240. Do Free Vacations Close More Deals? John Dwyer’s CRAZY Strategy - John "JD" Dwyer

Hey contractors, have you ever wished you could just get out of your truck out of admin or out of sales? Well whatever it is you hate doing in your business there is a predictable path out and in this coming web class I'm going to show you that way. Over the past decade, 1,900 contractors have used a simple six-step system to build a reliable staff, improve their margins, and spend their evenings and weekends with their families instead of just rushing through estimates and responding to emails. The purpose of this web class is to show you how they did it and to give you the tools and templates they used along the way. October 21st, click the link in the description to register and I'll see you there. Hey everyone, welcome back to Contract Revolution, the podcast by Breakthrough Academy. What if you offered your potential customer a free vacation if they hired you by the end of the week? gimmicky? Maybe. According to today's guest, it really works. John Dwyer or JD for short has built an entire business around incentive-based marketing. Or in other words, rather than resorting to price-discounting to get more work, what if you looked at just adding more value instead? Sometimes that's something small like a happy meal and sometimes it's something big like a free trip to Disneyland. In this episode, JD breaks down what he thinks are the five elements of a successful direct marketing response campaign, including what he calls the wow factor for incentive. This guy has got some serious out-of-the-box ideas so buckle up and let's get into it with JD. You're listening to Contract Revolution, the podcast by Breakthrough Academy, where we systemize contracting businesses for growth. Keep listening to learn how the world's top contractors scale their companies, build killer teams, and make more while working less. JD, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for coming on my friend. You are on the other side of the planet. You want to tell us all where you are, what you do, why you're here. Okie dokie. I'm in Australia. I've been married for about a thousand years and I have six millennial children who have left home but come home whenever they need money. So, therefore, it's the normal parent trap. And yeah, we're on the Gold Coast in Australia, which is an hour flight north of Sydney. Awesome, man. And so, you're in the business of direct response marketing, have been for a very long time. Why don't you tell us a bit, what do you do today? What's your world? What are you working on? Obviously, you work with tradies a whole bunch of contractors. We try to talk about them over here in North America. But what's your day-to-day life? What are you up to? Yeah, Okie dokie. Yeah, we tend to specialise. And my business is called theinstituteofwow.com. So, therefore, as that name implies, the Institute of Wow. It's all about teaching tradies and other businesses, just how to create wow factors to get more customers. And yeah, so we tend to concentrate on what we call emotional direct response tactics. And I'm sure you're probably familiar with a guy in America called Dan Kennedy, who's been doing that for a thousand years as well. We know him all too well. Yeah, so we're sort of that version of him down under. However, we have plenty of clients in Europe and in America as well. And the whole idea of this direct response marketing is to wow people in such a way, with a Happy Meal toy, for example, that they take their eyes off the price. So the whole idea of any one of us in business is to actually wow someone so that they don't look at our price. Okay, you already did that with me earlier before we prep. We'll talk about that in a bit. I'm curious on your end, why direct response and for you, how long you've been doing this for a long time? Because that looked into you a little bit. You've been 30, 40 years, maybe longer. You've been at this for a while. Why direct response? I set the business up in 1832. 1832. All right, so you're a clone. But at some level, you've stayed loyal to this for a very long time. And marketing has evolved so much. Every year it evolves. Why do you feel like this is a mainstay and why have you stayed loyal to this way of marketing for so long? Yeah, look, I did come from a background of being a national marketing manager for a big supermarket chain here in Australia called Woolworths. And Woolworths are probably the biggest supermarket chain down under. And when I was with Woolworths, I had the opportunity to test what we call direct response marketing. Now, they had a brand like Nike or like Kellogg's or like Coca-Cola. They didn't really need to do any brand building. They had a great catchphrase, which they still use today. And that's Woolworths are the fresh food people. So they gave you the indication that they sold fresh food. And what we used to do back in the day is create what we call continuity programs. And so for every $10 that you spend at this supermarket, you would get a stamp. They keep in mind this is pre-digital. So it was back in the 1800s. So you'd get a stamp and you'd lick the stamp and put it onto a saver sheet. And when you actually saved up X number of stamps, you got cookware and glassware for a spectacularly reduced prices. And I sat back and looked at this thing just go like a rocket. It was just unbelievable. You know, once the, mostly women, but most because the supermarket shopping, once the women actually got, you know, one glass in the glass set, she'd have to come back and get the second glass and the third glass and so forth. Same with cookware. And then we moved on to scratch games. And what we would do is we'd give away the chance to win $100,000 or $200,000 with scratch tickets. And whenever you actually purchased something at the cash register, you got a ticket, you scratched it out, and you might have got a red $500 note, you had to come back and get the green and the, and the blue one in order to win $500. And I could see the absolute impact that this was doing on an artificial basis had nothing at all to do with selling cornflakes or Coca-Cola. It was an artificial stimulus that got people coming back and back and back. And that's why we thought, well, listen, I'll leave all worths and set a business up that just specializes in that. And that's what we've been doing since. Hey guys, quick question before we continue the episode. If you could get a custom roadmap for growing your business in five minutes, would it be worth your time? After tracking the growth of over 1600 contracting businesses since 2015, we've put together a five minute quiz you can go take right now that draws on a massive pool of data. You'll get instant access to a personalized report that's going to tell you which one of the four phases of contractor growth you're actually in right now. How your company stacks up in the six core areas of business compared with industry benchmarks. And what to go do next, including customized resources, tools and templates, you'll have access to right away. No waiting around for an email or filling out a million separate forms. The link is in the description, so go check it out. Now back to the episode. Does it hit the same part of the brain that gambling does? It kind of sounds like some of things you're talking about. It's similar. Can you explain that or talk to that a little bit even? Yeah, well gamification has been around since Vegas, so it was around back in the early days. So therefore, yeah, there is an element of gamification to all this sort of stuff. And at the time, when I was doing all of these things, I was younger and our friends had children. And so therefore, they were threatening me at every barbecue to stop doing this to their wives, because they were spending a fortune at Woolworth's. But there is. And so, you know, we have a, I've got a resort in Fiji that came to us a couple of years back and they said, we're running at 35% occupancy rate because we're 