Biz Bites

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[00:00:00] Essential direct marketing insights for professional services in the age of AI. This is a podcast episode. You don’t want to miss with the unbelievable John Dwyer, JD from the Institute of Wow. He has incredible insights to give you. Whether your business is a small business, medium business, or a large business, these are the tips and tricks you don’t want to miss.
They are going to get you real impact really quickly in many cases. We also talk about AI and the role it’s playing and the incredible things JD is doing with AI at the moment. So sit back and enjoy this one with pen and paper in hand. The Institute of Wow. Here we go.
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Biz Bites. And my guest today is going to introduce himself, but all I can say is wow. So John, over to you. Oh, you started the whole show with a dad joke. That’s terrible. You can’t do [00:01:00] that. Come on. It’s gotta be, it can only go up then from there, isn’t it?
Yeah. Oh goodness. Mate. Look, the reason that he has graciously said, wow, is because my business is called the Institute of Wow. And we’re a marketing company, a direct response marketing company. And so we tend to provide the businesses things that, They will get an instant result from and we can’t guarantee 100 percent that it’s going to be a good result, but they’ll get a result most of the time it is, but they’ll get a result like within a day.
And so direct response marketing is very different from brand marketing where you might be sponsoring the Olympics or you might have your face on the side of a bus or back of a taxi. Direct response marketing is all about putting on Facebook campaigns or Instagram campaigns today or newspaper or brochure, whatever it might be, and knowing tomorrow if it’s working for you.
It’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because we’ve had these titles like social media, right? It’s a really obvious title, but sometimes people just don’t think about what it actually means. And direct response is exactly as you’ve just said, right? It’s just a direct response. [00:02:00] I find it interesting though, social media, how many people in social media completely forget that the term social media exists.
That’s the foundation of it in the first place. But talk to me about a direct marketing because it’s changed a lot. You’ve been doing this for a while. So talk to me about changes for starters. What have you seen that’s changed in over your time doing this? Yeah I’ve been doing this marketing stuff since 1842.
So therefore I remember my, yeah, my, my first, form of transport was the horse and cart, which is the, this is the silly dad jokes that my millennials, I’ve got six millennial children and they back out the baby boomers just My baby boomer generation bags out the millennial, so they’ve heard it all.
Yeah, we could. There’s been huge changes, of course. And the latest one, as Anthony’s a I we’re getting robots now to basically answer the phone for our clients and then also to schedule appointments and to do sales and all sorts of stuff. So therefore, when it’s got to the stage where robots are playing a big role in direct response marketing, you just wonder where else can it go?
[00:03:00] You think you saw it can’t get much better. But I remember, Back in the day, when fax machines came out, my father in law said to me at the time yeah, this is this won’t get any better than this. Fax machine. Joe, it makes us both feel old when you start talking about that. Cause I remember the fax machine.
I remember, I think I’ve said before on the podcast when my first, Yeah, paid job was at channel 10 and we still had a typing pool at that stage. You give the scripts to, to the typing pool to type for the news and the, in the evening. If there was, it was different, I’m sure I speak for you and for a whole lot of other people that might be watching or listening to this, and that is, is that we scream if something takes 10 seconds to download now. But to answer your questions in terms of the changes, yeah, look, they’ve been massive. The mainstream media, as has been proven in the recent US elections, doesn’t play the role that it used to for anyone, whether it be a politician or whether it be someone, selling goods or services.
And I am not sure how the TV [00:04:00] networks are going to stay alive because look at what happened with Trump. If he’d been on the Jimmy Fallon tonight show, then he would have had 4 million viewers. He went with Joe Rogan’s podcast, had 54 million viewers. There’s not even a close contest anymore.
And yeah, it has changed in that respect. It’s Facebook TikTok and all those platforms, of course, delivered to you now, like laser targeted audiences in the day that you would spend money on radio or TV and newspaper, the wastage factor was massive because if you are only after. women who were, and you’re selling a wrinkle cream for argument’s sake, and you’re after women who are the age of, 45 upwards and you had an expensive wrinkle cream, so therefore you wanted them to live in an upmarket suburb, then you can laser target that on social media, as but you couldn’t do that on newspaper or TV.
There was massive wastage. Yeah, that’s the thing, isn’t it? That it’s we’ve got more and more targeted. I think the interesting thing I’ve always found is that media has actually led the way and where we’re going. I look back and say that [00:05:00] the old days where we had, three television stations and that expanded, but eventually we got it.
Yeah. Pay TV and people started understanding, okay, you could choose a bit more specifically about your audience. Then it got more specific because those channels went from just, for example, a lifestyle channel to just to also having a cooking channel and a building channel and et cetera. And it’s got more and more specific.
And. Podcasting is a great example of that as that it gets more and more specific all the time as well. There are podcasts out there that are just for very particular audiences that might be just skewed towards, females in their twenties, for example, and if that’s the audience that you want, you can find that audience quite easily.
