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Brian Gottlieb (00:00): Back in the early days. I think the only rule of business is simply to stay in business. Sometimes it’s the rules that we create in our own mind that limit us. It’s my belief. If you’re a business owner, one thing’s for sure. If people love what they do, they tend to do it a whole lot better.

John Jantsch (00:14): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Brian Gottlieb. He is the founder of Tundra Land Home Improvements and author of the upcoming book we’re going to talk about today Beyond the Hammer, a Fresh Approach to Leadership, culture and Building High Performance Team. So Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Gottlieb (00:35): John. Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it. Let’s have a good chat today.

John Jantsch (00:39): Yeah. So is there Tundra Land? Is there some story behind the name there? I find myself tripping over it every time. I want to say Thunder Land or something like that.

Brian Gottlieb (00:47): Yeah, people did mistake it for that at that time. First of all, I wanted to find a name that didn’t exist on from a URL standpoint. So the business was Wisconsin based, which is the frozen tundra. So I thought, why not Tundra Land? And it seemed to work real well. And then of course I dialed one 800 Tundra Land to see who would answer in some plumbing company, somewhere answered. And I said, Hey, can I buy your phone number? And they said, sure. So I had the domain and I had the one 800 number. So he was a happy guy.

John Jantsch (01:16): They probably didn’t even know what you were buying, right? I mean, they weren’t using it for that. It just happened to add up.

Brian Gottlieb (01:21): Right, right.

John Jantsch (01:22): So in the bio, I didn’t read this part, but to you talk about starting your business with $3,000. So I’m not going to ask you what challenges you face because it’s obvious, right? But talk a little bit about the early days and really was there a pivotal moment, because you’ve obviously grown it to quite an enterprise now.

Brian Gottlieb (01:43): Yeah, right. 2009 in the back of a friend’s warehouse on a plastic folding table with $3,000 in cash. I thought it was a great time to start a business. So look, there were a lot of people that in 2007 and eight lost their jobs, which also meant there was an opportunity there, some great talent out there, and it was to me, a great time to start a business. But sure, in the early days, everything was a challenge. I mean, everything was a challenge. $3,000 doesn’t go very far. So this is Duct Tape Marketing. You have to go out and you have to make a lead, and you have to make a lead, and you have to sell a lead, and you have to install a lead, and you have to do all those things just to stay in business another day. Back in the early days, I think the only rule of business is simply to stay in business. But over time, we started to grow and grow. And when I sold all the businesses that original business, tand spawned into a couple of other businesses that covered multiple states in the United States. We had 600 employees and doing about 150 million in revenue when I finally sold all the businesses a couple of years ago. It was quite a fun ride. A lot of learning along the way though.

John Jantsch (02:47): Well, your book is essentially a, I dunno, would you call it a leader? Yeah, you’d call it a leadership book, I suppose. And I think somebody who’s at some level managed 600 employees can actually call themselves a leader. A lot of your book is pegged to the word belief and this idea that it really starts with that. And I’m a fan of the idea of the power of the universe delivering if you have beliefs. So unpack kind of that idea and what it means to this entire book, or really even to your entire thinking about leading.

Brian Gottlieb (03:22): Yeah, so what it all really came from is that when you think about back in 2009 when I started the business, if you’ve asked me what my business was, I would’ve said, well, we’re a construction company.

Testimonial (03:31): Maybe

Brian Gottlieb (03:31): Fast forward six years later, when I had 30, 40, 50 employees, I might’ve said, well, we’re a sales and marketing company that happens to be in home improvements. But what really allowed us to grow was when we said, what are we really? Well, we’re a training organization. Let’s just be a training and development company, and what does that mean? And part of that process is believing in people and helping and getting people to believe in themselves. And the more people believe in themselves, the more they’re willing to grow. Sometimes it’s the rules that we create in our own mind that limit us. So can a leader change that perspective? And how do you influence the mindset of people on your team? John, when I first started the business, the success of the business depended upon how well I personally executed. But as you start hiring people and building a team, now the business’ success depends on how well teams execute. And by the way, that’s both in the leader’s presence and in their absence. So getting people to believe in themselves, but also getting them aligned around a certain set of beliefs around a mission and a vision and things that really matter. And these are all the necessary ingredients to build an aligned team and aligned teams perform well in any market regardless of competition.

John Jantsch (04:42): So how do you get, you’re in one of those industries where, I mean, there are a lot of businesses that knowledge workers are brought in and they’re told the mission and we got to believe and we’re all on the same team. And sometimes you feel like, I could be wrong, I am wrong. But sometimes the feeling is that, well, those people naturally get it, but okay, you hire a carpenter and they just want to go out and build the mantle on the job that they’re working on and not really think of themselves as a training company. How do you kind of deal with that mindset? Or did you,

Brian Gottlieb (05:11): Yeah, that’s a great question, John. So first of all, it’s true. There are a lot of mission statements that are either, in some cases they’re businesses, and other times it’s just maybe a poster on the wall somewhere.

(05:22): And the question is, how do you bring it to life? How do you weave it into the fabric of your organization? And how do you make it so that everybody, whether they’re swinging a hammer out in the field, just a carpenter or somebody that’s working in the mall trying to schedule an appointment for a bathroom model, how do they understand what is their role in the mission and vision? How do you bring it to life? I’ll give you an example of one way we did that if I could. So we would install replacement windows in people’s homes. Well, when you put new windows in people’s homes, you typically take the old windows out and you throw ’em in the trash, which normally that’s okay, but our mission statement was to do well and do good. And what that meant for us is the purpose of business is to make a decent profit decently.

(06:03): So we always looked for opportunities where we could do just that and how can we involve others in the organization In doing so, one way was with these old windows. We would take these old windows out of people’s homes, and instead of throwing ’em away, we would turn them into really cool art pieces by giving these sashes to local artists and community members and the high schools, and they would turn these windows into art pieces. And then once a year, all these windows would get auctioned off and the money raised would go to make a positive impact. Then the life of another individual. If the installer wasn’t careful taking those windows out, we wouldn’t have windows to auction. If the marketer didn’t set an appointment, we wouldn’t have windows to auction. So that’s just one example of how you can take a mission statement and just really weave it into the business. And people then feel like their job is more than just a job. It feels like they have purpose, and that’s really important. They also understand that their work is impactful.

John Jantsch (06:58): And there’s countless, especially when we were going through after the pandemic and there was this quiet quitting and all whatever terms people wanted to call it. Really the bottom line came down to people saying, I, I’m not tired of working. I’m just tired of working here. I’m just tired of working for you. I want to work somewhere

Brian Gottlieb (07:15): Where I feel valued. I write about that in my book that there was a study upwards of 60% of people in the United States have left a job simply by the way, just to get away from a manager. So there are a lot of reasons why you write people quite quit after the pandemic, but then still there are a lot of unhappy people. And that’s such a shame because look, it’s my belief, if you’re a business owner, one thing’s for sure, if people love what they do, they tend to do it a whole lot better. So how do we get people just to love what they do? Because the customer journey really starts with the employee journey

John Jantsch (07:46): A hundred percent. I mean, I’ve said it a hundred times any way, shape and form that your business comes into contact with a customer, that person is performing a marketing function regardless of what their job title

Brian Gottlieb (07:57): Is. It certainly is. And it’s interesting because when you think about scripting inside of an organization, it’s quite common in the home improvement business where maybe the sales reps are scripted, but really the installers need to be also taught how to communicate with a customer. How do you ask for check? How do you make sure the customer is happy and all these sort of things? Because you’re right. The thing about the home improvement industry, unlike many businesses, is 99.9% of every employee is customer facing, whether it’s over the phone or face to face. And you’re right, and everything represents your brand, and you just want to make sure that you’re aware of that.

John Jantsch (08:34): Well look no further than the reviews, the five star reviews in the home service industry, and they don’t often mention the company. They mention Rusty who fixed my boiler.

Brian Gottlieb (08:44): That’s right. We had a couple of our installers. What they would do is while they were in the home doing whether a bath project or window project, they kept some nine volt batteries in their toolkit and they would say, Hey, Mrs. Jones, when’s the last time you changed your smoke detector batteries? I’m here. I’m happy to do it for you. I’ll tell you what, look, we always installed a great shower and a great window for people, but customers love that little 2% shift. It was a big deal for them.

John Jantsch (09:09): Well, a lot of it’s because they’re not getting that in a lot of places in their life. And so I think that it, I don’t want to say it’s easy, but it kind of lowers the bar, doesn’t it?

Brian Gottlieb (09:18): Well, people deserve, customers deserve to have a great experience, especially when they’re investing their money in something. Likewise, employees deserve to have a great experience. They’re giving up a portion of their life inside of an organization. They should be happy doing so it shouldn’t be a miserable experience. It doesn’t. There might be some other

John Jantsch (09:38): Stuff they’d rather do. So let’s get down to some brass tacks here, some in the weeds stuff. You introduce an approach to feedback that you call the center and sphere. You want to break that down.

Brian Gottlieb (09:51): So what happens when you tend to give feedback to people, even when it’s just a little bit constructive, they tend to kind of shut down and people tend to remember the negative more than the positive. So when we give feedback to people, we want to transfer belief whenever possible, and we do that through the center of the sphere. We explained to them that A, we believe in them and we believe in them because, John, I believe in you because I’ve seen you do X, Y, and Z before, and I know you can continue to do well at that. What I’d like you to work on is fill in the blank, some sort of actionable feedback, but then you surrounded again with the sphere of encouragement because remember, the purpose of a one-on-one conversation when you’re coaching isn’t necessarily to terminate somebody. It’s to coach them up. And to be a great coach, you have to be effective. And how do you be effective? Well, you have to connect with people and get people to really want it. Take advantage of whatever advice you’re giving them and not look like they, you’re beating up on them either.

