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John Dwyer – Institute of WOW
On the Best Strategy for Success: “Prove to people that you can help them by actually helping them.”
We all need to market our businesses, but we also want to have fun. Did you know that often, the most fun in marketing is also the most successful?
John Dwyer of the Institute of WOW takes this to another level and shares some incredible marketing insights to get your brain thinking of ways to market your business.
We’ll explore fascinating case studies—like how a sweepstakes promotion catapulted an Australian resort’s occupancy rates and how a turf farm sold three miles of grass in just three days. Get ready to hear about boosting business with Facebook contests, running successful B2B promotions, and even hiring Jerry Seinfeld into a hugely successful campaign for an Australian bank. Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, John Dwyer’s marketing insights will offer valuable lessons and inspire you to embrace a “why not” attitude in your business pursuits.
Listen as JD explains, in simple, easy to use action steps, how you can market your business.
Enjoy!
Visit JD at: TheInstituteOfWow.com and https://getmorejd.com/
Podcast Overview:
00:00 Interest rates affect consultancy fee negotiations.
09:47 Join forces to sell holiday vacation vouchers.
14:51 Discount is 10%, disguised as gas promotion.
16:06 Insurance covers big prizes; stimulates product sales.
21:37 Offer landscapers premium beer for lawn work.
27:53 Inappropriate promotion idea involving deceased relatives.
35:27 Ugly fence contest generated many new leads.
42:04 Lobster Cave grew by collecting customer details.
47:59 Room given free; resold at various prices.
51:24 Help people by actually helping them first.
55:21 Answering all calls increased revenue by $15k/week.
Podcast Transcription:
John Dwyer [00:00:00]:
Look. I’m a digital marketing agency and deal with a 25 year old. But if you need heart surgery for your business, and you do, let’s just say it was heart surgery for you, we do actually use the guy that just came out out of medical school, and he’s 25, and he says, listen. I’ve never done this heart surgery before. I’ve learned all about how to do it at at college. I’m gonna give this a hell of a good shot. Okay. Or would you give it to the guy with a few wrinkles that has been around the block a few times who says, look.
John Dwyer [00:00:24]:
I can do this in my sleep.
James Kademan [00:00:27]:
You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumph and successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link found at drawincustomers.com. We are locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie, calls on call extraordinary answering service, as well as the Bold Business Book. And today, we’re welcoming slash preparing to learn from JD of the Institute of Wow. And today, we are talking marketing. So JD, how is it going today?
John Dwyer [00:00:57]:
Thank you very much, James. And so that, they, whoever’s watching or listening to this doesn’t think that I’ve got a completely weird name. My name is John Dwyer, but I get the initials JD all the time. And as I said to you before we started the recording, I get lots of other names, but we won’t go through that.
James Kademan [00:01:11]:
Yeah. Right. Right. JD’s cool. JD’s cool. So Institute of Wow, I’m excited to hear this because I I looked at your website, all the marketing stuff you have going on. Let’s start with the big story that you have on there with getting Jerry Seinfeld to work with you at a bank in Australia.
John Dwyer [00:01:27]:
Yeah. And, James, that was about a dozen years ago, and, I’ve milked milked the daylights out of that, of course, as one would. And, I remember on one occasion in the 3 years that I went back as a force to New York to get Jerry to, you know, film the TV commercials and so forth, I said to him on the 2nd year that he didn’t have a website at the time. And I said, oh, can you imagine the amount of t shirts and caps yeah. You could sell. And he looked at me and said, do I do I look like I need to sell any capsule t shirts? And I said I said, probably not. You’ve got more money than god. And, and he said, besides, why would I need a website, JD? I looked at yours.
John Dwyer [00:02:00]:
I’m on there more than you. So, anyway, I, I guess, I had looked at, but how that came about, it was that I had a client down under where a direct response marketing company, and we called the Institute of Wales. So, it’s all about, you know, showcasing to businesses how to wow factor their products or services to get people interested in buying them. And, on this particular, occasion, this bank down under was trying to take on the big boys. They were a challenger brand trying to take on the Wells Fargo. And that’d be like a little corner store taking on Costco. You know, you’re not gonna win on price. So you’ve gotta win on having a wow factor.
John Dwyer [00:02:34]:
Some sort of, you know, distraction that’s gonna get people not to look at the price. And so, therefore, I introduced them to a travel company that I was doing some TV commercials with. And, yeah, we came on TV, for 3 or 4 years and Facebook and and, you know, Insta and a whole lot of them. We said, get a home loan and get a free vacation. The thing went nuts. And in the 1st few years, they took an extra $15,000,000,000,000 worth of home loans.
James Kademan [00:02:58]:
Wow. And
John Dwyer [00:02:59]:
this this idiot who’s on your show didn’t charge a percentage of the results. I just I got a consultancy fee. So I’m a moron. Yeah. And so around about 4 years into it, we said, look. Why don’t we take it up a level? And I won’t bore you with all the details, but, I contacted George Shapiro, who was Jerry’s manager out of Beverly Hills. And, I said to him, would Jerry like to be a larrikin and stand outside a fake bank and, you know, basically tell everybody to get a home loan, get a free vacation? I thought it would be a chance at a million, but as it turned out, George Shapiro is a bit sarcastic and cheeky. He’s just passed away about 12 months ago, but he was very sarcastic and cheeky, and and I’m I’m a bit that way too.
John Dwyer [00:03:35]:
So we got on pretty well. And to my surprise, he came back and said, yeah. Jerry thought that’d be a good idea. Let’s do it. Nice. And so for 3 years, we had Jerry standing outside of fake bank. I say fake, he lives in, you know, New York. So therefore, we went to a little country town called Cedarhurst.
John Dwyer [00:03:50]:
We found an empty shop, and we built the Greater Building Society, you know, fake branch there. And he stood outside with people walking past, not taking any notice of him. Obviously, they were actors, you know. And, he was doing gags and just saying, you know, get home now. Get a free vacation. And when you put Seinfeld next to something like that, boy, it just took off. It was unbelievable. The, yeah, the figures just went through the stratosphere.
James Kademan [00:04:11]:
Isn’t that incredible? So that time, were you smart enough to get a percentage? Or is that
John Dwyer [00:04:16]:
just something for you as well? No. I’ve never been smart enough to do any of that. James, obviously, I’m a complete idiot. Yeah. All all jokes aside, that what the bank did say, look, they can’t do things like that because whilst it was a stunning success story, the reserve bank, you know, if if the reserve bank decides to drop the interest rate because of, you know, you know, circumstances, then, of course, you know, they can’t go handing out percentages to people because it was really just because they dropped the interest rate. I I I said to them at the time when I, belatedly requested, you know, a review of my, consultancy fee, I would drop it in lieu of getting a percentage. They they said to me, yeah. Well, you know, if the reserve banks drops at half percent, people are gonna come in and get a home loan.
John Dwyer [00:04:57]:
It had nothing at all to do with you. I said, we can build in some variables. We can build in some variables. It was all too late.
James Kademan [00:05:04]:
Yeah. Burner. So but it worked. The marketing worked.
John Dwyer [00:05:08]:
Yeah. Look. It was just incredible. And as it turned out, when because Jerry had only ever done 2 advertising campaigns before in his career, which was American Express and Microsoft, and this company’s a little bit smaller than those 2, it was headline news. I mean, when the news broke, it was on 6 in Australia, it was on 60 minutes, and it was on all the current affairs shows and the today breakfast shows, you name it, it just went nuts. So just in the 1st 2 days, they picked up about $4,000,000 worth of free advertising.
James Kademan [00:05:35]:
Wow. That is cool. That is super cool.
John Dwyer [00:05:38]:
Yeah.
James Kademan [00:05:39]:
So let’s back up a step to when you first got in the game of the Institute of Wow. When did you go off and decide that you’re gonna start your own business here in the marketing world?
John Dwyer [00:05:49]:
Yeah. Well, I was born in the 1800, and so therefore, I’ve been doing this for a little while. And, yeah. So when I left school, I did the college thing. I did the advertising, you know, degree at college and, learned nothing, of course, because, you know, you had all these colleges and the actual teachers, the full time teachers that never done anything themselves. And so luckily, in my early twenties, I got a job in the, marketing department of a big supermarket chain in Australia. There’s there’s 2 of them, and one of them is called Woolworths. I know you guys in America had Woolworths at one stage, but this is not the same thing.