25 years old. And all the brand new Fiji and resorts were opening up down the road and they were brand new. So it was the Sofitel or Hilton Hotel. And so therefore, they were actually, you know, snapping a lot of traffic away from this particular resort that was 25 years old. So we put a campaign on for travel agents in Australia. And we said, look, for every room that you book into the Hideaway Resort, which was our hotel that was 25 years old, we will give you a ticket in the million dollar draw. And we take out the million dollar insurance with Lloyds of London. So a million dollars will cost us 20 grand, let's say, that you will take. And what happens is that, yeah, they went from 35. So when you walked into a travel agent in Australia and said, I'm going to Fiji, where should I stay? You know, the travel agent would say, oh, well, what about the, the, sorry, if mum and dad walked into the travel agent and said, look, I want to go to Fiji, then the travel agent will say, you got a Hideaway Resort. They go, but why would I say there? Why don't I stay at the Hilton? And the travel agent will say, Ebola? Oh, why wouldn't I stay at the Soffitel? Rabies. Okay. Well, I guess I better stay at the Hideaway. And the Hideaway Resort went from 35 to 99% occupancy within a week and stayed there for three months. So that had nothing at all to do with the facilities in the resort. It had everything to do with the travel agent was persuaded to put them into this resort because they could win a million dollars. It sounds like to you, what you're speaking to is you're hitting on something primal in the human brain that is timeless, that regardless of how marketing strategies change over time, this is something that is just the way our brain works. And so you're tapping into that. You also mentioned brand building and a lot of the people that come to you have a good brand and they're looking for results now, ROI. Can you just, just even for everyone listening, define direct response and how is it different than other types of marketing? Probably the best way to explain it is that you go to a traditional advertising agency or marketing agency. And most of them are digital marketing agencies these days, which means they're run by someone who's still using PimpleKram. And you would say to them, okay, look, I want to build my brand. I want to make more sales. The traditional advertising agency will say to you, look, we will help you get them to fall in love with your brand so that they will actually taste your product. We flip that and we say we'll get them to taste your product so they'll fall in love with your brand. And so our version is not the Seaford shop putting its name on the back of the local soccer team's jerseys. Ours is actually the Seaford shop having a hostess outside at lunchtime and dinnertime giving out calamari samples so that people will taste them and then fall in love with the calamari and go inside and buy the barramundi. It's more experience driven, is that fair to say? Like they're actually experiencing your brand, experiencing your offer before they actually have to buy from you in some level? Yep, it's good. No surprise, it's good experiential marketing yet. So how does this apply to contractors? Because I know you said you have a certain subset of your marketplace that you work with or tradies, let's say. How does this work with them? When you look at campaigns for like a plumber or a landscaper or a builder, what are they doing that's different from other people in their exact same space based on this way of marketing? Yeah, and look, it wouldn't matter whether they happen in Australia, we call them tradies, of course, but so it wouldn't matter whether they went to university to become electrician or concreter or pest control operator or doctor or dentist. I've never seen a college anywhere in the world that teaches anyone anything but to be a good technician. When I had a dentist on the phone yesterday and he needed more traffic and he said to me, he did four years or five years, whatever it was at college, back when he was younger and they taught him how to fix teeth, but no one ever taught him how to get patients. And so what happens is that landscapes, I've got a lot of buddies in the game and we've got a lot of clients that have been using our services that are tradesmen. And they will say the same thing, they're a very, very good technician, but they might not be flash at marketing. And so that's where we fit in. And most of the trades people these days will be a member of one of the lead generation companies. And so therefore they will get three leads. And of course, they try to get to that lead as fast as they possibly can, because that might increase their chances of conversion. We say, look, you don't need to get to anyone too quickly. We'll provide you with a wow factor that will just make any of the other competitors invisible. And so we'll give them something that they can actually use as a tradesman that will take people's eyes off the price and discourage those people from even thinking about another tradesman. So can we do this today? Because I wrote down like what I think is like a three to five step formula. It's like problem solution, wow factor, CTA, and then make sure you have some good tracking on this. Can we walk through these steps a little bit in context to a trades business or a trading business so that we can just get some examples of how to do this for our own organizations? Is that cool? Yeah, pretty pretty pretty. You've almost nailed it. The five components of direct response marketing as we interpret it is number one, highlight their problem. Number two is exaggerate their problem. Number three, provide them with a solution. Number four, provide proof, which is normally testimonials. And then number five, a strong CTA call to action. So let's just use a solid dealer, for example. Problem, do you know that you are paying way too much for energy at the moment? And that is something that's fixable. Number two, aggravate that problem or exaggerate it. And that is that energy bills are just going to go through the roof more and more and more and more. Number three, we can fix the problem with our special solar package that we've got on at the moment, which comes with a free vacation. I'll talk about that in a second. Number four, proof. And that is basically a whole bunch of people saying that this solar business has actually halved their energy bills or just basically obliterated them. And then number five is a strong call to action. And that strong call to action is let us do this by the end of the month and we'll give you a free vacation to Disney World. You follow those steps. It's pretty hard not to increase your conversion. We've got a solar dealer that's on the front page of my website, The Institute of Wow. And he actually ended up having to put on a dozen staff because of this particular formula. Now, if you said to me, was he the norm? Probably not because he actually joined all the dots. What happens with us? Of course, it's like the doctor that tells you to stop smoking and then he looks out the windows, you're walking to the car park and you're lighting up a cigarette. I mean, we can only do so much if someone doesn't join the dots. We can't do much about it. But this particular solar dealer joined all the dots right down to the free vacation. His conversion rate went from 44% up to just under 90%. Because when he walked in, there was three quotes on the table and the housewife would say, look, we've got three quotes. You could see them there. And he would say to her, okay, well, listen, we're all within a few hundred dollars of each other. If you make a decision by five o'clock today, I will gift you with a free family holiday to Disney World. And once that comes out, then it's all over. Right. You hit the lizard brain. And we're like, yeah, yes. So can we break these down a little bit? So what I wrote down problem, exaggerate the problem, solution, proof, CTA with a wow