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Brian Gottlieb (12:18): Yeah. What’s interesting is some of the best processes came from employees that weren’t necessarily satisfied, by the way, this whole thing that when an employee leaves, you’re supposed to do an exit survey and an exit survey. Well, okay, that’s great. It’s an autopsy is what, let’s call it an autopsy. Okay, but you mine so much valuable information. We started to do something called stay interviews. Instead of waiting for somebody to leave, let’s interview them while they’re actually working with us. Let’s ask them four questions. The first question is, what makes you want to come to work every day? The second question is, what would one day make you want to leave? The third question is, what is one thing the company is doing wrong today? And the fourth question is, what is something you’re not getting out of your leader that you really need? Mining for those things really tells us where we need to take the organization, because what happens is when a business grows, and with 600 people, you could imagine the org chart is growing and I’m getting further and further away from the customer and really away from the customer facing people.

(13:20): So stay interviews really connects the leader of the business to what the mindset of the team is, the true culture of the organization, how are people thinking? Because how they think affects how they act and how they act is how they behave, which is how the organization performs

John Jantsch (13:37): Well. And those are some pretty tough questions, and I think that somebody who has asked those questions is going to feel heard. It’s like, oh, you care what I think?

Brian Gottlieb (13:45): And isn’t that what people want? But we all want to feel heard, valued, and appreciated. More so than a paycheck, by the way.

John Jantsch (13:52): Yeah, yeah. No, it shows up all the time when people are surveyed. So how much of this, the word culture has certainly been pretty popular the last 10 years. How much of this really, the problem I have with the word culture is a lot of times people, this is what it should be. This is what it ought to be, as opposed to, this is what it is, because that’s really what culture is. I mean, there’s things you can do intentionally. So how much of this would you say is culture and how much of it is just figuring out who you are and being it?

Brian Gottlieb (14:19): Well, I think, look, let’s talk about what culture is right there. I think the word is overused. Every business has a culture, whether you want it or not, you’ve got a culture. Now we can talk about what that culture is, but I believe culture is what do people think about the organization? What do they think about their, how do they think and feel about the business itself, and how does that affect organizational performance? We had a saying in our business that if you wanted to copy our performance, you first had to copy our culture, which means you had to copy what goes on inside of our people’s heads. And that’s a lot to me. If you have the right culture, and you can always inspect your culture, look at any organization. I visited plenty of companies. I know you have too, John, and if you look at how a company hires, how they terminate people, what does that process look like? How they promote, how they reward and compensate. That’ll tell you a lot about the culture because it’ll tell you what the priorities are inside of the organization, which also tells you how people think and feel about the business.

John Jantsch (15:22): So there’s a line, I think it’s directly from the book. Company culture is shaped by the lowest level of acceptable behavior in an, that’s a pretty bold statement, Mr. Gotlieb.

Brian Gottlieb (15:35): Yeah. Well, what happens? It’s a very important statement. It’s easy. It’s the manager that creates a toxic environment, shapes the culture of the organization, the high performer, low culture fit, the person that really gets results, but they’re not good around the rest of the team that you try to isolate shapes the culture of the organization, the low performer, high culture fit, the person you in sales, it’s like the person you love, but they can’t even close a car door, but you keep them around because you love them. All of these things shape the culture of an organization. This is why it can’t be ignored. One of the pillars in the book is that leaders are aware of the echo of their voice, and the idea is that you can’t ignore these sort of things because you’re right. The culture is shaped by the lowest level of acceptable behavior.

John Jantsch (16:22): I mean, it really kind of disempowers the people that say, Hey, I’m doing this and doing that, and look what they’re getting away with. I guess they don’t care.

Brian Gottlieb (16:31): It sends a wild ripple effect through the entire organization.

John Jantsch (16:35): Yeah, yeah. So you briefly mentioned Windows for a cause. You had another one, baths for the Brave or for the Brave. Talk a little bit about, you started talking about where they came from. What impact did they have really on your business to the point where you probably sought out my next business, we’re going to do X, right?

Brian Gottlieb (16:54): Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting because the thing about Windows for cause is as it makes an employee, a co-producer in the mission statement, it also makes the customer a co-producer. And that’s really powerful when you can create a co-producing customer. IKEA does that really well. If you buy anything from ikea, everything comes in a little skinny box and you got to put it together. You know that going into ikea, but IKEA customers are co-producers. Keeping the costs of Ikea down Bath for the Brave was another example. It’s so sad. The thing about the Bath business is it’s very joyful, but there’s a lot of sadness too. There are people that have, there are a lot of veterans, in fact, that have served our country proudly, but they have a shower because of mobility issues that they’re petrified of. They can’t step over their bathtub safely. They can’t take a shower safely in their own home, and they don’t necessarily have the financial means to do anything about it.

(17:45): Bath For the Brave was an initiative that we started where we surprised free veterans. We surprised veterans with free showers just in time for Veterans Day. And in fact, it wasn’t just myself. It became a movement with 30 40 other home improvement companies across the country, all surprising veterans with free shower projects. When you talk about how do you involve an installer in your mission, I will share with you, John, the installers would fight with each other. They wanted to be the one to install the free shower for the veteran that served our country. And again, we can’t do free showers for veterans if customers don’t first buy showers from us. I think a tangible mission that creates a co-producing customer and involves your team in the process is really something

John Jantsch (18:32): Special. And that’s why I love, from a marketing standpoint, and the home improvement business was probably as bad as any, it got really tough to find skilled labor there for a long time, especially as demand was skyrocketing. And I found that companies that did a great job with their employees and were actually able to promote how happy their employees were and what a great place this was to work. That became a tremendous brand, didn’t it?

Brian Gottlieb (18:56): Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Because word does get around, doesn’t it? Word does get around. It’s interesting. When I sold one of my businesses in 2022, and again, it was coming off of there’s no labor shortage. We received 9,000 job applications the last year I had my business 9,000 applications that people that wanted to come. And by the way, this isn’t Wisconsin where there are more cows than people, just to be clear. So that’s a lot of applications, but people want be part of something really cool. And again, because really when you think about even recruitment is marketing as well. It’s all marketing, isn’t it?

John Jantsch (19:34): Yeah. A lot of people just think it’s lead generation or something. It’s like you run an ad and people show up, and it’s really, if we’re talking about all the things being true, people want to work a place with purpose. I guarantee you some percentage of a performers that you want, they’re looking for that first.

Brian Gottlieb (19:52): That’s right. And then if an organization can also create upward mobility, because as long as I’ve been in this industry, there’s been a labor shortage, and so let’s not even worry about that. Let’s just be a training organization where we can take people right out of high school that didn’t want to go to college, and let’s teach them a skill where they can do quite well and have a wonderful life with great benefits and raise a family, and all those things that are really cool in life. But you have to believe in people to do that,

John Jantsch (20:21): Get good at their craft. Did you start apprentice programs? Was that part of your

Brian Gottlieb (20:25): We did, yeah. We were able to bring anybody in and just if they were willing, if they had the right mindset, if they were hungry and trainable and all those sort of things, yeah, we can put ’em on a path of success and didn’t mean just because we hired them for this role, that’s where they ended up. Sometimes we move ’em into another role inside of the business. Again, it really does come down to just taking a moment and trying to find the best fit for somebody and not just kicking ’em to the curb in the role they’re in. It’s not working out.

John Jantsch (20:51): Yeah. Awesome. Well, Brian, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to tell people where they might connect with you and find more about Beyond the Hammer?

Brian Gottlieb (21:02): Yeah. You can always connect with me on my website, which is brian gottlieb.com and beyond. The Hammers available on Amazon, the audio version, Kindle, and of course the hardcover book. It’s a great read. I think you really enjoyed it. It’s a fun story. It’s a parable, and it’s also actionable, so you can plug it into your business very quickly.

John Jantsch (21:20): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Testimonial (21:36): I was like this. Found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

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The Power of Expert Feedback to Improve Writing Skills

The Power of Expert Feedback to Improve Writing Skills written by Tosin Jerugba read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Tim Grahl

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Tim Grahl, CEO and publisher of Story Grid. He discusses the process of writing and publishing books, emphasizing the importance of developing writing skills and receiving expert feedback. He also highlights the power of storytelling and the impact that books can have on readers.

Tim Grahl dedicates himself to helping authors craft better narratives and bring their work to readers. His expertise lies in applying the Story Grid methodology to fiction and nonfiction, guiding writers through creating compelling, well-structured stories. Under Tim’s leadership, Story Grid has become a valuable resource for authors seeking to refine their craft and successfully navigate the publishing landscape. His book, “The Shithead: A Novel in Fifty Songs” is set to be released on September 19th!

Key Takeaways

Writing is a skill that requires deliberate practice and expert feedback.
Start by writing short scenes before attempting to write an entire novel.
Books have the power to leave a legacy and impact readers.
Expert feedback is crucial for improving writing skills.

Chapters

[00:00] Introduction to Tim Grahl and Story Grid

[03:20] The Process of Writing and Publishing Books

[08:52] The Power of Books and Leaving a Legacy

[12:10] Starting with Short Scenes: The Path to Writing a Novel

[16:36] The Importance of Expert Feedback in Writing

[20:12] The Role of Workshops and Expert Feedback

[23:14] Favorite Authors: Anne Tyler and Carlos Ruiz Zafon

More About Tim Grahl:

Add Tim Grahl on LinkedIn
Check out his Website
Grab a copy of The Shithead: A Novel in Fifty Songs

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by:

Oracle

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Duct Tape Transcript

Tim Grahl (00:00): Books go places you can’t go by yourself. And so they have a way of going out into the world and touching people that you could never get to on your own.

John Jantsch (00:10): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Tim Grahl. He is the CEO and publisher of Story Grid where he oversees marketing and operations for the story grid universe and story grid publishing. Under Tim’s leadership Story Grid has become a valuable resource for authors seeking to refine their craft and successfully navigate the publishing landscape. We are going to talk about a number of books, first thousand copies, book Launch Blueprint, but Tim’s also got a new book, a novel called The Shithead, a novel for N 50 songs, which depend upon when you’re listening to this comes out in September of 2024. There. I just ruined my G rating. Dang it, Tim.

Tim Grahl (00:53): Yeah, I’ve already had a couple people say the book had a lot of language in it. I’m like, if you did

John Jantsch (01:00): You the Bible, my first book, duct Tape Marketing was published by Thomas Nelson. They were just getting into business publishing, but they had to date it had been a Christian publisher. They still give the imprints still around. They sold the business part to Harper. But Thomas Nelson is the biggest publisher of Bibles.

