The Home Service Expert Podcast - Identifying What's Unique About Your Business To Build a Million-Dollar Brand

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

Rick Cesari specializes in direct response strategies and video marketing. A direct-to-consumer marketing consultant with over two decades of professional experience, he has used these techniques to help build iconic brands such as The Juiceman, Sonicare, The George Foreman Grill, OxiClean, and GoPro, and grow companies from start-ups to over a billion dollars in sales.  In this episode, we talked about direct response marketing and television marketing, strategic marketing plans, branding, video production...

There's definitely two sides to the marketing equation, and that is basically generating the business. But then if you don't fulfill the second half, which is completing the business in a way that all your clients are happy and you can only do that with good employees and a good business model, then your business is never going to grow. I don't have any magic answer as far as hiring people. But again, I think you hit the nail on the head that that is just as important at the front end part of the business, which is bringing in the leads, bringing in the business, and then executing the business. And, you know, I talk about that in my book, Building Billion Dollar Brands, that if you're going to build a brand and a long lasting brand and something that can grow to a billion dollars, you have to execute both sides of those equations. You have to be a good marketer on the front end and bring in the leads and the sales and then make sure that you have happy customers. Welcome to the Home Service Expert,

where each week Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello, and today I have Rick Cesari with me. He's an expert in direct response marketing, direct response television marketing, strategic marketing, plans, branding, video production, and mostly marketing. This is what he does. He's based out of Seattle, Washington. He owns a company, Rick Cesari, direct response video pioneer from 2018 toumer, D2C marketing consultant. For over two decades, he has used direct response strategies plus video marketing to help build iconic brands such as the Juice Man, Sonicare, the George Furman Grill, OxiClean, Clarisonic, Rug Doctor, Momentous Golf, and GoPro Camera, and many others.

Rick's strategies have helped grow four companies from startups to over a billion dollars in sales. He enjoys working and learning from other entrepreneurs and small business owners and continues to be on the cutting edge of new direct response and branding advertising campaigns, creating and implementing innovative cross-platform direct marketing strategies. Aside from being an entrepreneur and keynote speaker, he's the author of three books, Building Billion Dollar Brands, Buy Now, The Video Persuasion, and he's working on a fourth one. Rick, what's the resume? Well, thanks for the great introduction. I really appreciate it and I'm excited to be on your show, Tommy. Yeah, you know, it sounds like you just marketing is the real common core of what

you enjoy. And I got to tell you, my main focus in life is marketing and in secondary is sales. I love marketing and I love sales. So you're a businessman, an author, a speaker, and an expert in your field. Tell me a little bit about your journey, those brands, Sonicare, just GoPro, it's nuts. Tell me a little bit about what you've done and what you're working on and how you got to be where you're at today. Sure. All right. I'll try to give you the condensed version. Believe it or not, even though I enjoy marketing and have a lot of success in marketing, I actually never really studied that. I was a biology major in college. And my idea was that I was going to go to dental school. But after I graduated, I went to school up in Pennsylvania and I moved back down to Florida

where my family was living. And I was a little bit of a bum for a year as a bartender and a lifeguard and was kind of just enjoying life. But I realized that was, you know, got old pretty quickly. It was fun and everything, but I was always motivated to be successful, you know, got old pretty quickly. It was fun and everything, but I was always motivated to be successful, you know, whatever that definition means. And so I started reading a lot of books about investing in real estate. That was real popular. So your listeners know I'm 63. So this goes back quite a ways. We're talking about the middle eighties. And I basically went to a seminar, went out, did what the guy told me, bought and sold a house, and in two weeks made like $12,000. And I was like hooked. And I said, wow, this is fantastic.

So I was like a success story for the guy. And he asked me if I could help him with his marketing. And I just kind of had a knack for it. I started helping him promote real estate seminars. And just to show you how long ago it was, we were using newspaper ads to promote seminars. But really the common thread from even way back then to all the products I've done is really using direct response marketing, which we can get into talking about later. But after the real estate, I was working for someone else at that time, helping him do that. But then I started my own company when I moved out to Seattle. I had a friend from college that was living out here. And I moved out and started a business. And it was the

juicer business. It was called Trillium Health Products. And we just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right product. And sales took off. And that business grew from zero to 75 million in sales in about four years. And we sold it to a company in Chicago called Salton Housewares. And Salton liked the way we did the marketing. So they brought me two products. One was the homemade bagel maker. And the other one was a slanted grill, which basically ended up turning into the George

Foreman grill. So I did all of the marketing for the George Foreman grill. There was another company in Seattle, you mentioned Sonicare, they were a Seattle startup that reached out and asked me to work with them on on marketing. And, you know, they were having trouble getting their product into stores because it was a very expensive toothbrush, $150. And the most expensive one on the market at the time was a couple bucks. So they were having trouble with their retail sales. You know, we made a half hour infomercial that just helped educate people about gum disease and that took off.

And it's a very similar story with all those products, including OxyClean and Rug Doctor and more recently the GoPro cameras, which was a really fun project to work on. So it's been really fun to be able to work with great products and great companies and help them build their businesses. That's awesome. I can't wait to dive into this because I think that the secret sauce is learning how to make the phone ring and finding great people to fulfill the call booking. Sounds like you've done a lot of products, but this also goes to home service is building a brand. Today I was on a podcast with six other people talking about the power of a brand. And, you know, I want to talk to you a little bit about it because I got

this stuff kind of fresh in my mind. Sure. You could get more money than any other person when you've got a brand. You're top of mind awareness, Toma. You've got the ability to be the person that they go to and search for on Google. So your pay-per-click goes down. It's just so much more expensive to just do things without a brand. So talk to me about starting with a brand and building a brand and what that looks like.