Look, I wanna set up a network for a DHD people. I reckon I’ve got it. I’ve never been diagnosed, but I’ve got the attention span of a goldfish. And so I figured for people like me who cannot concentrate, if someone gave me a choice of doing a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle or five years in jail, I’d take the five years in [00:06:00] jail.
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Look, I want to set up a network for ADHD people. I reckon I’ve got it. I’ve never been diagnosed, but I’ve got the attention span of a goldfish. And so I figured for people like me who cannot concentrate, if someone gave a choice of doing a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. Or five years in jail. I’d take the five years in jail because I’ve got, there’s no way I’m going to put a [00:07:00] jigsaw puzzle together.
So I reckon if we sit and maybe you can go house with me, Anthony, we’ll set one up for people like me who’ve got a low attention span. You only have to make one or two shows cause I’ll never watch the whole end of it anyway. Just loop the shows. I’m with you there. It’s like, when you think about it though, how many people sit there?
I get frustrated when I watch my, when I watch my kids watching TV. If I’ve decided to put my phone down, cause I don’t want work coming through anymore. And then all of a sudden, you’re sitting there and going, are you actually watching this? If I actually changed the channel, would you even notice?
Because they’re on their phones and doing 600 other things. It’s it’s crazy. It is. And we’re having six Millennials and I know you’ve got, you’ve got two or three, two? Two. Two. Yeah. They’re just not like us real humans, are they? They can multitask where they’ve got a laptop, a phone and the TV in front of them.
How do you do that? I don’t know, I really don’t know, I’m like you, I get easily distracted on one thing to the next. It amazes me too, that their ability to binge watch stuff at the same time, [00:08:00] that’s almost counterintuitive with the fact that they’re doing 500 other things at the same time.
Yeah, no, you’re dead wrong. The thing that I probably should have answered when you said, look, what do you see in terms of changes with direct responsibility just marketing. When people ask me what direct response is, aside from saying it is what the name says. But the other thing is that most advertising agencies will tell you get people to fall in love with your brand so that they will taste your product.
And what we do is if we flip that, we get them to taste your product so they’ll fall in love with your brand. And I just think that’s a very significant difference because if the seafood shop has a host or hostess outside at lunchtime and dinnertime, handing out calamari samples, that’s a very smart move because they are getting people to taste test their product with calamari.
And presumably, it’s nice. So therefore, there’s a percentage of those will come in and buy the barramundi, which is much more expensive. So we flip that model of getting people to fall in love with your brand. So they’ll taste your product to get them to taste your product. So they’ll fall in love with your brand.
I think that’s the easiest way to explain it. It’s a great analogy. [00:09:00] But I wonder how you know, you talked about AI, how is AI going to change that? Because, AI is almost In the way at times for that, does it create more opportunities for those that are willing to go the traditional routes or is it that you have to adapt?
Look, the example I just gave you was bricks and mortar, of course, being a super chop, if you’ve got an online business and, or an online component for your business. The wonderful thing with with, robots on, we’re down the path quite considerably with that is that they can do the taste testing for you.
So therefore, they can ring 1000 people. And in America, Robo calls are not able to be made unless it’s to your database. And so you can’t randomly make robo calls in America. That’s what they call them robo calls. But in Australia is still the wild west. So if you want the robot during 1000 random people, you can still do that until someone comes in and decides that put a government rule in place.
But yeah, so we’ve got that happening whereby, we’ve got clients who could have only ever wrong, maybe, 20 or [00:10:00] 30 people in an hour to now being able to bring a thousand people in an hour. And that robot who sounds like a human, so very few people would even detect that it’s a robot, is actually asking questions and delivering taste testing and whatever that service or product is in that phone call.
So talk about being able to Like, expand your reach and it’s absolutely crazy. And it’s if anyone’s not using it at the moment, and there’s plenty of people not, not you and I do because we’re in the marketing advisory field, but for an everyday business owner who’s not using it, either, learn it yourself or get someone like you will need to.
Teach you how to use it because it is just the future. There’s no question about that. How do you think you kind of, battle that difference between, particularly a lot of my audience of professional services based business. So they’re providing some level of service and service by nature is Generally done by human beings.
And I think there’s a lot of these services will still be, although assisted by I perhaps in the [00:11:00] background. So how do you balance between where the I should begin and end, particularly in that human facing? Role. Like reaching out to people. Is there a benefit in still having the human facing or it’s just not economically viable to do it?
If you’re in the service industry, they want to talk to you. There’s no question about that. So therefore, if you build up a reputation for yourself, Anthony, and and you have and so have I, mine is bad, but yours is good. So that someone said to me the other day, we use Cheeky as a child. I said, let’s put it this way.
I’d only have to walk out. I went to a Catholic De La Salle school and the brothers were pretty strict and we got the strap and all that stuff back in the day. It went a bit like now of course. Can you imagine anyone giving someone a leather strap these days? Not a chance. They would just go to jail.