factor. Is that, is that the right? Okay. So let's go through this. Problems are problems. And how, how do you as a, let's call it a solar installer? Because that's the example you're giving me. How does a solar installer identify the right problem? Because there's so many versions of this problem that you could, you know, basically come up with. I mean, some customers want it because it's going to save them on their energy bills. Some customers want it because they want energy independence. Some of the customers want it because whatever, it's going to save the money on something. Makes the roof look nice. Makes the roof look nice. Yeah. Actually, I literally am looking into this right now because I'm getting my roof replaced and I'm like, should I get solar shingles and how much is that versus metal and what's the advantage to getting, you know, anyway. So everybody has different needs and different wants and has different perception of problems. How do you identify the right problem to go after? My best friend, ChatGBT. You just ask him. He'll tell you what's going on. And in the old days, as in only just a year or two ago, you would just, the answer to that would be, oh, well, you know, make sure that you ask potential customers, in other words, prospects, what is the biggest need that they have in your area? And if it happens to be, for example, you're a weight loss program, you know, then of course it would be that they want to look good for summer. And so you would say, Jenny Craig, for example, the weight loss company, it would be problem would be are you overweight, not feeling good about yourself? Number two, it would be aggravate that problem. Do you know that summer is just weeks away? Don't you want to look good in your swimsuit? Number three, provide the solution, come on my dietary program and you look like a supermodel within four weeks. Number four, that is proof. And that's when you show the before and after shots. And then number five, a strong quarter action, join my program and I'll give you a blimp. I've asked a few different markers, the same question I'm going to ask you the same one is, is there something to be said about what everybody is thinking about, but nobody's actually verbally said. So it's something internal in their brain. And I gave this example on another podcast and I'll give it to you as well. Imagine, we're talking weight loss right now. So imagine you're driving down the highway and you see a sign that says, is your belly rubbing on your belt? Call this number. And what you're doing is you're speaking to a part of your brain where you're like, you know what I'm talking about, JD, right? Like you've, you've eaten too much one day and you drive home and you can feel your belly rubbing on your belt and you're just like, Oh God, I got to lose weight. There's something about that emotional response that's like, I've never even told anybody at that before, but this ad is speaking to me. Is there a way to get to that depth when you're speaking to problem solution? And is it worth it even? Spot on, absolute spot on. There are way too many agencies, advertising agencies out there that are just delivering catchphrases, which rhyme, for example, I picked up a big building society many years ago and I know you'll probably touch on it, but just in case you don't, I'll show off now. I got Jerry Seinfeld to do the advertising. And it was called the greater, the greater building society and the advertising agency before me, which was full of the ponytail brigade. They came up with a phrase for this building society, wait for it sooner or later, it's the greater. Like you just think to yourself, my God, how much did you pay an idiot to come up with that? I mean, all it was was the some, you know, 23 year old creative and the advertising agency decided that let's come up with something that rhymes and charge them $50,000 for it. Sooner or later, it's the greater. It's a wrong catchphrase. Anyway, it means that when you've been everywhere else, sooner or later you might come back to the greater. So therefore, your, you know, is your belt rubbing against your tummy analogy is absolutely spot on. You've got to talk in real language. And of course, I don't think that the tradesmen who might be watching or listening to this need any convincing. The reason that they are in the business that they're in and they're doing quite well at it is because I'm sure they're down to earth. They're down to earth sort of people. They don't go on with a lot of the silly stuff that some of the bigger companies do where they pay a fortune for a catchline like that. What I would suggest you do is, and again, look, I'm not being silly, but chat to BT can fix all of this for you is that you would purely and simply make sure that whatever the problem is that someone has, you explain that to them in a down to earth way, exactly the way that you just said. And one thing I'll just, I'll throw it there is I've noticed when I talk to my customers about the tests that I have, you see them laugh or you see them lean in, you see an emotional response come out of it. And the ones that don't land that are practical that are like, yeah, like, of course, like people want to save money to that's why they get solar. And they're like, yeah, they say, yeah, yeah, that, no, that is versus like, totally, right? Like they lean into it. And so one thing I, it's like, I don't have a sign, I'm not a marketer. It's like, I just, I think about these things, but I'm like, man, I look for an emotional response from my customer. So not only am I doing what you just said, which is draw it from them. Once you think you've got it, bring it back to them and see the ones that make them laugh or the ones that make them lean in or the ones that like them get angry, but you're looking to inflict an emotional response. Absolutely. And you know, laugh is probably the number one that I've used over the years. I'll give you an example. There was a little country town here in Australia and the lady who owned the hairdressing salon in the country town had had basically the business to herself for, you know, 25 years. There was no other hairdressing salon in town. And this little country town was a little bit like Anti Griffiths, Mayberry. Okay. There was one butcher, one baker and so forth. Anyway, another lady came into town and opened up a hairdressing salon opposite this lady. Okay. And this lady's name was Kimberly. And so Kimberly said to my wife, because my wife was going there to get the hair done. Can you ask JD, has he got anything that can help me combat the lady across the road? Because she just came out with $10 haircuts for men. And she said, I used to charge $50 for men. And she said, what do I do? Do I drop to $9 and go hang home and said to me, well, Kimberly needs some help. And I thought, oh, another freebie, that's all I need. You know, so anyway, I said to her, let me think about it. And guess what? She'd lost all the men, all the men within two weeks. We've gone across the road to the lady charging just $10 for haircuts because men will get the haircut at the butcher that I care about. And so anyway, I said, well, look, I think we've got the answer to this. So we put a sandwich board outside her hair salon directly opposite the one that stole all the men. And the the the actual sandwich board just said, we fix $10 haircuts. See that make me laugh. That's perfect. Yeah, if you're actually, this reminds me of like an old, like a Facebook reel or something, but it's guys, it's totally different services. He's like standing out there with a sign that says free hugs. And then the other guy stands next to him that says hugs $1 and he's like, mine are better. And that's why I think, you know, the humor side of it, I'm a bit cheeky and it sounds like you have to. So it probably suits my personality, but I find that humor is the quickest way to break through that question. Cool. So problem, exaggerate the problem, look to maybe instill some sort of an emotional response