Yeah, that's a great question. And you can't really just sit down on your computer and say, voila, I want to have a brand. Basically, it takes into account and your listeners, I think this is an important point, that what's your unique selling proposition? What's unique about your business or service that sets you apart from the competition? Then once you have that or can identify that or can create that, then you have to let people know that through all of the social media, marketing vehicles, however you can do that, why you're different. And obviously with Sonicare, the unique selling proposition was the sonic technology. And so that's an easy one. But let's take an example

of the Juice Man juicer. When we started marketing the Juice Man Juicer, there were other big juicer companies out there, Krups and Braun. And the thing that they were doing is they were marketing the juicer as a kitchen appliance. And when we came along with the Juice Man Juicer, we really focused on the benefits of drinking the juice, like you could have more energy. Yeah, have more energy, lower your cholesterol, live longer. And so we were selling the benefits of the juice and not the features of the product. And so that's a real important point as well, is really always focus on the benefits to the end user. And then I think the most important point and one common thread in all these products that have been built into brands is really the ability to market it

and using direct response principles where I have a just a general rule for any business. And that's like, if you're going to spend a dollar on advertising, you need to figure out a model that enables you to generate at least $2 of revenue in return. And if you can do that, it doesn't matter if you do it in newspapers, radio, online, Amazon, whatever, you can build a big substantial business. You know, I read a book probably years ago called No BS About Direct Marketing by Dan Kennedy. And one of the biggest things he says in his book was you could have direct response and still brand at the same time. A lot of people will tell you, you can't brand yourself and do direct response. Talk to me about your take on

that. First of all, I have both of Dan's books sitting on my desk right now, because I was going to bring them up in this podcast, because for your listeners, the people that have home-based businesses, if you own a business, you have to be a marketer. Otherwise, you're not going to have a successful business. So even if it's like you like accounting better than marketing, you have to learn at some point, at least understand the basic concepts, even if you're going to hire an outside agency. But that book you mentioned by Dan Kennedy is the first book I bought on direct marketing. And it's called the No BS Guide to Direct Marketing. And the other important point about building a brand that's in this book is basically,

he has a quote, which I love and I use in all my presentations. It goes, you don't brand to sell your product, you sell to build the brand. So to me, the marketing and the selling comes first. You're getting your product or service out into people's hands. Hopefully you've done a good job with your product or service. If people like it, they start to tell other people. And so the way you build your brand is really through good marketing and selling and getting your product and service out into the marketplace. I love it.

Yeah, I was listening to a guy named Ron Smith and his CDs. He was the pioneer of HVAC. I mean, he is the king of home service back in the day, the late 60s, early 70s. And he said something along the lines of yesterday, I was listening to it, is quit marketing your products as a home service-based company, like a garage door company, because your competitors could get the same products unless you've got a certain trademark. So learn to tell a story. Have you ever heard of a story brand where you, you know, like you did?

I love the idea of the juicer is, look, we're going to crush these vitamins down to where they're actually going to bring back your hair loss. They're going to give you the energy you've always had, better relations with your grandchildren or children. I think part of my story is I'm going to treat you like I treat my mom's house. We're going to fix the garage door. I have a garage door company. We're going to fix the garage door.

I got to fix my own mom's. And I tell the story about how I went into my mom's new garage door. It was a new construction. And the first thing I did was take off all the parts and put all my parts in that are high cycle that aren't going to break on her. I put a new opener in too. That's part of my brand story. What is your take on it? That's a fantastic story. And that sets you apart from the competition. Who wouldn't want to hire somebody who's going to treat you like they were working on their mother's house? And there's another book. And again, I'm a big reader of marketing books. There's one called Story Brand, which basically talks about telling your origin story.

And I know, you know, we're going to talk about video at some point, but everybody on their website should have a few crucial videos. One should be their origin story. And that's like, just like you said, what is it you do? And then why are you different than the other guys out there? And I'll give you a great example of one where if you're thinking of differentiation and you can't really think of anything, you know, there was a little shoe company about eight or nine years ago called Zappos.

And if you think about shoes or selling shoes, they're basically a commodity. Everybody can sell shoes, just like you mentioned garage doors or plumbing services or whatever. But Zappos basically said, we're going to be the best at customer service than any other company out there. And so people kept coming back to them. And eventually Amazon bought the business for about a billion dollars. So if you can even just differentiate yourself in that one area, that's a big deal because your competition usually isn't doing that. So I've got another books, you know, it sounds like we're both huge readers of books. I've got so many books. It's actually ridiculous. Last week I had Jay Abraham on the podcast.

Oh, he's awesome. He's definitely an idol. And I'm involved in the real estate market. I do motivated seller leads. I'm obsessed with my garage door business, but on the back end, I kind of got into real estate. So we've got a pretty similar background. I mean, there was a time where I was doing 200 motivated seller leads per day. Somebody that wanted to sell their house for cash. We're still over a hundred a day. And I just figured out a system to get them to the right end user that wants to buy houses. But I just wanted to tell you, like getting everything you can out of all you've got, that book discusses taking stuff from other industries and applying them to yours. And I love that concept. And then there's a book called Creating Competitive Advantage by Janie Smith.

