

And what she did with it was spotlight local business owners. Being on her show gave them the scaffolding. Her credibility, handed over to them.

She'd become an influencer. Nobody was calling it that yet.

It would be so easy to be the Lucy Zillio of your market right now. Make the show. Feature the businesses.

And think about where you'd point it.

Everybody spends all their money on seven things. Their home. Their car. Their food. Their health. Their money. Their kids. And themselves.

Pick one of those, become the advocate for the people in it, and you've built yourself a trust based distribution network.

That's the pattern running through all of this.

The foundational ideas from back then still work. The tools just got free.

So pay attention to the old school stuff, and take advantage of what we've got now.

And here's your nudge for today.

Find the people who raised their hand once and then never heard from you again.

Staying in front of them used to cost me a stamp every two weeks. It costs you nothing.

Start there.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/081-how-to-stay-in-front-of-your-customers-without-spending-more-money/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

Still in the 1997 journals. And here's what struck me this morning, going back through them.

These are the good old days.

Not those ones. These ones. Today.

Because I'm looking at page after page of playbooks I was running back then. Guerrilla marketing, we called it. All of it built around the tools we happened to have.

And underneath every single one of them, the same two jobs.

Get somebody's attention. Then get a message in front of them.

That's marketing. That was it then and it's still it now.

Back in 1997 the message lived on a recorded message line. One minute, three minutes, whatever it took. Their undivided, immersive attention the whole time it played.

So the whole game was getting eyeballs and pointing them at that recording.

Here's one I ran constantly.

Lead generation business cards. The cheap ones. Thin paper, black ink on yellow. A thousand of them for about fifty dollars.

Five cents a card.

And what I used to tell people was... get a stack every morning, put them in your pocket, put a hole in your pocket, and let them fall wherever you go.

You're moving through your day, and everywhere you go there are people.

Then the flyers. Same yellow paper, same black ink, up on every bulletin board I could find. Supermarket. Library. Coffee shop. Restaurants.

I treated those boards like a vending route. My cousin worked it with me.

Take-one tabs along the bottom edge. The headline, and the recorded message number.

Georgetown. Three bedroom homes. Zero down payment. Free recorded message.

And a photo of the kind of house you'd be getting.

Somebody walks past that, thinks wait, you can get a home like that with nothing down?... and calls to find out how.

There's Julie's Guide to Winter Haven. Free 1997 guide to Winter Haven real estate.

And here's Russell Oliver's card. I buy your jewelry on the front. I pay top dollar for your gold, diamonds and jewelry on the back.

That was the whole thing. A nickel of paper doing all the work.

But here's the realization I had, sitting there with those pages open.

This might be the greatest time there has ever been to be an old school marketer.

Because everything I just described, Meta and Instagram will now do for me. Better, and cheaper.

A static ad is a digital business card. A digital flyer. Same job, same amount of information.

And it costs less than a nickel to put in front of somebody.

Except now I'm not letting them fall out of my pocket and hoping.

I can say fifteen mile radius. This age. Men only, or women only. This job title. These interests.

Exactly the people I want.

And any small business can afford it. Five dollars a day. A hundred dollar test. It scales down as far as you need it to.

Meanwhile the skill that makes the whole thing work is the one that's never going out of style.

Three or four words that say exactly what you do.

Lovely homes, zero down payment. I buy your jewelry. Stop your divorce.

Write the headline. Give one call to action. You're in business.

So here's how I'd hone it.

Take an index card, or a business card, and make yourself work inside those edges.

What's the one image? What's the headline? What are the few words that get somebody to take one single action... learn more, download, get the details?

That's the whole play. And there are infinite ways to apply it.

There's a second idea that goes right alongside this one, and I want to set it up properly, so I'll tell you about it tomorrow.

No better time to be alive as a marketer than right now.

And here's your nudge for today.

Take what you're selling and fit it on a business card. One image, one headline, one action.

If it doesn't fit on the card, it isn't clear yet.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/080-these-old-school-marketing-plays-actually-work-better-today/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

I'm live at Honeycomb this morning, for their fifth anniversary. Cortado. Eggs and bacon. Journal open on the table.

That's the whole pattern, by the way. I come here, I pick up the journal, I look through it, and I find the insight.

Still 1997. Coming up on the end of my first year of journaling.

Yesterday I showed you the Today's Homeowner kit. The whole elaborate system, laid out step by step so anybody could run it.

And going back through it, something Jerry Ballinger said to me landed differently than it did at the time.

People don't do what they could do.

I didn't have enough experience yet to hear that as a pattern. I do now.

Think about what I was handing people. They could photograph every house style in their neighborhood. They could assemble the guide. They could run the ad. They could send out the information.

They could do all of it. I did it, and it worked.

But they don't.

And thirty years of getting results for people, and through people, later... that's still my quietest disappointment.

Jerry didn't leave it there, though. He gave me the ladder.

If you're in the coaching or information business, he said, you can't build around what people could do. You have to step down to what they're likely to do.

And if you really want to lock it in, you step down one more. What will they do?

That last one is the interesting one.

Dan Sullivan and I do a podcast every Sunday, Welcome to Cloudlandia, and Dan has a three question test for anything he wants to get done.

First question. Is there any way I can get this result without doing anything?

That's his first choice. And look how neatly that lines up with what people will do... because if there's a way to get the result without doing anything, that's the thing they'd pick.

If the answer is no, second question. What's the least I could do to get this outcome?

And then the third. Is there a who who can do my least?

Which puts him right back at getting the thing without having to do it himself.

That's all of us. We want the result. We don't want the work.

Here's the part that surprises people.