I copped that every day. But I got to a stage where the teacher, the De La Salle brother, when I walked into the class, he’d just say, do I get out? I haven’t done anything. So I know that you’re going to do something. So just get out, I spent most of the time [00:12:00] outside the classroom. So if you’re doing stuff like you and I, where you’re providing people with advice, there’s no question, of course, that people want to talk to you, not a robot.
However, What the robot can do, which is what we’re doing at the moment. We’ve got great results from it. Is it and I’m sure you’ve heard the name, a guy called Frank Kern in America. Okay. So he’s quite a well known direct response marketer and he has a phrase that he uses quite often. And that is, if you want to help people then, Just help them.
In other words, if you want to demonstrate to people that you’ve got the answers to their problems, then just give them an example. Give them a sample like the calamari outside the fish shop. So what we’ve done is we’ve put together a model whereby instead of doing a gazillion dollars on Facebook and getting bad leads, what we do is that we actually choose to business types that we know I can help in particular because there’s some that stand out.
And what we do is we actually invite them to come to a free one hour group session with me on Zoom. And so what happens then is that they actually get a call from the robot [00:13:00] once we get the details, and they get text messages as well. But nonetheless, the robot rings and explains to them, look, I’m Susie from the Institute of Wow.
I just wanted to know if you’d like to have a free Zoom call, a brainstorm on Zoom. With this guy who understands marketing, his name is JD, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the hit rate that we’re getting from that is surprisingly good. And we’ve only had, let’s say out of 500, every 500 calls, you only get about 5 percent of people who detect that it’s a robot.
That’s it’s amazing, isn’t it? Because I think in, in, in the phone call state and it, look, it will change as people get more used to it, but we’re so bombarded with, call centers that call us whether they’re legit or scams. We all get a number of them every day and it’s actually almost refreshing to get something then that is sounds human and just gets to the point and he’s clearly not clearly not a call [00:14:00] center.
Yeah. Look, if you’re flogging something. Then I would be a little more hesitant, but we’re not. We’re giving something away for free. So the script goes something like, look hi, it’s Lisa here from the Institute of Wow. We’re a direct response marketing company. We’ve noticed your business has ABC products or services, and you probably Would love some of the direct response ideas that we have.
And as it turns out, we have a free group zoom session, which has no more than 10 participants. So we make sure they know it’s not a thousand people on board. And this guy who’s worked with Jerry Seinfeld and looked after marketing for 7 Eleven and Westfield and Walt Disney and so forth, he’s actually providing 60 minutes of his time for free, where you can ask any questions you like, would you like a free ticket?
And that’s different from trying to fog something. Yes, absolutely. And I think it is the key, isn’t it? Because so many of those things that call those people that call you, they feel like they’re trying to give you something. They’re [00:15:00] not really, straight away they’re onto it.
And they just don’t take you off the list either, which is absolutely frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. We make sure that she hasn’t got an Indian accent. Okay. It’s on that though. When you say that there are 5 percent that might detect it because you’re getting what the scripts afterwards and seeing the responses of what people are saying and if people are asking that question, if they do are have you got it trained to be up front and say, yes, AI?
Oh, yeah. No. If they ask, then it says yes. Okay. A little bit like when you were at a conference with me last week, you would have seen the sample. And if the person who says, look, am I talking to a robot? You can’t tell a fib. No you, the girl who’s, we’ve just named Lisa, but you can call her whatever you like says yes, I am.
I’m an AI robot that’s working on behalf of the company. Yeah. And look, in terms of knowing the statistics because all the calls are recorded and transcribed if we wanted them to be, but they’re recorded, then we can tell how many people are asking, are you a robot? And it’s less than 5%. [00:16:00] Now whether some of the others detect that it’s a robot and they just don’t ask, but less than 5 percent of people ask, are you a robot?
Tell me how much programming is there in terms of the car, being able to adapt to the different questions that might get asked. Is it constantly evolving? And how much did you have to start with to train it? Yeah, constantly evolving. But what we get the AI agent robot, call them what you like, to do is to scale through the website, through Facebook pages, through anything we possibly can about the business.
So that if it’s answering a call, for example let’s just say we’ve got one at the moment on board, which is a trade business. It’s an electrical services business with air conditioning and ceiling fans and putting power points in and so forth. It’s a 5 million turnover business and they got 10 trucks on the road.
And so therefore, when you ring that now the robot will say to you, look, how can I help you? It’s ABC electrical services. And you say, look, I’d like a quote on three ceiling fans and an air [00:17:00] conditioner in my lounge room. It will have a conversation with you with regards to, okay where do you live?
And it’ll make sure that it responds by repeating that address back to you. And then it will say, okay, when are you available? And if you don’t say, at particular time, it’ll say how’s Thursday at 10 o’clock. sound. And then if the person says, Oh, look, can I just ask a question?