When I was at a seminar and they recommended this book and it says, you've got to be objective, not subjective. You've got to be quantifiable, not arbitrary. It's got to be something that's not a cliche and it's something that's not claimed by the competition. So you can't say we're open nights and weekends. If you're a garage door HVAC company or a chimney company, you can't say we do drug tests and background checks and we're the best at what we do. And we're trustworthy and we're honest and

we've got ethics. I really feel like you got to be super, super subjective or objective. I screwed that up. But you really got to tell people, tell them the facts. Out of the last 7,000 jobs we did, and if you've got a CRM that could track this stuff, 6,982 started exactly on time. And the other 18, we got resolved within 24 hours. Yeah, that would make me feel very comfortable hiring that business. And I think you're touching on a subject that's really close to my heart. I'm a huge believer and I really feel that probably the single most powerful marketing tool you can have is a great authentic testimonial. And most businesses don't take the time to call up and talk to their customers. And again, if you have a website and you have happy customers on there telling their stories,

in addition to your origin story, but they're telling their experience with your company or your service, to me, it's not just to me, it's proven through all the marketing I've done that if you give me a half a dozen really authentic, powerful testimonials that are true, that are really for using a product, I know that I can successfully sell that product. People respond to testimonials. They're a very powerful tool. And if there's businesses out there that aren't using them, they should be. You know, one of the things that we've developed at A1 Garage Door Service is we try to get that testimonial before the technician leaves. We get the before and after

pictures of a new door, but we also say things like this, Rick, tell me exactly your story of why you called us out. And then the one thing I love to say is how did the new door make you feel? Yeah. And I think there's something different when you say, you know, when I got home and I saw that new garage door, I didn't realize it's like 40% of my curb appeal. It's literally the smile of my home. And it meant so much to me. Just there was so much pride in my home again. It almost looks like we completely make over the house. Yeah, that's really, really smart, Tommy. And you know this because you've generated testimonials. You don't ask yes or no questions. You ask questions. How did that make you feel? You know what I mean? So that the people can

elaborate and talk and basically share their feelings, which is what other people want to hear. You know, I've interviewed thousands and thousands of people over the years to do testimonials. And, you know, in my book, Video Persuasion, I have a list of 20 questions that I like to ask people about their experiences to pull out good testimonials. We got a lot of stuff here. There's so much to unpack, but I want to dive into videos because back in 2009, I was using a camera before phones had it and I was taking testimonials and I would say, hey, make sure you repeat after me. Did the technician show up on time and they'd say, you know what? The technician, Tommy, showed up exactly when he said he was going

to show up and he came with a smile. And I love the cell phone or a crappy camera because it doesn't look, the lighting's not perfect. And I just found that having great videos. And then when I make my videos, it's not all good and great when I'm trying to do like a YouTube video. It's more like, you know, today wasn't a great day. I'm just like you. It's not always great. I don't always wake up out of bed and things run perfectly and try to relate to those people that might be listening. Can you talk to me? I mean, you've got a million tools in your, your war chest for this kind of stuff, but let's talk about some of the basics and then get down to some of the gold

nuggets. Yeah. So I think you hit the nail on the head. You know, it used to be maybe 10, 12 years ago or even longer, you know, you'd have to rent an expensive camera and have great lighting. And it's really expensive to do a video shoot. And now because of social media, people are used to and actually respond better to kind of not overly produced videos, stuff that you can just shoot on your cell phone. Maybe the lighting isn't great and that type of thing, but they're so used to seeing that type of video and social media that they

respond better to it. It has a more authentic feel. I know right now is probably not the best time to bring this up. But to me, the best place I've ever found to get testimonials is if you ever go to a trade show and you have a booth at a trade show and people are just walking up to your booth and you have your iPhone or a small camera and you're just basically getting really off-the-cuff answer, just a few quick sound bites, and there's all sorts of excitement going on in the background. You know, you can't fake that. It's really real, and people respond to that realism, just like you were saying about the videos that you've been producing. Yeah, and I think that the videos that I make, I try to really think about how can I be different?

I'll tell you what my biggest thing I've came to realization, and this is like, I think I've solved world hunger with this one, Rick. So I'm so proud of it, but I can make the phone ring off the hook. I got to tell you, I've got everything turned off, all my marketing. I'm not doing mailers right now. I've got 125 technicians and I need, I got 25 training and 30 more coming in. I'm not doing mailers right now. I've got 125 technicians and I need, I got 25 training and 30 more coming in. I'm not doing pay-per-click. Of course, we're doing organic on Google, but I've got a problem like many people have is they can't hire fast enough. And I've got a whole team of people, recruiters, trainers. We've got a learning

management system. I've got a whole green room research shoot videos. The thing that I'm, that I feel like I've solved and it's not complete yet, but marketing is not just about selling your services and getting clients. It's about finding internal customers because internal customers, your employees solve everything. They solve your marketing because he who could pay more per lead will always win. He who could, there's so many things that having the right technicians, the smile on people's faces, they're honorable, they're ethical. And that's one thing is so many times I see this happening. And I love videos because videos, we could be doing a blood drive. I buy pizza for everybody and everybody goes live on Facebook and shares it.