or get go deeper if you can. And like you said, that can be tragic. He could help you or you might be creative in your own way. But, you know, I refuse to just settle for what everyone's just going to give me as this tagline that everyone else says, I'm always looking for that different maker when I can. And then solution. So how do you craft a standout fix and almost the same question, but when it comes to the solution, do you need to be creative for this or do you just need something that makes sense to your customer? Like, how do you think through the solution side of this? Normally, tell the business owner to get out of the way and just feature on all of his advertising and marketing, his customers saying that he's a genius. So if you go on to any one of my web pages, I've got video after video after video. They're all 60 seconds saying this guy is an absolute marketing genius. He's done this. My turnover went from 2 million to 10 million within one year and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't pay them to do any of that. Would I let them do it themselves? Not a chance because I will get the worst testimonials you've ever sent in your life. So what I will do is a Zoom call. I will ask them a question. What was life like before JD and what was life like after JD? And then we'll cut up the good parts and put them together in a little 60 second reel. I've got dozens and dozens and dozens of those. So when somebody hears me talk in a podcast like this or if I'm doing a seminar or convention and they are thinking, look, this guy's too good to be true. There's no way that he could have done all this sort of stuff. Then we just direct them to those web pages and my clients sell me for me. I don't need to sell. And that's what I would absolutely suggest to everyone who's in the trades business is that if you've got happy clients, make sure you put your camera in front of them and get them to say nice stuff about you. It's quality matter. Does the amount matter? Is there any parameters to this or just get them out there saying the right things to you? How do you craft this? There's no question that the results matter that I showed off to you just a moment ago with that solar dealership because he had a free vacation he could give away. Then he just closed 88 percent of leads rather than 42 percent or 44 percent, whatever it was, but it basically doubled them by giving away a happy mail toy. And so if he just said to me, look, I've been part of JD's marketing program and he gave me an incentive and you'd never even mentioned it was a free vacation to Disney World. He gave me an incentive and that increased my business. That's not going to be anywhere near as hot as statistics. You want the statistics. Now in Trady's instances, the statistics may be that we got our energy build down by 80 percent within the first 12 months after he put the solar stuff on my roof. If it was a concreter, he might say, listen, we actually ended up selling the house about 12 months later and we paid $15,000 for him to put the driveway in, but we got an extra $50,000 or $60,000 or $80,000 because of the driveway was in the house when we sold it. So problem solution, make them laugh, hit the center of who they are, proof testimonials, run first, maybe some statistical things to go along with it. And then CTA, you brought this up a few times now. So you're called to action. How do you craft it? And then you add a wow factor, which let's speak to that as well. The best way I can explain this to any business owner and particularly business owners that are doing less than, let's say, $5 million because they're in, everybody's got a Coca-Cola competitor, what I call a 40-ton gorilla. My competitors are big advertising agencies. I don't have the resources that they do. We have a few members in our team, but certainly we can't, you know, we can't combat with the big guys. So therefore, I actually say to them, look, when you buy into my program, you get me. You buy into their program and you're going to be sold by the old guy who's been doing this for a thousand years. But you're going to get a 25-year-old that's going to look after your business. Good luck. And so I use me as that USP, the unique selling point. In terms of persuading someone to use your services when you are in a meatier industry, let's face it, every tradesman is in a meatier industry. There's a million competitors, a million solar dealers, a million electricians. And you try distinguishing yourself from all of the others. It's not easy. Like Mr. Smith, who wants electricians, he just wants electricians. It's kind of commodity driven at this point. Like everyone's feeling like they're the same contractor because they have the same general product offer. So how do you do it? How do you do it? You got it. You got it. You steal the idea or swap the idea that McDonald's came up with 44 years ago and it's got a Happy Meal toy. And so, you know, in my instance, we've got six children. They're growing up now and left home. But, you know, we have six under 12 at one stage. And we must have given McDonald's $7 billion throughout that period of our life and it had nothing to do with the Happy Meal box and the hamburger. It had everything to do with the Happy Meal toy. So if we had six screaming kids in the car, the easiest fix to that other than Finergan, which I don't know if that was legal, but anyway, we gave them Finergan every now and again that made them go to sleep. But other than that, then it was drive through McDonald's and get six Happy Meals and six toys shut them up. Kellogg's have been doing it for about 50 years. Toy in the bottom of the core flakes box. Amazon does it with Prime. If you actually join their Prime membership club, then you get free shipping and free movies and all sorts of things. And the little coffee shop down the road from you probably does it whereby they stamp the card. And when you get 10 stamps, you get a free coffee. But guess what? 97% of all businesses around the world have never used an incentive and it's nuts. They should be using incentives, particularly if you're in a Me Too industry. I mean, you won't get much more Me Too than a Trady. And that, you know, your stuff is like everyone else's. So you need a Happy Meal toy, big job. So what are some examples of this? So some of our contractors, let's say they do $2,000 jobs, other ones do $10,000 jobs. Some of them do, you know, million-dollar jobs, right? Custom homes. How do you match the incentive with the revenue you're about to turn it out with the profit? Like, is there a calculation to make sure you're not overdoing it or underdoing it? It's the right incentive. And then let's get into some of the ideas of what they could be. But just, yeah, cost by average job sizes. Is there a way to look at this in a practical way? Yeah, there is. If I walked into a menswear shop and wanted to buy a sports jacket and they gave me a skateboard, I would say that they're an idiot. And so therefore it needs to be messaged to market match. And we, yeah, we promote at the moment. And yes, because there's dollars in it for us, I mean, I won't make any secret of that. But we promote what we know as the world's number one incentive to not just traders, but to other businesses. And it's a free vacation. Basically, the traders here in Australia will buy from us a voucher like that. And on that voucher, they can, when they give that to the housewife, because they've chosen their particular business to put a concrete driveway in or to best control or whatever it may be, solar, they buy the voucher or fast for just about $50 and they give that out to customers to persuade them to use their services rather than someone else's. And then they have something like 120 destinations to choose from that they can go to. So we're talking Orlando, Disney World, New York and Las Vegas and San Diego, all throughout Europe, you know, Paris, Germany, you know, Spain, you name it. And what happens is that the hotels that are part