Although I’m asked after ceiling fans and an air conditioner, is there a chance that you might be able to put PowerPoints in for me? So it’s a left field question from where the conversation started. The robot will then be able to answer that because it’s already learned from the website and from the Facebook page, all the facilities that business offers.
It’s just incredible. It’s crazy. It’s amazing. Isn’t it? I know following from that event, we went to the other day and I posted about this where I fed. A whole lot of content from a number of my podcasts into the AI and it produced a three and a half minute. audio review of [00:18:00] the podcast itself and the value of the podcast.
And it was a conversation between a male and a female talking about it completely unscripted. I, it didn’t take very long for this to be generated. I was completely blown away and people who are listening and now you check out my LinkedIn posts and you’ll find it, but it’s a very interesting.
That information can be taken and used and does it sound like an AI? I think it still does, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think there’s always going to be a degree of an AI that’s going to feel different to what the human experience is. And I think that’s the difference. Like we’ve bumped around here and I think we, we talked just before we started recording the podcast where I said, look, we’re just going to see where this goes.
And that’s where, that’s human nature to be able to feed off stories and we’ll tell different stories or even different versions of stories, depending on how people respond and the the time you’ve got and the feedback you’ve got an AI can’t [00:19:00] really do that. It hasn’t got that human nature to it.
And I don’t think it ever will have that ability to suck in all of your stories and then to utilize in your content. in a conversation way. I certainly hope not, but what we try to do Anthony to make it as real as possible. Not that we are fibbing, we’re not lying to anyone. It’s just for them to determine if they think it’s a human or robot or whether they even care.
But when somebody asks a question, because there might be a half a second or one second lag for the robot to be able to find the information to answer that question, we have a noise effect of tapping a keyboard. With a call center in the background. And that’s one of the facility, that’s one of the options you can choose when you go down this path.
And so therefore, it does really infer that there’s someone from a call center answering because you can hear tap on the keyboard. So so that really does disarm if you’re like a person thinking that it might be a robot because they, sometimes it takes a second for it to answer. So let’s talk about a few other things because the AI part, I think this is the important thing just to finish on the [00:20:00] AI thing is that there is, it is at this level now where you can experiment with it and do it.
And you can turn to people like yourself who are, who have got that set up to be able to offer it to people. But that’s at a certain level of business, right? There are certain some of the smaller businesses may struggle to be able to do that, to afford someone else to come in. But it is the kind of thing where you can still play with it.
But yeah. Talk to me about some of the other options that you’ve got going on, because I know you’ve, and we won’t dwell too much on it. But if for those that have not heard of JD, and we’ll include all the links to all the stuff in the in their most famous, is it what I would I say most famous for bringing Seinfeld up and probably the big thing that’s That’s that everyone talks about.
No, I’m famous for a lot of stupid things. It was just that one, I’ve milked the daylights out of. Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you? And I think that’s, those sorts of things are great things to really wow at a bigger scale on a bigger audience. But when you’re talking about businesses that are, not quite at that level, what are the wow things that, [00:21:00] can be done to start making impact in a direct response?
Yeah, no, good question, man. Just so that at least the Seinfeld thing gets out of the way because we’ve teased everyone by mentioning that name but didn’t tell them what happened. I had a client some years ago called the Greater Building Society. It’s now a bank, but it was a building society at the time.
And I came up with an idea for them to take on the big banks by simply giving away an incentive. So we actually stopped the honeymoon rate, which every bank has. And we just gave that money to a travel company that was a wholesaler. And we came on TV and social media, and we just said, look, get a home loan, get a free holiday.
And the thing went nuts. They took an extra 15 billion worth of home loans in the first few years, and this idiot who you’re talking to didn’t do a door deal. I did a consultancy for you, right? What a moron. And so therefore, about four years into what was a 10 year promotion like people ask me, how long should you run a promotion?
I said, McDonald’s have been doing Happy Meal toys for 45 years. Just rinse and repeat if it’s successful. And that’s what happened with this one. I get a home loan, get a free holiday. It just went nuts. We stole that much business from the Commonwealth Bank and [00:22:00] Westpac and so forth. It just wasn’t funny.
And about four years in, I got Seinfeld to do their ads. And so that’s where that. And so for three years, I went backwards and forwards to New York and we got Jerry Seinfeld to get on TV saying, get a home loan, get a free holiday. And of course, if it wasn’t already successful, it just went through the stratosphere when you’ve got someone like him involved.
And as a result of being able to pull off, which, if I do say somewhat it’s, pretty big deal. Then I’ve milked the crap out of it for the last 10 years. And why wouldn’t you? And why wouldn’t you? Yeah. Yeah, with regards to other things, what we say to businesses whether they’re advisory or whether they, bricks and mortar retailers, or whether they happen to be doing an e commerce business, if you’re in a me too industry.