John Dwyer [00:06:18]:
This is a big supermarket thing. And I learned the value of what they call incentive based marketing. And what would happen is that, you know, they’d have promotions, like Scratch Games. And when you spent $50, you got a scratch ticket, and you scratch it out, and you might have got a a red $100 note, and you had a kid coming back to Woolworths to do your supermarket shopping because you wanted to get a red, a blue, and a green to win the the money. And so that’s what they call continuity promotions. It gets you to come back over and over and over again. And one of them took my, took my fancy. It was a, a a stamp collection promotion.
John Dwyer [00:06:50]:
This is pre digital days. And, it was for every $10 you spent, you got a stamp, like a grand stamp, but it wasn’t grand stamps. And you’d you’d actually put the stamp onto a saver sheet. You’d lick it and put it onto a saver sheet with cookware and glassware all over the saver sheet. And when you saved up, let’s say, 10 stamps, you got cookware and glassware for a ridiculously low price. Okay? And it went nuts. And I could see here that even though the competitive supermarket chain tried to match them on price, it was never gonna be in the league because this Woolworths had these Happy Meal toys, basically. You know? And I thought there’s something in this.
John Dwyer [00:07:21]:
And so, anyway, catalog story short, I set up my own business. It was called Dynamic Ideas in those days. And, that’s what we did. We produced those sorts of packaged promotions for businesses of all sizes, and then it grew to doing the same thing for McDonald’s and KFC and 711. We did all the big scratch bingo games for Murdoch’s newspapers down under. So, yeah, I got really heavily into packaging these, what we call, you know, incentives, and we provide them to businesses to use as a distraction.
James Kademan [00:07:49]:
So when you’re marketing your business when you first start out, was it tough to get clients to grocery stores or whatever to to buy into this and understand what you’re trying to do?
John Dwyer [00:07:59]:
Yeah. It was. And thank goodness for me, that little phrase that, I think is at the bottom of some of those motivational calendars, absolutely applies to me, and that is persistence beats intelligence. Nice. I’m not that intelligent, so therefore, I just kept on knocking on the door. And in fact, even at this age, you know, I’m a baby boomer, so, you know, it’s a digital age now, so I’ve surrounded myself with a bunch of experts that are 35. And so, you know, we’re doing AI robots and all sorts of stuff now. But, back in that day, yeah, we we we had the ideas.
John Dwyer [00:08:29]:
The only way that I was going to get into Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers to, you know, do the scratch bingo’s was just to be persistent. And even Seinfeld, I asked Seinfeld, on the first time I went over. I said, why did you do why did you say yes to this? I mean, you you’ve got more money than god. I mean, why would you do this bank down under? And he said for two reasons. He said, I like the Australian sense of humor. You guys take the Mickey, and that’s what I do for a living. And he said the other reason is I thought if I didn’t say yes, you’d never go away.
James Kademan [00:08:55]:
Ah, there you go. The power of persistence. I love it.
John Dwyer [00:08:59]:
Yeah. Yeah.
James Kademan [00:09:01]:
So you did you come up with these ideas? Because I can remember when I was a kid, the grocery stores had those little stamp things, and you get your dishes or cookware or whatever it was. I mean, my mom probably still has some of that stuff from
John Dwyer [00:09:14]:
Yeah.
James Kademan [00:09:15]:
Whatever, 30, 40 years ago. So was that a everywhere thing or
John Dwyer [00:09:20]:
what was that about? We sell we sell it from a a company called Tesco in the UK. So there’s a supermarket sort of chain in in London and right throughout the UK. Very, very big business called Tesco, and they were doing all of this sort of stuff. So, yeah. So I just got the ideas there, and we just put our own little twist to it. But, essentially, that’s where they all came from. Sure. But since then, once I got into all of these continuity things, you know, most of them have originated from, you know, between my ears.
John Dwyer [00:09:47]:
But, you know, you you you borrow and put all sorts of things together. I mean, we’ve got one now as a result of the Seinfeld get a home loan, get a free vacation thing going nuts. I was contacted by an international company just before COVID, and they said, listen, you seem to have half a clue when it comes to marketing. We’re a travel company, and we’ve got access to unsold hotel rooms all around the world. Do you want to join forces with us and pay us a royalty? And what we’ll let you do is actually sell these holiday vouchers, what we call a holiday in Australia, but vacation vouchers to businesses to hand out as Happy Meal Time. And so what would happen is that, in fact, the anyone listening can’t see this, but I’ll hold it up to the camera if you happen to be watching the video. They’re a quarter size, vacation voucher, and, it shows you all around the world where you can go. But this gives people 3 to 7 nights hotel accommodation in Vegas, New York, San Diego, Orlando, Grand Canyon, right around the world, Paris, Rome, it you know, you name it.
John Dwyer [00:10:44]:
And the hotels are happy to give up the room for free in the hope that, they will fill them and people will spend money on food and beverage. So that’s how it works. So this company rang me and they said, look, we’ve seen your Seinfeld stuff, it was pretty hard to get that a secret. How did you find Vacations as a customer incentive? I said, the best I’ve ever seen. I said, I’ve given away microwave ovens and skateboards and all sorts of things and dining vouchers. Nothing matches this. They said, well, why don’t you actually put that brain of yours to work and come up with an idea where we can sell the vacation vouchers to businesses, and they use it at happy meal time. And, everyone wins.
John Dwyer [00:11:19]:
The hotel fills their rooms outside of skilled vacation periods. They’ve got empty rooms, so therefore they fill the rooms, and hopefully they’ll make money out of food and beverage. So that’s what we’ve done. We launched that just before COVID. It went nuts. Obviously, during COVID, we sat on the reserve bench for a little while. So, what we do now is that because we know smaller businesses can’t necessarily do all of these big things that McDonald’s do, we actually give them these vacation vouchers for $50 each. They’re worth $1,000 and they just simply give them out to a customer when they buy the refrigerator, or they use their lawn mowing services, or whatever it might be.
John Dwyer [00:11:52]:
And the reason I bring that up, is because I’ve tested every incentive you could possibly think of, from microwave ovens to skateboards to dining vouchers to gas discounts, you name it. And there’s nothing, nothing, nothing comes near the success of giving someone a vacation.
James Kademan [00:12:07]:
That is cool. So the vacation that’s the hotel stay, they have to come up with flight and all that kind of stuff on their own. Right?
John Dwyer [00:12:12]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So anybody that was offered for, you know, just under $50, and, it’s 3 to 7 nights in New York and Vegas and Orlando and all sorts of places. They just gotta get there. Yeah. So it was only for a combination. It’s for 2 adults and 2 children.
John Dwyer [00:12:25]:
Yeah.
James Kademan [00:12:25]:
Alright. Did they have to sit through some timeshare thing or something like that?
John Dwyer [00:12:28]:
No. I thought I thought the same thing. Look. I’ve been in this marketing game forever, so I’ve seen all the travel scams. And, I said to these guys, look. Is there any timeshare presentation? Because I run the other way, because we’re we’re all seeing them. No. There’s not.
John Dwyer [00:12:40]:
No. It’s very it’s a very clever idea. The hotels are mostly for start TripAdvisor. There’s a few in Europe that are 3 and a half, but most of them are for start TripAdvisor rated. And, yeah, it’s basically, they are giving up the room when they’ve got empty rooms, because it only cost them about 12, $15 to clean the room, but they’re hoping whoever stays there as a free guest will spend money on food and beverage.
James Kademan [00:13:02]:
Got it. That is cool. That’s clever. I was also looking at your website, and I saw the gas vouchers, and I saw the sweepstakes things.
John Dwyer [00:13:13]:
Let’s start
James Kademan [00:13:13]:
let’s go down the road of the gas thing because that was intriguing.
John Dwyer [00:13:17]:
Yeah. It’s, it’s interesting. We haven’t yeah. We we we probably haven’t pushed that as much as we should, to be honest with you. I’m your typical entrepreneur. I get distracted by a butterfly. Oh, butterfly. Oh, yeah.
John Dwyer [00:13:26]:
And, at, Woolworths, when I was there, I got to know, you know, quite a few people, and, this was a 1000 years ago. And they were talking at the time about, using gas discounts, and I had left by the time they brought it in. But what happened and, was that whenever you spent $30 at the supermarket when they eventually brought this in, you got, 4¢ a liter. Now you guys are in gallons, but we’re in liters. You got 4¢ a liter off your gas. Went nuts. And so, therefore, I thought, well, hang on. How do we do this for small businesses? So what we did is that we took it to another level because keep in mind, my thing is called the Institute of Wales, so I’m supposed to do that.