of this program are happy to actually give up their rooms, because outside of school vacations, they're running about 30% vacancy. And so therefore the hotels go, well, listen, you know, outside of school vacations, which is Easter and Christmas and school holidays, then we've got 30% of our rooms vacant, we may as well give them to businesses to use as a Happy Meal toy and not destroy our brand. Because if they went through the temptation of dropping their pants, that of course, that takes their brand from the penthouse to the penthouse without taking the elevator, they don't want to do that. They don't want to let the public know that they're giving these rooms away for next to nothing, but they're quite happy to give them to us and for us then to sell them to businesses as a Happy Meal toy, because that's under the radar. Nobody sees that they're giving up those rooms for free. Okay. And that's how it works. And the reason I highlight that, as I can tell you all sorts of other incentives that we've used over the years from movie vouchers to dining vouchers to, you name it, you know, gas discounts at the local gas station, you name it. I've tried everything, everything, and nothing comes there a free vacation. And the reason why is because a free vacation suits a 25 year old and an 85 year old, doesn't matter whether they're male or female. Interesting. So you like just really simple here, because a lot of our contractors work with homeowners, more or less, it could even, it could be considered a commercial contract, but that might be conflict of interest, depending on how it all goes at it down. But You can, I'll show you how to do that. You can do B2B. You can do B2B. You keep in mind is that my mantra is very similar to Dr. Abel's. What is that mantra? Well, that is just do it however you need to do it. That's questions later. So interesting. So the CTA is, hey, we're going to give you a free vacation. And I guess it sounds like you've got a way to make these vacations not cost what they cost publicly. And so that they actually will give is a lot cheaper. And the cash reserves for that aren't, aren't, I'm spending $3,000 for every $4,000 job I book. It's $50 costs at some level. It's pretty low. Yeah, it's free. Yeah. Basically, what happens is that I mean, we normally sell them for $97, but when I'm on a podcast like this, we just cut it in half for obvious reasons. We're marketers, you know. Are we marketing right now? Are we giving people a note? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, my wife hates me because every time, you know, she's with me and I'm doing something like this, she goes, for God's sake, would you take that marketing hat off and just enjoy yourself? But all jokes aside, the thing is, is that your podcast, I would suspect, is meant to deliver as much value as you possibly can to viewers or listeners. And I could tell them to go out and get a dining voucher or movie voucher and all that, but it won't work anywhere near as well as giving someone a $1,000 holiday for free or vacate. We call it holiday in Australia, but vacation for free. And if you don't mind, I will show up. It came about courtesy of Jerry Seinfeld. That's how this whole idea came about. I was going to ask you about that. So don't worry. I was in my thought pattern here, but like, so this is what you did back when you, and was it billions of dollars worth of mortgages that came out? Like, tell the story, please, because I read a bit about it, but I didn't want to say too much. I wanted to ask you. So your big kind of like thing is, is you took this vacation concept and you had Jerry Seinfeld speak to this and it went huge. Can you speak to this a little bit? Yep. Yep. Went ballistic. I'll do the really quick version. And that is, is that a building society in Australia called the Greater Building Society. They contracted me as a consultant to look after their marketing and they've been using big agencies. And as I said, the big agencies, you know, would come up with silly phrases like sooner or later as the greater, that was the best they came up with. And they are in, I see, of sameness. I mean, at the end of the day, if you buy Cadbury, Cadbury chocolate, it's different from the no-name chocolate. If you buy, you know, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, it's different from the no-name Corn Flakes. If you borrow a million dollars from the Greater Building Society, it's no different from the million dollars from the Bank of America. It's the, there is no point of difference, right? You can, and I kept on saying to them, you guys are on drugs. You're out there on TV every night and you're saying, get a home loan from us at 6.2%. The bigger Bank of America or the Wells Fargo down the road can be 6.1% within a heartbeat and they will be. You're not going to beat those 40-ton gorillas. You're a small business. Now, they're the 250th biggest business in Australia, but compared to the, you know, Wells Fargo Bank, they were small. And so they said, okay, smart alec, what should we do? I said, take their eyes off the interest rate. Take their eyes off the price. And I'd been doing some infomercial TV ads for a travel company, a discount travel company. So I introduced them. And what we did is we stopped the honeymoon rate because as you would know, every bank around the world gives you 1% off for that first year and then they bump it back up again. So we grabbed that 1% and gave it to a travel discount company. They gave them a $10,000 vacation for five and the rest is history. Basically, what happens is that we came on TV and we, in social media, this was about a dozen years ago and we said, look, get a home loan or swap your home loan from the nasty Bank of America across to us and we'll give you a free vacation. Now, keep in mind the cost was neutral because they stopped doing the honeymoon rate, which was a 1% discount. Anyway, for the first three or four years, it went nuts. It went absolutely crazy. They took an extra 15 billion. This is little Australia. We've got the population of California, right? They took an extra $15 billion worth of home loans in the first few years. And then in the fourth year, I got Jerry Seinfeld to do the advertising. So therefore, I annoyed the daylights out of him. And eventually he said yes. I asked him why he said yes. He said, I thought you never go away otherwise. And I told him my mantra is persistence, but it's intelligence. So anyway, I'd fly to New York and for three years, Jerry would stand outside a mock-up of this bank and not far away from where he lives in Hamptons. And we just film all the commercials, bring them back to Australia and put them on social media. So it was Jerry Seinfeld saying swap your home loan and get a free holiday. We got a holiday in Australia. Get a free vacation. It went like, if we thought we had a success on our hands before, once you had Seinfeld involved in it, it just exploded, absolutely exploded. And what happened is that this international travel company saw what I was doing and they contacted me and said, look, we're a travel company. We've got access to unsolved hotel rooms around America and around the world. You look like you've got half a clue when it comes to marketing. Do you want to join forces? And that's how it's all got together. So let's do this. Let's put the link in the description. I don't know what link we're putting in yet, but JD, you have your team send us some stuff and let's get everyone listening some access to this. Because this sounds like a really convenient way to have a wow factor on your CTA without having to cost an arm and a leg. So cool. And you can do this for people in North America, I assume with a lot of our listeners. Anyone wants to have a look at it. Just go to vacationsincentive.com. That's our American website. So vacations, blue or vacationsincentive.com. Ignore the $97 there because we'll give it to you for half that price. All right. Sounds good. Let's talk a bit about like time and quality