And that means your solar panels look like the other guys or your refrigerator looks like the other guys, or your lawn mowing service is pretty much the same as all your competitors, then you probably need the likes of what, we preach, and that is wow factor marketing. You’ve got to come up with a wow factor that distinguishes you from your competitors.
Because if you don’t, then the only marketing [00:23:00] plan that you can have is to drop your prices. And if you drop your prices, the guy down the road can do the lawnmowing, cheaper than you in five minutes. So we say to small businesses, if you think you’re going to win on price and you’re a hardware store opposite Bunnings, then you need some serious psychotherapy because you aren’t, you’re not going to beat the 40 ton gorilla, but how you can beat the 40 ton gorilla.
If that hardware store across the road from Bunnings says, look for every hundred dollars you buy from me, I’ll give you a pitch fork or I’ll give you a leaf blower or whatever the the Happy Meal Toy might be. Bunnings would have six months worth of committee meetings to try and work out how to combat that.
You would just beat them hands down. So what we do for smaller businesses, because we realize that they’re pretty good technicians, but they might not have skills in marketing, is that we provide them with exactly that. We provide them with concepts that, Will distinguish them from their competitors. So whether that’s how you can win 500, 000 if you spend money with us, and that’s an insured price promotion that they only pay a few thousand dollars for, or whether it be fuel discounts or whether it be free [00:24:00] vacations, we give the opportunity for them to give away a free vacation and we charge, 50 bucks for the vacation.
But it’s a three to seven night vacation worth 1000. We package all that stuff together for small businesses so that they can just plug and play. Because what I found coming from the corporate world of doing all this sort of stuff for bigger businesses, like the building society and obviously advertising got Woolworths and all of those sorts of things.
They’ve got a marketing team that can make it happen. But if you’re a small business, you’re a good technician, but you just want the package. So what we do is that we just give them the package. Which is amazing for people to be able to have that. And I think this is the, and I think what’s important is that businesses of any size, whether you are You know, really small or whether you’re, in the category of the, I suppose any upwards of a couple of million dollars a year turnover and start getting bigger from there, then there are things that you can be doing to make you stand out and get an immediate response.
And that’s an important thing to be doing. At any time of the year, I think there’s a lot, people get sucked [00:25:00] into, Black Friday is a good example. Often wonder why people get, thrown into that basket with everybody else and doing exactly the wrong thing is what you’re saying, which is heavily discounting, which means that we all know there are certain places we just have to wait for those one or two times a year when the prices get completely slashed, that’s when we buy.
All they’re seeing is an artificial spike at a particular time of year where they’ve lowered their prices. And that, to me, doesn’t seem like a logical way to go. There are these things where you can stand out, aren’t they, on an ongoing basis and run it at your own pace? Look, the reason I’m shuffling here is because I wanted to show you Exhibit A, and Exhibit A looks like this, okay?
It’s a holiday voucher, okay? It looks like that. And I know if you’re listening, you’re not seeing this, but it’s an A4 voucher, which allows people to have three to seven nights a week. Pretty much anywhere in Australia and around the world. Vegas, New York, Orlando, Grand Canyon, Bali, Fiji, Europe, all that.
And what it is that [00:26:00] when I did the campaign with Seinfeld, a travel company contacted me not long after, because it’s pretty hard to keep it a secret when you’ve got Seinfeld doing your ads, and they said, look, we’re a travel company. We get access to unsolved hotel rooms at four star hotels around the world.
We’re not a marketing company, but we’ve seen what you do. You look like you’ve got half a clue. Yeah. Do you want to join forces and offer this as a Happy Meal toy? My words, not theirs, but offer as a Happy Meal toy to businesses. And I said, Oh, absolutely. So what we’ve done is the last few years we’ve done that whereby businesses can buy these vacation vouchers offers for less than 50, but they’re worth up to 1, 000.
You try getting three or four nights at a hotel for less than 1, 000. So that’s why they’re valued up to that. And they give it away as a Happy Meal toy. And I always say to businesses, let’s just say you were selling something for 500 in the world of Groupon where it’s 50 percent off. Do you think if you held a 10 percent sale, anyone would care?
10 percent or 500, but who cares, but if for that same 50, which is 10%, you gave someone a thousand dollar value holiday, shut the gate. [00:27:00] So that’s where, an incentive will always be the price discount. As long as the incentive is a low cost to the business, but a high perceived value. And that’s why McDonald’s toys work because that toy gets produced in China for 20 cents, but in Kmart, that’s worth 5.
So that’s why the Happy Meal toy works. It’s a low cost to McDonald’s, but a high perceived value. Does some of it have to be scarcity as well? Because some of those toys that might be in a McDonald’s thing, for example, you can only get in a McDonald’s. And so it’s depending on what it is that there, is that because I’m looking, thinking about particularly a couple of the supermarket chains that have done these little toys and they try to create an element of scarcity with it that they’ve got them there, but you can only get them here and it’s only for a limited time.