John Dwyer [00:14:03]:
And so what we did is that we packaged a promotion for smaller businesses where they could say, spend dollars50 at my butcher shop or, you know, whatever it might be, and I’ll give you 10¢, not 4, 10¢ a liter off your, of your fuel. And how it worked is that, basically, when you came into the butcher shop, if you spent $50, you got 10¢ off your fuel. If you spent $100, you got 20¢ off your fuel. So you got 10¢ for every $50 you spent. You go out to any gas station and fill it up. All you had to do was bring your receipt back to the book. I’m using a butcher, but it could be any business. You bring the the receipt back to the butcher.
John Dwyer [00:14:36]:
He looks at it and says, okay. Well, yeah. 50 liters. It was a maximum of 50 liters. So therefore, you’ve just got 50 liters multiplied by 10¢. That’s $5. Here’s the $5. $5 as a percentage of the 50 that missus Smith spent is 10%.
John Dwyer [00:14:51]:
So if she spent a $100, then she got 20¢ a liter. So she went out and got her gas, she came back in and gave the receipt. 20¢, you know, multiplied by 50 is $10. So therefore, $10 of the 100 that she spent is still at 10%. So it made doctor Evo look a nice guy, be quite frankly. So it was, basically a 10% discount disguised as an unbelievable promotion. Keep in mind, the little butcher who’s sitting outside the big supermarket, Woolworths, and Woolworths was saying 4¢ a liter, he could now say, come and shop with me, and you can get up to a dollar per liter off your gas. But, of course, the only way they got a dollar per liter off their gas was they’d spent all that money.
John Dwyer [00:15:28]:
So it was basically a 10% discount on steroids.
James Kademan [00:15:32]:
Dang. So with that, with the percentage of the fuel, the cost of the fuel, and all that jazz more or less equating 10%, how did you make money in all that?
John Dwyer [00:15:41]:
We charged, for the IP. So therefore, what we would do is we’d say, listen. We’ll put the promotion together for you. It’s only ever gonna cost you 10% of your turnover, but we’ll charge x $1,000 for managing the whole process.
James Kademan [00:15:53]:
Got it. Okay. Yep. Okay. Yep. And tell me about the sweepstakes thing, because I saw that $50,000 sweepstakes. Yeah. But there must be some fine print in there somewhere.
James Kademan [00:16:03]:
I guess I didn’t peruse all of it. So tell me how that works.
John Dwyer [00:16:06]:
Yeah. Look, it’s an in what we call the insured promotion. Okay? So the big insurance companies around the world, the Lloyds of London and so forth. They provide the big cash prizes to deal or no deal, TV shows, or who wants to be a millionaire. That’s all given by, that’s all basically covered by an insurance company. So when the network gives away that $1,000,000, which is not too often, then the insurance company coughs up the money, and the TV station pays the insurance premium based on the difficulty of the questions. So, therefore, I’ve been doing this for quite some time, and I’ve got a pretty good relationship with a major broker for Lloyds. And what we do is that we provide big cash switch state prices to businesses to, again, act as a stimulant to people to buy their product or service.
John Dwyer [00:16:51]:
So you might say, if you’re selling lawnmowers, buy my lawnmower, and you’ve got a chance to win a $1,000,000. Okay? Or 100,000 or whatever it might be. So, you know, I can get a $1,000,000 for around about 20 to $25. I can get, half a $1,000,000 for around about 10 or $12,000. So what happens is that when somebody buys your product or service, they actually get a ticket in the draw. And then at the end of the promotion, be it a month or 2 months, a preliminary draw happens where someone is chosen, and that someone goes online, and there’s a chocolate wheel. And in that chocolate wheel, there’s 200 numbers. And they select one of those numbers, so it’s a chance to win.
John Dwyer [00:17:29]:
And, so let’s just say it’s a chocolate wheel with 200 numbers, and I chose number 84, then I press the spin button. And if the number comes up, then I win the $1,000,000. If it doesn’t come up, then I get a consolation prize.
James Kademan [00:17:42]:
Alright.
John Dwyer [00:17:43]:
Simple as that. And, and so therefore, look, as long as, you know, on the website and all of one’s advertising, it’s, you know, highlighted that it’s a game of chance. But, you know, when you are drawn, there’s a chance that you could win. Everything’s fine. And, you know, we get $50,000. We we put a package together for businesses. They pay us 5 or 6, and they get a $50,000 sweepstakes.
James Kademan [00:18:03]:
That’s cool. That is cool. And I imagine people are attracted to that. Everyone wants to to win or see that big golden nugget, whatever.
John Dwyer [00:18:11]:
Yeah. Well, we had a, a a holiday vacation resort in Fiji. Do it a few years ago. And, he contacted me, and he said that he’s an Australian guy, but Fiji is a little bit like Hawaii for you guys. It’s an easy destination for us to get to. It’s only 3 hours flight. And he said, look, my major business comes from travel agents on the East Coast of Australia. And, really, you know, we’re 25 years old, and there’s a lot of new resorts near the airport that are beating us.
John Dwyer [00:18:37]:
And I said, okay. He said, have you got any of that excuse the language, but he said, have you got any of that wow, s h I t? I said, yeah. Okay. Right. So, anyway, apologies for my voice. I got a bit of laryngitis. So, anyway, we put a promotion together for travel agents. So this was b two b.
John Dwyer [00:18:53]:
And we said to the travel agents on the East Coast of Australia, look, for every night you book anyone into the Hideaway Resort, which was this 25 year old resort, then you get a ticket into the $1,000,000. Now a travel agent doesn’t care where the person goes to stay. They get their commission no matter what. So when you actually went to a travel agent throughout this whole period, and by the way, it was a $1,000,000, so we got the $1,000,000 for him for whatever it was at the time, 15, 20 grand. So when you walked into a travel agent with your husband or your wife and said, look, we’re going to Fiji. We thought we’d go to the Hilton. The travel agent would say, no. No.
John Dwyer [00:19:23]:
They got rabies. Okay? They got Ebola. You don’t wanna go there. You wanna go to the highway resort? And they go, oh, okay. Right. Okay. So, therefore, the occupancy rate was 32% when we launched. It went to 99% and stayed there for the 3 months.
James Kademan [00:19:38]:
Wow. That is incredible.
John Dwyer [00:19:42]:
Yeah. So, I mean, look, these are all psychological, driven, you know, marketing campaigns to get people off the fence and to also distract people from the price. If you are selling on price, then really, if you think you’re gonna beat Costco, or Amazon, then you need you’re you’re on drugs. Okay? So the thing is is that, you know, what we stand for with the Institute of Wow is giving people a wow factor that distracts them from looking at the price.
James Kademan [00:20:09]:
Nice. What are some of the other things? The the wow, we’ll call it stuff that you’ve done over the years.
John Dwyer [00:20:15]:
Yeah. I’ve gotta tell you that there’s one that is is a funny one. It’s a for a, for tradesmen. Okay. We call them tradies here in Australia. Do you call tradesmen tradies?
James Kademan [00:20:25]:
I don’t think so. No. Yeah. I think we should start, though.
John Dwyer [00:20:29]:
So we we call, you know, handymen and, you know, builders and electricians and plumbers. We call them tradies, but they’re tradesmen. And, this guy had a, a turf farm, as in grass. So he had, like, you know, 2 or 3 miles worth of turf, and he would sell that to, landscapers who would then sell it to consumers to, you know, put grass in their front yard or back yard. And he saw one of my song and dance shows at a seminar, and he came up to me at the end of it, and he said, listen, I like this distraction policy that you’ve got. He said, I have, like a bucket load. I won’t say what he said, but he started with this. I’ve got a certain load, of grass I’ve gotta get rid of.
John Dwyer [00:21:07]:
And I said, oh, okay. Right on. And, he said, could you visit me? And as it turned out, it was close to where I was, so I visited him the next day. And sure enough, he had miles and miles and miles of grass.
James Kademan [00:21:16]:
And he
John Dwyer [00:21:16]:
said, it’s very competitive, he said, because there’s no difference between my grass and someone else’s. Whereas, there is a difference between Coke and Pepsi. And I said, yeah. I know. Okay. He said, so it’s all priced. He said, landscapers come to me, and they’ll ask me to get 2 or 3 homes worth of grass. But, you know, I’ll give that to them for $6.50 a square meter, and the guy down the road will be $6.40 a square meter within 5 minutes.
John Dwyer [00:21:37]:
So it’s a race to the bottom. And I said, okay. Righto, leave it with me. So we came up with an idea that because 99.9% of landscapers are men, what what would be a good Happy Meal toy for them? And we decided it would be a premium beer, in Australia down under the premium beer is one called Crown Lager. That’s the beer that normally chief executives and doctors and dentists would drink, okay? And a landscaper would probably not drink that. But this was the most expensive beer. So what we said to the landscapers, for every home’s worth of grass, which is the front yard or back yard, we will give you a slab, a carton of 24 of these bottles. Okay? A carton of this very high premium beer.