And then I give them $1,500, $1,500 if they get an employee that comes in from their stuff and they say they mentioned them. And I mean, I'm paying out people every single week, $1,500. And it's become a recruiting machine to get great people because they don't want to put their name on a bad candidate. So what is your take? Because I think in the home service space specifically, we focus way much too much of our time on going after, we need more clients,

we need more customers, but we forget about the employees and our family. Yeah. And there's definitely two sides to the marketing equation. And that is basically generating the business. But then if you don't fulfill the second half, which is completing the business in a way that all your clients are happy and you can only do that with good employees and a good business model, then your business is never going to grow. I don't have any magic answer as far as hiring people. But again, I think you hit the nail on the head that that is just as important at the front end part of the business, which is bringing in the leads, bringing in the business, and then executing the business.

And I talk about that in my book, Building Billion Dollar Brands, that if you're gonna build a brand and a long lasting brand and something that can grow to a billion dollars, you have to execute both sides of those equations. You have to be a good marketer on the front end and bring in the leads and the sales, and then make sure that you have happy customers. And one thing I do find is I don't think enough businesses spend time talking to their customers and getting feedback from them about

what they like, what they don't like. And at the same time you're doing that, obviously, you can turn them into testimonials, but you're basically getting that feedback and constantly improving the customer experience so that when you're out there marketing, you're under-promising and over-delivering, which is another term in my branding book that is one of the secrets to growing a business and growing a brand. And that all really depends on the people you hire and the employees and how they deliver your services. I love the idea of, there's a book on my shelf. It's called Ask. It's by Ryan Levasque, I believe. And it explains that all we need to do to become that next level company is really ask the clients how we could have done better and what kind of wow factors.

Is there anything? So, for example, one of the things I do is when I'm on my way to your house, I'll call you up and I say, hello, Mr. Sassari. My name is Tommy Mello. I'm on my way to save your house. I'll call you up and I say, hello, Mr. Sassari. My name is Tommy Mello. I'm on my way to save your day. I'm going to fix that crossover better than it came from the manufacturer day one. And I want to let you know, you've probably got the text message. It comes from our system. It's sent out to you, told you a little bit about me, but you didn't know that I'm thirsty right now and I'm stopping at 7-Eleven. I just wanted to know if I could pick you up something on the way. And the goal of that is to get instant report.

That sets you apart from the competition. Yeah, I build instant report. And I've learned something called reciprocity from a guy named Robert Cialdini, who wrote the book. You're making me crack up. I got Robert Cialdini's book on my desk, The Psychology of Persuasion. He's down in your area. He's a professor at Arizona State. Yeah, I know him, actually. Well, I used to work out of the same gym as him

and I've watched his stuff. I went to U of A for my master's degree and they showed me him back in 2012. I said, this guy must be good to show an ASU professor at U of A. So yeah, no, he's fascinating. That's one of the books I highly recommend too is it's called Influence to Psychology of Persuasion. And really, if you're gonna do marketing, that really lets you understand the psychological reasons that marketing principles work. And again, just the half a dozen books we've mentioned on your podcast, Tommy,

if people would read those, they'd be light years ahead of their competitors. You know, I say something all the time, Rick, is readers are leaders. And what I found is it's very hard for people to sit down and read, and they got to make it part of a consistency that they just 20 minutes a day, you can listen to Audible. You know, I noticed you have your book on Kindle. I bought the paperback. I prefer Audible or paperback. It's the video persuasion book. Everything you need to know, how to create effective, high-level product and testimonial videos.

You know what? Here's the cool thing is you do this correctly. I'm such a fan of marketing. I'm probably one of the only people I know right now in home service that's like, I had to turn everything off. I've never thought I'd have this problem, but I truly believe I could get to a billion because I know I need 2,000 technicians to do $500,000 a year. That gets me to a billion. And I can tell you exactly how much the company's worth. It's worth roughly around 2.4 billion at that point. And I can tell you this,

I'm gonna have to buy back in at 40% when that happens. And that's gonna happen within three to five years because I've reverse engineered it. And I think too often, we don't think with the end in mind and that's not the end for me. That's just a way to get to where I wanna be to become a philanthropist, to give back and do the things I really wanna do.

That's awesome. Speaking of two things, that's another quote I always use, start with the end in mind, because a lot of people, they'll go into business, and I know it's important to set goals, but what do you want your business to be in three to five years? You know, you just basically very clearly told us where you want to be in three to five years, and so you're going to have a better chance of getting there than most other people. And then I love the fact you talked about philanthropy right now. I'm working on a new startup nonprofit with the guy who owned the OxiClean business. They sold that business for $325 million to Church and Dwight. And now he wants to start up a

nonprofit to give away his money. You know, there's another guy and I know you've heard of him down there, Joe Polish. Joe Polish. Yeah. Yeah. With the Genius Network. And he basically had, he got started in a home service. Carpet. Carpet cleaning. Rug cleaning, carpet cleaning. He was a disciple of Dan Kennedy with the No BS Marketing books. And now he has grown this whole genius network into just something that's phenomenal. And again, starting with a home-based business. I hate to talk about books, but there's so many things

that I've taken and applied. It's the Red Bible for me. It's called The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. And Chet passed away, but there was two things that I talk about that I love is number one, his daughter, Amanda took over the business. She was a songwriter and a singer. Didn't know anything about Chet Holmes international. He had over 300 employees, but the one thing he set up is each and every one of them were paid on

performance. So when she took it over, they performed still to get paid. And that was huge. But he went and tried to help out Chet Holmes International. They went and did a case study with a carpet cleaning company. And the guy said, listen, I need to double my revenue. That's why I'm hiring you. He said, well, what if I told you we don't need to do any marketing? He said, that's impossible. I need to do double my revenue. I need more clients. What do you mean? He said,

what if I told you that we could do a case study and I'm pretty sure we could get this done and it's going to be accurate and double the amount of times your customers use your current ones. So to get customers and keep customers is a huge deal. And I'm sure you're familiar with this with Sonicare, but you look at this and you say, how are we going to do this? Well, they proved that the average person got their carpet clean once over a year within the timeframe, especially the commercial accounts. And when they did the case study, they proved that when you get it done every quarter, you've got more healthy employees and the people with carpets have healthier employees. When you wait to over six months, it's actually spreading more germs and making people sicker at work, getting less done.

