John Dwyer with The Institute Of Wow

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. Another episode of High Velocity Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have John Dwyer, who is with the Institute of Wow. Welcome, John.

John Dwyer: Thank you for having me, Lee.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Uh, tell us a little bit about the Institute of. Wow. How you serving, folks?

John Dwyer: Yeah, I like the way that you say that. The institute of. Wow. Um, look, uh, as that name infers, uh, it’s all about, uh, providing businesses with what we call direct response. Wow. Factor concepts. So things that will, you know, I guess, attract customers much easier than price discounting because a lot of businesses fall into that trap where they they need to put some money in their pocket and some food on the table, and the first thing they do is drop their prices. So what we do is that we provide them with wow factor ideas. That takes people’s eyes off the price.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How’d you get involved in this line of work?

John Dwyer: Uh, yeah. Look, I’ve been doing it since the 1800s, so therefore I’ve been doing this for quite some time. And, uh, my backstory is that when I was getting towards the age of leaving school, I was pretty good at art. Artwork was my subject. And then, uh, back in the day, a thousand years ago, when I was leaving school, I could see that computers were coming around the corner and that a little bit like what kids would have seen a few years ago with AI, I guess. But I saw computers were coming around the corner. I thought, hmm, there’s not going to be much money in doing artwork as in freelance artwork. Maybe what I should do is take that creativity and put it into something that might be scalable. Not that I knew what I was doing at the time. By the way, I’m trying to make myself sound smart. At 18 or 19, I wasn’t. Yeah. So anyway, that’s what I did. I went to university and college and picked up the advertising degrees after a few years. And then, yeah, went and worked for a major supermarket chain in Australia. As you can tell from my accent, I’m down under. And that was a great experience because in my 20s I was lucky enough to work for a big supermarket chain in Australia called called Woolworths, and they had a lot of this wow factor stuff happening. So if you shopped at Woolworths for every $10 you spent, you may have got a stamp back in the day. This is pre-digital, you might get a stamp and you put that on a saver sheet. And when you saved up so many stamps, you got special prices on cookware and glassware and all that sort of stuff. And throughout the time I was there, we ran big scratch games to give away million dollar prizes. And yeah, basically it taught me direct response. And it was very, very good for me because obviously I ultimately left Woolworths and set up a business that did the same thing.

Lee Kantor: So does the same formulas and techniques of back in the day leveraging direct response. Does it still work in today’s kind of short attention span world that we live in?

John Dwyer: It does. I mean, look, it’s tougher It’s tougher because everybody’s got that four second attention span as they’re scrolling. So it is tougher. And I guess that’s why we’re continuing to do okay. Because, uh, business owners do realize that you’ve got to stop the scroll. Uh, and uh, while some business owners are still using television and radio and newspapers and so forth, it’s not what it used to be. So really, Zuckerberg and, uh, TikTok and LinkedIn, they’re getting all the money these days. So you’ve got to learn as a business owner, you’ve got to learn. And if you don’t want to learn, then get someone like us to do it. But you’ve got to learn how to make sure that you can stop the scroll because you’ve got four seconds.

Lee Kantor: So, um, let’s try to help some of these listeners. How do you stop the scroll? What are some of the do’s and don’ts?

John Dwyer: Mm. Okie dokie. Um, well, again, you wouldn’t expect me to say anything differently. I mean, it is the Institute of. Wow. So what we say to people is you’ve got to have a wow factor. And as corny as that might sound, uh, when it rolls off the tongue like that, um, a wow factor is something very much akin to what McDonald’s do with the Happy Meal toy. I’ve got six children. They’re all grown up now and left home. But, you know, over the years we probably would have given McDonald’s, you know, a small fortune. And it had nothing to do with the hamburger in the Happy Meal box. It was all about the free toy. So metaphorically, they stopped the scroll. They got everybody’s attention by putting a toy in the Happy Meal box. Uh, Kellogg’s have been doing the same thing for 50 years with a toy in the bottom of the box. Uh, Amazon. Do it with their Prime membership. If you’re a member of their Prime membership club, then you get free shipping and free movies and all sorts of other privileges. Um, and the cafe down the road from you and from me, uh, probably, you know, has given you a reward card. And if you get ten coffees or nine coffees, you get the 10th one for free. So it’s all out there. Um, the irony is that 97% of businesses have never used an incentive. Um, so a big part of direct response marketing is what we call incentive based marketing. And that’s the Happy Meal toy in the box. And 97% of businesses continue to go down the price discounting path. And they don’t, uh, they don’t value add with an incentive. So my advice to anyone, if they were advertising on social media, have a wow factor incentive. And that is a very good way of stopping the scroll.

Lee Kantor: Now what about the, um, kind of B2B, uh, coaches and consultants of the world that don’t have maybe tangible things that they sell? How can they add some of that wow factor into their offering?

John Dwyer: Mm. Yeah. Good question. Um, yeah. Look, I fall into that category because when I moved from corporate, which was the big supermarket chains and stuff like that, into helping smaller to medium sized businesses, the, the Anthony Robbins business model is pretty much it. So you jump on stage and do your song and dance, uh, and you attract, you know, business owners in the room. And then at the end of that, of course, you, uh, you offer them the opportunity to use your services and, you know, courtesy of Covid. A lot of that now is done online. Like we’re, you know, like we’re doing right now. I mean, webinars and podcasts have become the new seminars. Um, on a B2B basis, you could do exactly what I do. If I wanted to beef up a month’s worth of income. I will run an ad on Facebook or LinkedIn because my audience are business owners. That’s the only people who want to talk to me. I don’t deal with consumers. And I will say, look, how about you enter the contest to win? You know, three months worth of coaching free of charge from me.

John Dwyer: And I’ll tell them on that advertisement, which might be on LinkedIn, uh, you know, all the sort of stuff that I do, what direct response can do to help their business and so forth. Now, any business that enters a contest to win three month’s worth of my consultancy obviously is interested in getting marketing consultancy. So I don’t attract an audience. I attract a red hot audience who have already glowed in the dark and put their hand up and said, I want more of this stuff. So we give one away. But then I might have another 100 or 200 businesses that are pretty warm prospects to go back to and say, look, you didn’t win the three months consultancy with John, but we do have an opportunity for you to work with them. Would you be interested in this special deal or whatever it might be? And that’s what I would suggest to any business coach or consultant or advisor that, you know, come up with a price that might be your services.

Lee Kantor: And, um, walk me through what it’s like to start an engagement with you. So say I come to you, say I’m one of those business coaches, and I come to you and say, you know what? I’m frustrated. Uh, the growth of my business is not going in the right direction. That’s. I’m. I’m assuming that’s how most of your clients feel, right? When they’re working with you. Something’s gone wrong, and they need help either rebooting or refreshing. Uh, what they they do. So talk me through what that first kind of conversation looks like. So you so you get enough information so you can educate and educate and help them.

John Dwyer: Yeah. Look, it’s not a very long conversation, Lee, because it’s the same conversation just about for, you know, 95% of people, um, uh, nobody has ever knocked on my door and said, oh, John, my name is John Dwyer, but I get JD, nobody’s ever knocked on my door and said, JD, I’d like you to help me build my business over the next, you know, five years I’m in no hurry and no one’s ever done that. Uh, they’re always looking for David Copperfield to provide them with a marketing plan that’s going to get them a hell of a lot more clients quickly. Uh, and so, generally speaking, yeah, if they’re in the same sort of game that I am and that is providing advice, um, a lot of the time they just are not aware of how best to, um, play the numbers game, because look, at the end of the day, uh, it is a numbers game. It’s all about selling once to many. Uh, if you’re not selling once to many, then of course, you know you’re not scaling. And I fell into that trap. By the way, I can’t criticize anyone else. When I first got into this, I didn’t realize that, you know, the scaling was very, very, very important. Uh, not so much when you’re dealing with bigger businesses. So I’ve only been in the small to medium business sector for about a dozen years. Uh, up until then, uh, I, you know, had McDonald’s and 7-Eleven as clients. I had Kellogg’s as clients. Um, I had, you know, big businesses. Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited, uh, I used I used to provide them with all the scratch bingos for their newspapers, you know, not these days, but back in the early 2000.

John Dwyer: And what happened about a dozen years ago, I said to my wife, look, we’re not getting any younger. Why don’t I use this intellectual property that I’m charging a few dollars to for the corporates and cut it up into bite sized pieces and make it available for smaller businesses? And she told me that I was an idiot and, uh, stick to my knitting. And as our husbands do, I didn’t listen to her. So Teresa. Yeah. Yeah. I had a baptism of fire. I jumped on, uh, you know, the small to medium business owner sector very quickly. And, uh, I’ll tell you what. It was a dry six months to start with because I didn’t know how to speak the language. Um, I was used to being involved in corporate and corporate are not necessarily wanting to win the race. They’re happy for you to provide them with consultancy. And eventually, after six or 7 or 8 months, you know, they start to see results in the small business sector. That’s not the case. They want results tomorrow because they’ve got to put food on the table, no matter how many likes they’ve got. The kids are still wanting to eat, you know. So what we do is we just simply have a very quick conversation that would probably go for the best part of, you know, maybe 20, 25 minutes. And then I put a plan together for them, um, that will hopefully, you know, give them a roadmap that they can follow quite easily.

Lee Kantor: And then, uh, then they do that on their own. This is your kind of, uh, giving them help. And sometimes, though, people need a helper. Do you ever do the work or that you got out of that side of the business?

John Dwyer: Oh, yeah. I was an idiot, Lee. I thought that just like the corporate world where they had an advertising staff that maybe, you know, five or 10 or 20 people where I’d go in and, you know, I mean, one of my most successful campaigns. And I’m going to show off here because I’m going to name drop, uh, was a bank down under, uh, whereby instead of advertising on price, uh, in other words, an interest rate for a home loan might be 6.2%. Uh, we got rid of that and gave that, uh, what was what used to be their their lure, which is a honeymoon rate. We’d give that to a travel company. And that travel company gave them a, you know, a discounted vacation. So we came on television for this bank. It was the only bank in the world that did something like this. It was very bold. It was get a home loan from this particular bank and get a free vacation. It went nuts. And then a few years after launching it, I got Jerry Seinfeld to do the ads. And so I’d fly backwards and forwards to New York, and Jerry would do all the TV ads for us, so we would be Down Under with Jerry Seinfeld on TV saying, get a home loan, get a vacation, get a free vacation.

John Dwyer: Now, when Seinfeld got involved with something that was already successful, it went through the stratosphere. Um, now that bank had a marketing team of 12 people so I could get into their office. I can, you know, basically show off and provide the advice to them and say, you should do this and you put this on TV. You did this on the newspapers. You did this on Facebook. You did this on LinkedIn. And they had a team to execute. Um, in the small business sector, that’s not the case. Uh, they’re all too busy. They’re running their business. Whether it happens to be a butcher, baker, candlestick maker. So we woke up to ourselves after getting very frustrated. I would give them the Seinfeld style level advice. Uh, but I found that that was something that was just silly because they just they appreciated it, but nothing ever got done. They never executed it. So what we do now is that we implement it for them.

Lee Kantor: So now take me back to that time at that bank. So every other bank in the market was, um, working off a price or advertising on price or that was their point of differentiation. So you’ve you’ve found one needle in the haystack that you were able to convince to do something totally different. And, uh, and that’s not easy to do to convince someone to go against the tide. Can you walk us through kind of how you were able to persuade, usually a very risk averse group of people, to take a chance this bold at a time when none of their competitors were putting their neck on the line. How how did you persuade them to take the risk?

John Dwyer: Yeah. Look, very good question. Um, they were boring bankers. Okay, uh, lovely people. But you wouldn’t want to get caught in an elevator with them. The conversation wouldn’t be gripping. Um, and so therefore, they employ a marketing consultant like me who’s sarcastic and cheeky, and I thought we were probably going to butt heads. Um, as it turned out, they didn’t realize until I told them that they were a challenger brand. And if you’re not the Coca-Cola of your industry, um, you’re a challenger brand. Okay. And, uh, so, you know, I mean, Richard Branson used to be a challenger brand with Virgin Airlines, but of course, it’s up there now with, you know, American Airlines and everyone else. A challenger brand is one that doesn’t take the number one or number two spot. So when I got together with them in their boardroom and, you know, there might have been 7 or 8 managers around the table, I threw a Happy Meal box in the middle of the boardroom table. Uh, Anthony Robbins tells you, you know, you’ve got to get attention. So therefore, that was the way I got attention. And I pulled out the, uh, the toy. And I’d been there for a couple of months doing a time and motion study on the business from a marketing perspective. And they had been doing everything that all the other banks do. So it’s a me too industry, the banking industry or the home loan industry.

John Dwyer: They all look the same. So it’s all me too. Me too. Me too. And so what happens is I said to them, okay, um, this is what I think could make a big difference in your business. Now, I was being silly just to get their attention, and they said, okay, idiot. I mean, what are you talking about? With a toy out of the box in the middle of the boardroom table? I said, look, I will give anyone here $100. I put out $100 note because that gets the attention of a banker. And I said, I’ll give everyone $100. Note if you can tell me what a Happy Meal costs because they’ve all got children or grandchildren. No one got within a dollar. And I said, well, that proves to you that McDonald’s have taken your eyes off the price. Okay. It’s all about the toy. And so I suggest what you guys might like to do. You don’t want to be advertising on price. You are the 250th biggest business in Australia. So they’re not small. They weren’t a butcher, a baker. They’re a pretty big business. But the big banks, the Wells Fargo style banks were, you know, 50 times bigger. And that’s why they were a challenger brand. I said, so if you’re a challenger brand, you’ve got to do things differently. What is your acquisition tool at the moment? And they said, oh, we give 1% honeymoon rate to, you know, the husband and wife for the first year.

John Dwyer: I said, every bank does that. You know, if the interest rate was 6%, they’d make it 5% for the first 12 months to get your in, and then it goes back up to 6% after 12 months. Why don’t you pick that up and give it to this discount travel company that I’ve been doing some TV commercials for, and they will give you a $10,000 vacation for $5,000, right? So if you were borrowing $500,000 and a 1% honeymoon rate for the first year was five grand. You give that to them and they’ll give you ten grand holiday. And that’s what we did. So I introduced them basically to the travel company. And then the rest is history. We came on television and social media and we said, get a home loan from this bank or not even get a home. Swap your home loan from the nasty Wells Fargo bank who’s treating you like a number and charging you? Uh, well, what we would say is that not once in ten years we ran the promotion for ten years. Not once did they ever advertise a price. You you can imagine. That’s that’s, um. Nobody in the world would run their business for ten years without advertising a price.

Lee Kantor: Now, I know when you’re saying that, you tell them this idea, and instead of giving the 1% as 1%, you take the same amount of money or less and then make it into a vacation. Um, and, um, I just find it difficult to understand how a bunch of bankers throw their credit card across the table to you and say, oh yeah, let’s run that. Like, there’s committees. There’s boards of directors. How possibly were they able to be persuaded this simply on such a contrarian idea? I just think there has to be more to it.

John Dwyer: Uh, look, uh, I make it sound easy that they said yes on that day in the boardroom. No, no, you’re quite right. I mean, it took a couple of months for them to get their head around it and have all their usual committee meetings. Um, but, you know, it was I had been there, uh, as a marketing consultant for probably 2 to 3 months when I was just looking at all the stuff that they were doing and it was all rubbish. It was all the billboard freeway, right?

Lee Kantor: It was all the MeToo stuff that everybody else was doing. You were telling them to do something totally contrarian, something totally outside of what I would imagine would be their comfort zone. So I’m just want to understand, because this is what the listeners need, because this is there in that same position. A lot of listeners have a great idea. They just have a difficult time convincing people to take a risk. You were able to do that. I want to really understand how you were able to convince it had to be layers of bureaucracy to go along with this idea. Did they pilot it in a small way, or did they just kind of go all in? Like, how did this get across all of that bureaucracy to get a yes?

John Dwyer: Yeah. Look, um, I guess it starts with the big idea. If you’ve got a big idea, um, there’s a pretty good chance even a left brain person, which, of course they are, uh, would react to it. Um, I think really, if I didn’t have the pedigree that I had up until that time, uh, maybe it would have been difficult to get across the line, but I had pulled off a few of these things over time. Um, you know, over the years because of, I guess, thinking outside the box, I’ve done stuff with meatloaf and Michael Jordan and Paul Hogan, Crocodile Dundee and all of these sorts of people. So, uh, not that Seinfeld was part of the equation in the first instance. He didn’t come until 3 or 4 years into the campaign, but I had a reasonable track record. So therefore I would show all the things that I’ve done for the big supermarket chain here in Australia and for car dealerships and for butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. So I showed them what I had done. If this was my first rodeo, then yeah, probably they’d go, look, you have no clue. You don’t know what you’re talking about. And the fact that the travel company was already a client of mine and I was doing infomercials on television for them, um, I think that played a role too. So therefore I already had the relationship with the travel company and, you know, sometimes perfect storm. You know, the jigsaw pieces just fall into place. Um, I have to say this to you. It was easier to get the building society. It’s called the Greater Building society. It was easier to get them to say yes, to get a home loan, get a free holiday. That’s what we call it. Down under. You guys call it vacation, but we call it holiday. It was easier to get a yes from them for the concept than it was to get Seinfeld. So if you said to me which one was the easier, I’ll say the bank. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: So now do those same techniques work nowadays? Infomercials. Uh, those kind of, uh, classic direct response communications?

John Dwyer: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It doesn’t matter what the medium is these days. Um, and, you know, I don’t do a lot of copywriting. Now, there’s a guy called ChatGPT that does it for me, but, uh, but nonetheless. Yeah, the when, you know, I’m a baby boomer. And so therefore, you’re going to get the question from younger people who own their business. Look, uh, how do we know that? You know, you’ve kept up with the times? Well, I have, because if you’re in the marketing game, you’re an idiot if you don’t. And I’ve got all the young guys around me that, you know, press the buttons when it comes to LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook and so forth. Um, but the thing is, the actual principles of direct response marketing have not changed. It’s still basically problem solution marketing. You know, you overweight and you know you don’t feel good about yourself. Well guess what? I’ve got the solution for you. And coincidentally, spring and summer is just around the corner. You’re going to look good in your swimsuit. So problem solution. So nothing’s changed with regards to what direct response marketing is. It’s all about the problem, the solution. The only thing that’s changed is the platforms. You know, the communication platforms. And uh, yeah, I mean, it doesn’t it doesn’t take away that the idea that worked 20 or 30 years ago will still work. It’s just a different communication platform.

Lee Kantor: Now, in order to leverage the, um, social channels nowadays, do you have to use paid as well as, uh, kind of organic or can you get away with just doing organic?

John Dwyer: No, no, no, there’s no way in the world you could get away with just doing organic. And, you know, the platforms have designed their platform to make sure that you can’t. Yeah. Someone said to me the other day, we’ve got a couple of clients in Texas and, uh, they’re selling motorbikes. Uh, and, and, you know, although I’m down under, we have clients all around the world these days because what we do, of course, is package it together for them. And they just basically sit back and watch it work. And this happens to be, um, a vacation promotion. Um, with Seinfeld’s campaign going out. Get a home loan, get a free vacation. Uh, we got contacted by an international, uh, travel company who said, listen, we’ve got an access to empty rooms right? Throughout America and Australia and Europe. These hotels outside of school vacation periods are running at 30 or 40% vacancy. Um, can you help us? You know, basically fill those rooms by giving this as a promotion to businesses to attract customers. And I said, yeah, Hallelujah. They said, look, you’ve obviously got half a clue when it comes to marketing vacations Where a vacation company, we’re just helping hotels fill otherwise empty rooms. And it’s a win win win. It’s a win for the business that says, look, come and, you know, buy my refrigerator and you get a free vacation in Vegas.

John Dwyer: It’s a win for their customers, obviously, and it’s a win for the hotels because, you know, ordinarily they would have been running outside of school vacation period with 30 or 40% empty rooms. They fill those rooms and then hope whoever stays there might spend money on food and beverage. So that’s how it worked. And as it turns out, we have a motorbike dealership in Texas that launched the promotion, uh, for getting test rides. So it’s a test drive, but it’s a motorbike, so it’s a test ride. And I designed the promotion for them. We give them the vouchers for 3 to 7 nights vacation in New York and Orlando and Las Vegas and San Diego, Grand Canyon, all around America. So this voucher will give you up to seven nights vacation at any one of these four star hotels. In all those beautiful locations, all you got to do is take a test ride. Now, the mathematics on that is, is that for every ten test rides Odds. In the US, the average is 3.5. Conversion rate in sales. Now these are Harley-Davidson motorbikes. They are about 25 to $40,000.

John Dwyer: So you can imagine if I give them the vacation vouchers for $50, uh, and they give me ten times that because, you know, they do ten test rides. That’s a lousy $500 they spent. But if they sell three and a half times a motorbike, that’s worth 30 grand a time, it’s a pretty good oari. And, uh, it had been running for a couple of weeks, and I got on the zoom call with them and said, how’s it going? And the marketing girl said, look, not flash. You know, we’ve had about 10 or 15 people come in for a test ride, but we would expect it more. I said, what marketing have you done? And she said, ah, we’re boosting posts. That was it. I said, well, there’s your problem. Because the point is, is that you may as well just give a donation to Zuckerberg. That’s not going to do anything. You’ve got to do paid advertising anyway. Cut a long story short. We put the ads together and they’re doing paid advertising and kaboom, It just took off. So no, you can’t you can’t use organic and think that that’s the only thing that you’re unless you’re an influencer with a million followers, uh, you’ve got to pay Zuckerberg some money.

Lee Kantor: And then what is a budget that you would recommend? Maybe a solopreneur or business coach to start with?

John Dwyer: Yeah. Uh, you know, um, it comes down to the CPM, the cost per lead. Uh, and so therefore we advise people to do a test and fix mentality. So they should run at $50 a day for it depends on how wide your audience is. But let’s just say your audience happens to be your city or your state. Then you might run a 50 to $100 a day for ten days and see what your CPM is, your cost per lead. Um, and of course, the quality of those leads. Um, in our instance, you know, we’re a marketing agency and we have all these package promotions. So the, the vacation voucher one, which is extraordinary because you can actually give someone $1,000 value Vacation is only going to cost you 50 bucks. Um, we package that together and provide it to businesses, so all they do is press the button. We would market that down under, uh, here in Australia, but we do it in America as well. But we market that down under in Australia at around about $100 a day. Um, and that means over a week that’s $700. Uh, we will get leads. In other words, you know, business owners are scrolling through their phone and all of a sudden they see, wow, this is a a Happy Meal toy from heaven.

John Dwyer: You know, I can use this to sell my products because I can give someone a free vacation. They will stop. They will click the ad and go through to our landing page, and on our landing page, it gives them enough information for them to the landing page. By the way, if you want to have a look at is vacations incentive comm. So if you go to vacations plural vacations incentive comm, you’ll see it. Don’t worry that the price is $97 there. We give it for $50 for anyone that’s, you know, that looks like they’re going to do it properly. Um, but anyway, what happens is that they click, that they go through to the page, they get excited and fill the details in and then we follow up. Now we get leads for that at about $23. Um, sometimes it jumps into the 30s and 40s, but mostly for $23. So out of $100 spend today, I should get around about five leads. And if you’re closing, you know, two out of those five leads because it’s a spectacular offer. Uh, and we’re selling, you know, packages that are a couple of thousand up, then. Yeah, you get a pretty good return on investment, but it all comes back down to that cost per lead.

Lee Kantor: Now, in your business, are you still, um, so it sounds like you’re still doing, uh, kind of classic agency relationships with, uh, businesses, but do you have kind of the, um, few to many strategy as well where you do online classes, online kind of offerings?

John Dwyer: Yeah we do. Yeah, yeah. So, um, you know, the, uh, model that we’ve got because I realized that small business owners didn’t have the wherewithal to implement a lot of this stuff. The major part of our business is packaged promotions. So for example vacations incentive. Com has one. Um, we have another one called the Facebook contest formula. Uh, I think it is, uh, and what that is, we actually provide to them a service whereby they tell us what their product or service is, and we just get the leads for them. Um, so say, for example, a dentist, uh, came on recently and he’s after, you know, obviously fixing people’s teeth. And so therefore we said, okay, what’s the most expensive product that you’ve got that you want to push? And he said, oh, the Invisalign, um, braces. It’s the invisible braces. Instead of the kids having metal on their teeth these days, and they’re about $5,000 a pop. So we just ran a contest with the formula that we’ve got. I’ve come from a contest background, so we’ve done all the big scratch bingos for Murdoch’s newspapers and the monopoly style promotions for McDonald’s and all that sort of stuff. Right. So, you know, it’s in my DNA. So we ran a contest, as we do for everyone else. And it basically on Facebook said to parents, uh, would you like to win for your child? Invisible braces? Now, the only parents that enter that contest are parents with children who have got crooked teeth. If your teeth. If your children have got perfect teeth, you’re not going to want to win invisible braces.

John Dwyer: Um, he only spent $25 a day by seven days. And in the first seven days, he got just under a thousand contest entries. Okay, so let’s just say it was 990 or something. Uh, he gives one away and worth $5,000, but only costs him half of that. So he gives one away. But he’s got 1000 people then have glowed in the dark. Who said my child’s got crooked teeth? You don’t get a better database, you know, than that. And so therefore he then follows them up and offers them a special deal that if they actually do book his braces by the end of the month, they’ll get guess what a free vacation. So what we do there is we join both of those promotions together to give him dynamite. And because he couldn’t get to the, uh, he couldn’t get to the thousand people because we had to stop it. So successful for any one of our clients. We, you know, we had to stop the campaign pretty quickly, which is not exactly a smart move on my part. Uh, but anyway, because he couldn’t get to them, we just put our robot onto it. So we have a business within our business called a Genie Now.com. And what that is, is that a AI receptionist basically takes over so we can ring those thousand people within a few hours and offer them exactly the same deal. But a robot does it.

Lee Kantor: So it’s kind of a turnkey offering to any business out there that wants to run some sort of a contest online. They just are basically they pay your service, plus whatever the, uh, the fee to Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever platform they’re using.

John Dwyer: And that’s right. And look, and we keep, you know, look, most of the big advertising agencies, of course, as we know, because they’ve got to pay for the water fountain in the lobby and they’ve got beautiful offices and they’re driving Maseratis. They tend to have a, an ongoing consultancy fee, which is frightening. Uh, we don’t I mean, we’re a relatively small company. There’s half a dozen of us involved in the company, so we don’t have those ridiculous overheads. I think we are really on the ball when it comes to ROI, and it comes to the creativity of these concepts. Um, what we do is that we, you know, the, as I told you, the vacation formula, uh, that is like a no brainer for any B2C business. Um, you know, we’re giving these vouchers away for $50 a time now. They can’t buy in onesies and twosies. They’ve got to buy in multiples of, you know, 30, 40, 50, uh, but nonetheless, that’s that can fix a business in five minutes if they do it properly. That one I just told you there was all about leads and what we found when we got into it, because it generates so many leads so quickly and so cheaply, they can’t get to the leads. And so therefore, that’s why we got the AI receptionists involved. Uh, we do the million dollar draws, so we get $1 million, uh, insured for around about 20 grand. I can get $100,000 prize for a business for probably 3 or $4000. So all these are, you know, buy my product during the draw to win $1 million. Okay. So we do a lot of that package stuff. But then there is other things, uh, which if you don’t mind me plugging it, it’s JD Marketing makeover. Com so my name is John Dwyer. So JD marketing makeover. Com and in that instance it’s for businesses who just want to use my consultancy services and suck up whatever is in my brain and then go off and do it themselves. So there’s there’s the opportunity for consultancy if people want it.

Lee Kantor: Now as part of the service that when you’re, uh, building all those leads in the database for any of the people who are, um, you know, uh, signing up for, for whatever the prize or the contest is, is there any follow up email marketing offering as well, or is it on their own of the company has to kind of figure that part out?

John Dwyer: Oh, you know, that I would do all that as well. So therefore we create a full funnel. Um, uh, we have a software program called Go High Level. I mean, we’ve been through all the other ones. Um, Infusionsoft and Ontraport and a whole lot of them. Uh, but we have a database ourselves of, uh, just under 10,000 business owners. Um, most of them, 7000 are probably in Australia. The other 3000 are in America. Uh, so, yeah, we’re pretty used to doing the email funnels. Uh, so anything that we provide to a business, we make sure that we give them, uh, either advice or packaged promotions that play on very little input from them because we know they’re too busy running their business.

Lee Kantor: Now, a lot of our listeners are business coaches and entrepreneurs, uh, in America, um, is there uh, let’s see. How can I phrase this? You mentioned a success story for a fairly large bank. Do you have a story you can share for a solopreneur or an entrepreneur? Were you able to help somebody that maybe had was a coach or a consultant was struggling and you were able to help them get to a new level.