John Dwyer [00:22:15]:
And he said, do you think it’ll work? I said, I don’t know. We’ll give it a shot. So he sent out a brochure because, keep in mind, these guys are not tech savvy. So we sent out a brochure, and we also sent out emails and text messages. And we said, for every home’s worth of browse you get from me, you’ll get a carton of this premium beer. He rings me 4 days after we launched and said, JD, got a problem, which is not the thing you wanna hear from anyone when you’re a consultant. I go, what’s wrong here? You know? I said, what’s the problem? He said, we’re out of grass. We’ve got we just sold 3 miles worth of grass in 3 days.
John Dwyer [00:22:45]:
I said, what? Even I was, I was supposed to be the marketing show off that nothing is a surprise. I knew it was gonna work. I couldn’t believe it. What? And he said, he said, yeah. It’s just all gone. He said, I’ll tell you how stupid this is. He said, one guy, who was the biggest pain in the ass client that I’ve ever had, he would always ring me and say, I can get it down the road for, you know, 50¢ a meter, cheaper. He would always just, you know, basically, you know, negotiate back and forth.
John Dwyer [00:23:09]:
He rang me and said, look. I want 18 homes worth of grass. I don’t care where the grass gets here, but I need the beer by Friday. I’ve got a party.
James Kademan [00:23:17]:
Nice. The man of priority right there.
John Dwyer [00:23:21]:
You got it. And so what happens is that that was a few years ago, and he, he just repeats it. It’s and when people say to me, well, you know, what do we do after this? I go, what do we do? When McDonald’s came up with that toy that worked, they’ve been doing it for 45 years. Just rinse and repeat. Just don’t get coming up with something else. Kellogg’s have been putting a toy in the golf leagues for 50 years. Amazon, with the Prime Membership Club, they will give you free movies and free shipping and free music. And also, when you come up with something that works, just keep doing it until it doesn’t work.
James Kademan [00:23:50]:
Right. Right. Have there ever been any marketing things that you’ve done that you thought were gonna be successful and just ended up face planning?
John Dwyer [00:23:59]:
I’ve had, probably a million, failures. And it’s the same old story. Michael Jordan missed more hoops than he ever made because he shot more hoops. So yeah. Yeah. And look at this age now, I mean, I’ve got a pretty good handle on what works and what doesn’t because you’ve had all those failures. It’s convenient for somebody who might be a baby boomer to say that because it’s a good, it’s a good combat technique against the younger kids with the ponytails that are coming along. Because I always say to someone, look, go to a digital marketing agency and deal with a 25 year old.
John Dwyer [00:24:31]:
But if you need heart surgery for your business, and you do, let’s just say it was heart surgery for you, would you actually use the guy that just came out of medical school, and he’s 25, and he says, listen. I’ve never done this heart surgery before. I’ve learned all about how to do it at at college. I’m gonna give this a hell of a good shot. Okay? Or would you give it to the guy with a few wrinkles that has been around the block a few times who says, look, I can do this in my sleep. Yeah. And so I’ve lost I’ve had a gazillion failures like we all have. But, yeah, at this age, I mean, we’ve got a pretty good hit rate this day.
John Dwyer [00:24:59]:
We got one at the moment, which has just pulling me away. We’ve called it the Facebook contest forum. And it’s so simple, Joe, that you like, I don’t I can’t believe I didn’t come up with it earlier. I only came up with it 6 months ago. And what it is is that you just take a campaign out on Facebook, and you have a contest to, your target audience where they can win your product or service in a contest. So let’s let’s just say for argument’s sake, you were a dentist, because this is one that we did last week, and you are selling invisible braces. And, they’re called Invisalign. Okay? So, therefore, you’re selling these invisible braces, and mainly for children, but adults do.
John Dwyer [00:25:36]:
Then we just simply ran a contest on Facebook, and we said, how would you like to win invisible braces? They’re worth 5 or 6 grand. Right? He got 1400 entrant entries in the 1st week at around about 50¢ an entry, so therefore he only spent $700. Right? He gave one away, but he’s got 1399 people with crooked teeth who have just glowed glowed in the dark. They They just put their hands up and said, I’ve got well, you don’t wanna wear braces if you’ve got straight teeth. Right?
James Kademan [00:26:06]:
Right.
John Dwyer [00:26:07]:
So what it does, it flushes out not leads, but red hot leads. We did one for a walking frame business. It was a guy that has walking frames for elderly people, and he has a product called the Wheelie Walker. And so, we ran that only 2 weeks ago. He got 822 leads in the 1st week from 70 80 year olds. And, so, therefore, he just said to me, look. I wouldn’t get 800 leads in 6 months. He said, this is incredible.
John Dwyer [00:26:33]:
He got the leads for 35¢. So, therefore, he was getting something like around about a 120 leads a day, and he couldn’t keep up with it. He’s he’d never had that many leads in his life. So what we’ve done for him and what we can do for other clients is that he was spending $40 a day, which is a very modest budget on Facebook, right, gearing in towards that demographic. So now we said, Dream, what can you handle? And he said, oh, half of that. He said, okay. Well, we don’t spend $40 a day anymore. We’ll just spend $20 a day.
John Dwyer [00:26:59]:
So we’ll give you each week, you know, instead of, you know, 800 leads, you get 400. And that’s the beauty of it. Once you’ve actually tried this and you’ve flushed out these ridiculously hot leads, you can adjust your Facebook budget to suit your capabilities. In his case, we’ve just got an AI robot ringing everyone. He’s not doing it. We just have an AI robot ringing them and saying you didn’t win. But obviously you need a Willy Walker, so therefore, we’ve got a special deal for you. If you buy this week, we’ll give you a free vacation.
James Kademan [00:27:27]:
Oh, look at that. Combining them there. I love it.
John Dwyer [00:27:31]:
Evil. Doctor evil.
James Kademan [00:27:34]:
Ew. You just play the game. Play the game. That is incredible.
John Dwyer [00:27:38]:
What have
James Kademan [00:27:38]:
been some of the industries that people have come to you and you’re just like, oh, I gotta think about this one? Where it’s not just a grocery store or dentist or something where it’s an everyday thing. It’s something more obscure.
John Dwyer [00:27:49]:
The most difficult one has been a funeral parlor.
James Kademan [00:27:52]:
Oh, alright.
John Dwyer [00:27:53]:
That’s not really tasteful to say, let me burn your relatives, and you get a free vacation. So that’s that’s been a challenge, or even to run a continuity promotion, whereby you get points when your relatives die. I don’t think that’s tasteful, so I we backed away from that. That was very difficult, that one. So, look. 1, I’ve I’ve this came up not so long ago, and this had nothing at all to do with sweepstakes or Happy Meal toys. It was a hairdresser in a little country town, a little bit like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. Okay? So it was a little bit like that.
John Dwyer [00:28:27]:
And anyone who’s under 40 will be scratching their head going, what’s that?
James Kademan [00:28:31]:
Mayberry, who?
John Dwyer [00:28:33]:
Mayberry. Yeah. And, so, therefore, this lady, had an hair salon for 32 years in the main street, and she’d never had any competitors. And this lady came to town and opened up across the road.
James Kademan [00:28:46]:
Oh, no.
John Dwyer [00:28:47]:
Yeah. So she said to me, look. We’ve got a problem. We charged for men’s haircuts $55, and we had a good amount of men. She said, we make most of our money out of women because they’ll spend a 100, 200, 300. But the men’s haircuts at $55 are very easy because they’re quick. Men just wanna get in and get out. And she said, we’ve lost all the men because the lady across the road is offering $10 haircuts for men.
John Dwyer [00:29:08]:
And I went, oh, gosh. So she said, either I got $9. I said, no. Don’t be silly. Don’t do that. You’re not gonna make any money in $9 haircuts. And she said, oh, I don’t know what to do. I’m beside myself.
John Dwyer [00:29:18]:
She said she said, not only we lost all of our men because they don’t care where they get the haircut, they go to a butcher. But, also, we’ve lost a lot of their wives because where they go, the wife goes. So I said, well, leave it with me. And so, therefore, 2 days later, I went and I said, well, look. I think I’ve got an idea. And, we did execute this idea, and within a month, she got every single man back. All we did was put a sandwich board outside her hairdressing salon, which said we fixed $10 haircuts.