So they came out with this amazing case study. It had all the red stamps to say secure, real, official. And they doubled the business just with a case study. Isn't that cool how that stuff could work? Yeah, it's really awesome. And you know, one of my clients, we didn't mention, but it's called Rug Doctor. And they were basically a rental only business. You could see their machines in like 30,000 stores nationwide, grocery stores, hardware stores, things like that. And I actually started working with them. And they

started doing direct to consumer sales, and basically learned everything I needed to know. All the things you just said about dirty carpets and the importance of having clean carpets. And it was just a fantastic experience and another company that grew very quickly. You know, I had the, this is like a few years ago, but I had the, you ever heard of the Ginsu knife? Yeah, the Ginsu knife. Yep. Very much so. Barry was one of the guys named Edward Ed Valente. He's out of Rhode Island. I actually went out, met with him, worked with him for a little bit on some stuff, but it's just amazing. I feel like back in those days, what was that? The seventies when they came

out with that? Yeah, that was one of the very first infomercials on TV was the Ginzu knife. So I got to meet, unfortunately Barry had passed away, but I got to spend a lot of time with that and just learn a ton. And I think about the days of what the innovation has led to. I think about the guy that was in the car the whole time talking about real estate. I think about Dean Graciasso, the guy that was in the car the whole time talking about real estate. I think about Charmin, just the branding that goes into this stuff. Or I think it was the discount tire where they threw a tire through the store. Yeah. Yeah. And just these things that I love history in general, but I love the history of marketing.

Yeah. Well, that's an important point you're bringing up, Tommy. And I think people get a little bit overwhelmed with all of the different marketing channels and should I be on Facebook or Instagram or whatever? And I like to try to simplify it. And the way to simplify it is really be a student of history of marketing and really understand human psychology and what people respond to. And these other things then, whether it's Amazon or Facebook or Instagram or whatever, they just become the distribution channel for your message. But if you understand the marketing history and what worked in the past, those same things will work currently and they'll work in the future. And you don't have to reinvent the wheel. I don't think there's any original ideas in marketing,

but really recycled ones with new packaging on them and then delivered through a different distribution platform. And you can boil marketing down to that being that simple. Oh, yeah. Yeah. People say I don't like to do marketing. And I'm like, listen, you don't like sales and marketing. You're never going to get married. You're never going to have a friend. You're never going to go anywhere in your life because if you can't, how to win friends and influence people, I've got 25 copies sitting on my shelf, but that's, that's one of the good books that you start with. But everything you're doing is marketing and networking and selling yourself.

And I just, I find it hard when people say I don't like to sell. I'm like, well, you're selling yourself every day, but there's another book, The Cell is Human by Daniel Pink. But I want to talk a little bit about something that we don't really talk about a lot with marketing because I'm a huge fan of free marketing, which is public relations. And there's a good thing called HARO, help a reporter out. There's amazing ways to get involved with charity, get PR, do a great cause, make your employees want to come work for you, the future employees. And I think that people look at charity and they go, you know, we just don't have time or the money to just spend money on charity and get involved in the community.

And I think once you become a story brand, and it's not evil, it's not evil to think this way, because there's no reason you can't knock out three birds with one stone. I want to hear your take on building a great company that gives back to the community. For me, it would be the blood drives, the giving time, but more importantly, giving garage doors. This is what we do. I buy them cheaper than anybody. I've got the staff to do it. I can do a lot for a lot of people by giving for this cause. What is your take on that? And how do you equate that to marketing? First of all, I agree with you. The last chapter of my book basically talks about using marketing to do social good. And once you become a good marketer, you can use it for lots

of different things. If you want to help your own business, the more people you help along the way, the more that that's going to benefit your business. And I think that anybody that runs a business and is having success that doesn't give back in one way or another really isn't doing things, in my opinion, the right way. Everybody, whether it's been in the form of mentorship, in form of financial support, in form of giving free product, all of those things to me are part of being, quote unquote, a success. And so the fringe benefit to that is that you can do those things and then it'll come back to benefit you from a marketing perspective. So I agree 100% with what you said. Let's just do a scenario here. And I want to hear your take on this.