Absolutely. My mantra to any business. Is that first of all you gotta have an offer. Okay. So if you’re doing less than a couple million dollars And you spend money on brand building then I think you’re Yeah, you need some therapy because, Coca Cola can [00:28:00] do that. McDonald’s can do that.
Nike can do that. Kellogg’s can do that because they’re a big business. But if you’re only doing less than 2 million, and many businesses are doing much, much less than that. In fact, 96 percent of Australian businesses do less than a million turnover. Then you shouldn’t be in the brand building game.
You want to build your brand, don’t get me wrong. But you want to build it and sell stuff at the same time. And so therefore I always say to people is that when you are going to be on Facebook wherever it might be, your message has to be an offer. Like I’ve got a client at the moment that just said to me, when I gave me the Copy yesterday for his Facebook campaign and it was we promise to try to beat wait, not to beat, but to try to beat any other quotation.
Why don’t you just give Mark Zuckerberg a check and say, don’t even run the ad because that’s not going to work. It’s got to be an offer. And as you said, it needs to be an offer with either a time deadline. deadline. And and so you’re spot on. You can only get those McDonald’s toys at McDonald’s.
You will never [00:29:00] find them in K Mart. Do you subscribe to the idea of the guarantees then? The, I’ve heard a lot, there’s books and plenty of things being written about, Oh you must provide some guarantee with your business. And usually it’s something to try and make you stand out or what people want.
I’ve heard it suggested to me as a, selling the podcast done for you. Oh, you’ve got a guarantee that you’ll have 10, 000 downloads in 90 days. Yeah. And you’ll double your amount of sales. And if anyone’s listening and thinking, I welcome you. I want to talk to you about doing a podcast for you.
But if you think that is going to happen, then none of that is real. It’s, that’s those kinds of guarantees tend to, I don’t understand that still works for people. They just seem so false. Yeah, most of that is BS and the people who are in the information marketing game, which is the selling programs online of, how to be a better soccer player or, how to be a better builder or how to be a better computer scientist or whatever it might be.
They do it. Because they [00:30:00] know already there’s skepticism and so therefore they dilute that skepticism by giving a money back guarantee and they know by statistics that there will only be ever one or two or three in a hundred that will ask for their money back and because it’s a digital product there’s no cost involved anyway, so therefore if they sell a hundred three grand products and they get Two or three that come back again, they want a refund or so be it.
But in the game that you and I are in, where we’re offering advice, I could never, ever do it. And the reason I can’t do it is because, I cannot guarantee that the client, the business owner is going to implement what I tell them to do. I’d be like a doctor saying that, I’ll guarantee that you’ll get better if you stop smoking.
And then he looks out the window and the guy that just visited him is lighting up a cigarette in the car park. So if there are ways that the business who, you give advice to, can get away with not following it, then you can’t offer a guarantee. And I always say to people, I don’t know whether you’re wearing an ankle bracelet.
There’s good reason why when you’re offering advice, you can’t give guarantees. Yes. And look, [00:31:00] as I said, it flaws me that people still fall for that. And and that there are still agencies out there pushing for that. I think it’s really interesting to me. Jokes aside, you’ve got enormous amount of credibility for all of the things that you’ve done over a number of years, but it’s it’s getting harder and harder to stand out in a space that has so many scammers out there.
There’s just so many of them. Yep. Oh, look, I I have to say that one of my Children went to the New York Film Academies in his mid twenties, and they had to at the end of the course pitch a TV idea, a sitcom idea, and he pitched one of what was like The Office, but because he’s heard all my seminar stories, he called it The Seminar.
And if there was a tagline, it would be BS on steroids, because I’ve stood in the green room behind some of the stages of these conferences and seminars and Yeah, the guy that was just out on stage before I go out would be telling you that he owned a castle and he had the Miss World Wife, of course, and he had a Maserati and all this stuff that comes up on [00:32:00] the screen.
And when he comes off the stage and I’m having a drink with him behind the stage, I said, Oh, wow, things seem to be going pretty well for you. He goes, Oh, yeah. Jadu, that’s showtime. And I think, I said he said, I’m really down to my last 20 grand. I went, What? What? So I’ve shared these stories around the dinner table over the years.
And of course, this child of mine, who’s interested in video and film, filmography says, Oh, Dad, I’ve got this fantastic sitcom idea. I said, Don’t you dare use any of the characters that I’ve described to you. Yeah, so the seminar game has certainly got some yeah, it’s got some baggage. There’s no doubt about that because the phrase I believe for the seminar game is yeah, get them high, make them buy.
Yeah, I can believe that. I can believe that. I wanted to ask you as well, because it touches on some of the things that we’ve been talking about is this whole concept of gamifying. The things because in a sense, what you’re talking about with, winning a holiday and it’s a game, how important is gamifying [00:33:00] these days in incorporating that into business?