James Kademan [00:29:43]:
Nice. Nice.
John Dwyer [00:29:47]:
So, you know, sometimes it’s not necessarily, the Happy Meal toy, you know, distraction. Sometimes it can just be, you know, depositing the seeds of doubt that the other person’s product might not be as good as yours.
James Kademan [00:30:00]:
That is cool. Have there ever been any business to business type things that you that you work with?
John Dwyer [00:30:08]:
Yeah. Half of our clients half of our clients. And we got clients in America, not many in Europe, but but certainly in America. I I love the US. I’ve been there probably 50 times. And over the years, we were a Disney licensee. So, therefore, I would take out the posters and books and and bubblegum card licenses for all the Disney movies. And so every trip back in those days, when I had 6 kids under 12, every trip cost me $50 because imagine me saying you’re going to Disneyland, you’re gonna stay home in Australia.
James Kademan [00:30:37]:
Woof.
John Dwyer [00:30:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. So the the look. Half our business is b two b. So therefore, you know, we have businesses wanting to distinguish themselves from other businesses. And, in that instance, I mean, one I just put the campaign together for you last night, is a company that, is a blinds manufacturer. So, therefore, you know, for your windows at home, your your blinds and and shutters and curtains. And he wants to sell to a major chain called Spotlight in Australia who sells, guess what, blinds and shutters and, you know, curtains.
John Dwyer [00:31:12]:
And he said, how do I get in? He said, we’re we’re we’re already in, but we want them to spend more. I said, okay. Well, just say to them that you would deliver to them a packaged promotion. And I just told him the holiday the vacation promotion. So, therefore, he’s gonna be pitching to them next week. We put them all together for him. He just presents it. And he says to Spotlight, who has 250 stores around Australia, so it’s gonna be a good plan for him.
John Dwyer [00:31:35]:
You buy x amount of our curtains, or our our blinds, and we will give you this promotion whereby every time somebody spends x dollars on the curtains, they get a free vacation. So what he’s doing is he’s funding the vacation promotion. He gives us the $50 for each one of the vouchers, but he gives it to the other business for them to use as an attraction.
James Kademan [00:31:57]:
Nice. Okay. Alright. So that can, I guess, promote for their salespeople or things like that that can help that way?
John Dwyer [00:32:06]:
Yeah. Because, look, in this day and age where everything, now, of course, is is looked upon, in the old days of being able to give someone tickets to the, you know, Super Bowl or tickets to, you know, the American Open Tennis Tournament, Those days are limited because there’s a lot of corporate governance these days, so it’s very difficult to, you know, do the long lunches like we used to do. And so what we, find ourselves doing is putting together a package promotion for the business to sell to another
James Kademan [00:32:35]:
business. Got it. Okay. Interesting.
John Dwyer [00:32:39]:
Yeah.
James Kademan [00:32:39]:
Do you so the you have to find companies,
John Dwyer [00:32:43]:
like
James Kademan [00:32:43]:
the sweepstakes thing. You gotta find the insurer and stuff like that. Fuel, you gotta find that travel thing. You gotta find that back end stuff. Is it tough to find the back end people?
John Dwyer [00:32:56]:
Yeah. Look. It it is for something like the travel thing, although that dropped from the sky. I can’t take you, but credit for that. They saw my Seinfeld campaign. We don’t get a vacation, so they contacted me. With the fuel thing, excuse me, with the fuel thing, they can go to any fuel station. Okay? They can go to any gas station.
John Dwyer [00:33:14]:
So that’s, if you like, the genius of it. They don’t have to be tied to 1 gas station. They can go out and get the gas from any petrol station, let’s say, in America. They just bring the receipt back to the butcher shop or to the swimming pool company, whatever it might be. They don’t care where they got the gas from. All they’re interested in and keep in mind, it’s just a 10% discount dressed up as a promotion. That’s all. So, therefore, there was no need to find any, you know, any gas station companies involved in that.
John Dwyer [00:33:40]:
As far as the insurance is concerned, yeah, look, there’s a whole bunch of, insurance companies out there that do the prize insurance. We happen to stick with Lloyds, just because they’re big, safe, and friendly. So if you’re gonna do one of those things where it’s an insured prize promotion, I always find it’s better to deal with the 40 ton gorilla.
James Kademan [00:33:59]:
Got it. Okay. There’s experience there. They got the money to back it. They’ve got the systems in place to make sure it’ll work. Yeah. It’s not just some guy hanging out in a trailer saying, trust me.
John Dwyer [00:34:09]:
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I gotta say to you though that for anyone listening, and you don’t have to use me. I mean, we do it, but you don’t have to use me. Just swipe the idea. That Facebook contest formula, is probably something that’s up there with the vacation idea, in terms of just being I can’t say guaranteed because you can never guarantee anything, but pretty close to guaranteed success. It just stands to reason.
John Dwyer [00:34:34]:
And and the reason I’m bemused with this because I can’t believe I’ve been doing this stuff for this long, and it took me till 6 months ago to wake up to it. And that only came about because I was doing a a presentation at a convention, and this guy came up at the end, and he said to me, JD, you’re going on about how powerful Facebook is, and it’s the most laser targeted form of advertising. He said, look. I’ve got an aluminum fence business. Now you guys pronounce it aluminum aluminum fence business. And he said, I’ve advertised on Facebook, and it doesn’t work. And I said, let me have a look at your ad. And his ad was, guess what, a picture of an aluminum fence.
John Dwyer [00:35:07]:
Like, not really sexy. Okay? And I said to him, look. I don’t think anyone’s gonna get hard nipples over that ad. I said, do you wanna get out of the way, and we’ll do it for you? And he said, yeah. Sure. Now what he was doing in the first instance was a mistake. He was highlighting the features, not the benefits. What he should have done is shown what we call the shit to gold picture, and that would be before and after.
John Dwyer [00:35:27]:
So here’s a piling fence in a 30 year old house falling over, and on the right hand side of the photo, of course, the aluminum fence. And then you talk about the benefits of your house is gonna increase in value. The neighbors will love you because all of a sudden, the fence that was falling down has now been fixed and blah blah blah blah blah. But what we did is we ran the ugliest back fence in Australia contest, and your part of the world would be the ugliest back fence in America contest. And what we did is we said take a photo of your ugly falling down fence. We zeroed in on just the, suburbs with 30 year old homes, and we said just take the photo and post it to our Facebook page, and you’re in the chance to win a $5,000 fence makeover. He got 6 months worth of leads in 3 days. Wow.
James Kademan [00:36:11]:
And he rang me
John Dwyer [00:36:12]:
and said, I’ve never seen anything like it. He said, they’re they’re not any hot leads. They’re giving me a picture of their fence.
James Kademan [00:36:19]:
Right? Yeah.
John Dwyer [00:36:19]:
Right? So then we started doing it with Kitchen Innovation Companies, the ugliest kitchen in Australia, and it’s just like, it’s dynamite. It’s just doesn’t bring in leads. It brings in red hot leads. And you don’t have to do the photograph thing. That’s a bit cute if it’s a kitchen. That’s a bit cute if it happens to be a bit of a fence. But just run a Facebook contest with your prize, a giveaway. I mean, the Walking Frame 1, for example, he just had people in their seventies eighties where most of the entries, somewhere in their forties and fifties because their parents were in their eighties.
John Dwyer [00:36:48]:
Right? He didn’t have any 25 year old gymnastic experts in there. Like, it it’s you don’t get much better than a red hot lead who’s glows in the dark and said, I love your product. Right. And as I said, we I mean, we have a a package put together, and we give it to people. And if if you don’t mind me promoting, it’s just fbcontestformula.com. So, therefore, if you wanna have a look at it, swipe it if you don’t wanna use us. Just go to fbcontestformula.com and take it. But if you want it done because you’re like me, if you got a sore tooth, you go to a dentist, then, yeah, we we do it.
John Dwyer [00:37:21]:
Yeah. I mean, the guy rang me last week. We we charge $997 a month, so it’s pretty cheap. And, and we manage everything. We put the ads together. We put the landing page together. We provide the reporting every week and all that sort of stuff. And this guy rang me and he said, JD, I went to your page.
John Dwyer [00:37:36]:
I swiped the idea. And he’s a landscaper. He said, we gave away $2,000 landscaping price. And he said, I ran it for 4 days, and I got one entry and spent nearly $400. He said, can you do this for me? That’s awesome. You got us all go get us all to the cattle, Dennis. Yeah.