Testimonial (01:17): And

John Jantsch (01:17): So in my manuscript, when I turned it in, the only word they made me take out was crap, the word crap. So we’ve come a long way, haven’t we? Yeah.

Tim Grahl (01:27): Now we’re just putting it on the cover.

John Jantsch (01:29): So explain what Story Grid is for those who haven’t discovered it.

Tim Grahl (01:35): Yeah, so my partner, Sean Coyne, has been in publishing since 1991, mainly as an editor, but also as a writer and story researcher. And he wanted to develop a way to analyze books to find out what’s wrong and fix them. And so he came up with what is now called the Story Grid, which is so we can give really clear, specific feedback on people’s writing from the sentence all the way up to the full novel or full book. And it’s a really systematic approach that’s based on feedback and a rubric that we can actually help people become a better writer in a very short period of time. And so I came on, we started the podcast nine years ago, and I was the Guinea pig. And so I would write in public and share it on the podcast, and he would give me feedback and just rip it apart live on the podcast. And now I’m the CEO. So I run all the marketing and operations and everything, and I’m kind of the main Guinea pig still. So that’s why my book’s coming out, and it’s a proof of concept of what we can do at Story Grid.

John Jantsch (02:37): So it is funny that you talk about it having a rubric and being very systematic. I remember one of my first editors read through the first kind of chunk of the book that I gave them, and he said one of his notes on the paper, I felt like it was an eighth grade English teacher wrote on the paper and said, you do a lot of throat clearing here. And that was one of my favorite pieces of feedback. Get to the point. Damn it.

Tim Grahl (03:00): Yeah. So that’s what we focus on is helping writers level up their craft so they can write a book that they’re proud of that leaves a

John Jantsch (03:07): Legacy. Do you find that one genre, it works better than another? I mean, obviously business books or nonfiction books are much different than fiction. Does it not matter

Tim Grahl (03:18): As far as the writing or the marketing side,

John Jantsch (03:20): Or No, really, as far as the story grid approach?

Tim Grahl (03:23): Oh yeah. So we’re on fiction and anything narrative driven. So we do memoir, we like a lot of Malcolm Gladwell books. I write nonfiction and I write business books. But it’s a different approach than a narrative driven book.

John Jantsch (03:41): Yeah, yeah. Okay. So talk a little bit about, you mentioned the, I think we were on, I think we’re here, we’re recording. I’ve been doing too many interviews today. Sorry. But the idea of doing interviews for this, so in fact, you at some point did 600 one-on-one calls with your audience. First off, that sounds incredibly painful, but you clearly learned something from the nature of it.

Tim Grahl (04:07): Yeah, so almost two years ago, back in November, 2022, the business kind of hit a wall. And I realized through just things when it’s just this gut feeling of things are not working well, and this is not going to grow, I don’t know what’s going on, something’s wrong. And so a friend of mine, she was like, Hey, she started asking me questions about our audience, and I couldn’t answer them. And she’s like, you need to get to know your audience better. She’s like, you need to start doing just phone calls with your audience. And what she didn’t know about me at the time is I’m like a fucking train. So you tell me to do something and I just start doing it and I don’t stop. And so I started doing calls in January, 2023, and now I’ve done probably now 650 one-on-one calls with people, and I’m now scaling back from that. But it’s one of those macro level, it was painful, but it’s calls with people that are trying to be writers. Most of them are pretty

John Jantsch (05:11): Fun.

Tim Grahl (05:12): I like those people. But now I know my audience really well. I know why they write. I know how old they are. I know when they began writing, I just know them so deeply and well and changed the whole approach to marketing, and we figured out what we should be doing in the company in the process. So about a year ago, I had a really big breakthrough again, after I’d done probably the first two or 300, and now we’re up 29.2% in the business this year, over in the previous three years, we had been flat for three years. And so we figured it out and now we’re going to grow. But it was just really, I just needed to get to know my people. And so I started talking to ’em one at a time.

John Jantsch (05:59): So it’s funny, for years we have developed marketing strategy for clients, and a lot of how we develop messaging is by interviewing their clients because their clients talk about the problems that they get solved by that company. And quite often it has nothing to do with the actual product. It’s stuff they’re not getting in other parts of their life even. It’s pretty crazy. And some of the verbatim statements that people have said, I was like, well, there’s your core message.

Tim Grahl (06:24): Yeah, it was for too much of, well, one of the things I realized was we kept talking about writing a book that’ll sell well and writing your bestseller.

(06:33): After I’d done the first almost a hundred calls, I went back through all my notes and just read through. Not one person talked to me about wanting to write a bestselling book. They want to leave a legacy. They want to leave something behind for their family to read. They want their kids, their grandkids to be proud of them. And I’m like, oh gosh, I just pulled all of that stuff out of our marketing, and it’s all about legacy, being proud of doing the thing you’ve wanted to do since you were 14 years old. And I didn’t know that it made sense after the fact, but I didn’t know before I just talked to everybody.

John Jantsch (07:09): Writing is weird, isn’t it? A lot of people, even if they say, I’m a terrible writer, I would never do that, or I’m certainly not going to make the time to do that secretly, doesn’t everybody want to write a book?

Tim Grahl (07:18): As far as I can tell, I mean, I hang out with a lot of writers, but I think what it is, we all want to leave something behind that takes everything we’ve learned. We’ve all been through really shitty stuff. We’ve all learned really hard lessons, and we want to leave it behind for other people. And the seemingly most accessible way to do that is to write a book. It’s hard to make a movie you can paint. I don’t think that gets the point across. So a book seems to be the way to do that, and it does it really well. And I actually think fiction is a better form than nonfiction because if I start telling you, John, this is what you need to do and here’s what you need to think, it’s like I start arguing with you or thinking, but if you just tell me a story, it changes my mind without much effort. So that’s what I’ve really dedicated myself to is being somebody that can write something great. The shithead is the outcome of that. The early reviews of it have been really good. People love it, and it’s having the kind of people are emailing me saying, I’m going to therapy after reading your book. So it’s

John Jantsch (08:31): Pretty gratifying, isn’t it? I mean, to realize that you can have that impact and you won’t hear from a lot of people. But I mean, wrote Duct Tape Marketing 17, 18 years ago, and it just floors me that people today are like, I built my business on that. I was really trying to came out, I was just trying to feed my family. I had no idea.

Tim Grahl (08:56): Yeah, I mean, I read it when it first came out. I remember buying it at my Barnes and Noble when I lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, and I was trying to get my business off the ground, and I was like, this guy knows what he’s talking about. It was like the first time I felt like I read something that was something I could do. It wasn’t some high-minded way of doing it. Oh yeah, for sure. So writing and books go places. You can’t go by

John Jantsch (09:22): Yourself.

Tim Grahl (09:23): And so they have a way of going out into the world and touching people that you could never get to on your own.

John Jantsch (09:30): So I’ll start basic and start peeling into the actual stuff. But when somebody comes to you and says, oh, Tim, I really want to write a book, what should I do?

Tim Grahl (09:39): Yeah, I mean, the first thing I try to do is talk ’em out of it. It’s cliche at this point, but it’s like writing book. And it depends on how you’re approaching it. Writing a nonfiction like a business book, and again, I’ve written a few of these, so I love them. That’s a different thing than trying to write fiction. Fiction is really hard to do Well,

John Jantsch (10:05): And

Tim Grahl (10:06): I have, yeah. So anyway, if somebody wants to learn how to write, the first thing they need to do is just start writing short pieces. We’re a big fan on the fiction side or the memoir side of writing one scene. Can you write one scene that gets somebody excited to read the next scene? If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be trying to write an entire book because it’s setting out for a road trip from LA to New York, and you don’t even know how to drive a car. You’re going to put it in the ditch before you get out of the neighborhood. And so with business books, I find that they’re easier because you’re usually talking in your own voice, especially if it’s from your expertise. So you’re used to consulting, you’re used to coaching, so writing in your own voice is a little easier. But the biggest thing is, can you write a blog post that people want to read? If you write a white paper and you send it to 10 people, do they interact with it? Do they email you back? Do they like it? Was it helpful? And sitting down to write a book first can be really daunting. And if you don’t have a good guide walking you through it and you’ve never done it before, it’ll probably not be very good.

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(12:43): And that to me is what I always find is that you take the note cards and you rearrange ’em all, or how do you do that?

Tim Grahl (12:51): Yeah, it depends on how you go about it, but the way that we’ve found works the best is you start with your theme, which is how you want the reader to change as a result of reading your book. Right? Right.

John Jantsch (13:04): That’s totally true of any good book, right?

Tim Grahl (13:05): Yeah. So it’s like what’s the one if one change they make? So for my book, the Shithead, it was like, I want to move people from feeling like they’re broken pieces of shit to they’re perfect and have everything they need. I really truly believe that about people. I believe that if that one change could happen across the globe, it would solve 95% of our problems.

Testimonial (13:28): And

Tim Grahl (13:28): So I believe that. So then it’s like, okay, now I start crafting a story that will, you can watch somebody descend into hell of believing they’re a piece of shit and then come out of it at the end, right?

(13:41): And so it really is about, the hardest thing is when you’re writing a business book, you just put on the page the truth. Here, do this. And there you go with the fiction title. You have to just tell the story and trust the reader to get the message that you’re trying to give them. And it’s all about you being able to write a story that infers everything to the reader. So that’s the hard part. But when you’re at a restaurant and you’re people watching and you see that couple across and you’re like, oh my God, they’re fighting

John Jantsch (14:16): And

Tim Grahl (14:17): You didn’t hear anything. You didn’t hear them fighting, but you can just see in the way they’re interacting. So with writing a fiction book, you have to just show what I can observe and let the reader pick up on the fact that they’re fighting. I don’t want to tell the reader they’re fighting. So if I’m a good writer, I should be able to describe it in such a way where they know what’s going on. That’s one of the harder things about writing fiction, is you have to just tell the story. You have to have the theme clearly locked in your head, but you don’t put the theme on the page. You just let the reader figure it out.