limits. Do you do that in your ads? Do you not like creating urgency and scarcity? Is there something to that? And how does that work? What's a good way to do this? I also think like, what's the way to do it? We're at back, you know, backfires because I find in today's world it's like act now or everyone's like, that's bull. We're desensitized to it. So where does it work? Where does it not? How do you do that right in today's world? Yep. The best way to explain this is that when my children were younger and they had a messy bedroom, I would say to them over and over and over again, clean up your bedroom, clean up your bedroom like every other parent would. I got nowhere because they knew I was BS, you know. Once I said to them, clean up your bedroom and you'll be able to go to the movies with your buddies on Friday night, but you won't be going if you don't clean up your bedroom. Bang, the bedroom was cleaned up. So therefore, even using the direct response stuff with my own children, much to the char grin of my wife, actually worked. You've just got to have a, you've got to have a deadline. You know, the thing is, the same old story, a goal without a deadline is just a dream. So therefore, if you think you're going to be able to sell your services and get the conversion rate that you want without a deadline, you're on drugs. Okay. You've got to have a deadline. Either that or quantity limit. A quantity limit is normally seen by the consumers as BS because they go, oh, yeah. I mean, you know, I see some people having webinars these days and promoting the fact that there's only a hundred seats. So it's digital. You can have a million seats. You know, it's just, that insults people. Yeah. For contractors, it can be quality based, or quantity limit based on their schedule. So it's like, we only have so much time to book out, but it falls on deaf ears from a marketing standpoint because you don't know what that contractor's schedule is yet. So you can't tell if there's high quality or low quantity. For time, like how do you set a time limit to a campaign where you give away a vacation, let's say, but then want to run that campaign again? Because at what point are you just running that campaign all the time? And how does that flow? Yeah, you do what Sher has done for 10 years. And that is, it was so successful by public demand on coming back again. Okay. So the thing is, is that the consumer who you're targeting at the moment is once you give him or her your solar panels is completely off the planet then, you'll probably never see them again. Okay. Unless you have a product or service that's going to be repetitive purchase product or service. And so therefore, don't worry about the fact that, oh, they might see that you've brought it back again next month. Because at the end of the day, you know, they probably won't see it because they're not looking for your stuff anymore. You've already delivered to them. What I would say, there's no magic pill to disguising the fact that you're going to run this regularly. But what you can do is that you can actually, if you've got a Happy Meal toy that looks like this, and you're getting that for $50. So therefore, you've got a thousand. These are three night vacations, by the way. And in Mexico, it's five nights in Cancun and some places at seven nights, right? But you've got three nights throughout America. So it's valued at, and they're all full-star results. So therefore, you're talking, you're not talking Harvey Parks. So you could say, listen, if you get in by the end of the month, we will give you a free vacation. We've got a couple of Texan Harley-Davidson dealerships using it at the moment. And they're using it by saying, get in by the end of the month, just take a test ride. No one's going to buy a Harley-Davidson to get three nights accommodation, but they will take a test ride. So they've exploded their test rides like crazy. I've only just spoken to them yesterday. And they are doing it to the end of this month. And I said to them, okay, so what's the plan? They said, well, what will happen is that because of public demand has been unbelievable. And it has. We've got more people taking test rides now. By the way, that they sell 3.5 bikes out of every 10 test drives. We've just increased their test drives by 200%. So you imagine how many more Harley-Davidson they're selling. If 3.5 out of every 10, they're just going to revisit it the next month, the same brought back by public demand. I can imagine too. I mean, every contractor is a little different, but I know for a lot of the ones we work with, they very much have high seasons and low seasons, especially in Canada, United States, Northern States, we have like winter season, summer season, we very much have seasons. So, you know, for our exteriors, say painters, it's, you know, they're not doing a lot of exterior painting in the wintertime, but they want to do some interior. They want to book some more work. It's a good seasonal, potentially like thing to run on an annual basis. And then when you're like a lot of our landscapers are just, they don't want to work in April, May, June, July. Everyone's coming to them because all the plants are starting to grow. It's like, you're not running in your high season. You're running in your low season would be maybe one thought I had on that. So. And you can do it. You can do other things too. I mean, the vacations is the number one that I've come across. I've been doing this for a thousand years, as I told you before, and I've never seen anything that comes near it. And we've done gas discounts and we've done movie tickets and, you know, we've done dining vouchers. The big difference with it, McDonald's gets that plastic toy made in China for 20 cents. But if you see it and came out, it's worth four or five dollars. So therefore, for you, it's a high perceived value. But for McDonald's, it's a low cost. That's the incentives that work the best. This one, $50 for a voucher and it's worth a thousand dollars, of course, is insane. And so therefore, if you're looking for stuff to give away, not only the message to market match is always a bit difficult because try getting something that's low cost and high perceived value that suits a particular geographic profile. The good thing about a vacation that suits anyone, it doesn't matter. What you can do though, you can do other things. For example, the insured price promotions. You can say, look, and if everyone who books my service this month, you're in the chance to win a hundred thousand dollars. And you can get that hundred thousand dollars insurance from the Lloyds of London style companies for just a few thousand dollars. So you can do things like that whereby you get the Elvis found headline. It's not in my mind anywhere near as good as you buy you get. In this instance, where you buy, you get a vacation, it's always going to be you buy, you might win. It's interesting. You've done this for a lot of years and you found something that works and you keep hitting it. And why change what works, which is kind of like what I've learned in life a little bit. So cool. There's also this concept. I want to move this one other thing you talk about is being the UN of authority in your space. Explain what does that mean. I'm imagining like you're being friends with everybody. Explain this to me a little bit. Yeah, not so much UN as United Nations, but rather the UN. So my little catchphrase is they'll try and be the UN doctor, the UN dentist, the UN concrete or the UN electrician. In other words, you are unlike and you're unconventional. So it's just something if I'm doing a seminar, you know, a webinar, what have you, I try and leave them with something that's going to make them think about me. And so therefore, the best way to do that, aside from just case studies, like we've just been going through now, is to give them some sort of mantra that, you know, is a brain tattoo. And mine is, well, try and be the UN of your industry. So that means unusual or