James Kademan [00:37:54]:
So there comes a point, I believe, in entrepreneurs’ lives as they grow, they advance, their business is doing things in the positive broadly speaking Yeah. Where you got other problems. You got employees, managers, clients, vendors, all that kind of stuff, and it’s just a lot to juggle. But there comes a point where it’s just like, you know what? I’m gonna pay a pro because I’m a pro and I want people to pay me for my service, but I can’t do it all. Let me pay a pro. And at least in my world, I’ve had better success paying a pro than myself trying to do it.
John Dwyer [00:38:27]:
Yep.
James Kademan [00:38:28]:
I like to try to do stuff a little bit just so I have some modicum of knowledge so that when I’m talking to the vendor, I know kind of what they’re talking about.
John Dwyer [00:38:37]:
But
James Kademan [00:38:38]:
no. The results, I don’t wanna say exclusively have been better with a vendor, but for the most part, there’s a reason that they’re successful doing what they’re doing. Let them do what they do.
John Dwyer [00:38:47]:
Oh, James, and my wife will tell you that I’m the worst, most hopeless man in the world. I can’t Oh, shit. Yeah. No. No. No. I’m the opposite from MacGyver. I go to a hardware store on the weekend just to walk around and look like a man.
John Dwyer [00:39:02]:
I would not I would not know how to use a hammer. And so, therefore, I don’t know how much we’ve spent over the years. We’re we when we the kids were at home, they’ve all left now the 6 kids, so we’re in the high rise now. But up until 6 months ago, we were on 2 and a half acres. And we must have spent a fortune on handymen because, you know, I’m just hopeless. I couldn’t do a thing. And I just keep on coming back to, when my wife would criticize me for not being a real man. I said I said to her, you can’t hurt my feelings.
John Dwyer [00:39:29]:
I have no feelings. Alright? Give it your best job. But I used to say to her, look, if you got sore tooth, go to a dentist. We just pay the handyman to come in and do the stuff. I couldn’t do it. No way. That’s it. That’s it.
James Kademan [00:39:40]:
You need brain surgery. You’re not gonna trust your neighbor. Like,
John Dwyer [00:39:43]:
find a braille Can I give you another can I give you another thing? Aside from the Facebook and I say Facebook, it could be Instagram as well, but Facebook contest formula. And that collects data for you. So therefore, you’ve got their name, you’ve got their age if you wanted, you’ve got their demographic profiles, you can even ask them for their salary if you want. You can do whatever you want on the entry page, and they will give it to you. That’s the beautiful part about a contest. Because they want to win whatever you’re giving away, they will tell you their mother’s maiden name. You know? But, I had another client last week contact me. There’s an Italian restaurant, and two things were wrong.
John Dwyer [00:40:18]:
It’s, Italian restaurant at the bottom of a 5 star hotel, brand new, and in the 1st 4 weeks, they were empty. So I said to them, okay. Well, listen, first of all, you know, why don’t you give away a $500 voucher as the price on a Facebook contest? So that was a given. And then I looked at their logo, and their logo looked like it was a local pizza shop at a little country town. It just didn’t, there was no message market match. And so therefore, I cheated. I just went on to chat GBT and I said can you give me, artwork for a prestigious logo for an Italian restaurant and just typed in all the sorts of things that we needed. Within, like, 30 seconds, the logo looks like it’s the Palazzo Versace.
John Dwyer [00:41:00]:
I mean, it’s just Nice. I gave it to the guy, and because he’s not into marketing, he didn’t know that I cheated with, Chat GPT. He just thinks I’m a genius, so I’ll let him think that. And the reason I bring this up is 2 things. Number 1, message to market match. So whatever your product or brand is, just make sure it’s presented to your audience in the way that they would expect. Okay. His upmarket Italian restaurant was selling entrees for 50 or $60, but his logo looked like it was Kmart.
John Dwyer [00:41:30]:
And, I said to him, it’s called message to market match. And, the second thing is, I said to him, look, I’m going to give you an idea now that will double your business if you do it, but you won’t do it. And, he said, his name was Victor. And, he goes, but I will tell you that. I said, no you won’t. You’ll pay me money, and I’ll tell you how to do this, but you will not do it. And, of course, I’m teasing him, but not really because I’ve given this idea that I’m just about to give to you to restaurants and cafes at conventions I’ve spoken at, and clients that I’ve got, and only one has done it. I know I’m doing the drum roll crescendo to tell you what it is.
John Dwyer [00:42:04]:
And this one restaurant is in Melbourne, Australia called the Lobster Cave. He took his business from 2,200,000,000 to over 5,000,000,000 in 1 year by just doing this simple thing. And all it is is that we stopped all the advertising, and we gave 50¢ to his waitress, waitresses for every name and contact detail they collected, and they handed the check on the table. So, if you and I and 2 other buddies were having lunch, at the end of that lunch, she’d come and put the $200 check on the table, on the bill, and she would give us, not a QR code, no apps, it was just basically a little form, which was the size of maybe an ace of diamonds, and it said, win dinner for 10 of your friends at the end of the month, give us your name, your email, and the main thing is, of course, your cell number. And, that was a few years ago. He’s up to nearly 100,000 on his database now. And he’s the only restaurant in the world that’s 100% full every single night of the year. The only night that he’s not is Christmas because he doesn’t open.
John Dwyer [00:42:58]:
And all he does is this. I was visiting him on one occasion. He’s got a 160 seat restaurant, and he said to me, come upstairs, and I’ll show you how your he’s very kind to me, how your BS works, JD. So we go upstairs to his office, and he calls his long suffering secretary in. And he says, Darlene, can you show JD, how many seats we’ve got filled tonight? And this is at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. She She said, of a 160, we’ve well, I forget what time I was. Let’s just say we’ve we’ve got 60, so we’ve got to fill a 100 seats. He said, we’ll send out JD’s text message number 4, and I’ll give them 20 text messages.
John Dwyer [00:43:29]:
And number 4 would say, hi, Gail and John, that’s my wife and my name. Chef Pierre would like to invite you to come to the dinner tonight, a special lobster tail meal for 2 to $68. Right? Now a bottle of water in this place is $30, so you’re not gonna lose $68, I can tell you. Right? The average couple spends 204. And so it’s not bait and switch, but it’s pretty close to it. Okay? So this Right. I should you can delete that part. So, therefore, they come in for $68 special meal, and, of course, they walk away $204 lighter.
John Dwyer [00:44:01]:
Alright? And all that happens is that she walks in. She’ll she’ll send that text message out to, let’s say, of his, you know, 100,000 list. She’ll send that out to a 1,000. And she’ll walk in to his office 10 minutes later and say, all 100 empty seats are gone, completely booked.
James Kademan [00:44:18]:
Just like that?
John Dwyer [00:44:19]:
Because the text message says this deal will only be available for the next 30 minutes.
James Kademan [00:44:23]:
Alright.
John Dwyer [00:44:24]:
So 84% of all text messages are open within 2 minutes as opposed to an open rate on email now, 10% if you’re lucky. So you’re not interested in their email, you’re interested in their phone number. And, the reason I bring that up is because I will tell that story to restaurant and cafe owners all the time, and they’ll never do it. So I said to this guy, who’s just come on recently with his Italian restaurant with the bad logo, I said to him, you won’t do it. And, guess what? Last night, he contacted Vince, and we’re ready to launch on Monday. So
James Kademan [00:44:56]:
we’ll we’ll see
John Dwyer [00:44:57]:
we’ll see what happened. And when he says to me, oh, look. We’ll just put a QR code on the table. I said, no. No. No. No. You people in the hospitality industry, you must be on drugs.
John Dwyer [00:45:05]:
It’s called hospitality. You don’t put a QR code there and expect them to do your work for you. Go look. Here’s 2 tickets to Disneyland. Go and see how it’s done. You idiot. Right. All it is is just a piece of paper the size of, you know, the size of a wallet, and it just says win dinner for 10 of your friends at the end of the month.
John Dwyer [00:45:23]:
You’ll find that 90% of people will fill that in, and then you’ve got a database that you can milk forever.
James Kademan [00:45:28]:
Very cool. I love it. Tell me, really quick because and this is top of mind on my end because I have a trade show coming up. And this I mean, you’re trying to compete with 50,000,000 different things going on, all the other different booths, the classes that attendees are going to, all that kind of stuff. What are some of the things you would recommend for a company to do at a trade show to try to get attention?
John Dwyer [00:45:51]:
We’ve done a bunch of, trade shows in Vegas. I’ve made we’re we’re not a big business by any means, but we’ve done a few in Vegas with these package promotions. And, what you can’t do it now because of security, but back in the day, we could just slip, invitations on their door or under their door in the hotel. You can’t do that now, of course. You know? And what it would be is the chance to win a a a wonderful prize. It was normally a holiday in Vegas. Keep in mind that everyone’s coming for the convention. But they had to come down and check the prize board at our booth.