John Jantsch (14:52): I wonder, I often wonder that it’s like an actor in a play. I mean, they become obsessed with the character. When you’re writing a book like this, does every conversation, everything you see the couple of next, they become characters or fodder, at least for characters.

Tim Grahl (15:07): Well, again, I think this is different depending on the writer. So this book was, I took what happened to me and some stuff that happened to me, and I built a novel around it. So it was a very personal story. So it’s definitely not a true story. Some pretty rough stuff in there that didn’t happen to me. But it’s more about, it’s almost like looking back, so you’re like, all right, I need something like this, or I need a character that did this. And you just start pulling stuff from other movies, other books, stuff that’s happened to you,

(15:46): Just different things of, but you have to be like, all right, I’m building this story and I need something like this here. I need a character. So I get really firmly planted, and I’m usually pulling from my life, so I’m like, oh, I’m, this character is that person, so I’m going to write that person into the book and just try to make them bigger than life. So it’s a little bit of both, but I try to shut it off because it’s not good if I’m out to dinner with my wife and I’m thinking about writing. Yeah,

John Jantsch (16:17): Yeah. Well, I suspect that’s a great place for people to start, especially for a first book because they have a lot of firsthand knowledge. And you become James Patterson. You can go start hiring people to research stuff for you. But that first book, I’m sure. So do you have any tips for I, one of the things most people that are writing, many people that are writing fiction, it is not their day job. It is something that they’re doing kind of on the side to try to finish. So do you have any tips for like, okay, it’s going to be 58,000 words. How do I get that done?

Tim Grahl (16:53): Well, so the one thing I try to get people not to do is try to write a novel at the beginning, because novels are really hard to put together, and there’s too many things happening. And this is one of the things I have a stack of soapbox, and this is one of ’em, right? So people don’t understand that writing is a skill just like any other complex skill. So if I have never played the guitar before, you play the guitar, right?

John Jantsch (17:21): I do.

Tim Grahl (17:22): So if I’ve never played the guitar before and you said, Hey, Tim, just sit down and play Led Zeppelin, man, come on. And I’m like, no, I can’t know how.

John Jantsch (17:32): So

Tim Grahl (17:32): When people say, I’m going to sit down and write a novel, it’s like you don’t know how. Just because how to type words doesn’t mean you know how to tell a story. And there’s basic skills. Just like if I want to learn to play the guitar, I got to learn my scales. I got to learn how to play chords. I got to learn how to learn how to even tune the guitar, and I have to learn all of these skills. And then I learn how to put ’em all together, and now I can go perform, see, again, guitar, you separate practice and performance. Same thing with woodworking. I practice cutting cheap pieces of pine before I cut the $80 piece of oak and writing. We just smush ’em together and we’re like, I’m going to learn how to write while writing something I want to publish. That doesn’t make any sense. And the way that you get better at something is deliberate practice, which includes short feedback loops. Well, you can’t short feedback loop an 80,000 word novel.

(18:26): So the biggest thing I want people to do is focus on one scene. Can you write 1000 word scene that is really good? And when you send it to 10 people, they write back and say, Hey, what happens next? Probably not. So let’s focus on writing scenes first. And then once you’re consistently writing great scenes, then we start building up from there. And so that is the number one mistake writers make. And I made that mistake for over a decade of just like, oh, this novel didn’t work. Let me try another one. Let try another one. Let me try. And it was that, again, like I said earlier, it’s setting out for a road trip and I don’t even know how to drive. And so I want people to separate practice and performance, understand their skill development first. And then once you have the skills, you can go write whatever you want.

(19:17): Just like once I’m really good at playing the guitar, I can go play whatever song I want, and now I can get good at playing those songs. But every fucking guitarist, whether they’re playing rock or they’re playing country or whatever, got to learn the acorn and got to learn how to strum. They all have to learn the same basic skills and then they can start going in a direction they want to go. And so I wish more writers understood it is a skill development process, and if you just focus on the skills first, it makes everything so much easier in the long run. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:52): So where do you come down on and disclaimer, you guys offer workshops, so where do you come down on that kind of public writers’ groups, workshops as a way to get that feedback, but it also could be a little soul crushing, right?

Tim Grahl (20:08): Yeah. Well, okay. Yeah. This was my big breakthrough as the CEO of the company is about a year ago I started looking around. I’m like, we are running seminars and trainings and all these kind of things, and I’m like, nobody’s actually getting better. What is going on?

John Jantsch (20:24): And

Tim Grahl (20:24): I’m like, oh, they’re getting better here in this one program we’re running. And then I got better. What do those have in common? I’m like, it’s the expert feedback. So even in Masters of Creative Writing programs, your feedback comes from your peers, which is the stupidest fucking thing I can imagine. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t you giving me advice on my writing, and I don’t want to give you advice on yours. I don’t know what I’m talking about either. And so expert feedback, and it’s like, well, that’s why we run the workshops. It’s so hard to get expert feedback that’s objective and not subjective. And it’s like, well, I also have a coach I pay in jujitsu and a coach I pay in CrossFit and everything else because it’s like to get better at something, I need to try it. Have a coach look at me, tell me what I did right and wrong, and then go try again. And so I think this is what holds writers back for literally decades,

John Jantsch (21:24): Is

Tim Grahl (21:25): They’re in an echo chamber of their own head or other peers that don’t know what they’re talking about. And that’s why nobody’s getting better. And that’s what held me back for years and years too. I’m 43, but I’ve been trying to write fiction since I was in my early twenties, and it’s not until the last five years that I was able to quickly get better because I was getting that expert feedback.

John Jantsch (21:49): Alright, last question. Who’s your favorite author,

Tim Grahl (21:52): Right? The last, well, okay, I’m going to give two you. I’m going to cheat. So Ann Tyler is one of my favorite. I think she’s a master of making boring things. Really interesting, right?

John Jantsch (22:04): Yeah.

Tim Grahl (22:05): Her books are not thrillers, they’re about just married couples and stuff.

John Jantsch (22:08): They’re

Tim Grahl (22:08): Just so good.

John Jantsch (22:10): The

Tim Grahl (22:10): Other one that nobody So accidental Taurus is my favorite one of hers. And then this guy named Carlos Ruez, Fon, Z-A-F-O-N, wrote a book called The Shadow of the Wind, and it is one of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read. It’s so good. It’s like a mystery and a coming of age and a love story all wrapped in one. And that book, I have more highlights on my Kindle than any other book I’ve ever read. It’s just so beautifully written. And he has a whole series of books called The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, something like that. But the first one, the Shadow of the Wind is just wonderful.

John Jantsch (22:48): Yeah. Alright, well, do I get to share? You want to know? Yeah, of

Tim Grahl (22:52): Course.

John Jantsch (22:53): So Cormick McCarthy, I just absolutely love. The Road has probably become his most famous because of the movie, but the whole border trilogy, I mean, he just gets inside of people’s head. The inner dialogue is unbelievable. And then Tom Robbins Still Life with Woodpecker. That’s kind of an old one, but the whole story is so absurd, but he just makes it believable.

Tim Grahl (23:12): Tom Robbins?

John Jantsch (23:13): Yeah, he’s written a handful of books, but that’s my favorite one of his. Awesome. Well, Tim, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Tell people where they can find out about the workshops that you do and Story Grid in general, and obviously find a copy of the

Tim Grahl (23:26): Shithead. Yeah, so story grid.com. But really, if you want to know what we do, go to just look up Story Grid on YouTube. I’ve got about a hundred videos on there, and that’s the best way to really dig into who we are and what we do. We run the workshops every month. I highly recommend those. And then shitheads available@storygrid.com, Amazon, all the places you buy books.

John Jantsch (23:48): Awesome. Again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you soon. One of these days out there on the road, Tim,

Testimonial (24:03): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients, it’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever

John Jantsch (24:19): Made. What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash Scale.

Clone of Weekend Favs September 7th

Clone of Weekend Favs September 7th written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

Doodle helps schedule meetings by allowing participants to choose from suggested time slots without the hassle of back-and-forth emails.
NightCafe Creator is an AI-powered tool that generates art from text prompts and allows users to explore and create stunning digital artwork.
Spark Mail is an email client that prioritizes important emails, enables team collaboration, and helps manage inbox overload efficiently.

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Connect with me on Linkedin!

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs you can find them here.

The 7 Ways You Might Be Doing Email Wrong

The 7 Ways You Might Be Doing Email Wrong written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Jay Schwedelson

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Jay Schwedelson, a leading marketing expert in the US known for his research-backed approach. He’s the Founder of SubjectLine.com, a top-ranked free subject-line rating tool, and has tested over 15 million subject lines.

Jay Schwedelson also founded GURU Media Hub, hosting the GURU conference, the world’s largest email marketing event, attracting over 50,000 attendees annually. His popular podcast, “Do This, Not That!: For Marketers,” is a top-rated marketing podcast in the U.S. Through Outcome Media, Jay’s team runs over 40,000 campaigns annually for top global brands. He’s been recognized as a top industry leader and inducted into the Hall of Fame at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.

We discuss the importance of subject lines in email marketing and share tips for improving open rates. We also cover:

The significance of call-to-action buttons
The timing of email sends
ESPs’ (Email Sending Providers) role
The relationship between email and landing pages
List hygiene and the impact of AI and privacy on email marketing

Key Takeaways:

Subject Lines: Your subject lines are crucial for getting emails opened. Starting the subject line with a number or fully capitalizing the FIRST WORD can increase open rates, and using an ellipsis or a question mark at the end of the subject line can also pique curiosity.

Call-to-action buttons: CTAs should be written in the first person to increase click-through rates. The language should focus on what’s in it for your recipient rather than what you want.

Timing: We all know the timing of your email depends on the type and target audience. Newsletters do well at the start of the week, while offer-based emails may perform better on weekdays or weekends. Or do they?

ESPs: The selection of an ESP should be based on your business’s specific needs. Different ESPs specialize in various types of email marketing, such as B2C or B2B. When you’re tempted to blame your ESP, ask if you chose wisely.