This is the first time I've really, I think I've ever asked this question. Okay. You're brand new. Okay. So we'll just say you're pool cleaning. So you do some pool maintenance and pool cleaning and a little bit of stuff on the pool if something breaks. And you want to become a great marketer. You want to make the phone ring. You want consistency. You want to pick up clients. You want to keep those clients. A little bit different than HVAC or plumbing or electrical or garage doors because you can build a book of business that you keep going to every week. So I guess you can relate it to both of those, but where do you start? What is your plan of attack? And you don't have millions of dollars to spend on this. So you want to be guerrilla marketing as possible. Yeah. And that's a great question. It's a good point you made about having millions

of dollars to spend because every one of the products that you mentioned that I built into brands were either a startup or relatively new products that didn't have big marketing budgets. And so we pretty much had to be successful in our marketing and used profits from sales to really create a marketing budget. And I think that that's kind of the mindset that you have to

have when you have a small business or a startup is I think that every business needs to do thinking before they launch into the marketplace along the lines of a lot of the things we touched on today. How is your product or service going to be different than the competitors? And then once you figure that out, you have to make sure that you're consistent in all your messaging. The best types of marketing for small businesses and startup businesses are really ones that don't cost much. You mentioned PR.

There's some type of PR that you can get on a local basis that lets people know about your business. The minute you have your first customer, we're assuming they're getting treated correctly, you're delivering a good product, work on making that your first customer testimonial. You can build an entire business around one great testimonial. Take a look at, it didn't turn out great in the long run, but take a look at the guy from Subway, Jared, before he got into trouble for 10 years. That was one person, one story that built the entire Subway business. And so really it's important to get that one success story under

your belt and then be able to let people know about it. So what are ways that people can know about it? Well, social media is free. You have to understand how to do it a little bit, but it's a way of reaching people that doesn't really cost you anything. And then there are cheaper ways of doing advertising on Facebook and things like that where you don't have to spend a big budget and as long as you're doing it in a direct response mindset where you're generating revenue based on the ad dollars you're spending that's the way to kind of launch and grow a business yeah I love that way I got a couple things that people could do you know my buddy Josh I want to talk I'll go back to that my buddy Josh that I've had a couple things that people could do. You know, my buddy, Josh, I want to talk. I'll go back to that.

My buddy, Josh, that I've had a couple of businesses with owns a company called Snow. And it's. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I know that company. Yeah. So he started that and he he's a very, very smart young guy. You know, when he was 12 years old, he became an affiliate for a bunch of other companies

and saved his mom and dad's house. Wow. So he's got a cool story. He's Latino and just he's building these really cool schools for people just two years to become experts in digital marketing and stuff of that nature. I think he's got involved with guys like Ryan Dice and Perry Belcher. But ultimately, what I was going to ask you is influencer marketing. It's becoming bigger, better, stronger than it ever has. It's literally, you can find these influencers. And, you know, I always think about Tom Selleck and how he does the reverse mortgages. But it hits the right demographic, right? It's hitting those people that are, you know, 55 to 65 or 70 that know him, Madden and PI, they used to, ladies used to think he was.

No, we had a really successful campaign for walk-in tubs. And I don't know if you remember a guy named Ed McMahon. He was Johnny Carson's right-hand guy. And he- I know exactly who he is. Many, many years, he was the spokesperson. And because the market for that was 55 and up. So he was the right guy. So you're talking about influencer marketing. I'm a big believer in that.

And again, there's some similarity to marketing history. It's very similar to celebrity marketing, PR, except, you know, obviously influencers come in all sizes. And for a smaller startup business, I would say use a smaller local influencer or influencers and try to leverage them. If you don't have the money, some of them you don't have to pay. The bigger ones you do. But maybe try doing a joint venture with people. If they believe in your product or service, they'd be open to doing that. Yeah, well, you know, this is just

off the cuff, but I was like, we build all these custom wood overlay doors. And I thought about, and I don't have a guide for how to do this stuff, but I thought about find a world-renowned woodworker. I'm talking to somebody probably in the States that, you know, some of these guys sell wood like tables for a hundred thousand dollars and come out with a signature series, have them design it, choose the wood, basically help us build the prototype, and then we would rebuild it, and there would be a limited edition series, and just sell 100 of them for 50 grand a pop. That's $5 million.

You can't say, let's do round two or something else. But the point is, why do so many people play in the same, like, I don't care what my competitors are doing. I'm not going to play in the same realm. I'm thinking so far outside of the box. And so many people work so hard to make so little in profit. It doesn't make sense to me. I'd rather sell things.

And then people say, well, how could you charge that much for that? I'm like, hey, I could throw a bunch of paint at a wall and call it a van go. And 400 years later, I'm like, it's all relative, isn't it? I don't know why people think when you sell something for a great amount of money that you're ripping people off either. No, well, you're not. And as long as you're selling a quality product or something that's scarce or hard to find, then you can control what you can charge for it. I'll give you, you know, again, another example along the lines, which you just talked. We were did a lot of marketing for an Oregon company called Worksharp and they make knife sharpeners. And basically they're in every outdoor store in the country.

And so they went to, I had never heard of this guy. He lives over in Hawaii, but he's probably the most famous knife maker in the world for like pocket knives and hunting knives. And we basically got him made a version of the work sharp that had his name on it. And for the audience that appealed to, we were able to sell the product for two or three times more than what the regular one was, just because of his name appeal. And, you know, he was an artist in the area of building knives. And so it kind of, you know, again, very similar to the door example you gave interesting yeah i love i love the notion of that when people say how are you going to do direct response marketing for garage doors i explain to them is you got to think outside of the box what

are a couple things that i could think about number one bottom rubber on a garage is how you keep all the nasty bugs out when's the last time anybody looked one, bottom rubber on a garage door is how you keep all the nasty bugs out. When's the last time anybody looked at the bottom rubber of their garage door to see if it's stale and still keeping a good cushiony bottom to keep the bugs to create a tight seal? Number one entryway. Number two.