Because it’s a term I think we’re hearing more and more all the time. Is that real? Is it really working? Is it? Is it something that’s going to continue to work? Or has it had its day already? Yeah, there’s a yes and no to that. Look, you’re talking to someone who’s probably Run more contests and sweepstakes than anyone, certainly in Australia, but maybe even globally.
I’ve spoken at some places in America and when I’ve told them that I did all the scratch bingo games for Murdoch’s newspapers, and I’ve been involved in McDonald’s and KFC and all the fast food chains doing scratch games and all sorts of promotions they were blown away in America. So maybe I’ve done more contests than anyone.
But if you said to me today, would you recommend that a business holds a contest whereby People have the chance to win versus something whereby if they purchase, they get a reward. Not might get, but they get a reward. I will always go for the latter. Despite the fact that a large part of my career, some years back, [00:34:00] we were doing at one stage, 14 million a year in the nineties, which is, for a small business.
And now we I don’t know, 20 employees at the time, but that was a reasonable sized business. And that income was all doing scratch bingos for newspapers and, scratch games to win 50, 000 for blockbuster video and all that sort of thing. But if you said to me, would I recommend that? I’d say certainly in some instances, but in most cases I would recommend to businesses to give away an incentive.
So that means is that, if McDonald’s said, look, buy a Happy Meal and one out of every five boxes will have a toy, I don’t think they’d sell that many Happy Meals. And Kellogg’s likewise, if they said buy Corn Flakes and one out every 10 boxes will have a toy. They’ve woken up to the fact that you buy, you get, will always beat you buy, you might win.
But it leads me to this is that if you don’t have a happy meal toy that you can give away with every purchase of your service or your product, something that we’ve been experimenting with and it’s just like mind boggling in terms of the response to it for small businesses is what we call a Facebook [00:35:00] contest formula.
And so therefore we’ve developed a program that we sell to businesses or they can swipe and do it themselves. And when I. You describe it now, whoever wants to grab it, just go and do it yourself. But if you want it done properly, if you want it done professionally, then we have a package.
And what it is that you give away your product or service as a prize on a Facebook contest. You will get a gazillion entries. Let’s just say it’s lawn mowing services for a month. Win my lawn mowing services for a month. And you give that away as a prize on Facebook, they click the ad to go through to your landing page and on that landing page, which is the entry page, of course they leave their details, and then you give one away, and you’ve got, let’s say you’ve got a thousand entries, you’ve got 999 people who have just put their hand up and glowed in the dark and said they need So you, you then ring them or text them or email them, however you want.
You say, listen, you didn’t win the contest, but I’ve got some good news. I’ve got a special summer deal on at the moment whereby we can do this, that and the other. And if you order by Friday, I’ll give you a free holiday or whatever the bonus is. Shut the gate, it’s all over because, I was talking [00:36:00] yesterday to tutors.
It was a webinar for tutors, Maths tutors, English tutors, Chemistry tutors online and these are mainly women and they’re sitting at home behind their computer tutoring people. And I said to them, if you ran a contest where you gave away 10 Maths tutoring lessons, I said Maths because it was American without the S.
If you were to give 10 sessions away for Maths tutoring, who do you think would enter that contest on Facebook? And of course the answer is, mum and dad who have slow learners, children at maths. I said, if you’ve got 300 entries, you gave one prize which was 10 sessions, do you think it’d be nice to have, 299 people you contact and say, look, you’ve got a child obviously that’s slow at maths, I can help you.
It’s just so easy. It’s one of those things that’s so obvious, but no one’s ever used it before. Isn’t it obvious? I think that, I think the challenge for some businesses is that lawns is an obvious one because you’re not going to enter a competition to win a free lawn mowing for a month if you don’t have a lawn.
But One of the [00:37:00] problems with it with a number of businesses, of course, is that they might be a consulting type service, and they offer a service, and it might be valid for a particular business, but and for many of those businesses, but ordinarily they couldn’t afford to actually do it. So this is how much of a pre qualified do you need to put into that?
Or do you, you don’t, you can’t afford to do that? You because the old theory was just when you want people to get their details. Ask for as little as possible, because the more you ask for, the less likely they are to complete the form. Yeah, I don’t go along with that, because the thing is that I don’t want to talk to anyone who’s broke, and that’s not because I’m not a Christian, I am, and I would like to help as many people as I can, but I’ve got to put food on the table as well. Yeah, making sure you prequalify them like crazy on that landing page is so important. But we are so evil that when we’re doing seminars, and since COVID, it’s mainly webinars, but when we’re doing seminars, we would ask for their turnover, and we still do that now with webinars.
And so it will say zero to 250, [00:38:00] 250 to 500, 500 to a million, blah, blah, blah. And when they turned up to the seminar, we would color lanyard them based on their turnover. And so therefore, if they were doing less than 250, they got a red lanyard, which meant stop to me, right? If they were doing over a million, they got a gold lanyard, which meant that I’d give up my first born to talk to them, right?