Landing Pages: Email and landing pages should be closely connected. Emails should direct recipients to specific landing pages that are optimized for conversion. Social proof, such as testimonials, can make your landing pages more compelling.

List Hygiene: List hygiene is essential for maintaining email deliverability. Hard bounces should be immediately removed from the list, and soft bounces should be monitored and removed after multiple occurrences.

AI: AI is expected to significantly impact email marketing in the future. Apple’s iOS 18 will introduce AI-driven email bucketing, which will affect how emails are categorized and displayed on mobile devices.

Chapters:

[00:00] Introduction and Background of Jay Schwedelson

[03:09] Optimizing Call-to-Action Buttons

[05:22] Timing Email Sends for Different Types of Emails

[07:05] Creating a Seamless Connection Between Email and Landing Pages

[09:04] Maintaining List Hygiene for Better Email Deliverability

[17:04] The Future of Email Marketing: AI and Email Bucketing

[19:19] Conclusion and Contact Information

More About Jay Schwedelson:

Check Out his Website

Visit Guru Conference

Add him on LinkedIn

This episode was brought to you by:

ActiveCampaign

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Wix

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Duct Tape Transcript

Jay Schwedelson (00:00): No matter who you are, it could be the NFL, Amazon IBM, Salesforce, I don’t care. Some portion of all your email will go to the junk folder and spam folder. It’s fact, every time you press send on an email campaign is an opportunity to test something. And it doesn’t have to be complex or sophisticated because a lot of people hear that like, oh, I don’t have time, I don’t have the infrastructure. I don’t want to do the setup. Listen, nobody does, right? All you want to do is what did we do last time? Okay, let’s try something else.

John Jantsch (00:30): This. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jay Schwedelson. He’s the leading marketing expert in the us known for his research backed approach. He’s the founder of subject line.com, a top ranked free subject line rating tool and has tested over 15 million subject lines. He’s also founded Guru Media Hub hosting the Guru Conference, the world’s largest email marketing event, attracting over 50,000 attendees annually. So Jay, welcome to the show.

Jay Schwedelson (01:02): Fired up to be here. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (01:04): So your agency in your literature mentioned that you sent out over 6 billion email messages in the last year. So I have to ask, what’d you learn? What are you seeing as trends going on in email?

Jay Schwedelson (01:16): Yes, we do send out a lot of email about half what we send out to consumer, half what we send out business. We always are seeing new trends and new things, and I guess the thing I try to think about is getting that email open. People just don’t realize the importance of that subject line. And so I think if people paid a little bit more attention to some of the small things that you can do to radically change the number of people opening up your emails, it can really improve the outcome and how you’re using email.

John Jantsch (01:40): Yeah, yeah. It’s funny, I’ve been sending email for years and I’m always puzzled by the fact you’ll look at your stats and it’s like this email got 15% more opens in last same time of the week, same time of day. It’s basically my newsletter subscribers. Y And I’m guessing you have discovered that subject line just really has a lot to do with people opening.

Jay Schwedelson (02:01): Yeah, I’ll give you some quick wins that you can do that literally cost you nothing, take three seconds to do, and they really do have an impact. So for example, whatever you start your subject line with really matters. Nobody actually reads the whole subject line. You could literally put the end of the subject line j’s a big loser and no one does see it because no one reads the whole thing, right? So what you put the first few characters matters if you start your subject line with an actual number, right? The number seven, the seven pitfalls. To avoid the three hottest fashion trends this winter, the five things every HR pro needs to know, just a number starting there will actually increase the percentage of people opening your email by about 15%. Why? Because it stands out a little bit. And when people are doing that social scroll in their inbox like, oh, wait a minute, I’ll take a look at this, and it’s in the subconscious.

(02:50): Other things that help you stand out is when you fully capitalize the first word or two words in your subject line, maybe it’s the word new or just released and you capitalize every letter in those first word to two words, it works so well. And then other little things that work, which sounds ridiculous, is at the end of your subject line, putting the three dots, the ellipsis, something that all SMB owners need to know dot, just putting those three dots. We are inquisitive. Human beings are inquisitive. We need to know the answer to stuff. So using those three dots or using a question mark, it will lift a percentage of people opening your emails by a ton. So little things, big impact. That’s what I’m all about.

John Jantsch (03:33): How far can you take that? I mean, I get a lot of clickbaity ones and they follow that formula. Five things you should stop doing today and then you get in there, it’s like these are five things everybody talks about. I mean, so do you sometimes run the risk of being so intriguing with the subject line that you then don’t deliver?

Jay Schwedelson (03:53): Well, that’s a great point. You need to deliver, right? So the way email works is it’s like links in a chain. You have a good subject line and they decide to open it up. Then you have a really compelling headline. Okay, I’m going to now go a little bit further. Now you start to deliver on the promise that you made in that subject line, that headline with whatever the bullets are or the offer that you made. And then you have a really compelling call to action button that doesn’t say something horrible like register or download. It says something really good, and then you get ’em to that landing page or that destination page. And again, you take ’em through each step. So if you’re not delivering on your initial promise that you made in that subject line, then you’re wasting everybody’s time. So I couldn’t agree with you more.

John Jantsch (04:33): Okay. I want to go back to something you just said because I get a lot of emails that say download or register in a button. What should they be saying?

Jay Schwedelson (04:41): So the secret sauce and email when it comes to the buttons in your email, your call to action buttons, those rectangular things, if you write them in first person, you’ll see an increased click-through rates by over 25%. What do I mean? So let’s say you were promoting a webinar and you had two versions of your emails and the buttons in one email said register. That’s what you want them to do. But then the other ones that you’re testing say, I want in or register versus save my seat. What sounds better to you? You get a little bit excited. Again, it’s in the subconscious. Nobody actually gets excited, but you have to think about what is in it for the person, not what you want. You want them to register, you want them to download, you want them to download that piece of content instead of download is Yes, I want my free whatever report, right? You want the person to feel that they’re part of the action and instead of telling people what to do, get them involved with doing that thing and it actually does matter and all these things cost you nothing and they take five seconds.

John Jantsch (05:44): Yeah, I always love the ones that write under. It says, no, I don’t want to be better looking and have a better sex life or whatever it says,

Jay Schwedelson (05:52): Those work so well, you’re a hundred percent right. The negative ones do better than anything. It’s phenomenal. I saw one for a newsletter the other day. It was Subscribe to this newsletter and it says, no, I can’t read. And I was like, it’s amazing. I was like, that is amazing.

John Jantsch (06:10): So you mentioned the testing word a couple of times there. Should we be constantly AB testing or whatever format you use, subject lines, even actual content? What’s your take on testing?

Jay Schwedelson (06:22): Every time you press send on an email campaign is an opportunity to test something. And it doesn’t have to be complex or sophisticated because a lot of people hear that like, oh, I don’t have time, I don’t have the infrastructure, I don’t have to do the setup. Listen, nobody does, right? All you want to do is what did we do last time? Okay, let’s try something else this time. If that’s the least that you could do and it’s not scientific, that’s okay. It’s better than not trying something new. Every time you hit send, you should be testing something. The key thing about testing is you always want to make sure your tests are different enough. The problem a lot of people make is they go, okay, we’re going to change this one little thing, right? This one image, this one little button. Your tests have to be really disparate from the last thing that you did or else small test changes equal small result changes. Significant changes equal significant result changes. Even if it doesn’t do as well, that’s important too. So testing always.

John Jantsch (07:22): Alright, so another T word timing used to always be like conventional wisdom was never send on a Friday or always send on a Tuesday at seven. I mean, are the rules around timing?

Jay Schwedelson (07:33): That’s a great point. It’s so funny. Everybody follows the herd. So everyone used to be like, well never send on a Monday or Friday because everyone’s upset that they’re at work or they’re looking forward to the weekend. It’s not going to do well. So what did everybody do? Everybody collectively with one brain, they start sending on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, which led to about 85% of all email being sent on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, which then led to everybody saying, oh, we should be sending on Monday and Fridays because nobody else’s, and it’s just unbelievable what we all do. But here’s the way you really should be thinking about it is not all email is the same. And I think that’s the problem in general. You have newsletters, you have promotional emails, you have transactional emails, you have all these different buckets, and so you need to find the right days and the right times for each of those things.

(08:19): So for example, newsletters, they do really well at the start of the week, Monday, Tuesday, and early in the morning, five to 6:00 AM that’s not going to do really well for your offer based emails, right? They’re going to be maybe 10:00 AM or 11:00 AM and if you’re on the consumer side, the weekend’s going to be the best time for you. So the type of email you’re sending is really important. And then in terms of how you’re measuring everything, what you really want to do is almost think of yourself as if you’re a swimmer, you just want to be beating yourself. It’s not, oh, what’s my industry’s average open rate, click-through rate. It’s like, who cares? It’s on my newsletter. I get an average open rate and click-through rate of this. And I tested this week and it did better than that and I beat myself and that’s great. And on my promotional emails, I tried Wednesday instead of Thursday and it went up from this to that. And you want to benchmark yourself and beat yourself, and that’s how you’ll find the right time and the right day and the right cadence.

John Jantsch (09:18): Yeah, I’ve actually had some of my best commercial successes on Sunday nights for business emails, and I think it’s just that’s when a lot of times business folks are kind of collecting their thoughts for what’s going to happen for the

Jay Schwedelson (09:28): Weekend. Totally agree. Absolutely.

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(10:37): So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue and save precious time by upgrading to active campaign today. Hey, digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things that you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio. Work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites. Alright, time’s up, but the list keeps going. Why don’t you step into Wix Studio to see more. So let’s talk about ESPs for a minute. They all pretty much have the same feature set, work the same. Is there something we should be considering? Should we be doing our own email servers? What’s your take on ESPs in general?