unconventional. Okay. And that can be via the speed that you work out. You can say, look, you know, statistically, I'm the only tradesman in the United States of America that has a 94% turn up rate on time. So it could be, it could be that you're the only one in your particular industry that actually wears aftershave and you've got a uniform. That would be a big plus. It could be any number of things, but the thing is that you want to make sure that you are the UN. Now, Gordon Ramsay is the UN in the chef world because he screams to people. You don't find too many other critics to do that. So try and be, I won't say like him, but try and be the UN of your industry. I saw a really good ad on Facebook on during, you guys have Black Friday out there. We have something called Black Friday. It said, for Black Friday, we have no deals. Are you going to capture your attention? Or another one that says, we are the most expensive in our space. And here's why. And it hit on all the pain points of why other stuff sucks. And you're just like, okay, cool. Actually, I clicked on that. I was like, I always pay attention to stuff on that because I'm like, for me anyways, in a lot of ways, like I am my own best customer. And so I always think about like, what are the things that attracts me and makes that basically the marketing message I want to bring to my own organization? That's not true for everyone. I saw one on the freeway the other day. It was for a very expensive steak restaurant. On the Gold Coast here in Australia. And it was, we have the best steaks in Australia. And we are the worst vegetarian restaurant. Yeah. Guaranteed worst vegan restaurant you've ever been to. Good. Well, that helps me with a lot of different things on my questions here. I don't have a ton more for you. Just like some rapid fire questions, if you're cool, that I would love to know the best headline you've ever written, the worst flop you've ever had and lesson you've gotten from it. And yeah, just any other myths about marketing, you'd love to bury. I'm trying to think of the best headline. There was one many years ago, and just because my memory fades, it fails me. It was something that was very similar to that steak and vegetarian one that we just spoke of. It was something like the worst vegetarian meal of all time. And it was something to do with. Let me skip to the second one. I'll keep the wheels turning inside here to see if I can come up with the best headline. But what was the second one again? The biggest flop you've ever had where you're like, "This is going to be great." And you're like, "We learned a lot from this." Oh, absolutely. Gosh, I've had a... Yeah. My wife was in my office at the moment. She'd say to you, "What do you mean flop singular? We're talking flops, flops, flops." Yeah. The thing is, is that my wife made a big mistake because her father was a composite gambler and lost a number of homes on the horses over her period of being a teenager. And of course, she marries an entrepreneur and she was so silly. So yeah, look, there's been a roller coaster ride. We've made it and lost it and made it and lost it like all entrepreneurs. So therefore, there's been plenty of losses. I think the biggest flop that we had was that... And it was some years ago. So in my defense, I was a bit younger. I decided to come out with Christmas gift boxes. And what it was was basically a cardboard box with all the Christmas stuff on the outside of it. And instead of buying a card, you could fill in the Christmas card on that side of it. And when you press the corner, the box would just come together like a shoe box. It would just pop up. And I'm thinking I'm a genius, of course. Well, this is... It was the silliest idea that I think the world has ever seen. We produced a certain amount of them and sold them to a big retailer here in Australia. And I think they've still got them in their warehouse 30 years later. It was just a complete failure. But I've got to say, I would have more failures in my early days than successes. And the beauty of that is, of course, you've heard the Michael Jordan thing. He missed more goals than any other basketball player in the world, but he shot more shots. And in my earlier days, yeah, I was silly. I had lots and lots of things that we threw money at and lost. But fortunately, when you get a bit older, as I am now, because of that training, there's the hit rate is much better these days. You learn from your mistakes. I didn't get into this as much, but when you are doing testing of new marketing ideas or something that's kind of a little bit out there, which sounds like it's a lot of what you do, how do you test it in a way where you get the right amount of like data back where you're like, okay, this was worth it. Let's go and not do what you just said, which is like, get really excited about an idea and just go all in and realize it doesn't work. I did this with something called the Valpak years ago where I put out 300,000 slips on the Valpak and got zero leads back. And I put a ton of money into it because it sounded like it made so much sense, but I didn't test it. How do you test something properly when it comes to some of these strategies to actually make sure it's valid and not something that you're just excited about? And these days, it's so much easier than back in those days. I mean, given that we're in the digital world now, you can test it. We're doing one at the moment. We have a side business that we set up over the last 18 months. And I guess anybody in the marketing advertising game has dipped their toe into AI because it's basically the new fad, but it's going to take over the world. I shouldn't have called it a fad. So we have a thing called AIGenieNow.com. So AIGenie, as in G-E-N-I, AIGenieNow.com. And what that is is answering the phone for tradies. Okay, so basically, we know they're under a sink or they're on top of a roof, so they can't get to the phone. So we answer the phone for them a chance and wait for it, $10 a day. So it's $10 a day for a robot to answer the phone, $24.7. And we've spent a lot of time on that out of the last 18 months. Now, we're not the only player on the block. So therefore, I won't bore you with the details, but we distinguish our receptionist service very differently from most of the others because we're a marketing company. When we're launching it to tradies, which was only a few months ago, this is a brand new, what I thought they would do is really get involved in a webinar, something like this, that would go for 50 minutes to 60 minutes, failed miserably. Their attention span is that of a goldfish because they've got so much going on in their lives. And so therefore, we realized that that was a complete failure. We would actually be lucky to get 20 or 30 tradies on every webinar. So what we did is that we just cut that webinar down to six minutes and we just drive traffic now from our Facebook ads direct to that six minute video. And not only do we get more turnouts, but we get more conversions. So that was a massive mistake because we thought the tradesman would add more time to watch a 60 minute or near enough 60 minute video, we just sell it. But you're learning from your campaigns, which is important because I think for anyone listening who's an entrepreneur, you can put together the best campaign ever and hide it from public view and then put it out there and have it flop when it just could be one or two parts of it that are actually the problem, not the whole idea. You have to be able to decompartmentalize a little bit of the stages of what's going on to make the right decision about what to change versus just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Is that fair? Yeah. And you know what, where we missed the point too with the AI is that we were thinking that where the money we could make would be on inbound. And so therefore, whether it be a restaurant, I mean, the big industries that can't answer the phone are restaurants, hairdressers, tradesmen, and the list