That's new to me. I just, I hadn't thought of that before. Yeah, well, and then another thing, noisy garage door. Next time you go home, and this is something you do on the radio, listen to that thing. If it's making all kinds of, it's just like a human. If it's making all kinds of noises, it needs to get lubricated, adjusted and tightened up.

Let us come out and get it before it breaks. And those are two great ways. Or, hey, we got a thing in Arizona called monsoon season and electricity goes out a lot of the time in monsoon season. Don't let your garage door opener completely burn out. Let us come tune your garage door up and put a surge protector on there as part of our price to do it. So, and I hardly ever say price, usually I say investment. But the point is, you know, I think you could do direct response for any home service business if you could figure out the right way to position it.

Oh, yeah. No, you absolutely can. And, you know, let's circle back and, you know, the Dan Kennedy book, the No BS Guide to Direct Marketing. And his other one is called the No BS Guide to Brand Building. But he actually, if you go in, he has a course called Magnetic Marketing, which basically shows you how to create, everything we've been talking about today shows you how to create inbound leads. And I don't know, I think that course costs $149. And if I was starting a small business, a home-based business, I would basically read all the books you and I were talking about,

but get that course. And basically, you would have the fundamentals to be a success at marketing your business. And then just always keep in mind, how can you do things differently than the competition is doing? How can you differentiate yourself? And that's what you come back to, like you said, thinking outside of the box. What can I do a little bit different that the competition isn't doing? And that'll be the difference maker in the success of your business. You know what another big thing is that I've been working on is strategic partnerships. You know, I mentioned to you, it's so funny because I'm going to give out all these tips and secrets, Rick, and no one's going to do them. That's the crazy thing is 1% of the people. Not no one, but very few people.

Very little. You know what I mean? The listeners are very smart people. And I'm very, very lucky to have 15 to 20,000 downloads a month. And these people actually do stuff, but typically their competitors aren't going to do this stuff, but bottom rubber, well, what did I say about a bottom rubber? It keeps bugs out. Well, who would be a strategic partner for me if it's going to keep the bugs out of the house? A pest control company, right? Pest control company, yeah. Then you can leverage their list.

And why not give them $30 and charge $100 and only make $70 but still get my feet in the garage? And now they're making money. They're looking like the heroes. And the one thing I want to tell you, Rick, that most people forget is they'll get a pest control company. They'll go, yeah, last time we recommended a company like yours, they burned my client and we lost several contracts. So they went in there and just tried to upsell. So I have a system that I send out of my CRM the feedback from their clients, because it's under a campaign under my CRM, trackable campaign, to say you're going to have access on a daily basis to every client we go out to to make sure that you're going to get five out of five service. We're going to create raving fans out of your clients, just like you do. And here's my guarantee, is if they're not happy with the service we give,

I'm not only going to give them their money back, but I'll personally call them and apologize. And I think that the things like that, that we talk about and do, a lot of people say, I don't want to partner up with anybody because I don't want my clients to get a bad taste in their mouth if you don't do something right. But imagine if you could reverse that and say, imagine how much better you're going to look if we make them feel great. It's kind of like the people that say to me, I don't want to train my employees because what if they leave? I say, what if you train your employees and they stay? Yeah. So, you know, that's a great point. And again, it's another marketing avenue for any

business, but even if you're a startup business and you joint venture with somebody and even in a different category that's already successful where you can provide a service to them and leverage their their list and so people will say well no one will ever do that and that goes back to the concept of the book you were talking about ask my thing is you never know that what someone's going to say but you'll never find out if you don't ask them you know it's not always easy to succeed in business. It takes a little bit of grit. But if you do some of the things, even if you did a third of the things we're talking about today, you'd have to be a hard time not being successful.

Yeah. It's interesting because one of the things I find, and I want to hear your take on this, Rick, is you can be the best marketer in the world, but if you're not selling it right, if you don't know how to price your products, you get burned. And I raise my prices three to five times a year because my distribution centers do. Metal goes up, labor goes up. There's a thing called inflation that I took a lot of economics courses. And unfortunately, not a lot of companies take economics. They don't understand that you need to raise your prices because of inflation. Can you talk to me a little bit about getting that right when it comes to pricing?

Yeah. If you look at all the products I've sold over the years, I always go out in the marketplace at the higher end of the price range. First of all, I know I'm delivering a good product, whatever that product or service might be. And two, I never want to be competing on the bottom feeders at the lowest price point with the slimmest margins. Again, I've always had the success I've had by selling a good product for a fair price where there's enough margin in there that allows you to do some marketing. And I think that's another mistake people make is they'll look around and they'll say, oh, I can't charge that much. If you know you're going to be delivering a good product or a good service, I would start at the

top range of the market because it'll make it much easier to be in business if your margins are stronger than if you're trying to compete on price. And that's never a way I've ever been successful marketing. Whenever I look at a new product, I was going to launch it on TV or launch it online. I'm always at the top end of the price range because if you have a good product and a good marketing message, people will respond to it and they're not price shopping necessarily for that product. And that's interesting because I don't want any of my clients to price shop because I find that I'm the best solution for them. Like I sell oranges when everybody sells apples to apples.