John Dwyer [00:46:25]:
So, therefore, your lucky number might have been 304, and we had on our prize booth a list of all the numbers that won the prize. And so, therefore, it made you come to our booth to see if your brochure matched the number at at our Oh,
James Kademan [00:46:39]:
clever.
John Dwyer [00:46:41]:
Yeah. And because you can’t do the bikini girls anymore, that’s a no no. So, anyway, yeah. Look. I I would suggest we and, look, it’s funny you should ask this because we’re doing one for someone here that’s doing a, a convention in Sydney. And what we’re doing is saying, we we look after him as we would with you, of course, with these vacation vouchers. And he just simply says, come to my birth and, have a 5 minute conversation with me, and you’ll walk away after your vacation. And, the other booths around him want to step him through the heart.
James Kademan [00:47:15]:
Nice. Yeah. So That’s pretty slick.
John Dwyer [00:47:18]:
You won’t get anything hotter than inviting someone to just have a 5 minute conversation with you, and they walk away with a vacation. Right?
James Kademan [00:47:26]:
Yeah. That’s incredible.
John Dwyer [00:47:28]:
Pretty stupid. Yeah. Pretty stupid. And the reason the reason that that works is the hotels, or pretty much full star, they run at about 30% vacancy outside of school vacations. Now whoever you give this to cannot use it at Christmas and Easter and school vacations because it’s based on having unsold rooms. There’s no unsold rooms in those periods. Right? So the thing is is that if they’re running at 30% or thereabouts, vacancy factor outside of school vacations, then really that empty room is like an empty seat on an airplane. They’re not making any money out of it.
John Dwyer [00:47:59]:
And so, therefore, they’re happy to give that room up to us for free. We resell it for whatever we wanna resell it for. Okay? So we can resell it for, $90, for 60, for we’ve come up with a price around about $50 because that covers our overheads and the commission we need to pay the travel company. But when people buy in volume I mean, someone yesterday, contacted me, and they wanted a 1,000 of them. They don’t pay $50. They pay much less than that, of course. You know? So like anything else, you know, if you buy in volume. But what we found is that if you wanna get someone off the fence, if you want to artificially stimulate them to talk to you, then just simply say, listen.
John Dwyer [00:48:36]:
If you have a Zoom call with me, or in your instance, come to my birth, you’ll walk away with a free vacation. Shut the gate. And it doesn’t matter what demographic it is because these hotels are 4 star rated. Then it’s not like, you know, if you give it to a doctor, he’ll go, oh, no. I’m not staying at the RV park. But you can give this to any demographic, and they’ll give you a big hug.
James Kademan [00:48:56]:
That is cool. I love it. JD, you had some books. There was a huge one you wanted to mention. I’m excited to see this again.
John Dwyer [00:49:04]:
Yes. Because I’m an idiot, when I hit this seminar talk circuit, the people who were promoting my seminar said, you gotta write a book. I said, I don’t I don’t wanna write a book. They said, no. No. You gotta write a book. Oh, okay. So I did the normal small book, and it’s called the avalanche leads formula.
John Dwyer [00:49:20]:
So that’s the normal small book. Okay? But then they said you gotta write another one. I went, oh, come on. I mean, it’s it’s hard enough to get out on stage and talk. And so I had to write another one, so I thought, okay. Well, it’s my thing is called the institute of wow.com. I better write a a Wow book. So it’s this one here.
John Dwyer [00:49:35]:
If you’re listening to this, you can’t see it. But if you’re listening to it, it’s the size of a tabloid newspaper. It’s leather bound, gold tipped at the edges, and each one of these books is 300 pages of direct response ideas that you can swipe and use for your business. And, each book costs $420 to print, so it’s just a ridiculous thing that I did. But it got a 10th. We can give you the digital version of this. Okay? So therefore, in here, there’s 300 pages of all of the winning direct response ideas I’ve had over the last 15, 20 years. All these ideas are timeless.
John Dwyer [00:50:08]:
If it worked on television 15 years ago, it’ll work on Facebook today.
James Kademan [00:50:12]:
Sure.
John Dwyer [00:50:12]:
By the way, it’s called the Wow Manifesto. I can do it again.
James Kademan [00:50:15]:
The Wow Manifesto. I love that thing is huge. That is a book you put on your coffee table or in your waiting room, and people are just gonna be amazed by it just by looking at the cover and then inside with all those ideas.
John Dwyer [00:50:28]:
You know what, James? We get them to sign the insurance form. If they read this in bed of a nighttime and fall asleep, they’ll break their ribs. So, therefore, they’ve, we’re we’re gonna have a disclaimer.
James Kademan [00:50:37]:
It’s
John Dwyer [00:50:38]:
it is but you know what? All jokes aside, by producing a stupid, ridiculous book like this, and we for $400 odd to print, we would give this to anyone that joins the 25 k program. Of course, you would. Right? With anyone else, it’s a digital copy that we give them because you can’t hand out $400 books all the time. But you know what? When I hold that up, again, I mean, it’s called the instituteofwow.com. So therefore, when I hold that up, there’s no question that gets everybody’s attention because it’s got a wow.
James Kademan [00:51:06]:
Right. It’s not the Institute of Meh. It’s the Institute of Wow.
John Dwyer [00:51:10]:
Yeah. The the when some of our, ideas over the years have not worked, I just say, oh, it’s the Institute of Wow. Woah. Hey. That’d be all.
James Kademan [00:51:21]:
I love it. JD, where can people find you?
John Dwyer [00:51:24]:
Well, you know what we’ve found is that when I am on a podcast like this, the best thing to do, is what a guy in America, says quite often. He’s in the similar advisory game to me, and he said, prove to people that you can help them by actually helping them. And it’s a pretty good idea. And that’s really, I guess, another term for sampling. I always say to people, if you own a fit like, a seafood shop, have a hostess handing out calamari samples at lunchtime and dinner time, and there’s a good chance they’ll taste them and come in and spend money on seafood. And so, therefore, the best thing that we thought with this is to invite people to have a chat with me. So once a week, we have a group Zoom meeting for anyone who listens to me on your podcast to just join half a dozen other business owners and have a chat with me. And so, therefore, you’re gonna throw up probably when I give you the URL for this.
John Dwyer [00:52:13]:
But if anyone just wants to have an hour with me on Zoom, and be prepared that there would be 5 or 6 or 7 other businesses. But, nonetheless, you’ve got the chance to ask me any questions about your business. You like like your one just then about the, convention. How do you Yeah. Your birth? Yeah. Wait wait for this. Just go to getmorejd.com.
James Kademan [00:52:31]:
Oh, I love it.
John Dwyer [00:52:33]:
My wife threw up. She was sick. She was physically ill when I told her. That was the URL. So getmorejd.com.
James Kademan [00:52:39]:
Get more jd. She probably just kept clicking. Right?
John Dwyer [00:52:43]:
No. She’s she’s heard too much of this well stuff, I’m afraid. She just she just rolls her eyes. And then, of course, Joe, the other thing and and, look, I think anybody who’s married to an entrepreneur, whether it’s a husband or whether it’s a wife, is probably over the next phrase. Because I’ll say to her, I’ve got this new idea, and she’ll go, oh, no. No. No. No.
John Dwyer [00:53:01]:
No.
James Kademan [00:53:02]:
I I can tell you, my wife, I always think of her like a little fire fighter pilot because she likes to shoot down every new idea. And I’m like, this will be great. Right? But I was just joking with a a guy in a meeting that I had earlier this morning. Like, the entrepreneurs that I know, myself included, I feel like our full time job, beyond full time, is to constantly pull in the reins of the 5,000,000 ideas that we have rolling in our head every single day, and it’s not to act on every single one of those ideas. Yep. Like, 1 or 2 every once in a while, great. Run with it. But you gotta constantly pump the brakes because there’s always something going on.
John Dwyer [00:53:43]:
Well, you know what you know what? I I agree with that wholeheartedly. And she told me 6 months ago when we were about to go down the rabbit hole with the AI robots. Oh, look. That’s silly. And, now because a good portion of our income is coming from that, I’m not so silly after all. And, just before we go, the quick hand the the quick description of this is we had a lot of trades business, like electricians and plumbers and solar dealers, and they’re on the roof putting a solar panel in. They can’t answer their phone. So what we’ve done is come up with a a a product called AI Genie, as in I dream of Genie.