goes on there, but they're the top three. And so therefore, we thought problem solution will highlight to them, look, if you're under a sink and you're a plumber, you can't get your phone, we'll answer it for you. And we thought that pretty much all the money to be made out of AI was incoming, in other words, answering the phone. What we've discovered only in the last couple of months, that outgoing is where the big money is. So for example, we are starting tomorrow to ring 10,000, the robot will ring 10,000 people a week for a charity here in Australia. This charity helps basically feed hungry children who are going to bed at night, you know, hungry. And they came to me about six weeks ago and said, listen, at the moment, we have a telemarketing company of humans ringing 10,000 people a week, but they're taking a big percentage of what they earn because of the amount of people they've got to employ. And so therefore, they might raise 20 or $25,000 a week, but they take 70% of it. So what we've done is we've employed our robots now, we've done all the testing and it works like a dream. And so from tomorrow onwards, we'll ring, it doesn't matter whether it's 10, 20, 30, we can ring 30,000 a week, we can ring 10,000 a day. And so therefore, the robots will be ringing people saying, listen, did you know that one in six children in Australia are going to bed hungry tonight? And if you would like to donate X number dollars, let's say $50, guess what? We'll give you a free vacation. I just bring it back. Let me ask you this before we end, because this is like sitting in my head the whole time we're talking. AI respect your direct response approach. I think more of the world needs this. And especially in a world where I think a lot of people are more just about the brand and what looks good and they want to, but I will say there is a line. How do you, as an entrepreneur, decide between direct response marketing and good brand? Because one can eat the other a little bit if I'm not like, I've seen this a little bit. How do you make that distinction properly and decide for those listening, everyone, some, some people, it's all about their brand, some people, they don't care at all. How do you, how do you determine that to make the right decision about how you do this? Yeah, look, the best example I can give you is a hotel here on the Gold Coast called the Pallazzo Versace. And as that Italian name infers, it's six star, seven star hotel. We're talking Chandeliers in the car park. I mean, it's a big, it's a very expensive hotel. You won't get a room there for less than $1,000 a night in peak season, right? And so therefore when I'm talking to someone like that, I say, look, it needs to be messaged to market match. I just noticed you've got two Rolls Royce's sitting outside. What are they for? And the manager of the hotel said to me, oh, they pick up the Rolling Stones from the airport and bring them to the, you know, I said, okay, so it's only Port McCartney and Mick Jagger that gets them. I get, yep. I said, well, you're on drugs. Seriously, you've got them sitting there for, you know, 23 hours or 24 hours a day doing nothing. Why don't you have a campaign whereby in the winter months here in Australia, Sydney and Melbourne get pretty cold in the winter months, but the Gold Coast, which is the Orlando of Australia, we're still pretty warm, all right? So therefore in the winter months where you've got empty rooms, why don't you do this? Why don't you actually say that when you actually buy a five-day package, so you don't give it to someone just overnight, but you buy a five-day passage and you fly out from Sydney or Melbourne, we'll pick you up from the airport in one of these Rolls Royce's, and when you're here, we will give you free tickets to Dreamworld. So this is like Orlando, we have the, not Disney, but theme parks and we'll be world and Dreamworld all that, and you give the family pass to Dreamworld. Now, with what you're charging per night for the hotel, if you can easily build the cost of this into the room tariff. As soon as you did it, bang, instant, instantly, rooms booked out. Now, that's what's called message to market match with direct response advertising. They didn't lower their brand by dropping their pants and letting the world see that they're just giving up these rooms for next to nothing throughout the winter months. What they have done is, what we did for them is created a wow factor incentive that's conducive to their brand. That's what you need to do. It all comes back to this wow factor, and you're a good deal maker. It sounds like you're good at finding the way, which I think most entrepreneurs are. They can find little angles to things, and it's not just about discounting your price or giving a discount on what you do. It's finding something that people be wowed by basically, it sounds like, and being able to offer that in a way that publicly they couldn't get it, but privately you can because of a connection you have of some sort. It is, and the thing is, is that one last example before we go, it was a turf, in other words, he sold grass. He came to one of my song and dance shows that we put on, and he came up to him at the end of it. He said, "Look, I've got a bit of a challenge." He said, "I've got two miles worth of grass at the moment of my turf farm that I can't get rid of, and I've got to get rid of it before spring because then I replant again." Obviously, everyone with a turf farm leads to replant all the time. I said, "Well, who's your target audience?" He said, "Landscapers." I said, "Okay, what do you think a landscaper likes?" He goes, "I don't know, you tell me." I said, "I think 99% of them are men." I said, "I think they like beer." So what we did is we said for every front yard and backyards worth of grass, which in Australia would be 500 square metres of grass, we will give you a free carton of Crown Lager beer, which is a premium beer. So it's not your normal trady beer, it's a premium beer. So he said, "Right, so we just bought a mail list of tradesmen all around the area that he was on, 500 tradesmen. We sent out a letter to them because not all of them are sort of into technology, but we also sent a email and we just said, "Look, for every home with the grass you buy from us, we will give you a free carton of beer." He rings me five days afterwards. I said, "We've got a problem, which is something you don't want to get." I said, "Okay, what's the problem?" He said, "We've got a number of grass. All the grass is gone," because he said, "The guy that used to barter on price all the time," he said, "I'd be $6 a square meter." He told me he could get it down the road for $5.50. He rang up and said, "I want 18 homes with the grass. I don't care when the grass gets here. I've got a party on Friday. I need the beer by Friday." Good. JD, anything else to wrap us up? Any final words or advice for those listening? For some people, this is a concept they haven't touched much on, probably thought about maybe a little bit. Where do people start? What are your thoughts? All I would suggest to anyone, and I know we all fall into this trap when you need some cash, so you drop your price because it's a cash flow stimulant. All I would say is that instead of, if you are in a meat-to-industry where your electrical services are the same as many others or your solar panels are the same as others, your kitchen renovation is very similar to others, if you are not, if you like the 40-ton gorilla of your industry, then I would do everything I possibly can to stop price discounting and think alternatively with valuating. Valuating in my world happens to be coming up with a Happy Meal toy that's going to distinguish your business or your service or your offer from everyone else's. Cool. Love it. JD, thank you. Thank you for your approach. Thank you for being on with us. Have a good week and have fun living in the future in Australia. Let me know how tomorrow goes. It's my pleasure. Okay, see you, JD. See you, man.