Jay Schwedelson (11:37): Yeah, so ESPs, email sending providers, they are the platforms that everybody uses to send out their emails. It could be the MailChimps Constant Contact, HubSpot, Salesforce, you name it. And first off, I don’t believe anybody should be setting up their own mail servers in house. Not because you can’t do it, but you can’t keep up with the changes and it’s impossible. It’s just not worth the time, energy, or money. And these platforms are relatively inexpensive, so nobody actually loves their ESP, they just don’t. So if you’re like, oh, mine’s not that great, I’ve never met a human being that’s like, oh my god, the best ESP, that’s not a thing. It’s some version of okay, not great. That being said, what should you be thinking

John Jantsch (12:15): About? Early days, people loved MailChimp. I will say that though, they had some rabid followers, not so much anymore because big and bought. But anyway,

Jay Schwedelson (12:25): You’re right. No, you’re right. Early on there were a handful of people like, oh my God, this is so cool. But now everybody, I don’t know. I just feel like everyone gets frustrated. And also unrealistic expectations. Here’s a secret that people don’t realize no matter who you are, it could be the NFL, Amazon IBM, Salesforce, I don’t care. Some portion of all your email will go to the junk folder in a spam folder. It’s fact. But people get frustrated when they send out an email like, oh, someone went to junk. My ESP must stink or whatever. And that’s just not true. But what I would tell, the advice I would give when you’re thinking about your ESP is different, ESPs are good at different things. So if you are doing direct to consumer email marketing, there are certain platforms that are really good for direct to consumer email marketing.

(13:10): If you are doing B2B or B2B SaaS company selling like accounting software to enterprise level contacts, there are ESPs that are focused on making sure their email deliverability to enterprise level business to business organizations is spot on. If your marketing to education professionals or government professionals, different ESPs have different specialties and the reason they specialize is they know how to navigate getting the emails into these organizations, into these things. So you really want to make sure whoever you’re going to be working with, what is their roster of clients? Do they look like you? Are they in the same market that you are? Because if they’re not, you’re probably using the wrong platform.

John Jantsch (13:48): And we could go way deep into the servers and why they get whitelisted and all those kinds of good things. But talk a little bit about the connection between email and landing pages. A lot of people are just sending out generic stuff, maybe they send you to our website, but a lot of times we’re sending out offers, but hopefully that offer is going to a specific landing page. Talk about the relationship of those two elements.

Jay Schwedelson (14:12): Yeah, it’s everything. I’ll tell you, one big fat mistake that everybody makes is that about 19% of all click-throughs and emails, regardless of what they’re promoting, are clicks on the logo within your email. Nobody ever thinks about that. And I would bet the overwhelming majority of people have their logo traffic going to their homepage and not the offer destination page, not the landing page. That is one in five clicks. The other thing that people do is they stick social sharing links at the bottom of their emails because that’s their format. But here you are, you have an offer. When you have an offer, all you’re hoping for is that offer gets taken advantage of. You’re not hoping for more people to follow you on Instagram. You’re not hoping people click on your logo, get homepage. So take every conduit to response and send them to that landing page.

(14:55): That’s where you want them to go. And then when they get to that landing page, think about everything. If somebody is filling out your form, are the fields laid out horizontally or vertically because vertically is going to do way better than horizontally. Are you asking too many must fill fields? If you’re asking somebody zip code, do you really need their state potentially? And make sure that on that landing page, you also have some kind of social proof that you put right near that final submit button where it says a quote or a testimonial from anybody at anything. These are the most comfortable socks ever. This is the accounting software that changed our company. One final testimonial right near that final button increases the conversion rate significantly, the last validation step. It’s that last thing for people to feel like, you know what, I feel comfortable doing this. So there are little things on your landing page that radically can change the outcome of your performance.

John Jantsch (15:52): It always drives me crazy, is people who use templated stuff and so it’ll have their whole navigation on the top. It’s like, don’t do that. What’s the one thing you want the person to do when they get here? Remove everything else. Tell you. Right. Let’s talk about list hygiene. You’ve been doing this for a while. We all know that. I don’t know what the statistics are, but I remember hearing at some point, 10 to 15% of your list goes bad, but every 90 days or something like that. And if you’re not cleaning it up, you really ruin your reputation. Talk about your, not just how important, but let’s just agree it’s important and what’s your approach to keeping a list clean?

Jay Schwedelson (16:27): Yeah, so the attrition rate annually is going to be at least 20% for your database. You’ll lose about 20% of your database. And a whole other topic we can get into is being intentional about growing your list. If you’re not intentional about growing your list, you’ll have no list within a few years. But in terms of data hygiene, if you are not at least once a year, I like to recommend twice a year using a email validation service and there’s a zillion of them and passing your data through an email validation service to look for spam traps, to look for problematic email addresses. You are on a path to total failure and horrible deliverability, and a lot of these services are super inexpensive and you need to be doing this. It’s like not going to the dry cleaner. If you have a suit and you’ve worn it 10 times, eventually you got to bring the thing to the dry cleaner because it’s going to be a problem. That’s how you should be viewing your database.

John Jantsch (17:18): And some ESPs are going to say, Hey Jay, you’ve been getting X amount of bounces. Clean it up or no more. Right? And so what should we be doing? Alright, that’s once a year. What should we be doing monthly? I mean, I mentioned bounces. Hard bounces should just be immediately taken on care of.

Jay Schwedelson (17:32): Yeah, so when you send out an email, some percentage is going to bounce and there’s really two kinds of bounces. There’s hard bounces and soft bounces, and any platform you’re going to be able to receive the breakout of those two things. A hard bounce must immediately be taken off your list because when you send out to your email database and you have hard bounces, the receiving email infrastructure that are out there, the Gmails and Yahoos and Outlooks and Comcast, all that stuff, when they see you trying to deliver to hard bounces, they think that you are a bad sender. They think that you are not caring about your database, and that is when they will flag you. That is when you’ll go to spam and junk is for not removing your hard bounces. So immediately remove those and soft bounces your ESP, you should make sure there’s a routine set up that after three soft bounces they get put on the sideline as well. That’s generally a good rule of thumb.

John Jantsch (18:25): Let’s talk about the future and pretty much every conversation I’ve been having, although we’re 16 minutes and 52 seconds in this recording, and this is the first mention of ai, but I will mention what’s the impact of AI on email, sending personalization, all the things?

Jay Schwedelson (18:42): Yeah, we have big changes coming in 2025, massive. So Apple is about to roll out iOS 18 at the end of 2024, and in this rollout, they’re going to be making major changes to the mail app on our phones. That’s the little blue icon that we all use to check our mail. About 47% of people check their mail regardless of what email address, business consumer doesn’t matter. They use that mail app on their phone to check their email. In iOS 18, they’re going to be rolling out Apple Intelligence, which is Apple’s AI tools, and they are for the first time going to be within our email inboxes on our phones bucketing using AI, bucketing our emails and do four different buckets. So they’re going to be taking our email as we are receiving them. They’re going to have primary, they’re going to have promotional, they’re going to have updates. And so basically if you’re sending out promotional email, it’s not just going to go in the regular inbox anymore, it’s going to go in this promotions tab. And so the game’s going to be how do we write our emails? How do we construct our emails to give us the best chance to show up in the tab that we want to show up in? So that’s going to be all AI driven, and so there’s going to be a lot to learn as 2025 unfolds.

John Jantsch (19:49): What about security and privacy? More and more it seems like, although it seems like when GDPR was coming around, the sky was falling. It seems now that while people are talking about it, it’s not with the same panic. Do you see more and more privacy and security things impacting email

Jay Schwedelson (20:06): In the United States especially? It’s really relegated to what the platforms decide, what Gmail decides, what Apple decides what these guys decide, because we have not had any federal privacy legislation as relates to email since 2003. CAN spam, which is the weakest law you could possibly imagine.

John Jantsch (20:23): No enforcement either Canada, yeah,

Jay Schwedelson (20:25): No enforcement, right? There’s a patchwork of different state laws, but those are also all over the map. I mean, Canada has Castle and Europe has GDPR, and those are really viable laws related to email. So really the things to keep an eye on in terms of privacy is what is Gmail making us do? What is Apple making us do? Because that’s going to be really what we have to follow in the foreseeable future. There’s not going to be any federal legislation related to email.

John Jantsch (20:50): Yeah. Well, Jay, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and talking a little bit about email. Is there someplace you’d invite people to connect with you and find out more about your work?

Jay Schwedelson (20:59): Sure. So I got my own podcast too. It’s called Do This, not that for marketers. You could check that out. I do four episodes every week, 10 minutes each, so that’s fun. And then I’m always on LinkedIn. I post way too much stuff there, so connect with me, drop me a DM on LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you. And you can also just go to jay sch wetson.com, my full name, and you can find everything you want to know about me right there.

John Jantsch (21:23): Plus you can always play around with the free subject line.com app as well, or tool as well.

Jay Schwedelson (21:27): Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. Awesome.

John Jantsch (21:29): Yeah, so thanks again. Hopefully we will run into you one of these days out there on the road, Jay,

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Charge More With The Power of Pure Motive Service

Charge More With The Power of Pure Motive Service written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Joe Crisara

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Joe Crisara, author of What Should We Do? How to Win Clients, Double Profit, and Grow Your Home Service Sales. He shares his journey from struggling home service contractor to helping thousands of contractors increase their revenue.

Joe’s “don’t worry about it” mentality, is rooted in his blue-collar upbringing where his father often provided services for free, and once nearly led him to bankruptcy. Initially, Joe believed that cutting costs and lowering prices would build client loyalty, but he learned that true service isn’t about slashing prices. Instead, it’s about offering high-quality, long-term solutions that anticipate future problems. Now, through his ‘Pure Motive Service’ approach, Joe provides options that cater to different needs and budgets while ensuring excellence and proactively preventing issues.

Joe’s ‘Pure Motive Service’ involves providing solutions that prioritize:

Quality
Reliability
Safety
Health

He also discusses the significance of managing opportunities and anticipating future needs, offering practical advice for service professionals, and highlighting the role of marketing in delivering exceptional service.

Key Takeaways

Providing high-quality service and multiple options can significantly increase revenue for home service contractors.
The concept of ‘pure motive service’ involves providing solutions prioritizing quality, reliability, safety, and health.
Managing opportunities and anticipating future needs are crucial for delivering exceptional service.
Marketing plays a vital role in communicating the value of a service and building trust with customers.