Everybody's guarded about their ideas. Frightened somebody's going to steal them.

Nobody's stealing your idea.

And if they take a run at it, they'll only ever execute the surface of it. I know this because I spend my days trying to get people who are paying me for my ideas to actually execute my ideas.

So take the postcard.

What somebody could do is build the whole coalition. Treat their clients as advocates. Take the entire home under management, the entire life under management, everything that comes with living in Winter Haven rather than just buying a house here.

That takes a rare person. I've dealt with tens of thousands of people, so I can tell you how rare.

But what will they do?

They'll identify the 150 people already in their world. The people who know them, like them, trust them.

And then they'll make one decision.

Send the world's most interesting postcard to those 150 people every month. We write it. Interesting facts on the front, and on the back a note built specifically to orchestrate referrals.

One decision. These are my 150 people, and yes, send it every month. We prepare the whole thing once, and it goes out.

No thinking required.

And the outcome we're actually after is their return on relationship. That the people who already know them do more business with them and introduce them to others.

The bare minimum way to get that... the least you could do... is send the postcard automatically. So nobody in your world is ever more than thirty days from having your contact information physically in their hand.

That's the shift I can see happening across these journal pages.

It starts as look at this cool thing I did, and here's exactly how to do it yourself.

And it becomes here's the toned down version, and we'll help you with most of it.

And the things that work best of all are the ones where it's just... get out of the way, let me do it for you.

The way we articulate it now is the winner.

It's like working with a personal trainer, except we do the sit-ups and you get the six-pack.

That's what everybody dreams of. We do the hard work. You get the benefit.

So if you're starting down the path of getting your ideas executed through other people, that's the thirty years of lessons compressed.

People will do what people are willing to do. Which is nothing, ideally, with the result arriving anyway.

Accommodate that, and it's a great journey.

And here's your nudge for today.

Take the thing you're asking people to do... and ask yourself honestly whether that's what they could do, or what they will do.

Then build the second one.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/079-news-flash-people-are-lazy-heres-how-to-build-your-business-around-it/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning from Winter Haven.

Day sixty three, and not one rainy morning yet. I'm not going to jinx it.

And I've got the tickle trunk out today, so you know something good is coming.

Still 1997. About halfway through the year.

And going back through these pages I keep running into projects I'd forgotten I was proud of.

Here's today's one. The Today's Homeowner After Sales Service Kit.

Remember yesterday, when I laughed at my 1997 self wanting a laser printer that would run 11 by 17 pages?

This is what it was for.

Here's how it started.

I was flying from Toronto to Ottawa, and in the lounge there was a magazine I'd never seen before. Today's Homeowner.

I started leafing through it. Decks. Landscaping. Home improvement projects. All of it genuinely useful.

And my first thought wasn't that's a nice magazine. It was, that's a tool.

That would be a great thing for a realtor to give their clients every single month.

By the time we landed in Ottawa I had the whole thing worked out.

Send the magazine along with your newsletter. Do it in partnership with local businesses who want to reach homeowners anyway. And put a directory in it, so when somebody sees a deck they like, there's a local deck builder right there to call.

This was before I had the words for the Before Unit, the During Unit and the After Unit. But the seven step process was already there, all the way through to nurturing lifetime relationships. The eighth one, orchestrating referrals, came later.

Then Monday came, and I did the part most people skip.

I tracked down Today's Homeowner in New York City and I called them.

I don't know what gave me the audacity. But I got a great conversation out of it, and we came away able to buy the magazines in bulk at 87 cents an issue. On a three dollar cover.

And then I went and actually built the thing.

Here's everything you need to get started right now.

Step one, prepare your database in advance.

Step two, mail a letter to your clients announcing their gift subscription. And there's the letter, already written for them.

Step three, select client centered local businesses to partner with, and give your clients a value added bonus every month.

There's the service sheet. If you like what you saw in the magazine, here's where to get it locally. With room for their business cards.

There's the letter you could send those businesses to explain what you were doing.

And there's the sales letter we used to introduce the whole idea to our members.

I had it laid out for everybody.

And looking at it now, I can see exactly who taught me what.

Jerry Ballinger is all over the layout. Eben and I have the same skill set because we got to intern at the feet of a legend.

Jeffrey Lant is in the words. I don't think of Cash Copy as a marketing book. It's a book about being crystal clear, in the service of creating an outcome for somebody.

And Robin Williams. Not the actor. The designer, who wrote The Non-Designer's Design Book.

Contrast. Repetition. Alignment. Proximity.

The same headline size sitting in the same spot on every page. Everything lined up with something else. The things that belong together, grouped together.

I still notice when they're missing. When something's willy nilly on a page, that's what my eye is telling me.

But here's the real reason I pulled this one out.

It was a lot of work. And it got finished.

One idea. One project. Taken all the way through to something I can hold up thirty years later.

That's rarer than having the idea in the first place.

I got a funny email from Rick the other day. Dean, question. Are you saying you can teach me to make fat stacks by hanging out at a pub drinking coffee like you?

And I laughed to myself, because... yes. That's exactly what I do.

Every idea I've ever had, and every dollar I've made in thirty years, went through my brain and my pen and onto a journal page before it ever went out into the real world.

So I'm running the 50-Minute Profit Finder this Friday at 1pm. Free, live on Zoom, and I'll walk you through the exercise myself.

Bring a pen and something to write on. We'll go looking for the lowest hanging fruit in your business, and probably some fruit you didn't know was there.

And here's your nudge for today.

Take the idea you keep circling back to... and describe what the finished version of it would actually look like sitting in your hands.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/078-how-to-actually-finish-the-ideas-you-start/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast