Michael: Hi it is Michael Senoff with Michael Senoff’s In this next interview with Richard, we have an amazing list of case studies. A lot of people said, “What has Richard been doing over the last couple of years?” So I called Richard and I said, “Richard we need to do another interview of some of your case studies of what you have been doing in the last couple of years.” Richard has gone through his files. He has pulled out ten of his best case studies that will illustrate lessons and things that the HMA consultants can learn from what he has been doing out in the field. He will illustrate the power of the USP, the integrating of the USP and database marketing and alliances. You will see how one alliance that Richard has established over the years, keeps feeding him account after account after account. I know you are going to learn from these exciting case studies, so let’s get going. At the end of this interview Richard answers some of the most common questions from new and existing HMA consultants. We haven’t done an interview in some time and out of all this time, the last couple of years; you are not sitting there selling consulting packages.

Michael: You are out there executing, aren’t you?

Richard: Yeah.

Michael: So that is why I want to talk about some of the stories so that the consultants can hear from you and understand it. You are still out there executing.

Richard: Yeah.

Michael: Why don’t we start with your Solid Comfort story? Tell the consultants who that is. Why don’t you start with how you are getting these clients? Maybe explain how you are still very focused with your alliances; your MEPs across the country?

Richard: Solid Comfort is a furniture manufacturer that makes furniture for the hospitality business; hotels and things. When you go in and spend a night at the hotel, you look at your dresser and you look at your bed, that is who made it.

Michael: How did you get introduced to them?

Richard: They are part of the manufacturing extension partnership alliance that I had and developed over the last four years or so. That is an important thing that the HMA consultants. If they are looking to want to jump- start their practice and they are wanting to find new clients. Alliances. Step number four is part of their system. It is probably the best way to go do it without spending any money. I would just recommend to all of them that they find groups and associations in their area, Chambers of Commerce, manufacturing groups, Economic Development centers, other training companies, accountants, CPAs, printers, sign companies. These are all groups that are helping small businesses to succeed. They need to establish some relationships with these types of groups because they are the one that can introduce them to their clients. Marketing wise we just learned that the fastest way to jump start a practice is to try and get an alliance going. I would guess most of the HMA consultants have some of these relationships already that are sitting in their area. Then you want to use the PowerPoint presentation because that is exactly what I did here. I did a workshop with a manufacturing extension partnership that sponsored it. Solid Comfort came to the workshop. We just taught them the HMA system. We followed up with a complimentary consultation and we closed them. There is no question that what we tried to do was assume that the consultant had zero relationships. We put telemarketing scripts in there. We put direct mail in there. We put cold-call scripting in there, but that has to be the last resort. That is the hardest way to go. What we want HMA consultants to do is look at their own marketing assets. Take the time to say what relationships do we have. I have a friend that has been in the printing business, who is in the printing business. I have my CPA who works with other small business owners. I have a sign company around the corner that makes signs for small businesses. I have my local Chamber of Commerce. I have my local manufacturing association. I have my local Economic Development Group. These are all alliances and partnerships that HMA Consultants should go after first. Yeah, if you are going to do cold calling, do cold calling to these groups. Banks. I am heading there. I have now a contact in a U.S. bank office that was a former client. He is asking me to come down and do a workshop for U.S. bank customers. So I am in the process of getting into the banks because banks are in a very competitive situation right now. HMA consultants, if you have a relationship with a community bank start there. I am talking right now about an alliance with a company that does workshops in banks already. Well, they go in and the workshops that they offer cover all of the areas of starting and running a business. Financial, accounting, succession, and setting up marketing. I asked the owner of this company, “Well when you do the marketing of this workshop, what if the client wants marketing help after that? He says, “I don’t want to get there.” That is where HMA consultants can come in. There are lots of companies that might train initially on marketing, but don’t want to execute. So that is an alliance, where I use to think of it as a competitor. We are learning our strength in the HMA system is execution. A lot of companies can go out and do training, but they don’t then know how to engage the client, work with the client over 4, 5, or 6 months, get results for the client through a systematic step of execution. I am excited for the banks and I think you all should take a look at that. Solid Comfort came from a workshop that we did with an alliance that has been in place now for several years.

Michael: So when you did opportunity analysis with Solid Comfort what kind of hidden assets were really obvious to you?

Richard: Well they produced a great product so we knew that they had been in business 9 or 10 years so a long time; probably closer to 15 years. They had a lot of good clients. Holiday Inn, Best Westerns and good solid opportunities with hotels, but we learned that it was very competitive. They are a manufacturer. We have enjoyed helping manufacturers over the last few years because they have been getting a lot of competition from China, a lot of competition from India, a lot of competition from Canada and Mexico. Solid Comfort was in this boat. They were getting a lot of competition from overseas because hotel furniture doesn’t have to be nice furniture. I mean it has to be put together well, but it is not for presidential family, it is for a guest. So they were getting hit by a lot of this competition. If HMA consultants work with manufacturers what we are learning is that we have to find another reason for people to do business with manufacturers other than price. If price is the key reason that people are buying, then they are going to go to India, they are going to go to China, and they are to go to Asia, Mexico where labor is cheaper. They are going to buy from these other places. It has been great as far as currently. In a slow economical time these manufacturers need a lot of help in differentiating themselves. So with Solid Comfort, we took a look at those assets. We took a look at their credibility. We took a look at their performance. We developed a unique selling proposition. The case studies that we are going to talk about; several are from manufacturing. We assigned them a character trait of reliability, like Toyota. Toyota now is number one because they own the USP of reliability. When we have a manufacture like Solid Comfort where we can have a reliable USP, well but you have to do more than say that you are very reliable. What we did is we made a 10-point promise of reliability to increase profits for the hotel owners. On-time delivery, delivery of your furniture is guaranteed to arrive on the agreed delivery date or Solid Comfort will pay the freight on truckload orders. No unscheduled empty rooms costing you money. See these contractors and builders who order furniture, they have to have it there in the rooms on time.

Michael: Or they lose money on them.

Richard: That is right, they have empty rooms. Then we have a quote here. “Deliveries are on time 99.9% of the time with Solid Comfort. The performance of the product has been very satisfactory. Our furniture maintenance cost is among the lowest in the industry. All things to Solid Comfort.” Now we have a USP that really matters. We had nine other points. Superior product, product replacement, the blanket wrapped, no carton disposals, zero freight damage, full assembled delivery, order accuracy, attention to details, and a five-year warranty. We have a certificate that goes out now with each furniture delivery that has those ten points on it.

Michael: That is nice.

Richard: Yeah. They get their furniture and there is a certificate of reliability.

Michael: Let me ask you. You have a lot of different points and this has always been something that has been kind of confusing to consultants. What is the tag line USP if you could only pick one of those? Let’s say on Solid Comfort’s web site you are integrating that USP on the front page. What is the USP slogan that is going to ring all through the company?

Richard: A 10-point promise of reliability to increase your profit.

Michael: How long has that been integrated?

Richard: That has been in there now for it’s second year. They are having record sales.

Michael: Record sales since they made those changes.

Richard: That is right. They got it integrated into their brochure. They got it integrated into the web site. I just have to emphasize to HMA consultants the beauty of this marketing system is that steps 1 and 2 can have so much powerful impact and that is the USP and the integration.

Michael: Where else was that USP integrated with Solid Comfort?

Richard: All of the sales people that are making calls now talk about on-time delivery guarantee. You are listening to an exclusive Interview found on Michael Senoff’s

Richard: All right so it has to be integrated with all of the sales people that are either inside sales or outside sales. I would say that we are learning that over the years. It is that all of these stories and case studies, I have had some that have failed and HMA consultants will. They will have some that doesn’t work. If I were to identify the number one reason that it doesn’t work, it is that the sales people have not gotten around it and sold it. My guarantee doesn’t apply because they are not getting it executed according to my instructions and their training. They have to do that. If they don’t, then the guarantee is not applicable. That is the biggest struggle that we are learning. As HMA consultants, you need to understand that. You have to get it integrated into the sales people. Once I knew that these four inside sales people were doing it, we had record sales.

Michael: Did you move into database alliances with them?

Richard: Absolutely. They go into database. They are doing a newsletter that goes out to their customers, current ones. Each newsletter that goes out has this 10-point reliability on there so that they remind them and sell them again and again. We have sales people who are calling inactive customers, contractors that haven’t worked with them for a while. All of that is contributing to record sales.

Michael: Let’s talk about another one; Millennium Finance. Who are they?

Richard: This is a financial planner. They have been in the financial planning business for a lot of years, but he was trying to break out on his own away from the brokerage house that he was with.

Michael: Tell me how you made the contact and how you ended up working with him.

Richard: A workshop in a town not too far from here. He came to the workshop, again the workshop was sponsored by the manufacturing association that I am with. Many times they will promote to all businesses. So they did and here a financial planner came instead of just manufacturers.

Michael: What a great illustration. He paid to have come to the workshop, but he ends up coming to you as a one-on-one client.

Richard: That’s right.

Michael: So he approached you after the workshop. What did he say? Do you remember?

Richard: Yeah. He had a complimentary consultation. So I went to his place of business. We went through his assets. We did the opportunity analysis just like we are taught to. I went through all of his assets and he said, “You know, I need a system. I need a way that I can get new clients on a regular basis so that I don’t have to rely on my brokerage house.” He said, “There are some marketing experts within the brokerage business.” Which there are there are many of them, but they cost an arm and a leg for these guys to access. They just end up looking like everybody else. So he knew that he needed a strong marketing system.

Michael: What did you discover in the opportunity?

Richard: He had a good customer base. That is all we needed with this guy.

Michael: He wasn’t working it?

Richard: No.

Michael: What kind of numbers?

Richard: He only had probably 100, but the top 20% were strong people that could refer and could endorse. Now we ran into some legal issues because that brokerage business doesn’t allow direct endorsement. So we did workshops. We set up workshops with some of these top clients. They were just munch and mingles at the cabin that he owned in the area. He would only get 8 or 9 guests from these people to come out to the workshop.

Michael: Tell me specifically what you guys did.

Richard: We approached three or four of his top clients. We asked them to sponsor a dinner workshop.

Michael: Did you approach them by phone or through a letter?

Richard: He did personally, the financial consultant. He said, “I am working with a marketing guy and we are talking about doing some workshops. Would you mind helping us promote one?” That was fine. That was okay. They were all right with that. Personal invitations were sent out to the networks of these people. He had dinner brought in, catered in. Everyone was around a big table. He talked about the risks of retirement and many of the pitfalls that people get in to. That was another thing that we did that was unique. His unique selling proposition was not how to retire and get rich, which is the USP for everybody. We went the negative route. We went the pain route. We went the 10 ways that you could lose your retirement route. Ten biggest mistakes that you could make in retirement planning. They just loved it. They were great workshops. He does them now every quarter. He is on his way to meeting his $20,000,000 under management, which was his goal.

Michael: Wow, that is great. Did you guys work on his USP?

Richard: On his UPS we developed a free report; The Ten Biggest Mistakes That You Can Make. The free report was sent out to his database. So he is communicating with them. We integrated it into his web site as well. We put together a little brochure for him. We were three steps in there; one, two, and three. He paid $3,000,000 per step, but it was worth it to him because his alternatives were $15,000 or $20,000 if he worked through his brokerage house.

Michael: How did you handle his payments? Did you get them all at once or one at a time?

Richard: Each step at a time.

Michael: He didn’t do alliances? Which step didn’t he do?

Richard: Alliances, we kind of covered along with the database. We kind of did them together because most of his alliances were with his current customers.

Michael: Good illustration. How about Fitness Ridge? Who is Fitness Ridge? How were you introduced to them? How did they end up being one of your clients?

Richard: Fitness Ridge came through a referral from another client in the Southern Utah area. I went over and gave them a complimentary consultation.

Michael: Tell me how the referral came in.

Richard: The referral came in through a client that I had worked with down there before previously.

Michael: They called you?

Richard: We have a family member of mine that owns this fitness company and we would like you to visit with them. We went down. This is a company that is very well known for weight management spas. That is what this is. Fitness Ridge is a weigh management exercise spa company that has been in business now for probably four or five years.

Michael: These are overweight people that need to do something and they go there?

Richard: There are both. There are people that are there for their weight, but there are people that are there for their fitness.

Michael: Okay. Then they go stay there?

Richard: That is right. They stay a week, maybe two. All of their meals are provided, which are weight conscious meals. They teach them how to make a lifestyle change.

Michael: Why did they call you in?

Richard: To grow. They have rooms that they need to fill. That is their challenge.

Michael: Okay. You went over there and you met with them. You did the opportunity analysis.

Richard: That is right. The first thing that we did is find out that they did not have on staff a marketing person that could operate all of these opportunities. I am just going to list all of these opportunities. In the next 30 days, they went out and hired a marketing person. Then I was able to work with the marketing person and get them trained over the steps. We had a USP first tried was a guaranteed weight loss. Well, we ran it for about 30 days. They were getting a lot of leads from the web site. The salesman there, they did have a salesman, but not a marketing manager. The salesman was handling those leads coming in and he was closing those leads. We determined that the weight loss guarantee wasn’t really needed. It wasn’t really affective. So we changed USPs. The USP that we ended up going with was the price USP. We found that all the other spas were charging like $4,000 or $5,000 for the week. Fitness Ridge would charge $1,495 and give them as much as a $4,000 or $5,000 spa would. We went for price. We were a Walmart USP and boom. The hits to the web site just went up dramatically. His conversion rates went up as well, the sales person. Now they are headed for their first $1,000,000 in business.

Michael: That is great. Let’s talk about that you took them through the USP. The four steps in developing the USP. How was it that you guys missed the mark on that?

Richard: That is a great question. It is because they said, “We will go ahead and work those four steps.” I said, “Fine.” They didn’t. They didn’t call their customers. They didn’t look at the competition, like they should of and they missed the mark.

Michael: Now when they said we would work the four steps, did they hire you and pay you for each one of those projects?

Richard: No, this was not a paid deal. This was more of a favor from me.

Michael: Okay, so you told them what to do?

Richard: That is right and they didn’t do it. We came back and did it right, got them to do it right. The important thing to understand is that you have to do the due diligence on a USP. You can’t just quantificate and think you got it. Don’t worry. A USP doesn’t have to be in stone. It can be changed overnight. None of these things are life or death issues.

Michael: Obviously their guarantee wasn’t working. You came in and you pretty much identified what was wrong.

Richard: Yeah. Now they are going with that and they are just doing a lot better. You know, they never have done a mailing. We are working on a database with them. They have never done a mailing to previous attendees to the spa. We are working with them on a referral program. When they are ready to leave the spa, we are having them sit down and ask how it went. Can you get us three or four names? So now they are getting referrals that they weren’t getting before. We worked on up selling as part of the integration of the USP. When they came in to the spa they would go through the weighing and all of that. They do their preliminary check-up and stuff. It was at that point that we started to offer up selling, a new hike or a more extreme hike, an extreme bike ride and other things that they might be interested in. Now they are working on at-home coaching. When they go home can we help them continue the weight-loss program. It is back-end revenue. I will tell you, they have only gotten into one or two of these r recommendations and they are swamped.

Michael: That is great. Now you did mention when you approached them that you asked them to hire a marketing guy to implement all of these opportunities.

Richard: So much opportunities.

Michael: So is that a good strategy? Let’s say that there are consultants out there and he meets with a company like Fitness Ridge. He could either sell the execution or sell the projects where the consultants can execute, but could it be a good strategy for a consultant to advise them to bring on a marketing person and still collect consulting fees?

Richard: Sure. Yeah. The reason is if you can get help then all the better, especially help that welcomes your help. That is why this worked out so well. They welcomed the help, but they knew that they were missing. Many times as a consultant you will find people already on staff that you can redirect over to the marketing effort. So sometimes the assets are already there. It wasn’t here.

Michael: That’s good. Just thinking about this, I think this is a wonderful strategy because when you are selling your consulting services there is no doubt that your client has got to do some work on their part. There is a big chance that they may not want to do it or they are too busy in the business. I can see that as a pretty solid thing to do and to recommend to your clients to either allocate some labor within the organization to handle all the execution of the marketing tactics. You can kind of remain more in a consultative position and take some of the workload off of you.

Richard: Yeah. It kind of goes along with what I said earlier. That is that you kind of need a champion in the company that is with you. The more that you can do that then the more chance that you will have of success. This champion can be someone they hire to work with you. It could be someone already there. It could be the owner. I have a client right now that we are struggling with because the sales people haven’t caught the vision so the owner has. He is forcing these changes. He is forcing these mindset changes. So I have the owner as the champion. He is starting to say, “You know I just found out that I have order takers. I don’t have anyone that can sell anything.” He is seriously beginning to contemplate whom he has to let go. Those are okay things to start to go through because they have just been getting by with incoming orders from current customers. Yeah, if you can get a champion on your side then it is all the better.

Michael: Let’s talk about the Dakota Machine. Tell me who they are. How were you introduced? How did you get them as a client?

Richard: Dakota Machine came through the manufacturing extension partnership and they again, came to a workshop, followed up with a complimentary consultation and I closed them on four projects.

Michael: When you close on all of these projects, are you ever closing where they pay for all the projects at once or generally you are always doing it that they pay as you go?

Richard: Yeah. They generally have been pay as you go because they like the idea that they could stop me after step 1.

Michael: How much did you charge on these projects.

Richard: These are all between $3,000 and $4,000 a step.

Michael: Okay. What were some of their challenges?

Richard: Here you had a company that had a salesman making cold calls. They specialized in smaller machine parts. The salesman had gotten lists and was making calls. That was an asset. We knew we had. The salesman was open and he was willing to change and willing to make changes. We got a USP. Many times in manufacturing, one of the biggest issues and problems and voids in the market is getting product done and delivered on time, what they refer to as lead time. We determined that in step number one they could guarantee lead-time or they would pay the shipping. That became the script for the salesman. Another thing we found that the salesman was not doing is that he wasn’t qualifying very well. So he was talking to a lot of manufacturers that would never have the specialized machine part needs that Dakota Machine did. He was wasting a lot of time. In step 2, when you have a USP, you begin to train a salesman on what he should be asking to qualify for to determine if he wants to spend more time on that lead. His conversion rates shot up 20% to 30%, just in 60 days. We have now this little machine company at capacity and they are bringing on a second and third shift.

Michael: Is he still doing cold calling, but he is calling?

Richard: He is still doing cold calling.

Michael: But he is not wasting his time.

Richard: That is right. The material being sent out has our USP. So his conversion rates are going up because we have been upgraded to USP.

Michael: How did the USP rate?

Richard: A partner and profit is the slogan and guaranteed lead-time. When we tell you it is going to be shipped, it will be shipped.

Michael: So through the USP project, talking to his clients, talking to him, talking to.

Richard: Talking to the competition.

Michael: You found the biggest frustration out there for buyers of these small parts was lead-time?

Richard: That’s right. What happens is that a company needs a part and they need it in good time so that they can make their part and sell it. So they call up all of these machine companies and say, “Can you make these parts? How fast can you do it? When will you have it done? What quantities can you have it done in?” These machine companies say, “Well, I don’t know when we can get it done. It will be three weeks and they end up six weeks and it is pissing everybody off.” Dakota Machine had done a pretty good job of knowing how to get it done on time. So the USP wasn’t a huge operational issue because I have another client that is an on-time USP and they can’t do it. So they have to back off. Sometimes you get the assets right and they can do it and sometimes you don’t. Dakota Machine was able to do it. C Companies call them and they want to know that their parts are going to arrive on time so that they can finish making their parts and selling them.

Michael: Did you guys find a lot of incompetence in the industry?

Richard: Oh yes. It is rampant. There is a lot of incompetence in that area of the manufacturing industry because they have just gotten casual over the years. So they don’t have to get them out when they say they will. So they haven’t.

Michael: So Dakota could even sell their parts at a premium? Price really wasn’t an issue.

Richard: That is right. That is the important thing Michael, that we are getting people off of the price. For more exclusive interviews on business, marketing, advertising, and copywriting go to Michael Senoff’s

Richard: Which has dogged the manufacturing industry for so long. So when you guarantee lead-time, you can hold your pricing better than you were before and convert 20% to 30% more.

Michael: Dakota Machine, that is a great illustration on USP. How about Sue Steam? Who is Sue Steam? How were you introduced? How did you end up getting them as a client? How many projects did you sell them on?

Richard: I will tell you that this is probably one of the neatest experiences with a client. Let’s see, again introduced at workshop with the manufacturing group. Then we went and did our complimentary consultation, opportunity analysis and closed them at $6,000 a step for 4 steps.

Michael: How did you determine that they were going to pay $6,000 when you compare Dakota Machine? Where do you make that evaluation?

Richard: That is a great point and that is because you have a $10,000,000 company compared to $1,000,000 company. That is the first consideration. I also learned that they were spending $50,000 a month on advertising and marketing. So they were huge investors in that area. I knew that we could find money that they were spending wrong and help them reallocate it over to me. That is why I felt like I could ask it.

Michael: What did they do?

Richard: They signed on. We closed it.

Michael: What kind of business were they?

Richard: They make pressure washers for construction industry, for oil and gas industry when there is an oilrig out there in the middle of the ocean they have to clean them up. These guys make the pressure washers that they use out there to clean these rigs. Very good company has been around a long time, a lot of assets, a lot of good distributors around the country and Canada and foreign areas that sell their steam machines. So we got started and the reliability became the USP again.

Michael: Sorry to interrupt. I want to ask you. If you have a $10,000,000 company, whom is it that you met with? Who is it that is the decision maker on a $10,000,000 company?

Richard: Well we had an owner and we had a marketing director.

Michael: You had the decision makers there?

Richard: Oh yeah. I can’t emphasize that enough to all of the HMA consultants. If I were to look back, and that is why I don’t make the mistake anymore, you just don’t go visit the company unless you have the decision makers sitting in. The likelihood of my closing anything just drops significantly. Any ways, they were there, the two key people that I needed to have there. They looked at the agreement for quite a while. I held the pricing at $6,000 and they finally came around and signed up. We took them through 4 steps because step 1 was USP, which again went to reliability. I used the same packaging in USP in this company as I did with Solid Comfort. That is what these HMA consultants need to understand is that I charged twice as much and was able to use the same experiences and the same USP.

Michael: You didn’t have to work the whole USP? It was done?

Richard: That’s right, but they didn’t know it. They don’t care. That is what is great about the consulting business. It is when you see parallel situations that you can capitalize on and leverage and charge twice as much for and get the same value then it is a great opportunity. We did much the same thing. We came up with the reliability certificate mailed out. However, we did do some hard work no this one in that we did come up with a return on investment comparison between a Sue steam machine and the competition. We learned in our USP project that the Sue steam machine lasted much longer out in the field than the competition. We put together a little return on investment chart that showed how much money that our clients were saving by buying Sue steam machines. I guess that I should say I probably did a little bit of work on that one, but that was key in helping us to integrate this reliability is to get this free report together. Now it is being offered on their web site. It is being offered by all of the distributors. It is this free report showing how a Sue steam machine makes more money for our customers than any other steam machine out there. That was a lot of good stuff that we got. Now the sales people, there are four of them; inside sales people. They are now sending out the free report before they give a bid. They are now having the dealers on the other end that are working with the end user use that free report and that ROI analysis as part of the bid process. That was huge integration in step 2. It is getting those inside sales people sold on this ROI report. Then step 3, the database distributors; we started to get them using the report. We started doing more training around the USP and the report. Alliances were more working with distributors and having them do more marketing on their end. We went through the four steps and that finished about a year ago. I got an email from Jack Finger, the owner and he said, “Richard, I just want you to know that we are having a record year because of our USP and because the sales people are qualifying better and not wasting time on bids that we shouldn’t be selling.” See guys a good USP that is what you want to have, is qualify out people that they shouldn't be working with. What was happening is Sue Steam was getting drained. Their engineering department and their drafting and design department was getting drained by bids that they should not have been doing because they were all price oriented buyers. They didn’t care about an ROI with a steam machine. Once the ROI reports started getting used by the sales people, for example a guy would call and say I want a bid. The sales person would say, “Before we do that bid, I need you to read this ROI report. Let’s fill it out together and see the advantages of our machine.” Guess what would happen if they didn’t fill it out?

Michael: You would never get back with them.

Richard: No bids were given. Saving time and that huge waste of energy doing bids that were going to go to a prospect who didn’t care about the Sue machine. All of a sudden our conversion rates are going up. He sends me an email saying, “We are headed for $8.000,000 to $10,000,000. I just wanted to let you know that we are having a record year. I would like to do now steps 5 6, 7, and 8.”

Michael: At $6,000 a pop?

Richard: That’s right.

Michael: That’s nice, $6,000 times 8 is $48,000.

Richard: Yeah.

Michael: That is wonderful.

Richard: That’s from one client. That is the fun part of it. It happened because we were able to get the sales people shifting their paradine away from “Oh, you want a bid? Sure we will give you a bid.”

Michael: Those alliances are just handing you money.

Richard: Yeah. I mean this manufacturing alliance has just been terrific. I have not had to do any direct marketing in five years. I also want to maybe make this point. The reason these clients, sure they are referred to me so that helps, but you still have to go in and meet them face to face. You still have to help them see the money from their assets. If they don’t sense that there is money sitting in those assets, they are not going to make a $6,000 investment for the first step. Okay? You have to help them see. For example with Sue Steam, I would ask, “Jack, do you know the closing rate of the sales people?” He didn’t. So I said, “It is likely that we could increase that sales conversion rate if we got a good ISP and trained the sales people in that USP.” He goes, “Yeah. I know we are spending too much time with people that we shouldn’t be spending with.” So he saw the money draining out of his company. When he sees that he is going to pay you to stop it. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is that you understand the opportunity analysis process. The whole reason for that process is to show them the money because if you don’t do that, you are looking like and will be regarded as just another traditional marketing guy. These people are done paying for that. So it is the USP that we have as HMA consultants that is critical. That is that I am going help you find the money currently sitting in your business that we can uncover and increase sales. You know, Jack, I am not going to ask you to spend any more money on traditional marketing activities. Does that sound like something that would be of interest to you?

Michael: That’s great. Engine Rebuilders. The same situation, how did you meet them? What did you close them on?

Richard: Yeah. It is the same manufacturing workshop, the same opportunity analysis, and $3,000,000 or $4,000,000 company. They remanufacture engines for the skid steers like Caterpillar and companies that make these skid steer machines that are heavy load lifters and things. Instead of buying a new engine, Engine Rebuilders would do just that. The skid steer owner would send in the old engine, they would rebuild it and send it back out. We went through two steps is all on this one because it was a fast one. I didn’t see a lot of work that we needed to do. I didn’t see a lot more assets that we could exploit. We did a USP that extended the warranty on the engine longer than the competition so that the repairs and the rebuilding were better because of that warranty. That was our USP. Then we just started to integrate that with the two sales people who was the owner and another one. They just took the survey from the manufacturing group. They have gone from $3,000,000 to $5,000,000 in a year.

Michael: Just by changing the USP?

Richard: Yeah, that’s it.

Michael: They were just another engine rebuilder. They had nothing making them unique?

Richard: That’s right. I think we went to a 7-year warranty instead of a 4-year warranty. They are fine with that because they knew that they weren’t going to replace them any ways.

Michael: We are talking differentiation?

Richard: Yes we are. We are talking about a warranty that is longer than the industry. Then all we had to do was get the owner and another sales person using that and promoting that. They had a newsletter also that we started to send out to Caterpillar dealers. Once the dealers know t that they can sell a company that has a better warranty, and then they are going to start selling your rebuilds more. That was a great experience.

Michael: Shocker Hitch.

Richard: Shocker Hitch. Oh boy. It was kind of a new start and again came from the manufacturing workshops. This guy had invented a hitch for the back of the truck or larger vehicles that eliminated a lot of the wear and tear that a trailer would put on a hitch in a truck; just a better hitch. Here the USP wasn’t as big a factor as the sales training or step number two.

Michael: First of all, how did you meet them, same circumstance?

Richard: The same circumstances, workshops with the manufacturers. I came to a show that he had a booth at. I followed up with an opportunity consultation just like the others, but not a huge project. The reason that I wanted to discuss it was to show the impact of some important sales training. He was running ads in some industry magazines for his hitch. He was getting calls, but he wasn’t converting them. The ad described his USP pretty good in that the hitch would make it quieter than other hitches and would be a very high-quality hitch. That was okay, but what we had to work on was “A” when a guy calls in what are you going to say to him? How are you going to close him? Because we learned and listened to his pitch and he wasn’t asking for the order like he could. Shocker Hitch is a case study of just some good simple sales training. We took him through and he had a good 30% increase within 30 days. He was just ecstatic.

Michael: How many projects was that?

Richard: That was two.

Michael: How much were they?

Richard: They were $3,000 each.

Michael: Wonderful.

Richard: He got an increase in 30 days because it was fairly simple. That is how do I handle a call. What do I say? I will tell you to an HMA consultant that is huge. It is probably a bigger source of asset than any other. It is what is happening right now to a prospect. How are they being sold? Is a USP being communicated, number one? Number two. Are they being sold? Are they being handled right? Are they being followed up with after the conversation? Step two, as you remember, is to sell training that is required. Sometimes if it is a larger company, you could charge separately for that project and probably need to work it a little harder, but in this case this was just a one-man show.

Michael: Just clarify step two is integrated into the USP, but within that it is just sales training and getting the sales people to deliver that?

Richard: That’s right.

Michael: Good illustration Richard. Now we have Diamond Mower. Tell me about Diamond Mower. How did you meet them?

Richard: Again, through the manufacturing alliance. We went and gave them the same opportunity analysis. I guess, Michael, I don’t know what to tell you. All of these are happening in the same way, but isn’t that what HMA guys wanted?

Michael: That is what you want. You want one alliance to feed you business.

Richard: You want a system. The system is I will do a workshop. I will follow up. I will do an opportunity analysis. I will do a proposal and close. Workshops, follow up, do an opportunity analysis, show them the money, and close. The same thing. I want them to understand that this thing works.

Michael: A lot of your clients, some you are selling one project, some you are selling two projects, some you are selling four projects, some you end up selling eight projects. Can you take the pressure off of the HMA consultants where there may be a lot of pressure where they think that they have to sell four projects at a time or all eight? Give them some advice about being flexible and open and when they are meeting with the client they don’t have to sell all of the projects.

Richard: That is a great point. The system is designed to be manipulated for the client. The client situation, the client assets should dictate to the consultant what steps of the system do I need and do I want. So that is the way it is organized is to be manipulated by the consultant to meet the needs of the client. Not only meet the need of the client, but give the fastest impact and that is why I will say steps one and two can be for ever the only steps that HMA guys can ever develop and do. He will have impact after impact after impact.

Michael: Okay. Typical HMA consultant, at least I would think and when I first started doing HMA I thought the USP and integrating was a slow impact. That maybe up selling and cross selling to a database would be faster. How do you feel about that? Can USP be faster than something like that?

Richard: Great question. It can be. It usually is when a company has been around a while and the leads are flowing. In other words that is the big asset is that they are generating revenue already. The leads are coming in. The salesmen are working.

Michael: Changing the USP to an existing business with the flow of leads can be very fast?

Richard: That is right. Integrating it though is critical because so what if you have a USP. If the salesman doesn’t sell it, it won’t have an impact. The integration has to be successful and that is why you have to get the sales people on your side. You have to find that champion. Once those things come together, one and two can have powerful impact. In fact you know all of these case studies. Sure we did database. Sure we did alliances and they helped, but they weren’t and aren’t as immediate unless the situation is that you need more leads. There are alliances or database steps that can get you more leads faster. Again, it is what is the situation of the client. I just want to tell the HMA is if all they did was one and two, you can have a great career because that is so lacking out there. It is such a big void.

Michael: All right. Let’s do Diamond Mower.

Richard: All right. Great little company, they just got their survey from the government. They are up $1,000,000 over last year.

Michael: What do they do?

Richard: They sell lawn mowers that are used by vegetation county managers on the sides of the roads. When you are driving the freeway and you see these guys mowing lawns on the side of the freeway, it is probably a diamond mower.

Michael: Yeah, those big ones.

Richard: Well they had gotten the rights to a mower that automatically applied t the herbicide to kill the weeds. So before what would happen is you would have to go through and mow it. Then you would have to go through and spray it. So the labor costs were up. Pollution and poison risk was up. Now they had a mower that would cut it and spray it at the same time. This was Diamond Mower’s new machine. Well they came to the workshop and we followed up on the workshop. They said, “Richard, I just have to get help in getting this new machine sold. I have a bunch of them and I need to get them out into the market. It is called the Wet Blade.” We went to work and the key one here is alliances. We did the USP. We did the integration. We did database, but alliances were the key. That is they had an exclusive relationship with the herbicide provider, the company that provided the herbicide for the lawn mower to spray. This company, the herbicide company had been around a long time before this new mower came out. So they already had county people in their database. All we were doing was introducing the new mower to an existing database and formed an alliance with the herbicide company.

Michael: How big of a database was it?

Richard: Thousands of county people. These county people had already been buying herbicide remember. They have been buying poison to spray and they have been buying from this company, which Diamond Mower had set up an exclusive relationship with to use all of their herbicides with their mower. I asked the owner, “Why haven’t we promoted to the customers of the herbicide?” His jaw drops and he says, “Duh.” So we got a letter going from the owner of the herbicide endorsing the new Diamond Mower to his entire database. We started selling Diamond Mowers. That is a great alliance story for HMA consultants to see how simple this is. Why didn’t the owner see the customers of this herbicide company as his prospects? Because he doesn’t think that way that is why we are hired.

Michael: He is too emotional. You can’t see it when you are in it.

Richard: Yeah, you can’t see it when you are in it. So we had to help him step b back and help him look at his assets and see them in a different way.

Michael: Horn Plastics, same story. How did you meet them? It is probably the same system.

Richard: The reason I listed this one is because I want the HMA consultants to understand that they can do group training and have impact. Shocker Hitch and Horn Plastics were in the same group that I met with on a weekly basis, taking them through the manuals. They are doing it on their own. This isn’t a face-to-face. This isn’t me executing. This is group training.

Michael: How much did they pay for these group trainings?

Richard: They paid $500 per employee. So if we had 10 employees from the companies coming to this group training.

Michael: How many weeks was the group training? How long did you?

Richard: It was $5,000. We went for 4 weeks, two hours a week.

Michael: What time did you do them?

Richard: I did them from 5 to 7 o’clock at night, after the work hour. So I had eight hours invested. Two hours a week for four weeks, getting $5,000. They need to know that they can do these group trainings. Horn Plastics went through the group training. They did their USP. Here was the neat thing about them that the owner was spending $10,000 a month. They make plastic liners for the backs of pick-ups. That is Horn Plastics. It is a nice liner and it just goes in the back of a pick up. Well $10,000 was generating a lot of leads. Three sales people internally not doing a very good job. In the group training they learned their USP. They went back in step two, week two and they started to integrate the USP into those phone calls. We went through the four weeks of training and $5,000. I am not hanging around and asking too much about what is going on. I didn’t follow up a whole lot. I saw the owner on an airplane coming out of the Dakotas. I asked him I said, “Phil, how is it going?” He says, “My inside sales have doubled, Richard.” They just started to, again it was sales training in the second week that we helped them with to integrate the USP. He said, “My inside sales have doubled and I haven’t had to increase my $10,000 budget.” That’s a great case study there.

Michael: It’s a good illustration. When you are doing the group trainings, besides you just lecturing and teaching, how much interaction between your students and yourself during that group training?

Richard: We are going through the manuals together. There is quite a bit of interaction.

Michael: Do you use an overhead projector? Tell me how you organize the manuals. Everyone who comes in, they sit down and they each have their set of manuals. You have your set. Are you using any of the PowerPoints or are you just taking them through?

Richard: I take them through the same workshop that they would of seen in a workshop to introduce the system, but then it is their homework during the week that is critical.

Michael: So week number one, the first thing you are going to do is take them through the PowerPoint presentation?

Richard: Yeah and then the USP manual.

Michael: Then the USP manual?

Richard: Yeah, because the USP manual tells them the four things that they need to do. It is the same thing they have to do that a consultant would of done.

Michael: All right so they come back, week two, and they should of done the four things for USP?

Richard: That’s right.

Michael: Do you review on week two?

Richard: Absolutely. Then we go into integration. Then we go into the next manual. Here we went just to core four. We didn’t do 5, 6, 7, and 8.

Michael: On week two, you review USP. If people have questions maybe will you give advice on people’s USP?

Richard: Yes, for example, Horn Plastics comes back and says, “Okay. How do we get this USP into our ads?” They are running $10,000 worth ads. So we help them with some headlines, help them with some things that they can put into the ads to integrate the USP. Now their ads are doing better.

Michael: All right. So each participant in the group training, you will cover each one of their specific USPs in the whole group and learn from that experience?

Richard: Absolutely. They share ideas with each other.

Michael: So there is a lot of interplay and discussion?

Richard: Oh yeah. You want it that way. I had four companies in this group with 2 and 3 employees each on average. They were companies that didn’t want to afford the one-on-one, but would pay the $500 over the four weeks.

Michael: From that group training did you end up getting any one-on-one?

Richard: No.

Michael: Okay, we have time for one more case study. We have Shore Master boat covers.

Richard: What a neat little company. They manufacture covers for boats. They have been in business for quite a while. Here is what was important here. Again, they came to a workshop. We followed up with the opportunity analysis. We had a sales director who is in charge of two or three sales people and the owners wanted him to get going and move things forward. I found out that they just spent $50,000 on a brand new catalog being sent out to all of their dealers; 2008 boat cover catalog. I asked them, “Where is the USP in this catalog?” Of course there wasn’t. So again we have a traditional advertising firm that is kind of missing the boat. They are just doing the glitzy catalog without selling anything. I had a problem. I said, “Gee, this is already out. Man, what if our USP can’t get along with this catalog? What are we going to do?” So we went ahead and did the USP, but here is what we came up with. Elite partners dealer program. Making it easy for dealers to sell more. We came right back with the USP that said, “We mailed you our catalog. If you sell $1500 in boat covers, you become an elite partner with Shore Master. An elite partner has a guaranteed turn around. The last thing that you need in ordering for your customer is delay. As an elite partner, Shore Master Fabric will ship your order on the day that we provide at the time the order is placed or we will pay the shipping cost. Everything we offer is at your fingertips. Many other manufacturers say they are the biggest or have the most but Shore Master Fabric is the only one that guarantees the fit of your customers boat cover. If your customer’s cover or canopy does not fit, we will make it right at our cost, not yours.” So we began to turn these dealers that got this brand new catalog and we made them Elite partners if they sell $1500 a year. In other words, do you qualify to be a Shore Master partner or not? We turned it away from begging for dealers to do you dealers qualify to work with us? If you are not an elite partner, then I can’t guarantee the turn around on your cover. I can’t guarantee zip, but if you want to be an elite partner and you have our elite catalog. We just took the catalog and we positioned it as elite. Does that make sense?

Michael: Yeah, that makes sense. That is good. How has that performed?

Richard: This is a new one. They are just having a good summer. The guy tells me that his canopy sales are outdoing his boat cover sales, so he is excited about that. He says, “Richard, there is no question that just by communicating.” What we did was right after the catalog went out, we had all of the sales people call dealers and tell them about the elite program. He said, “Just by communicating our USP, we have increased sales this summer. That is in a summer where boats are not selling right now.” What he did was, maybe not as big of an increase, although I think over the year it will go up higher, but he has kind of saved his summer. He didn’t have the dip that he was thinking he would have. That is just as powerful and important as increased sales; not losing sales.

Michael: Michael, can Richard give us some advice about the core four from a time management point of view; shortcuts to get the job done quickly, how we can get through each step in one day along the lines of the Day Flannery interviews, tips on becoming more efficient in completing the four tasks in each module of the core four. Thanks and regards, Mark Whitely.

Richard: One thing that will help is if you can get a champion on board. If you can get someone that is helping you with the core four that is good, that will save you time. If you have to do it all, then that is going to be tougher. It really should be that you should not spend more than three to five hours per week, per client on the steps. If you are doing that, then you are maybe doing things that you shouldn’t be doing or that you don’t have to do. From a time planning standpoint, for example on USP, you meet with the company week one. Again, the system can be manipulated, so if you want to get it done in a day then have your meeting, make your customers calls, look at the competition and eight hours later go deliver USP. You could do that. You don’t have to spread it out over four weeks. You can get it done and package it in a day if you want. Again, manipulate the system the way that will best fit your client’s schedule. The system is kind of built though in the way the market has best responded. That is, wow I am going to pay you $3,000 and you are done in a day. But, you have been with me now four weeks. You have come in and spent time every week for four weeks. Oh, all right. See it is just easier for a guy to pay $3,000. The delivering of the system is kind of packaged in a way that we have learned best fits the market.

Michael: Here is a question from Sam, one of our new consultants out of New Jersey. Richard, if I were to drop you in a small to medium sized city with no money, no contacts, and no other resources except for the manuals. How would you get started in finding and acquiring closing clients?

Richard: Along with my manuals, I would have a PowerPoint presentation. I wouldn’t go into a city with just my manuals. If you were to drop me off, I would have my PowerPoint presentation and the manuals. I would immediately go to the local Chamber of Commerce. I would say that I have a workshop and I would like to offer it to your customers at no charge. So on the next chamber meeting, I would like to have 30 minutes. Is that something that would work for you? It is a new marketing system idea. I am not going to charge for your clients. All I am going to ask is that I can follow up with them if they are interested. So, boom! That would be the first thing I would do in small to medium sized cities. I would go to that Chamber and I would get a workshop ready. I would also start to visit maybe a sign company. I would go in and I would bring my manuals with me. I would say, “You know this marketing system has complimented signage for companies all across the country for years. It has helped them add more sales, which is what you want your sign to do for your customer right?” Yeah that is what we want. I would like to add some more marketing and sales training to your sign business. Could we do a little workshop for your sign customers? I would do the same with a CPA. I would do the same with a bank. I would take eight hours for a day and hit those alliance opportunities right off the bat.

Michael: You would ask to be able to be put in front of their customers to do the workshop.

Richard: At no charge.

Michael: We just heard two case studies and that is exactly how you work the system?

Richard: That’s right.

Michael: You just take it from there.

Richard: Part of the HMA investment that you are making is that you are buying a system that has been around for 17 years now. You can use those case studies. The credibility is in the system. The credibility of the system is that it has performed. So take the load off of yourself. Don’t put it on you. You have purchased the rights to a system so that you don’t have to spend 17 years putting it together. So don’t get hung up. If you go in to a prospect and the focus is on you, you will sell sabotage. You will become uncomfortable. They will ask you, what have you done? If you go into the opportunity analysis focused on solving their problem by use of this system, you are going to keep the focus off of you. Then you have all of the credibility you need in the system. I am hoping that helps in how to get things started.

Michael: Here is a question from Pete Perika. Michael, here is my question. Richard do you find one type of business better than another? For example, is it easier to get a retail operation to increase sales faster versus a manufacturing company?

Richard: I would say yes to that. I would say that retail is probably the best. The only reason that I have been focused on the manufacturing is two things. One is manufacturers are having to wake up to marketing. They are about 10 years behind retail, maybe 20 in that they haven’t caught on to marketing like they should. Hence, they have been losing business to China and overseas. They are tired of losing it and they are beginning to wake up to marketing. So from an industry standpoint that is why I have loved the manufacturers. They are waking up and they are beginning to get interested and we are here now to help them. As far as I think the quickest impact. Retail is clearly, probably the best because sales are happening everyday, people are coming in everyday, and people are coming in every day. They usually have a good database set up. Maybe they have been doing mailings. They have sales people with idle time that you could work on projects. That is why I would say that retail is probably the fastest.

Michael: Richard are there certain businesses that you try to avoid.

Richard: Yes, avoid start-ups. Don’t mess with the startups. They don’t have any assets and so they are going to be tough to make. Unless they will pay you to create those assets, avoid startups. Avoid restaurants and franchises. They always have to get marketing decisions from headquarters. Restaurants are just to monitor and track. They have plenty of consultants in the industry, so stay away from those kinds of businesses.

Michael: Hi Michael. It is always great to hear from you and Richard. My question is about Richard’s experience with the “done for you marketing”. Is he doing any of it for his clients? Managing marketing programs for a fee? I am getting more requests about going this route, but I don’t have the fulfillment system in place. Do you or Richard have any experience with this? Dedicated to multiplying your sales. Paul Fled, Marketing.

Richard: It may be that they want you to handle advertising, they want you to handle printing, they want you to handle Internet and all of that and actually be a fulfillment house. I would caution against that unless that is where you want your consulting business to go. I have stayed away from that fulfillment and I just always instead found it better if I look at the client and say, “Oh. Do you already have an ad agency that I can work with on this?” They go, “Yeah, we would like to use them.” You already have an Internet host that handles this. “Yes we already do.” You already have a printer that has been printing this? “Yes, locally.” Well we can just keep them. Then they know that I am not making money on that stuff number one. Number two it has just been easier to coordinate rather than try to do it all. Three, I have seen two competitors end up really suffering by trying to do both. By trying to execute on the marketing and be the fulfillment. I just caution you on that.

Michael: Here is a question from Jim Peck out here in San Diego. If an HMA consultant wants to focus on three or four types of businesses to specialize in, which ones would be the best ones for systematic cookie cutter implementation or consistent results?

Richard: I would go to retail, but avoid the franchises. Go to independently owned retail stores would be one type. Then I would go to manufacturers that would be my other one. Those would be my top two. Following that would be a real tie between service companies and professionals. I liked working with financial planners and service companies pretty much equal, so that would be the top three.

Michael: That is the end of this interview with Richard. I hope these case studies have helped you in giving you some new illustrations and examples of how to get clients.

Michael: Hi, this is Michael Senoff with HardtoFindSeminars.com. You are in for a treat. The old rules to making money in the marketing consulting business just don’t apply when you hear these stories. Right now, I’ve got Richard and expert marketing consultant to spill the beans on all the inside secrets of marketing consulting. In the next two part interviews, you’ll read real marketing consulting case studies from Richard’s clients. Other so-called marketing consultants will tell you the stories of others, but none of their own. This is different. The best way to learn how to be a successful marketing consultant is to hear exactly how the expert’s doing it now. You will want to hear what Richard does in his practice today in the fourth quarter of 2004. Get ready as I dig out all the goods from Richard’s proprietary marketing consulting methods. Now, you’ll learn how to do it by example in this two-part recording called, “Hidden Marketing Assets Found-Client Case Studies”. Enjoy!

Richard: I thought what I might do is illustrate what’s happening with these clients because it demonstrates the Unique Selling Proposition of my marketing system, and that is that the marketing system that’s unique because it not only increases sales for a client, but also net profit, profit margin, bottom line profits go up, working capital is freed up, and it can happen as little as 60 to 90 days for a client or quicker. And, it can mean a 25-100 percent increase in all of those, and it’s a system so it’s step-by-step, easy to execute, and you’re guaranteed the system’s performance. So, that’s the Unique Selling Proposition for my marketing system. That’s what sets it apart from everything else out there. So, that’s why a consultant can go with confidence in approaching prospects because he’s got something different and unique. Does that make sense?

Michael: Yes Richard.

Richard: So, all of these stories, you need to see what’s happening is we’re not just increasing sales. These are profits going to the bottom line because as you go through the stories, we didn’t increase the money spent to create those results. We didn’t have to do more advertising. We didn’t have to hire more people. We didn’t have to go to more trade shows. So, we’re freeing up capital because we’re better allocating the scarce resource and that’s so important, and that’s what’s so neat about this system is because it leverages these hidden marketing assets in a way that you can create these results without asking your client to spend huge amounts of money except which of course they’re paying you.

Michael: That’s fair though.

Richard: So, the client still gets all of that return for years to come. That’s important because that’s the Unique Selling Proposition for my marketing system. MUSIC

Michael: You’ve got a collection of past clients, and you’re going to discuss some stories, impact stories, of how you’ve implemented the marketing system with specific examples of the marketplace.

Richard: That’s right.

Michael: Let’s start with number one and see what we can learn from your experience.

Richard: Well, this first story happens to also be the first client that I charged a fee for as I was starting my career and got my training with Jay, and of course Jay Abraham’s approach was the contingency based, and that was difficult in starting my consulting practice. So, I got referred to a small clothing store in Elko, Nevada in 1990. They were doing about $500,000 a year, and I went in and met with them once a week for a period of weeks, implementing the marketing system.

Michael: What was it like women’s clothing?

Richard: No, it was more western outdoor clothing.

Michael: And, they had a retail, physical brick-and-mortar?

Richard: Yes, doing about $500,000 a year in business.

Michael: So, you were referred to them by?

Richard: By an associate. So, I charged this client $500 a day. That was my first fee- based charge.

Michael: $500 a day?

Richard: Yes.

Michael: Was it mail order or what?

Richard: Mail order, and he owned the store. He bought it from his dad. It had been in the area for a long time. I’d go out once a week and charge him $500. So, that was giving me a couple of thousand dollars a month. So, I was on my way to fee-based, and one thing that is a common and is that these steps in the marketing system are in an order on purpose. They are really ordered in a way to have the most important and effective impact as quickly as possible. So, we’re not trying to manipulate the steps in any way. They’re in an order to leverage the marketing assets of the client. So, our first step in the system is developing a Unique Selling Proposition, and a Unique Selling Proposition and the acronym is USP is the number one step and the first step in the marketing system because it is essentially the sales pitch. It’s the compelling selling reason that that company is in business. It is what sets that company apart, what makes that company unique from all of the competition, and it’s so important because with so many different kinds of businesses in the same business. So, here you have in Elko, Nevada in this example you have a clothing retailer that’s trying to compete against Corral West which was a franchise and Wal- Mart coming in and all of these other clothing options in the small town of Elko. He has to stand out. He has to be unique. He has to find something that will differentiate himself from his competition, and the reason he has to do that is because if people don’t perceive a reason that’s different to do business with you, then they’re only going to shop price, and they’re only going to go to the lowest price seller, and they’re only going to watch for the ads that give them the lowest price. So, that was the battle of this store owner had. He was fighting against the lowest priced retailers of western clothing in the area, and he had to win that battle. In the system, you’re trained how to determine a Unique Selling Proposition. You’ve given four step, and the first step is we met with the owner and his staff to get their perspective of the Unique Selling Proposition, and in your training material you have a complete questionnaire that goes through what questions you should ask. The next thing we did was to call some customers, survey customers, and in your training material you’re given all of the survey questions you need to have. And, we get the customers’ perspective of what might be unique.

Michael: Why is that important?

Richard: Well, because they’re shopping for some reason. They’re coming to the store for some reason, and we want to know what it is. They may be going to another store as well, and we want to know that.

Michael: Can you give an example like a Dominos Pizza example what a couple USP’s would be for companies that anyone would understand?

Richard: Yes, the Dominos Pizza, the dramatic impact for that company because they came out and they looked at all the competition and they surveyed customers, and they talked to prospects, and they asked what’s most important to them, and at that time speed was becoming and was a void in the industry. No one was delivering a pizza fast. So, they did. They said, “We’ll get it to you in 30 minutes or less or it’s free.” That was very compelling. That was very unique, and it took Dominos to the top of the pizza industry.

Michael: Was their pizza any better?

Richard: No, be cause what was important was speed, but now overtime, that has not become and maintained itself as a unique selling proposition because now people can get pizza in 20 minutes anywhere. So, it’s no longer unique to Dominos, and Pizza Hut started to keep delivering a better tasting pizza, and that began to matter more than speed over time. So, Dominos has lost its unique edge. Revenues are down. Domino’s is struggling. They have to create a new Unique Selling Proposition, but it sure raised the bar for everybody. Now, we can go anywhere and get pizza in less than 30 minutes and get tasty pizza. That is profitable. Another good example is Lenscrafters. Lenscrafters looked around at the industry, and they said, “Oh, you know, people want glasses fast, and there’s no one doing that. So, we’re going to build a lab right in the store and we’re going to deliver in about an hour.” Well, that’s a very compelling Unique Selling Proposition, and it’s got Lenscrafters at the top of the industry. No one’s matched it. No one’s done better, and so it continues to be an effective Unique Selling Proposition. Another good example is the battle today between Wal-Mart, Target and K- Mart. K-Mart is pulling out of bankruptcy, while Target can build a store right next to Wal-Mart. Why can that happen? It’s because Target has a different Unique Selling Proposition than Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is appealing to a low- priced audience. They want low-prices always. They communicate that USP over and over again while Target does not. Target goes after an income level demographic higher than Wal-Mart. They build a nicer store than Wal-Mart. They have wider aisles. They have a little nicer product line. So, Target’s doing very well building their store right next to Wal-Mart because they’re going to a unique demographic than Wal-Mart. So, there was a USP not in product but in who they were targeting. Does that make sense?

Michael: Yes.

Richard: So, there’s what we mean by Unique Selling Proposition is a very targeted reason that people should do business with you and no on else. So, with this clothing store in Elko, we determined that they carried a nicer line of product. So, we knew we couldn’t be a low-priced leader, and we also determined they carried the largest selection of product, and so, now we even counted the number of winter coats they carried and quantified this selection as a Unique Selling Proposition. So, we crafted the USP around a higher line and the largest selection in town. So that was the first thing we had to do. The second thing we did was make sure that message gets integrated into all of their marketing. That’s step number two in my marketing system.

Michael: So, where did you integrate that higher selection, better quality?

Richard: It starts first with the sales people on the floor. So, we did some training to make sure we got scripting into their sales pitches. So, when people come into the store, the first thing that they’re telling these people is why they’re shopping there at the store. “Well, we do have the largest selection of these higher end, better quality, clothing lines. No one else in Elko has that.” I all of a sudden started to close more business. People started to buy more in the store. And, we got it integrated in their newspaper ads that they were running in the local paper. We got it integrated into the radio ads that were running in the local radio stations. We got this message integrated through scripting and through copy work. You’re trained in step number two how to do that. So, that was the second most important thing. It’s silly to have a Unique Selling Proposition, and it won’t do any good unless it’s communicated over and over and over again.

Michael: And, it’s going to be done first.

Richard: That’s right.

Michael: Or you could be just wasting your time.

Richard: That’s exactly right. You could be running radio ads without a USP wasting money, and newspaper ads without a USP wasting money, and that’s what these businesses do is they get out advertising that emphasizes price. So, they get mad when all they’re selling is product with no margins. A USP gives them a different message to sell. That’s why steps one and two are where they’re at because it’s silly to pursue step three through seven unless one and two are done.

Michael: What was the results for this clother?

Richard: I’ll share one more thing that we did. What happened then is Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait right in the middle of our consultation with this clothing store. The very month I was going to Elko, Saddam decided to invade. No one came into the store and the traffic dropped in half. This store owner said to me, “Richard, I’m going to go out of business if you don’t help me with something here. I don’t care if I’ve got a great USP. I don’t care if I’ve got people that are hearing it on the radio. They’re not coming in.” They’re all home watching CNN because it was the first time that the networks were publicizing a war and putting it on the screen. So, his traffic dropped in half. So, I said, “Okay, then what we need to do is do better with who is coming in the store. What is your average sale right now?” And, he calculated that his average sale was $25. So, we did some training with the salespeople. We took some of his product line and built packages, and we raised his average sale to $50. We were able to double his sales with half that people. That saved him during that invasion. That kept him in business. So, the message is that when you’re with a client that’s in a hard time, or they economics of the situation is such that the shopping isn’t being done, the place to turn to is the customers that are coming in any way and doing a better job of getting more money from half the business that’s coming in. So, that was a dramatic impact on that store, and we took him from $500,000 to $850,000 in a year.

Michael: Did he stick with you through all the steps?

Richard: You bet, yeah. We got into step three which is database, and we reactivated customers. We got his customer on to a mailing list, and we sent offers and he created a frequent shopper customer club where the minute somebody spent over $500 in this club, they got $50 worth of merchandise free. That had so much impact. It kept his loyal customers coming back and coming back and coming back. So, we did some great things in step number three. Step number four is we started to put some cross promotion with other stores in the Elko area that had the same kinds of customers that he would want. For example, there was a Red Wing shoe dealer in the area, and we would have a special that would go to the Red Wing shoe customers over to this retail store. That brought in new customers in a different way without advertising more. We did the media, step five as we talked about getting the USP integrated into his radio and into his newspaper. He did step six, community marketing as a big part because Elko’s a small town. He was sponsoring snowmobile trips. He was sponsoring outdoor activities, and he would take some of his clothing up to these spots and serve coffee and hot chocolate, and he was sponsoring the event. So, he was out in the community making people aware of his store and of his higher end clothing lines. So, yeah, there were all the steps involved in that first client and it had a dramatic impact.

Michael: He was probably having fun doing it.

Richard: Oh, it was a blast especially when the war ended and his traffic picked back up.

Michael: That’s great. That’s a great illustration. Is he still around today?

Richard: He’s still around doing well.

Michael: do you keep in touch with him?

Richard: You bet.

Michael: Great story. Let’s do another.

Richard: I’m going to talk about a catering business. He was doing about $300,000 a year in catering and he was located in the Salt Lake City, Utah area.

Michael: How were you introduced to him?

Richard: My direct marketing contact did.

Michael: So, this is your phone guy. He called this guy cold, set up an appointment, and you went through the opportunity analysis?

Richard: Exactly.

Michael: Then, he said, “Let’s do it.”

Richard: That’s right. Well, the most important thing that my trained marketing consultants learn is how to spot the hidden marketing assets that an owner may not. So, a typical owner and this was the case with this catering. I go in and he’s doing about $300-$350,000 a year, and he says, “I need more customers.” I said to him, “How are you getting customers now?” He says, “I have the largest yellow page ad in the yellow page book. I have a full page ad.” I said, “Well, how does that do?” He says, “Well, I’m getting calls everyday.” Well, that was a clue to me, did he really need more customers? So, what we did in this one was fix and tweak an existing marketing process that was already in place, that was generating assets he was not leveraging. He really didn’t even need a Unique Selling Proposition although we went ahead and developed one, but the most important thing he wasn’t doing was capturing every phone call and following up on every inquiry from the yellow pages.

Michael: Who was answering the phone over there?

Richard: He was which was the mistake because he was also cooking. He was also the caterer. So, I convinced him to go ahead and hire someone that all they did was answer the phone and follow up with prospects that inquired about his catering, and that is all we did for that client, taking him from $350,000 to $700,000 in a year.

Michael: You started with step one, right?

Richard: Yes, you always look at the USP first.

Michael: So, he paid for his step one.

Richard: That’s right.

Michael: And, then what step was this implemented in?

Richard: Then, step two is again, integrating the USP into the current selling and marketing processes. That’s where this was because the phone ringing was his current process. So, we got somebody to answer that phone, integrate and give the scripting of USP over the phone, and he started to close more of his yellow page calls. It illustrates that you don’t always have to fix a whole lot. All we did on this one was fix the sales process.

Michael: And, he couldn’t see it?

Richard: He couldn’t see it. So, the message to consultants and prospects out there that are looking at this marketing system is that the USP for the my program is training you how to spot these hidden marketing assets.

Michael: I would think these things are going to jump out at you when you go through that opportunity analysis worksheet.

Richard: That’s right. That’s exactly why we created that worksheet was to help you as a consultant see these assets and help the business owner see these because they’re the ones that are usually missing them.

Michael: Okay, that’s excellent, and that would be related to increasing the conversion.

Richard: Yes, that’s right because the seven step marketing system grows a business three ways. It increases the number of prospective clients, it increases the conversion rate of prospective customers to paying customers and increases the value of each customers. So, you recall back to the clothing store. We didn’t have a chance to increase the number of people coming in the store because of the war. So, we had to go to step three and increase the value of each customer and raise the ticket from $25 to $50, and that survived the business. The second case, the caterer, we had plenty of prospects coming in the door. He couldn’t take anymore. He was too busy as it was. Well, a traditional advertiser or a traditional marketing consultant would’ve come in and said, “Well, we’ve got to get the phone to ring more. You need a bigger yellow page ad, or you need more newspaper ads, or you need to be on the radio.” Which, is just exactly opposite of what this business needed. The needed training in step number two which was a better handling of every inquiry coming in, and so you can see the beauty in the flexibility of the system. This allows the consultant to go where the opportunity is the greatest and provide the most value to your client.

Michael: That’s great.

Richard: All right. Here’s a great one. Here’s an attorney in the Salt Lake, Utah area-

Michael: Are all your clients in that area?

Richard: Yes.

Michael: You’re working right in your backyard?

Richard: Oh yeah, that’s what we want consultants to do is to enjoy their backyard. So, my travel is minimal and my expenses are minimal. The moving parade principle is critical here and that is just because they might not need you today, you want to stay in touch. You want to stay in contact because they might need you tomorrow. And, a business that starts business five years ago, is now a prospect for me. There’s always new businesses starting everyday. So, your own backyard is where the diamonds are.

Michael: Okay, let’s do it.

Richard: This is an attorney. He gives seminars.

Michael: How did the contact happen?

Richard: I wanted to do seminars, and I was looking through the yellow pages for a seminar company and I ran into this company that’s titled by a seminar name. In realty, it was an attorney that was going around giving seminars on asset protection, and his client base was doctors, dentists, high income professionals who needed to have their assets protected through legal channels.

Michael: Did you call him cold?

Richard: I did. I called him up and I said, “I’d like to look at doing seminars with you.” And, it ended up that that didn’t work out, but he retained me as a consultant. We went in and again, his USP was in his expertise. We knew right off the bat he had 20 years in the business. He was well respected around the country. He was a nationally renowned speaker. He used direct mail to get people into his seminar. I remember meeting with him, going through the opportunity analysis and I asked him, “So, how many people come to your seminar?” He says, “Well I do about three seminars a week. I get about 500 people total during the week.” I said, “Well, that’s good. Out of the 500 how many buy your asset protection package?” He said, “Well, I’m a pretty good closer on the seminar circuit. I close about 30 percent.” So, I said, “All right. So, that means about 150 are buying your package.” He says, “That’s right.” Then, because of the training, I asked this question, “So, what about the other 350 that didn’t buy?” He said, “Well, I don’t know. What can I do with them? I don’t do anything with them right now.” So, here I am trained to spot that as a hidden marketing asset, and he said, “Wow. That’s interesting. I’m already spending the money for those 350.” So, he says, “What do you suggest?” So, we implemented a back-end marketing program. This is really step number three, database marketing. We got all of those 350 prospects, and we developed and trained a call center of two or three salespeople who would call back the 350 prospects the next day or two after the seminar, and invite them to buy the package over the phone. This got this attorney a million dollars cash in a year that he never seen before.

Michael: Wow, that’s great.

Richard: That was nice because I did some of that on contingency. I could see the opportunity. I knew it was going to happen. And, what we found out was some of them just needed to go home and get their credit card. They didn’t have it at the seminar.

Michael: All right, let’s talk about that. So, in your opportunity analysis in asking questions you saw what this could mean. You had enough experience to know what kind of dollars this was going to bring on. Now, let’s say a consultant sees an opportunity like that, but the business owner has no clue. What are you going to say to try to lock in a contingency? Can you give an example with that specific case study?

Richard: What would you do is try to convince him and persuade him to a small task. You’d say, “Let’s just test it Mr. Business Owner. I don’t know if it’ll work. Let’s just test it.”

Michael: How many steps had he paid for already?

Richard: Well, we’d gone through and made sure his USP message was right. So, he paid me for that. We determined that I couldn’t help him a whole lot on the front end where he was a presenter and closing. He was doing pretty well there. So, we were big on this part which was the prospects that didn’t buy. So, he had paid me for a couple of steps, and he was paying me for the third step and then we locked in this contingency deal as part of that third step.

Michael: So, what would you say at that point? When you want to lock it in, what do you say?

Richard: You say, “Listen, why don’t we go ahead and we’ll cut what you pay me in half, and let me just take a commission on each of the sales made.”

Michael: Do you remember what he said?

Richard: He said, “Sure, absolutely.”

Michael: Did you draw up an agreement, a letter of agreement?

Richard: Yes, and it’s a commission agreement and it was based on the phone people that I had trained and that I saw it was very measurable because we knew we weren’t going to mess with the sales that he made in the seminars. So, these were all incremental sales that he had never looked at.

Michael: Can I ask you what you asked for in commission?

Richard: It was ten percent on every sale.

Michael: Okay, that’s easy for him to say yes. That’s not a big deal.

Richard: Sure.

Michael: So, you put a time limit on the agreement.

Richard: That’s right, and they’ll want to.

Michael: Or, what would happen? What do you think? Would they get resentful?

Richard: Yes.

Michael: The deal falls apart?

Richard: Yes.

Michael: So, you’d recommend if someone’s going to set up a contingency with someone, avoid that, and be fair and set a time limit on it.

Richard: Yes.

Michael: Don’t lock them in for life.

Richard: Yes, unless you want to become part of the company. If for some reason you want to become an associate with your client and stay with him long term, that’s a different story, but maybe you do that after a couple of years. I have no interest in becoming a long term partner.

Michael: That’s a great illustration.

Richard: Yes, a great story, and again, the importance of being able to identify these hidden assets because I tell the clients that I don’t know which step of the system or which combination of steps in going to generate the increases. So, I need to do all of these steps – the ones that I’m recommending. They understand that. Let’s go to a manufacturer. This company manufactures clips that go on the siding of houses to clip cable to the house. So, your Sprint people, your Comcast people, the installers of cable are the customers of this company.

Michael: How’d you find them?

Richard: A referral through an alliance partner that I have.

Michael: Can you explain that?

Richard: Yes, about two years ago, I came in contact through a client with a manufacturing non-profit group who is set up by the federal government and have offices in every state, and their job as assigned by the government is to help small manufacturers become more profitable. So, this manufacturing group I got contact with by way of another client, and I met with them, and I helped that group increase its business, and then they contract with me to work all of their manufacturing clients that need marketing help. So, it’s been a great alliance for two years now. I’m not an employee. They just contract with me, and it’s an 80/20 split. So, I pay them 20 percent of the fees, and I get 80 percent. So, this company was referred to me by this manufacturing group, and they manufactured these clips for cable. I met with the owner and with the person that he had running the company and they were doing about $15,000 a quarter in business. So, about $5,000 a month, not doing really well. We created a Unique Selling Proposition, and then we integrated the Unique Selling Proposition again into the person handling the phone call inquiries, and then we created a mailing piece – a combination of step three and step seven – going out to his customers and his perspective customers from direct marketing, and in 90 days we had them doing $55,000 a quarter.

Michael: That’s great. How were they getting their existing customers?

Richard: People were finding them on the website, and calling to order clips, but what this owner was doing or the guy running the company was saying, “Yeah, I’ve got clips”, but he wasn’t telling them the USP.

Michael: Were they a commodity?

Richard: That’s right. They were perceived as a commodity. We had to change that perception, and one of the attributes that this clip company had in all of their clips compared to the competition was it was much easier to use the clips, much easier to install, easier to maintain, easier to replace. We started getting that phone script into those inquiries, his conversion rates then doubled raising his revenue. So, once again, very simple, very simple, but step one has to be done. Step two has to be done, and then that gives you the ability then to get more steps from the client.

Michael: Did you take him through all the steps?

Richard: No, just four steps.

Michael: You’re not going to take a client through all the steps in all the cases.

Richard: That’s correct, and I would say there’s probably a pretty good rule that the smaller the company, the fewer steps – the larger the company, the more steps because the marketing’s more complex. The marketing’s more involved.

Michael: I bet these guys just thank you up and down.

Richard: Oh, they do.

Michael: They’re going to think you walk on water.

Richard: They do.

Michael: You’ve changed their lives, their families, and that’s a good feeling.

Richard: It is. It is. I’ll tell you one story that – and all of the consultants will get a little opportunities like this. I had a neighbor who came by, and he knocked on my door, and he said, “Richard, I understand that you’re in marketing.” I said, “Yes.” He says, “Well, I need you to know I can’t pay you anything, but could you help me?” I said, “Sure, I’d be happy to help you.” He said, “I’m starting a carpet cleaning. I got my truck. I got my equipment. I’m only doing $100- $200 a week. So, I’m really suffering here. Is there anything you can do to help me?” I said, “Well, what are you doing now to get business?” and he showed me a little four by six, five by eight flier that he would take and hand out to homes. Well, without going through the steps of a USP because I knew he couldn’t pay me to do that, I just created one, and we changed the flier. The flier was “Three rooms $49.95.”

Michael: Sell it on price.

Richard: That’s right. So, what I recommended to him was I said, why don’t you give them the fourth room free. So, do three rooms and they get the fourth room free. Well, he handed out about 800 fliers the first time and got one call. He handed out 800 with this Unique Selling Proposition and got 15 calls. He’s making a grand a week now. This changed his life overnight.

Michael: Did you have an instinct that that would pull from some prior experience?

Richard: Yes, I knew that free always is a good compelling reason to buy. That works very well, but if it also has been combined – I’ve used it with other packaging offers, and so he had this package for $49.95, and the reason I convinced of it. I said, “Listen, you’re already in the house. So, it’s not going to take you long to add another room.” He said, “That’s right. It’s not a big deal.” So, we went with it, and his life’s changed. So, yeah, there’s that satisfaction as a marketing consultant, the way that you can impact lives and businesses.

Michael: That’s great. Is he still doing it today?

Richard: He’s still going today.

Michael: All right, that’s excellent. That’s a good story.

Richard: Let’s illustrate one with this very large manufacturing company, a public company doing over $300 million a year.

Michael: How’d you find them?

Richard: Again, they were referred by my manufacturing alliance. This is a great story because a big, large, public company there’s some dynamic that as a consultant that you encounter that you don’t encounter with a small company. You have different levels of decision making. It’s usually a little longer sales cycle to get the deal closed. You invoice them, and then they pay you. So, it’s a little different dynamics than you might have with a small company.

Michael: So, where were you when the call came in? Who called you from the company? What position were they in?

Richard: They called me because the manufacturing group that I was associated with recommended that they call me to help them with some marketing issues. This manufacturing group, they have their own assessments. So, they’re going in and making assessments with clients, and during that assessment, the need came out for marketing. So, here was a division manager, a manager of over commercial product applications for this large public company, called me, and said, “Richard, we’d like to meet with you because we’re introducing a new product to the medical industry, and we want to know how we should best do that.” So, they made product already for the military who was a big customer of these, and they now wanted to take this same product and apply it to the medical field in a commercial application. So, with that, they paid me for step one. They paid me for step two. They paid me for step three. They paid me for step four. This was a little division. They had one sales person that was responsible for getting this product out to medical companies.