Chapters

[00:00] Introduction and Background

[01:20] The Pivotal “Aha” Moment

[04:31] Offering Multiple Options and Pricing Strategies

[07:57] Pure Motive Service and Anticipating Needs

[11:53] Articulating Solutions and Selling Premium Options

[18:08] The Role of Marketing in Delivering Exceptional Service

More About Joe Crisara:

Add Service MVP on LinkedIn
Check out his Website
Grab a copy of What Should We Do?: How to Win Clients, Double Profit & Grow Your Home Service Sales

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by:

Oracle

Nobody does data better than Oracle. Train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive at oracle.com/ducttape

Wix

Work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix Studio sites.

Duct Tape Transcript

Joe Crisara (00:00): If the client has to ask you for a solution, it’s too late, but you should have thought about a solution before you did that. Great service providers don’t just solve a problem. 15% of what they do solves today’s problem. About 85% of what they do solves the problems in the future. When you express those things, quality, reliability, safety, health, these are the reasons when somebody says, can you lower the price? And I always say, well, you know what? I wouldn’t be doing a good service if I were to cut corners on that

John Jantsch (00:28): Out. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Joe Crisara. Once a struggling home service contractor transformed his failing business through a pivotal aha moment that I think we’re going to get into today. And now he helps thousands of contractors increase their revenue by three to five times with his Pure Motive service system. He’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today. What should we do, how to Win Clients, double Profit and Grow Your Home Service Sales. So Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Crisara (01:04): Well, John, thank you. First, lemme start by saying though, I want everybody to know this, that John Jantsch, I’m talking to the OG here, this dude, he changed my life. He didn’t even realize it, but the Duct Tape Marketing book and just, I did have a small mention in that book when I was first starting was we had our website that had the content we delivered and I was mentioned in the book, what an honor, I almost melted when I saw my name in print. But definitely John, it’s been the service you provided. It’s an honor to be here, an honor to help the home service professionals and any other service professional doctors and anybody else who needs to create higher value when they communicate their solution to the clients.

John Jantsch (01:42): Well, I appreciate that, Joe. I can’t decide when people call me the OG of marketing if that really just stands for old, but I’ll take it, I’ll take it. So I mentioned in your intro the idea of the pivotal aha moment. You talk about it in the book, and I know you’ve shared this millions of times, but why don’t you share that kind of what set you on this path?

Joe Crisara (02:05): It’s actually right in the very beginning of the book, which is that I used to think, John, that as a home service professional, I grew up from a blue collar background. My dad was a plumber and stuff like that. And so we were always doing everything ourself. We never hired a service even though my dad was in the service business, and so I was always trying to save people money on things. It was my paradigm that I looked at the world as a service provider. How can I do things a little for less money to help the consumer out in a way? Because I witnessed my father doing that. He’d go through our church and he would help fix all their plumbing problems in their homes without, and they’d offer him money. He’d be like, no, don’t worry about it. So I grew up with that kind of give service and don’t worry about it kind of mentality.

(02:48): Don, it almost drove me into bankruptcy and there was an aha moment I had where it was and I was trying to save a client money and I lowered my price. I wanted to keep them as loyal clients. I figured the best to do that, to show my love is to lower the price for them. And I realized that they didn’t go with me. They went with another company and I was like, huh, what happened? And then I went to a contractor meeting and it turns out one of my best friends had a competing competitive company, but we were good friends from going to trade school. He said he got the job and I said, well, what did you sell it for? How could your price be lower than mine? I already dropped the price by like 700 bucks. And he said, no, Joe, I charged because I dropped my price from 2,500 down to 1800.

(03:28): He said, no, Joe, I charged $9,857. I’m like, holy crap, let me see. So he had it in his briefcase. He showed me that the customer didn’t go with me and the reason they didn’t go with me, I simply did not offer enough service. I tried to lower the price and cut corners on the service figuring how could I find a way to do it for less money to help the consumer? And it turns out I wasn’t helping the consumer. And then since that moment in 1991 and 1992 was I learned that people are motivated by a better service and they will pay more money voluntarily without trying to suggest that they do. So as you can tell by that first story, I’m not a really great salesperson, but what I am good at doing is providing an environment where the customer can buy without selling them. Does that make sense, sir John?

John Jantsch (04:16): Yeah, a hundred percent. And I know you talk about offering multiple options to customers that there might be the here’s the basic package, but here’s what’s going to make your water heater perform for years if we do these kind of add-ons. And a lot of times letting people choose really helps. It’s a great way to more profitability, isn’t it?

Joe Crisara (04:35): Well, it’s like great customer service in the trust funnel that you have so wisely helped us develop and articulate very simply. And simplicity is one of my greatest values. And I feel like by looking at what you created in that we fit right into that trust funnel perfectly. Because if you think about it, it’s not just a water heater, it’s the things that go around the water heater. You can say, well, the doctor does surgery on me. The surgery doesn’t cost hardly anything. It’s the hospital, the surroundings, the environment, everything else that the serene room where it’s completely sterilized from top to bottom, that costs more money than the doctor truthfully. And so I think that we don’t realize that when you get Starbucks, you’re paying for a cup and you’re paying for everything, the real estate to find the Starbucks. And the same thing is true for plumbers or landscapers or anybody who does roofing and things like that.

(05:30): They don’t realize that the part that they do is only about 15% of it. But there’s other things like if you’re doing a water heater, well, how was the main shutoff valve? If it’s not working properly, let’s replace that to give options. Now, of course you did mention start the bottom working way up. Now here’s the truth there. Here’s the science of pricing, which is in the book. So I definitely recommend that if you wanted to read the book, it’s going to go over the science of pricing and it goes over giving one price and what statistics behind that, if you only give price, you’re going to have the lowest conversion rate and the lowest revenue and cutting corners on the work, you’re going to have low quality work. You’re only giving because which price are we going to choose? We’re going to choose the cheapest one, and then we’re going to say the next one is good, better, best, which is starting at the bottom and then trying to upsell people.

(06:12): The best way to do it though it’s found out because that will give you 40% people upgrading if I start at the bottom and say, here’s a better water here, here’s a tankless or whatever, and here’s the one that has more protection and warranties and stuff like that. So that would be the 40% upgrade, but you would have an 80% upgrade if you started with the premium option first and then tiered yourself down to the next one and then finished with the economy one. So if I was doing a plumber, I would say the top option would be endless hot water purification. You’d have a wifi connected shutoff valve to shut the water off in this house if there was ever a flood when you’re on vacation, things that go with it, a 12 year warranty. And the bottom option would be go to Home Depot and buy a tank and I’ll put it in for 1200 bucks or whatever.

(06:57): So the top option, and then also I believe in the monthly payment aspect, the teaching service professionals that not only should you make it the premium mid-range economy like I talk about, but also let’s make those prices affordable by anticipating that nobody’s got, if I did that thing with the endless hot water and the whole thing I mentioned there, it’s probably going to be $15,000. Some homes could be $20,000. So I can’t expect people to be pulling $20,000 out of their wallet when they just have no hot water, but I can ask ’em to do 1 97 a month for 10 years. Does that make sense? So definitely that’s everything. That’s all the things that we all those 47 years of the crashing this way, John, they have about 24 years of crash and burns and I got about 24 years of figuring out the right way of doing it. But the crash and burns are very impactful and they leave scars, and those are reminders of what to do the right way as opposed to do it the wrong way. Makes sense, John? Yeah,

John Jantsch (07:51): Absolutely. If you don’t learn anything, it was just a mistake. That

Joe Crisara (07:55): Was it. That’s it.

John Jantsch (07:56): Yeah, and it’s interesting too because I think we make a lot of assumptions like, oh, I don’t want to charge ’em 30,000 or whatever it is. They’ll never pay that. Well, we don’t know that. And it’s not even that they won’t pay that. It’s that they want the level of what that’ll bring them. When you gave that initial example, they may have actually not gone with you because they thought, well, how good could it be, right for that cheaper price?

Joe Crisara (08:21): That’s right. It’s like he’s lowering the price on me. He’s giving me a discount deal when it comes to heating my family. I don’t want comfort of my family, I don’t want discount, I want done. And I think that’s something about it. I think we all innately, I always make a thing, if I went to Paris, France or whatever, and I couldn’t even speak French, but I saw how many euros, if I saw a menu in front of the restaurant, it said 75 euros for this one and five euros for the one at the bottom, I would probably say, well, I’m hungry. I want to get the one that’s 50 to 75. I can’t even read French, but I do know it probably going to get more and it’s going to be better if I spend more, right? So I think innately we don’t give consumers enough credit for doing that. But one thing I will, and I have some golden nuggets reserved everybody to not only do that but make it successful. There’s a couple I call small bigs that I can share on this podcast. I’m going to give you some golden nuggets that if you do want to do a premium mid-range and economy choice, that there’s some key things that are going to make that pop even better, which I definitely can’t wait to share with you guys.

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(10:19): That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape. Hey, digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things that you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio. Work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites. Alright, time’s up, but the list keeps going. Why don’t you step into Wix studio to see more. I want you to unpack the concept of pure motive service because when you gave your intro, you were talking, or early on you were talking about how you just wanted to serve, you wanted to help people and that led you to almost going out of business. There’s an element of that in pure motive service. So tell me how that’s different than going out of business.

Joe Crisara (11:25): Well, I think everybody already has, certainly John Jantsch has pure motive service in his heart. I’ve witnessed it so I know what it is and I can define it very clearly. What it is this, it’s basically how can I provide a service that is, gives people a range of the quality and reliability that I can give them. There’s the highest quality and then there’s the lowest quality to let people have a choice at all that say, here’s the best way to do it and here’s the cheapest way to do it and here’s the way in the middle, more professional. And then I have one that’s a higher safety and health that has not just a water heater, but water purification, maybe flood protection. So we don’t have any safety issues in the home. Then we have the best service. The top option will have a 12 year warranty on it with no, can’t write a check for anything.