John Dwyer [00:54:18]:
And, she answers the phone for them, or he, it’s a male or female, whatever you want the robot to be. And so, therefore, what happens is that these trades businesses now come on for less than $200 a month. We answer the robot answers the phone, and not only answers the phone for them, but also schedules the next, meeting. So, therefore, if someone says, look. My air conditioner’s broken. I need it fixed. The robot will have a conversation with them. You know? Would would you want anything else on here? I’d like 3 ceiling fans, and I’d like 4 PowerPoints.
John Dwyer [00:54:47]:
And the robot will quote an estimate and then say, look. Give me your address, and we’ll have someone there for you tomorrow at 3 o’clock. And what the robot’s doing is it’s actually going into the 12 trucks that this particular guy has on the road. I’m only bringing this up because of one yesterday. And he got 12 trucks on the road. Where they were losing money is that the next job that truck number 1 got might have been an hour drive away. Now that’s not the case because what happens now is that the robot actually schedules the next job for him, the next suburb. And they used to have a 40% abandonment rate on a hot day.
John Dwyer [00:55:21]:
So if it was electrical business with air conditioners on a hot day, they might get a 100 calls. They lost 40 of them because they couldn’t answer all of them, and people just get the, you know, what’s and they lose. Now 100% of all the calls are answered. And the guy yesterday said to me just in the last month, they’ve saved $15 a week on lost calls. So because every single call now is answered, like, within 2 rings, so they have no abandonment rate at all. He said the amount of money that means that we are now answering a 100% of the calls instead of 60%. That means we know what the conversion rate is in that extra 40%. We just picked up 15 k a week.
James Kademan [00:55:56]:
That’s cool. That’s impressive.
John Dwyer [00:55:58]:
Yeah. So I I I I I put that in front of my wife in front of the table every night when we’re having dinner. I say, I told you. I knew this one would work.
James Kademan [00:56:09]:
That’s the that’s the name of the game. Is she an entrepreneur as well?
John Dwyer [00:56:13]:
No. Thank god. But because she was, our kids would have never eaten, because we we both would have put everything on the next job. Yeah. Now she’s the daughter of an accountant, and so, therefore, she’s come from a left brain background, whereas I’m ultra right brain, of course, being an entrepreneur. And, luckily, that was the case because, yeah. Can you imagine 2 entrepreneurs around the dinner table?
James Kademan [00:56:32]:
You know, it’s a fun conversation, but, yeah, it could go up and down.
John Dwyer [00:56:36]:
It’s no. Because, well, we we have a win on something, And I’d say, okay. Well, let’s have well, you know, it’s like a gambling. And my wife, actually, his father was a compulsive gambler because then she marries an entrepreneur. Well, she’s an idiot. And, so you have a big win on something, and you say, well, let’s do it on the project. And, yeah. Thank goodness she would put me down from the sky because, yeah.
John Dwyer [00:56:58]:
She told us that the kids needed to eat.
James Kademan [00:57:01]:
Nice. That is cool. JD, thank you so much for being on the show.
John Dwyer [00:57:06]:
My pleasure. And, by the way, I’ll have a chat to you later on because I’m sure I can help you with some vacation vouchers for your big convention.
James Kademan [00:57:14]:
Oh my gosh. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great idea. I’m always trying to think of something to help people, because a lot of these trade shows is all introverts that wanna I call them pen stealers. Just grab your kitschy stuff and move on without looking up from the floor.
James Kademan [00:57:30]:
Yeah. And I’m always trying to think of something that to attract the attention, to get them in a conversation, even just to have them have a little bit more fun because I always seem so, not they seem to be zombies sometimes.
John Dwyer [00:57:44]:
What amazes me and, again, I guess it’s because our whole thing is, you know, the Institute of Well, when I go to these conventions, I’m just amazed that they’ve all got the M and M bowl of the candy and, you know, a few other bits and bits. And I think, is that the best you can come up with? I mean, did you, yeah, did you have a committee meeting and all 10 people said, yeah. What we gotta do is put M and M’s in a fishbowl that’ll attract them by the millions?
James Kademan [00:58:08]:
Right. Yeah. Right. Have to beat them off with a stick.
John Dwyer [00:58:13]:
I just shake my head on the is that the best that your committee could come up with? You know?
James Kademan [00:58:18]:
That is a fantastic question that I should ask, a lot of people.
John Dwyer [00:58:22]:
Yeah. Yeah.
James Kademan [00:58:23]:
But you’re not wrong. You’re not wrong at all.
John Dwyer [00:58:25]:
No. No. It’s, I mean, I, I I get asked all the time, you know, what my philosophy is. And I said, well, two things, test and fix, of course. And the second thing is hand around hang around people who say, why not? Not people who say, why? And you’ll normally find accountants and operational people will go, oh, why? I mean, why would you invest in that? Why would you do that? Whereas you’ll find crazies like you and I, a much more fun to hang around because we are. Why not? Let’s get
James Kademan [00:58:51]:
that Oh my gosh. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. It reminds me of, I’m trying to think of who the stand up comic was. I think it was Nate Bargatze, said he was hanging out with his wife, and his wife complained that she doesn’t joke with her. And he’s like, I hang out with comedians all day. Stand up comics.
James Kademan [00:59:07]:
I do this for a living. They’re more fun to hang out with.
John Dwyer [00:59:11]:
Yeah. Of course. That’s right.
James Kademan [00:59:13]:
Sorry.
John Dwyer [00:59:14]:
When I was doing the side film thing, I asked him the obvious question. I said, 2 people trying to be funny in front of you. And he said, yeah. Yeah. He said taxi drivers or not that he would capture taxi very often, I would imagine.
James Kademan [00:59:25]:
Right. Yeah. He’s got his Porsches or cars to
John Dwyer [00:59:28]:
Oh, yeah. So he’s got the the largest collection of Porsches, like crazy. Yeah. And, so I didn’t I said to him, look. I’m a bit sarcastic, and I think I’m funny, but there’s no way I’m gonna tell you a joke.
James Kademan [00:59:42]:
Mum’s the word, man. Mum’s
John Dwyer [00:59:43]:
the word. Exactly. So, yeah. I must say that, yeah. It’s much it’s just good fun to hang around with people. I’m I’m not talking crazy people who say yes to anything, but it’s good fun to hang around with people who go, yeah. Yeah. Let’s give that a shot.
John Dwyer [00:59:57]:
Why not? Why not?
James Kademan [00:59:59]:
No. The the visionaries are the ones that are, I’m gonna say, observant. Because I feel like a lot of stand up comics, a lot of their material is just observing and twisting the opposite to what people aren’t really thinking of.
John Dwyer [01:00:12]:
You got it. Yeah.
James Kademan [01:00:13]:
Take that standard thing and just look at the 180 degree view of it.
John Dwyer [01:00:17]:
Yep. And I think I think we’ve come to that point in the, in the conversation where you and I are saying, why can’t people be just more like us?
James Kademan [01:00:25]:
Oh my god. Wouldn’t that make the world so much better?
John Dwyer [01:00:28]:
It was
James Kademan [01:00:28]:
just that’s all there is to it. Right? If everyone just thought exactly what I thought, they would be right. I love it. JD, thank you so much for being on the show.
John Dwyer [01:00:37]:
My pleasure, man. All the best, man.
James Kademan [01:00:39]:
This has been Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle, stories, and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. My name is James Kademan, and Authentic Business Adventures is brought to you by Calls On Call, offering call answering services, to service businesses across the country. I should know what we do. Good gracious. On the web at callsoncall.com. And, of course, the Bold Business Book. Not as big as the Institute of Wow book there, but decent size. A book for the entrepreneur in all of us, available wherever fine books are sold.
James Kademan [01:01:12]:
If you’re listening or watching this on the web, if you could do us a huge favor, give us a big old thumbs up, subscribe, and of course, share it with your entrepreneurial friends. Especially those friends that could use a little bit of marketing help in their business, which, let’s just face it, that’s pretty much all of them. Right? What is the saying? Business is just marketing and innovation. Is that the idea? Something like that? John, can you share that website one more time where people can find you?
John Dwyer [01:01:38]:
Yeah. Because I’m so shy, I will give it up once again. It’s getmorejd.com because my name is John Dewyer. So getmorejd.com. And, of course, the company website is the instituteofwow.com.
James Kademan [01:01:51]:
The Institute of Wow. I love it. Past episodes can be found morning, noon, and night at the podcast link found at draw in customers.com. Thank you for joining us. We will see you next week. I want you to stay awesome. And if you do nothing else, enjoy your business.