Michael: Let me interject. Now, you’ve got a huge company here. You know they’ve got money. You’re not dealing with Mom and Pop down the street. What’s your decision making process of what to charge this guy?

Richard: Well, I knew that that they could pay more, and so I charged more $4,000 a step. I knew that they might call me later on down the road. So, I got in the door. There’s a nice fee, and we did the Unique Selling Proposition. The one salesperson that they had before we met was doing a little bit, maybe $50,000 a year in medical sales. So, we created a Unique Selling Proposition, and what was neat about this is they were keenly the experts in what they did, and the products they developed. So, I recommended to them that we set up a newsletter. These medical clients aren’t fast buyers. They have to test product. They have to get product approved by the government, and they’ve just got to go through a lot of hoops before they can buy product. So, I knew the sales cycle wouldn’t be that fast. So, I knew that we had to – what I call – drip on the prospects. So, we had this company develop a newsletter that would be sent out to these prospects on a regular basis reminding them of the expertise available. The salesperson was not doing any kind of follow-ups. We had to do a lot of step two in getting the salesperson into a selling system that was leveraged and that was accountable. So, we did all of that. He said, “Thank you Richard. We’re all done. I’m going to call you back in a year if we want to do it for another division. So, I’ll see you in a year.” Because he knew that the sales would take that long to develop. Well, a year later he calls me up and he says, “Let’s go again I got the data. We’re over $400,000 in a year, from under $50,000 in medical equipment.” So, he said, “Let’s do it for another division.”

Michael: Who wrote the newsletter?

Richard: He did because he has the expertise. So, we’re now – right now – I’m currently retained by them working on this other.

Michael: Are you charging them more this time?

Richard: About the same.

Michael: That’s excellent.

Richard: Again, a manufacturer, and these are all different kinds of businesses. Now, and that’s what happened with this audiologist that I worked with.

Michael: How do you get the contact?

Richard: He was contacted by our phone worker. I went in to see to him and he showed me an advertising campaign that he had paid an ad agency $20,000 to create and to put into the newspaper. And, he looked at me and he said, “Richard, I didn’t get one call.” So, it had totally failed and lost him $20,000. I said, “Well, here’s what I’d like to try and do. Number one there’s nothing in this newspaper advertising that tells me why I should come to you. There’s no Unique Selling Proposition.” So, he paid me to do that, to create that. I said, “Next, what we’ll do is I’d like to try some seminars instead of the newspaper.” So, we created a seminar promotion piece that went out in the direct mail. So, we decided to go direct mail rather than newspaper. This is so important because that decision was based on the work done to creating a Unique Selling Proposition because in the past as step one we determine that he was not a mass price seller of hearing aids, and if you go through your local newspaper, you’re going to see tons of advertising from hearing aid companies on price. So, I said, “Your customer is not going to be reached through the newspaper. That’s for a hearing aid company that wants to mass sell hearing aids at the lowest price.”

Michael: What was the Unique Selling Proposition? How was he different?

Richard: He was different because of two or three things. One he was the only one in the area that belonged to a national buying club that could purchase from all 32 manufacturers of hearing aids. So, he had the largest selection available. Number two is he’s the only one in the area that had a scheduled hearing health care plan. In other words, the customers come to him and not just get a hearing aid, but they would actually schedule their follow-up visits for the next two years. It was already scheduled in advance. So, he was just a higher end servicer. He was more of health care professional not a hearing aid dispenser. Well, you can’t persuade people in a page of advertising to do that. So, he was wasting his money. So, we redirected the resources – that $20,000 maybe $4,000 of it – to a direct mail seminar campaign, and we now have him doing seminars on a regular basis rather than newspapers. So, we shifted the resources to match the unique selling proposition because with the direct mail I can target to higher income people who respond more to a healthcare professional rather than a hearing aid dispenser.

Michael: Who are they mailing to?

Richard: They’re mailing to a demographic group of 55 and 65 years of age and older, at a certain income level. Then, we bring them to a seminar and give them a free dinner. That took a little convincing. I had to help the owner understand that, “Go ahead and buy 20 people their dinner, and bring them out on an evening at six o’clock and be done by seven-thirty.” So, we tripled his visits by going to the seminar route, and we’ve cut his expenses. Now, let me tell you we entered now into step four, and that is he had a neighbor that was a financial planner to seniors, and this financial planner had a thousand clients that he had serviced over the years.

Michael: Now, step four is what?

Richard: Alliances and partnerships.

Michael: Okay.

Richard: So, we’re forming an alliance and partnership with this financial planner, and so the financial planner – we crafted a letter that he’d send out to his thousand people inviting them to a seminar and a free dinner because we’d already found out that worked, yet it only cost to mail. It didn’t cost anything because the alliance partner covered the cost of the mailing, and it was a much smaller more targeted and I endorsed mailing.

Michael: Now, was something in it for the alliance partner?

Richard: Yes, the audiologist is going to sponsor a seminar to his patients. So, it works both ways. So, we’re going to do another seminar after this one that we scheduled with the alliance partner, but the turnout was so great, the conversion rate so high, that my client is booked for the next three weeks from this endorsed seminar.

Michael: Who put together the direct mail letter?

Richard: I did.

Michael: Was that difficult?

Richard: No, not when you know how to do it. That’s what the system will teach you. And, now we’ll sponsor a seminar for the financial planner. I went up to my client and said, “Do you realize that you’re going to sell probably 20 hearing aids and it’s going to cost you $400?”

Michael: Is the financial planner going to be your client, too?

Richard: Maybe. I wanted to tell the story about the audiologists because he retains me on a monthly basis. So, residual income could happen that way. You can keep a client for along time. He just calls me, and we just stay in touch, and I do a little bit every week for him and he pays me on a monthly basis. So, I have an ongoing client income.

Michael: Okay, that’s great.

Richard: Yeah, that’s another way to work with your clients, but it also illustrates and now what we’re talking about is he said to me, “You know, Richard, there’s got to be other financial planners that are going to the seniors.” And, he’s right. We’ll just start finding other financial planners to do the same endorsed seminars with.

Michael: He can do that for the rest of his life and never have to mail cold again.

Richard: And, save four grand. So, again, the system not only increases sales, but frees up working capital, increases his net profit, increases his margin. The business is impacted in all ways where tradition advertising can’t impact it like that. Here’s a furniture company, discount furniture store, and my phone contact contacted this group. I want to illustrate this story to also illustrate the important principle and I think I may have mentioned it in a previous interview and that was that a start-up company is hard to work with because they don’t have a lot of marketing assets. Well, this was a start-up when I went to meet them. They had been in business for about three months. So, he was just getting going. Well, the reason I went ahead and took this client is he was willing to pay me to help him build the assets. So, what’s important is don’t say no to a start-up just because he doesn’t have assets. If he has some capital and is willing to pay you as a marketing consultant to help him build up the assets, that’s okay. So, we did. But, he was doing about $4,000 net profit a month. So, he was grossing about $10-$12,000 in sales. He’d be in about a 40% margin. So, I said, “Well, we need a Unique Selling Proposition.” So, he paid me for that. I said, “We then need to get it into the ads that we’re doing.” And, he was doing some newspaper ads and he was doing some coupon ads with a local coupon company. I said, “Let’s get the Unique Selling Proposition into your son who’s running the store. He needs to be selling this with people coming into the store.” And, then I said, “He needs to track everyone that comes in and doesn’t buy because I want him to make a follow-up phone call in two days and see if they’re still interested and would like to buy what they were looking at.” So, we did really three steps, and we developed some letters for the customer base that they were building up, and then we did step number four which was alliances and partnerships because what we did was we created a promotion piece that could be used by a title company. When people go in to sign and buy the house, they go to a title company. Well, this title company liked to reward their customers with something. So, we gave them a $75 gift certificate to the furniture store. So, we have a partnership going on. We have people buying new houses. What do they need?

Michael: Furniture.

Richard: Furniture, so we have a title company that wants to give their customer something to say thank you for doing their closing at their title company, and the way they’ll say thank you is giving them $75 value towards furniture at the store. So, now we have step number four in place generating customers from a title company. So, we don’t have to go spend media dollars to drive people into the store. This is so important for consultants to see this. So, we’re generating more traffic. We did this training of salespeople in step number two to convert more, did the database which was to send out letters and started a customer club, a referral frequency club for his customers, and six months later, he’s generating net profits of twelve grand. So, he tripled his net profit, and they will know how to keep the store open, and to keep his son running it, and he’s looking to expand to get into a bigger location.

Michael: That kind of brings something up because when you’re looking at a company and choosing to take one on, and you know you can grow this business from your experience, is that something you want to ask them how much can they grow?

Richard: You bring up a great point. I refer to them as anti-USP which means can you handle this growth? Is there anything that’s going to kill it? We’ll create a Unique Selling Proposition for you, but can you kill it through your operations? And, yes, you’ve got to make sure that there’s nothing in the other parts of the business that are going to kill this growth.

Michael: What are you discussing then?

Richard: That you should try and spot that at the opportunity consultation. You should ask them, “Let’s say if we doubled your sales, do you have the capacity to handle that with the current situation that you’re in?” And, they might say, “Well, no I’ll need to hire somebody, but I can do that.” In fact, I was with a prospect yesterday. They manufacture baggage for certain industries – the duffel bags, backpacks and things like that, and she said, “Well, I’m doing about $600,000 a year.” And, I said, “Well, I can see where we can get you to $800,000 to a million dollars pretty quick. Can you handle that?” And, she said, “Yes, because just about three months I contracted with a manufacturer facility that is my competitor who can handle all of my excess business.” So, I knew then that we’d be okay. So, I knew without that manufacturing facility, we would have buried here.

Michael: Okay, great illustration. Let’s do another.

Richard: I mentioned in another interview this client. They were a very large employee leasing company. Employee leasing has been a big trend in the last ten years. They were doing about $60 million in payroll, and they were a very good progressive company. We went in and conducted the opportunity consultation, saw where I could help them. They paid me then to start implementing the marketing system. It’s a good story for a couple of reasons. Part of the Unique Selling Proposition is to get with the owner, and get the owner’s perspective of what is unique. So, we did that. We called customers and talked to them. We looked at the competition and see what they’re selling and between all of that we arrive at creating a Unique Selling Proposition. Okay, then we go to step two – integrating it. So, he had five salespeople. So, I went to the five salespeople, and I said, “I want to hear your sales pitch.” And, in going out with those five salespeople, I never heard what the owner thought was the USP. So, here we have an owner on a different page than the five salespeople. That’s a problem. And, what the reason is that it’s also a problem is the five salespeople are selling a commodity just like all the other employee leasing firms. So, their closing rate isn’t very good. They’re closing maybe one out of five, and they’re closing on price, again, how much is your health insurance? How much are you going to save me on health insurance premiums? How much is your dental insurance? So, again, it was a price issue which illustrates a commodity approach has been taken by these five sales people. What we did then was take the Unique Selling Proposition and make sure that all five salespeople were now selling that Unique Selling Proposition, and again, in those two steps we go from $60 million in payroll to $90 million in payroll in a year.

Michael: Wow.

Richard: And, that’s because we’ve doubled conversion of 20 percent to 40 percent. So, he kept me on, and we went into database, step number three. We went into alliances and partnerships, step number four. We actually did a lot of media. We created new brochures. We created new radio campaigns. We were in the industry journals. We went to the industry trade shows. We always won the number one marketing awards that were presented at the trade shows. And, then here came a contingency opportunity. He called me up and he said, “Richard, are you ready to leave your consulting and would you come with us full time as my Chief Marketing Officer?” I said, “Well, what’s in it for me? I don’t know if I want to leave my consulting practice.” He said, “Well, as you know, the industry is going through some massive changes, and we are going to be going public, and that will happen in about a year. I’d like you as Chief Marketing Officer and I’m going to give you some stock. If they stock goes as planned and it comes out public at the prices that we’re planning, you’ll be a millionaire.” So, I illustrate this story because of two things. One is he took me out of my consulting for two years.