(12:12): The bottom option will have no warranty. You got it at Home Depot, I can’t warranty something like that. And then the ones in the middle will be five, seven years. So you see the warranty is expressed by how many years? I’m going to back it up and you could price, by the way, the warranty and service is a profit center that will be 38% to 42% revenue at an 80% gross profit for any service professional that’s out there. Whether you’re, I mean, landscapers definitely would need a service membership to keep track of what’s going on at the property. Really any kind of a service business needs to continue the service and anticipate what’s next and that’s the service there. But here’s the big, here’s the thing I was talking about this the golden nugget. When you express those things, quality, reliability, safety, health, these are the reasons when somebody says, can you lower the price?

(12:57): And I always say, well, you know what? I wouldn’t be doing a good service if I were to cut corners on that option. Now we do have other options that are lower if you want to choose that. So it’s kind of anticipating that people are going to negotiate. And so we’re kind of already built the negotiation into our options. So they look at the top one and they go, Joe, that’s a lot. You’re asking me for water purification, everything like that. Can we do anything less than that? So yeah, we could just go without the water purification. That would bring the price down to this. Okay, but I like the water purification, right? Yeah. So once you introduce, see Americans and everybody in the world when you introduce a solution to them that’s right for ’em. Now here’s the key word. I’m going to give you the golden nugget.

(13:37): Here it is. You arrived here and your question was perfectly designed to do this. I didn’t know if you knew that or not, but here it is. It’s the word because, so if you can’t articulate the reason why you included water purification by using the word, because you can say, Joe, I just added the water purification in because of your daughter, Amy, when you told me she had eczema. I just felt like that would be the better way to go with the solution. And Joe, I also did the 12 year warranty because you told me you work as an accountant and a bookkeeper. I don’t want to make sure you can focus on your job. Let me focus on the water heater for 12 years and you focus on your family and focus on your job. So you have to have the reason why, and that’s where our training comes in, is that how do we teach people to articulate the pure motives in a way that is really quality, reliability, safety, health, customer service, defined by your actions, by putting it into your solutions and not just lip service, I call it John, where people talk like, oh yeah, we’re a high quality company.

(14:37): Really prove it by putting it in your prices and make it relevant to the customer. That’s the word. Because that’s one of the pure motives is to say, not only do you got to do all that, but all that has to be customized and relevant. So it doesn’t look like the plumbers just, or some of the service guy, the HVAC guy or electrician or whoever it is, even the accountant or a divorce attorney. It could be anybody. You’re not just throwing stuff in to fluff it up. You’re putting stuff in there because you can draw a line to anticipating what’s going to happen and preventing that before we run into a problem, I would say this, great service providers don’t just solve a problem. About 15% of what they do solves today’s problem, but 85% of what they do solves the problems in the future. Does that make sense, Sarah? Yeah,

John Jantsch (15:24): Absolutely. And that’s not going to be for everybody, but the percentage of the market that wants you to anticipate and appreciate you anticipating the problem, they’re more than willing to pay a premium, right?

Joe Crisara (15:35): Well, it’s close to a hundred percent of the people will see the benefit. But here’s the thing about it. Now they may not be able to afford the benefit or that’s the thing about, so what we’re trying to do is get our consumer to say something like this. So instead of saying, this is a ripoff, get out of my house, we don’t want that to happen. So what we’re trying to get a hundred percent of the people to say, if they don’t want it, if they want it, we want ’em to say pick an option and there’s the words, what should we do? Which one do you like? What should we do? And so here’s the options, what should we do? And then the customer’s like, man, I just didn’t know it would cost this much. And I’d be like, I understand it’s a high investment, but it’s an investment in your family, so what should we do?

(16:11): And they’re like, Joe, is it okay if I don’t buy this from you? See now that’s a little different tone rather than get out of my house is the rip off. So it’s much better if they say something like, Joe, I think I’m going to have to go with my brother-in-law who’s less money. And number one, I appreciate your effort and nobody ever presented anything. I feel amazed that you did all this for me. They see the effort that you’re putting into the thoughtfulness behind the solution, and nobody is going to insult you when they see that you made a customized relevant solutions for them. They may say, you know what? I already signed a contract for my brother-in-Law or something like that. So the ones we usually lose are people who already had plan B firmly in place and there was nothing we could have done really.

(16:56): But they’re calling, that’s a lot of people called to see if they can find a cheap price on their brother-in-Law so they can go back and tell the brother-in-Law, there’s a guy cheaper. But what they aren’t expecting is somebody who’s way better than their brother-in-Law and they’re kind of conflicted. So what we’re trying to achieve is happy customers who not only use the solution but refer it because they say nobody’s going to take care of, if I had my mother, I would give her a peer motive service provider. I know I won’t have to keep dealing with this and my mother won’t have to keep calling me. This guy’s going to take care of the thing today and also make sure she has grab a cyst bars, she’s got a knee replacement. So he’s going to think about those things, not just wait for the client to ask us for it.

(17:36): The key thing I believe, John, if the client has to ask you for a solution, it’s too late, but you should have thought about a solution before you did that. If you’re teaching marketing, I would say, well, here’s how we do it. I thought about, you’re probably going to ask me who’s going to do these funnels or whatever. Well, here are some providers I have chosen that would be a great person for you. So you anticipate the next step because if you’re lost, I don’t know who’s going to do the marketing funnel. And it’s like, thanks John for creating another problem for me. In a way it makes sense there. So I think every service needs to think if I am successful with my service, then there’s going to be something else they’re going to need that goes with it. Am I going to provide it or am I going to provide a sister company or somebody to help with that?

(18:16): Because when that funnel gets stopped, it doesn’t usually get stopped by the consumer, it’s stopped by the service provider who failed to keep doing the next step that the referral step or the step in that funnel. So I think we are the ones service MVP and the book is the thing that drives consumers through that funnel that doesn’t just matriculate without an accident by gravity. It does it because a great service provider is moving people on a conveyor belt that moves ’em through that funnel and keeps moving it through the funnel on the referral step and the action step. And that’s why I think what we do fits so perfectly together because it’s like people like you are some of the guiding lights behind. It’s just up to the standards of guys like David Fry, you might remember him and sure guys like you, I had to live up to that standard.

(19:09): If it doesn’t hit that standard, I’m like, it can’t be in the peer motives. So there’s six peer motives and definitely it’s defined very clearly in the book and I think it’s something you can give. You can be the cool part about it. It can be transparent with the client and say, I did this for you. I made these options and the reason I made ’em is this higher quality on the top option and I give you a range of other quality and you can be as transparent with the consumer. And there’s people right now who advertise, ask us about our pure mode of service in the marketing. So they actually use that as a marketing tag. I have some companies that say, where we always give you premium mid-range economy options or the call is free if we don’t do that. So they actually promise that in the marketing now. So it does kind of feather into that. We’re not a marketing company, but definitely the actions that the experience that we provide people in the field or in their home is definitely facilitated and amplified by the actions of people like you who help broadcast at the consumer.

John Jantsch (20:06): Well, anytime, I’ve always said this, anytime your business is coming into contact with a customer in any way, shape or form, there is a marketing function being performed.

Joe Crisara (20:16): Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s where marketing comes to life. You’re promising before the doorbell rings and we’re executing that promise after the doorbell rings because if your marketing is promising something, I think that’s where a lot of market people, when they do marketing fall short, they can’t think of the USP or something that we’re going to do. The reason is their company doesn’t operate better in differently. So the key to getting that selling position where it is unique is by doing service that’s unique. We call do magic moments, which is praise the effort of the people in the home to get through victories and challenges, diagnose the people, diagnose the system, make premium mid-range economy options, and then manage the opportunity to get the job done or reschedule it. Because if you leave an opportunity behind, it’s not the customer’s fault that you forgot about it, you just emailed it and that’s it guys, that’s what a hundred percent of people are doing.

(21:12): 90% of ’em are just emailing the quote and leaving, I don’t do that. I’m like, dude, let’s email the quote, but let’s also make an appointment to follow through and make a choice on this thing. If you don’t want to make a choice, let me withdraw the bid. I always tell people, because I’m not here to sell you, I’m just here to make sure I manage this opportunity to help you. I always say that if the service provider can’t manage that opportunity when they’re selecting solutions, how are they supposed to manage the entire job they’re doing or whatever they’re kind of trying to do. So I always say this is a demonstration of the work you’re going to do by managing the opportunity in the home. I think that’s why I really feel like it was so honored to be on this podcast. I was like, duck marketing is a cloak that fits around. We’re in the middle of that thing and this is like a cloak of comfort I feel right now being on the show with you.

John Jantsch (22:00): Well, Joe, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. Where would you invite people to connect with you and to find out more about what should we do? I know you work with a lot of home services, but this really applies to services. This just applies to businesses, a lot of what you’re talking about. So I’d love

Joe Crisara (22:17): It if people, it does connect with anybody who really, every business is a service business. I always look at it, even if you’re stuff, you’re creating a service to provide stuff to people. So we have our website called service mvp.com. If you go to that or if you wanted to email me at joe@servicemvp.com, we actually have a link. The book is on Amazon, it’s $25 and 95 cents, or if you get an audible, I think it’s 1995, but if you want to, I can’t do anything about the audible, but I can do something. We have a book funnel that if you email me, I’d be happy to send you the link to the funnel where you, all you got to do is pay for shipping for eight 90. We’ve sold over 10,000 books right now at this point. So we really, it’s off to a good start.

(22:59): We released it in March and this is our trust funnel. Use the material for such a very little amount of money that’s ridiculous and make more money first. And then if you want to examine what we can do for you to help your team and yourself succeed, and whether you’re a startup, there’s no better way to start than to make sure you create trust with you as the first prototype employee. Or if you’re a big company, which we have a lot of people, right? Remember you used to be living in Kansas City, I think right back in the old days. I did. May was one of our clients over there. You had one of our big clients. So definitely we have a lot of big companies and small companies that use this over 33,000 companies that use this. So definitely I would recommend doing that, Joe@servicemvp.com or just go to service service mvp com and get a free course and just try that. Make sense?

John Jantsch (23:48): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we will run into you one of these days out there on the road.

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