And the good news is, what are you doing to create a different experience? I think people want an experience. You don't go to get a steak dinner or a nice bottle of wine with your wife or your significant other. You go for the experience. You can have that at home for 50 bucks or cheaper. Now, why do you go out and spend $300 as you're going for the experience. You can have that at home for 50 bucks or cheaper. Now, why do you

go out and spend $300 is you're going for the experience. And if people enjoy the experience, they tell others and they become raving fans. How do you create that experience in your marketing message? Yeah. There's another great book. You might've read it called Fascinate by a woman named Sally Hogshead. And she has a great quote in that book. Basically, she said, different is better than better. And it really sums up a lot of what we're talking about today is your unique selling proposition. Why is your business different than others? Anybody can go out and say, I'm better.

That's not a competitive point. But if you can differentiate your business, that's one of the keys to success. I'm just curious to hear some tips and some gold nuggets of how do we start the process to start to build these differentiations and really make ourselves stand out from the crowd? I love just getting down and dirty with a group of my cohort, the people in my business, and getting on a whiteboard, and just talking about, we've got people, product, and process. That's Marcus LeMond, and I believe in more of the process dictates the product and the people. But you start with

those three things, and you just kind of work through it. Do you have any good insight into that? Yeah. Again, for a brand new business, this wouldn't work, but most of the companies I've worked with over the years were existing businesses, even if they were very small. And so that's one thing you need to do is get into a room and do the whiteboard strategy, brainstorming with you and your management team, employees, whatever you can. But the other one where I've got really valuable feedback is, even if you're a smaller business and you have a few customers, I make it a point to go out and talk to 15 or 20 customers, interviewing them. And I usually get enough informational feedback from those people that I can develop a marketing plan for the business.

You know, what is it you like about the business? How do you hear about us? What do we do different? How did we make you feel? All these things. And by the time you talk to 15 or 20 people, you start to see some really trends that you should double down on and then other trends that you say, hey, I need to fix this and do this differently. So that's always been, I know it's not necessarily sexy or glamorous or anything, but all the products you mentioned in my introduction, I've used that technique to really come up with the key marketing points that I was going to take out in my advertising. You're already doing that. So that's not like new to you.

No, no, no. And I understand that. But you know, one of the things is, is I've got a complete team set up for feedback, but I don't think that's easy to set up. I think a lot of the listeners right now, I don't know if the listeners ever heard of a VA, a virtual assistant, and they understand, but you could easily, this is just a piece of advice that's coming, and I want to hear your take, but you get a virtual assistant that sounds really good. They speak good English. They could be in Canada. They could be anywhere. The greatest news ever is there's a lot of housewives. There's a lot of house dads out there. And you get them to just make these phone calls and fill out this thing on SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey is super cheap. You get them to take a survey,

fill in the blanks and certain ones, and you accumulate data over a few months. And it can be very, very cheap and effective to do if you create the right system. And I'm a big fan of standard operating procedures that are built around these concepts. And then you're going to get that enlightenment from these customers and these clients and start to do something with the data. Let the data be your guide to success. But do you have any other good ideas on how that maybe the listeners could go about getting feedback in an easy way that they're going, great, now there's another thing I need to do. I'll give this information in two ways because I don't want it to sound like

I want you to buy my book. But in my book, Video Persuasion, I actually have a link that you can download. It's like a six-part email series that is all set up from a template standpoint that you can send out to your customer base and as a way of getting people to come and give testimonials. And it is a numbers game. Like if I'd be honest with you, if you mail out 50 of these, maybe 20 people will

say yes, or 15 people will say yes. And again, for your listeners, I'm not trying to say buy my book Video Persuasion, because if you send me an email at my email address, which is rick at rickcesari.com, I'll send you the link for free for that email sequence. And again, I've tried to make it really easy for people to get that feedback. And it doesn't have to be complicated. The way you suggested doing it, Tommy, is a great way too. But I think that what I've found, even in bigger businesses that I go into consult with, very few of them are having that dialogue with their existing customers, which is your best source of information. How do people get a hold of you? Basically, they can go to my website, which is rickcesari.com, R-I-C-K-C-E-S-A-R-I, rickcesari.com.

And lots of good information you can download there or just send me an email, which is rick at rickcesari.com. And I answer all my emails. It's one way I give back. I like helping people that are starting in business and be open to answering any questions you may have. Okay, we already gave plenty of books,

so I won't ask that question. And finally, I'm gonna get all your books. I want to touch base again, but I'm going to just let you close out with one last final thought and one last kind of maybe gold nugget for the audience. Yeah. I'm going to go back to the very first book I ever read when I was in my, not the first book I ever read, but you mentioned it earlier, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And to me, that's a foundational book that really affected my entire life. And I still use a formula that's in that book when they talk about, you know, what's the best way to give a speech? And I actually use this formula for my videos.

And that's a real simple three-step thing. It's like, tell them what you're going to say, say it and tell them what you said. And people laugh at me, but I learned that back in the Dale Carnegie, I actually took his course and bought that book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And that was kind of the start for me of, you know, books that I read from a business perspective. I love it. Well, Rick, I could talk to you all day, man. I mean, you are cut from the same cloth. I think we're long lost brothers or something because you've read almost every book I have and vice versa.

And we talk the same language. So it's no, I'm not surprised at all how successful you are. And I'm sure you're going to be even more successful. Well, I want to make sure we communicate more with each other. I appreciate you coming on the podcast. I know you got other things to do. I tend to go over with people I love. So I'll reach out to you this week and you have an amazing day. And thanks again for coming on.

Thanks, Tom. You really appreciate it. All right. We'll talk soon, friend. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts.

You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review, make it four or five sentences, tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're just, we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it

out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it. you