Michael: When was this?

Richard: This was ’98.

Michael: And, you became a millionaire from that one deal?

Richard: No, no, no. No, I’m illustrating this.

Michael: Okay, go ahead.

Richard: To raise some flags. It is a way a consultant can position into a contingency type.

Michael: What did you say to the guy?

Richard: I said, “Sure, I’m going to come on board.” So, I come on board and what happens is the case which is so typical of many entrepreneurs, he brings in a venture capital firm to give him money to go public. They begin to find out that this CEO can not take the company public. He doesn’t have the skill set. So, he gets fired, and all of us get let go.

Michael: How long did that happen after you came on?

Richard: About a year and a half.

Michael: So, you weren’t doing any consulting for that whole time.

Richard: No, here I was investing, planning to go public, and become a millionaire. I illustrate it because it did two things. It took me out of consulting. These are things often beyond a guy’s control. That’s what I want to illustrate is that a contingency puts you at risk.

Michael: And, promises don’t pay the bill.

Richard: That’s right.

Michael: Absolutely.

Richard: Okay. So, another opportunity might come along like that, but did it cost me more than it helped me, I don’t know because they paid me well. I mean I was paid well as Chief Marketing Officer. So, I had nice benefits. I mean, I was a corporate man.

Michael: So, how’d you like that year doing that compared to your consulting practice?

Richard: Very, very, very unsatisfactory in satisfying my need to be out working with businesses.

Michael: You were trapped. You bit the carrot, and sold your freedom for a carrot.

Richard: There you go.

Michael: That’s a good lesson.

Richard: It’s a great lesson, and I don’t want to say that it would’ve necessarily have been the wrong one. It may have been great. So, my message to all of the consultants out there is keep your eye open. These opportunities are going to come along, and you just have to decide what’s best for you. So, a great story, and had a big impact in my consulting business.

Michael: What would you tell someone who’s been a corporate guy for his whole life, and this consulting system or being a marketing consultant is something that he’s always wanted to go out on his own, but he’s just had the fear. Talk about some of the benefits of being your own boss, having your own business, and some of the fulfilling things that you’ve experience over the years doing this.

Richard: Well, I say the number on fulfilling is the freedom of creativity. When you’re your own boss and the only one you’re answering to is the client, the creativity and the fun in generating that creativity is very, very fulfilling. If you don’t perform for the client, he’ll fire you. So, you’re on the line, and when you’re on the line, you just have to be creative. You have to be good. You have to raise your level of performance. When you’re in the corporate world, you don’t have to do that as much. You’re held back by others that are making creative decisions. You’re always fighting. You’re always looking for political turf. You’re always worried about who’s getting credit. It’s the nature of the corporate world, and I learned in my experience is that the corporate world can never, ever pay you enough. They just can’t. They’re not set up to pay you for your individual creativity and performance. The only one that can afford to pay you that is the client. And, that’s the freedom of the consulting business. I started to get bored. I started to get routine, and I started to get less creative, and so that’s why it was unsatisfying and while I was grateful that it finally came to an end not in the way that it did, but that it came to an end. And, it gave me the chance to get back out, get free again, and answer only to the client and be creative again. There’s the fulfillment of your own consulting business.

Michael: Let’s do another story.

Richard: Here’s a great little story in your own little home community. Here’s a small little niche company. They make medallions out of gold, silver and brass, and they creative incentive medallions for brokers that do premium incentives to like Coca-Cola and to Boeing, and I was, again, referred to them by my manufacturing relationship, and they were doing about $5,000 a week in sales – a little Mom and Pop shop and struggling. Here they were 60 and 63 year old couple burdened by the fact that they have to go to their business and work everyday because they’re in debt and because their sales aren’t high enough yet they would like to retire. Well, again, they’re looking to me to say, “Richard we need more customers.” And, whenever you hear that as a consultant, the first thing you want to say is, “Well, maybe you don’t.” because let’s ask the question, “How well are you doing with the inquiries that you’re having now?” Well, as we took a look at that, we create a Unique Selling Proposition, and then step number two is to take a look at that and say, “All right, who’s answering the phone? Who’s answering the inquiry? And, what are we doing with it? Are we following-up? Are we selling the Unique Selling Proposition?” Well, the wife in this partnership was the one tasked with the sales. So, she didn’t even know how many calls were coming in. She didn’t even know how to do a bid. She didn’t know how to follow-up. Yet, after a couple of weeks of measuring, we found that she was getting inquiries everyday for bids, from a website that they had, and yet the bids were not getting converted. She was not closing them because she said, “Richard, I don’t know what to say to them.” So, based on the stories today, we now know what to say and that’s the USP. So, we trained her and helped her to manage each inquiry better, and here three months later, they’re doing $12,000 a week instead of five, and it’s a burden that’s lifted. She says, “You know, now when someone calls I know what to tell them.”

Michael: Is this a new client of yours?

Richard: It’s been great. So, again, and maybe later on we’ll do more steps with them, but we’ve got them at capacity right now. They’re handling enough that they got because they’re handling each inquiry well, and doing well.

Michael: So, how many steps have they gone through?

Richard: Three steps is all.

Michael: Let’s talk about how much time have you spent really, if you added up the hours of time you spent with this couple?

Richard: About ten hours.

Michael: Ten hours total?

Richard: They’ve paid me $3,000.

Michael: That’s a great story.

Richard: All right. I want to illustrate something that’s happened this past year over the last year through this relationship that I’ve developed with the manufacturing group as an alliance. For the first time, we’ve done some group training. I hadn’t done that. I’ve always worked with clients one-on-one because I didn’t know how I could do the group training profitably. Well, it so happens that in all of your states out there, in all of your communities, there are parts of the government that provide training funding for businesses and their employees, and in this particular instance this funding is available from the state of Utah. But, I didn’t know about it until I got associated with the manufacturing group, who’s a non-profit group whose business is to know about these sources of funding. So, what’s worked out is the manufacturing group has done the promotion in communities around my community. These are smaller, more rural communities that you could not profitability as a consultant work with someone one-on-one because you’d be traveling too much. So, we have been able to package and this will be included in the releases that are coming out in the updates of the system, but we’ve been able to package group training now. So, I did four of these group trainings, training about 80-100 business owners and employees as of last year.

Michael: You saw 80 at a time?

Richard: About 20 at a time. We’re training them in two hour increments. So, I’ll go to the area for two hours and come home and train them all at that location.

Michael: On how to build their business using this system?

Richard: That’s right, and each of those training sessions has been about $10,000 to me.

Michael: For two hours?

Richard: For about two times seven weeks, six weeks, about twelve hours. What is exciting is these business owners who never, ever could afford to pay someone one-on-one what I would need to be paid, they get funding from the state at $500 an employee, and they have to pay $125 of that. So, the government funded $375 of the $500 yet I got paid the $500 per employee. Every state has some of this type of funding. It might be through the economic development centers. This one was called, “Custom Fit for Utah”. So, we want to encourage your consultants to understand that here’s a new way to deliver this system, and that is through government funded training because that way they can get paid what they need to get paid, but they’ll be able to attract businesses that couldn’t afford to pay them any other way.

Michael: That’s great.

Richard: And, do it in a different way that isn’t through group training rather than one on one.

Michael: Do you know what kind of forms they have to fill out to qualify for the training?

Richard: We know what the forms are for the Custom Fit of Utah.

Michael: Pretty simple?

Richard: Yes.

Michael: Does the state pay quickly?

Richard: Oh yeah.

Michael: Who is that pays you?

Richard: What happens is that the manufacturing group is the one that gets paid first, and then they turn around and pay me.

Michael: Do you have to wait for your money after the trainings?

Richard: Thirty days.

Michael: That’s great. That’s fantastic.

Richard: That way you just simply delivering the steps differently than if you were one- on-one.

Michael: So, someone signs on and goes through your system, this is just one way of them earning income.

Richard: That’s right, and it increased my income $40-$50,000 this year. I hadn’t done it before. I’ve never done this group training. I’ve have never found these sources of government funding that are available. So, we want the consultants to be aware of that.

Michael: How do you prepare for a training like that? You get 20 people, you’re going to head into all this, what are you going to print out? What are they going to walk home with? How do you do this?

Richard: They’re getting the seven steps, modules that have been prepared for the web and that are now available in manuals. What we’ve done is we’ve written and taken the seven steps and turned it into a self-study course by the business owner. So, as a consultant all you’ve got to do is go through those manuals.

Michael: And, when you’re doing your presentation, are you using a projector or anything?

Richard: I’m using sometimes my laptop with the PowerPoint seminar materials that’s going to be available to the consultant.

Michael: So, you’ve got this thing all on PowerPoint?

Richard: Yes.

Michael: So, I can bring my laptop – you’re using your laptop, but that’s just for your reference?

Richard: The manufacturing group has a projector, and then a screen.

Michael: That’s great. So, you’re just doing your PowerPoint presentation and walking them through it.

Richard: Yes.

Michael: And, you’ve got this PowerPoint presentation ready.

Richard: That’s right. So, as a consultant, you’re going to have the manuals. You’re going to be able to use those and make that part of your group training. And, it simply set up so that the business owner himself can take himself through the system, and doesn’t require a consultant to do it for him. The next case study revolves around a financial planning firm. They were doing about three and a half million dollars a year in business. Their target market was a wealthy individual who was on the verge of selling their business and retiring. So, they were going to come into a lot of money and a lot of assets. This financial planning firm would sell financial plans for those types of people. So, the customer was the typical business owner who had their business for about 20 years and was selling it, and coming into a lot of money. When I met them, and visited with them and this was a fellow I had worked with previously in my outside sales days. He called me up out of the blue and said, “I started a financial planning firm, and I want you to come and help me with some marketing.” So, that’s how I got this client. We went in and found out that they were generating their prospects and their leads through advertising in a very high-end periodical magazine, and these ads would cost about $10,000 a piece to run. So, I took a look at the ads and realized that there really wasn’t any Unique Selling Proposition in the ad. So, again, that’s the first place we look and we fix. We create a Unique Selling Proposition for them, and then we put that into the ads. In this case, they were just advertising financial planning. So, what we did was find out that the work they did would actually lower taxes by 50 percent or more for these clients. So, we started to be more specific in the ads, and we started to say, “Lower your taxes 50% or more.” Well, this doubled the response on the ads. So, that’s the situation of taking a USP and getting it integrated right into the ads. So, we didn’t have to spend more on ads. We just did a better job. Then we had a group of contracted independent salespeople out in the field and these people were just kind of loose out there. They were under contract where they got a commission for developing a financial plan, and what had happened was they prospects would come into Salt Lake City and meet with the company there in Salt Lake City. Well, by getting some of the salespeople out in the field, the clients could meet with them in their region and in their area. So, we were able to service more clients by setting up these outside salespeople who were qualified. Some were attorneys. Some were CPA background. Some were in insurance background. So we could train them enough to sell the financial planning that we had. By leveraging the salespeople out in the field, we set up a selling reporting system that required them to send in there contacts and then what they were doing with their leads and how well they were doing with their leads that we would give them from the advertising that we would generate. We tied down the sales process better. We had a real big push in alliances and partnerships. We found out that the conversion rate would increase if we brought the CPA in with the business owner. We were finding that we would propose a financial plan and they would go to their CPA and it would get killed by the CPA. So, we just simply started bringing the CPA with the client, treating them as a valued advisor partner from the beginning. So, our conversion rate started to go up. We started to do a little bit more community marketing in the areas of the salespeople doing seminars and workshops, and so over a year we took them from three million to seven and a half million by those steps of the system.

Michael: That’s fantastic.

Richard: Another great story and a great use of all steps of the system. Media was big. They were spending large on the media. Community was improved because we’d have salespeople in the local regional area. Direct marketing was huge because we would send out beyond the media. We would send out a newsletter and direct mail pieces to prospect. So, that’s a case where all seven steps were implemented.