John Dwyer: Um, yeah. Look, plenty of them. And it’ll be the same story for all of them. Um, most of them are not scaling. That’s the issue. Most of them are not scaling. Um, yeah. I’ll give you an example, and I’ll come back to answer that question in two seconds. But I’ve got a buddy of mine, uh, flying down from the US, uh, to Australia in a couple of weeks time. And he’s, uh, he’s speaking at a conference Down Under, and this particular guy used to work for Disney, uh, in Orlando. So he was one of the senior managers in Disney. And, uh, as you would expect, anyone who’s worked for Disney is normally in high demand, uh, for, if you like, revealing how Disney runs their business. And so therefore he’s coming down under to have nothing at all to do with me. I’ve done some stuff with him over the years. He’s about my vintage. We’re both baby boomers, so we both tell dad jokes and, uh, but what’s inside his head is incredibly valuable because he worked for Walt Disney in Orlando. And so therefore when he contacted me and said, oh, JD, I’m coming down at the end of this month, um, do you want to catch up? I said, yeah, absolutely.

John Dwyer: Now, instead of just catching up and having a beer, I contacted him last week and said, look, why don’t we do this when you’re down under? Why don’t we do a webinar, uh, live webinar. It’ll be a two hour session and, uh, we will call it if Disney ran your business, what would it look like? And, uh, all it will be is that we will just hire a little room. Uh, we’ll have it set up, uh, like we’re doing now, but it will obviously be zoom visual and we will banter for a couple of hours. We will sell a product at the end of that, which will probably be a, you know, 2 or $3000 product, which they get his stuff and they get my stuff as well. Um, and there’s every chance in the world that we would have between 50 and 100 people on there. Realistically, we might get more, but let’s just say 50 to 100. Let’s just say you go high ground and we get 100 on there and we have just a 10% close. We will do better than that. I know because we’ve done it before, but let’s just say we have a 10% close on a 30 on a $3,000 product.

John Dwyer: So therefore that would be ten times 3000. That would be $30,000. We’d split with each other for just basically sitting down and talking for a couple of hours. So that’s what I would suggest to any consultant or business owner. Just think like that in terms of scaling and stop doing the Onesy Twosies. And this is coming from someone who made massive mistakes, by the way, because that’s exactly what I would do. People would ring me up and say, would you like a coffee? And this idiot who you’re talking to, Lee would go and have a coffee. By the time I got to the coffee shop and got back again, I lost half a day. And if they didn’t come across the line, then, you know, I wanted to just jump off the edge, you know? So what I do now is that there’s no such thing as coffee, and it’s not because I’m. I think I’m better than them. I’m not. It’s just that it doesn’t make sense to work on ones and twos so that what you need to do as a consultant Sultan is, you know, have, um, you know, webinars and and what you’re doing right now, podcasts where you’re, you’re selling once to many.

Lee Kantor: Great advice. I mean, it has been such a joy to be talking with you. Somebody old school with new ideas for today’s time. I mean, it’s just amazing conversation. Thank you so much, JD, for sharing. What, you know, um, is there kind of a central location for people to go to kind of get Ahold of all the things you mentioned?

John Dwyer: Uh, by all means. Yeah. So, uh, I’m not wealthy enough to have my own private island, uh, quite yet. So therefore I’m quite happy to hand out any contact details when people say to me, why are you still, you know, treading the boards? I go because I had six kids. I mean, we had the Von Trapp family and, you know, private schools and vacations. Yeah. Uh, that’s why I’m still doing what I’m doing. Um, yeah. Uh, Lee, uh, the best place for them to go would be the website. And that is the Institute of Welcome to the Institute of Wow.com. The one that might intrigue even business owners because they can use it themselves. Uh, is the vacations incentive. That’s an interesting one. But if they wanted to talk to me and just have a chat on zoom because their audience, I’m more than happy to do that. So therefore, my email address is John at the Institute of Wow.com. So if you contact John at the Institute of Wow.com, I’m more than happy to book in a zoom call with you.

Lee Kantor: Well, JD, an absolute pleasure. I learned so much. Thank you for sharing what you know. Um, it was a great conversation and you’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

John Dwyer: My pleasure. Thank you. All the best.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.