What would happen, because traditionally, and I told this last Thursday when you and I were at that function, there was a guy in the room, Who worked for Tony Robbins for 20 years, and he was at the function that you and I were at. And anyway, we got talking and I told him about this technique that we used where I could easily, when I stepped down off the stage, and of course, you think you’re Justin Bieber at these things, because everyone comes up to talk to you.
When in fact you want them to go down the back of the room to have smoke coming out of their credit card. And I couldn’t work out who had money and who didn’t because at the end of the day you’d give them free advice for eight hours. You don’t want to spend another hour just talking to people who no way they’re ever going to buy from you.
So that’s what we did. We color coded them based on their turnover and it made it so easy for me to work out who [00:39:00] to talk to. And he was with Tony Robbins for 22 years and his jaw dropped. He went, Shady. That is insane. I said, Yeah, it’s pretty simple. It’s as simple as the red and green lights in the car parks at Westfield.
Why didn’t that come in 20 years ago? It’s only come in the last five years. But he said, I said to him, does Tony Robbins not do? He said no, we don’t know how wealthy they are. We’ve got no clue. I said it’s pretty simple. So yeah, you want to pre qualify them. You don’t want to be talking to people who just are not in with, in the lawn mowing thing, of course, you make sure that they own the house.
They’re not a renter. And you make sure they’re not living in an apartment. Yeah, absolutely. Because it is an important thing. And as particularly for all those people listening out there at the moment that are thinking, okay how does this work for my business? But it can, if you put a bit of pre qualifying in there.
And I think the message is that if the prize that they’re going to get is worthwhile, then people will submit their information. If the prize is ho hum, I don’t really care. Then feeling like they’re putting their life away. [00:40:00] Is it is an interesting one. And then I think the next part is which I think because the laws in Australia quite different to where they are almost in the rest of the world now regarding the collection of data and utilising that.
And most people Just, I’ve seen it over the years. You go to a networking function, there’s an exchange of business cards and all of a sudden you’re receiving 500 emails from that person. So in Australia, it’s been the case that pretty much anyone can end up on a database. But if you’re operating on it in a global sense, and I am, you are those laws are quite different depending on where you are.
So how important is it to then be, asking them to tick a box as well that you can send them other stuff. Is that the necessity now? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Or not even necessarily tick a box. Although that’s an easy one, but at the top of the page, it says that should you fill in the form below, then you are giving consent for us to forward other details, to you.
But you know what, if you come across Mother Teresa style, whereby you are giving value in [00:41:00] everything, then no one will complain. When someone that webinar that I held yesterday for tutors, okay, mainly in America, but they were in other countries as well. When a tutor was and it was it came about because there was a lady in America who had me on a very similar thing to this podcast and she coaches tutors.
She used to be a tutor, but she’s now, moved on to be a coach of tutors and she interviewed me. And when she was doing what you’re doing now, Anthony, she was quite impressed. So she said, Oh, what else can we do? And I said, Oh, if you like, I’ll teach tutors how to do that Facebook contest because it’s just so easy for them.
It doesn’t cost them to give away five or 10 sessions. And of course they got to attract people who need tutoring or their children need tutoring. And so when we were talking yesterday about it on the webinar. They just said to me how do we prequalify them? I said it’s pretty easy. You don’t have to dig too deep.
It would be first of all, are you absolutely the parents of children? Okay. If it happened to be a, a math tutoring thing how old are the kids? So you know exactly how old they are at school. Specifically, what are the symptoms that you see in terms [00:42:00] of, I guess lacking in math skills, and I don’t know what they are, but a tutor I would.
Tick A, B, C, D, whatever it might be, so you give them the options. And then just your contact details thereafter. That’s all you need. And that means is that when you give the prize away, you’re going to have a database from heaven. It’s not a database. It’s the world’s most valuable database, because people who entered the contest for their child to, get tutoring for languages, they have a child that they know wants to learn languages.
It’s pretty simple. Yeah, it’s amazing how simple it is. I wanted to ask you a couple other questions before we have to wrap things up, we could speak for hours and hours on so many things here, but I’m intrigued. You thinking outside of the square is the big thing of what you I think what you do and trying to come up with these things.
So firstly, let me ask you, what’s wowed you in recent years? Oh, gosh probably Elon Musk. Over the years I’ve, when people ask me, do I read books? I say, no, I haven’t got time to read books, so if I did, I’d just go to the last [00:43:00] chapter and find out what was happening. I just watch the movie, I watch the movie of the book because it’s over and done with.
It has to get the AI to give you the summary. That’s all you know. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I remember before the HSC, the higher school certificate back in my day, back in the 1800s we were just, I just bought the crib notes before, we went for the exam and I’m exaggerating for the sake of humor, but yeah I’m, I’ll read autobiographies, no question about that, but yeah, just a fiction book, not a chance in the world.
So the thing is that I used to, be. I guess driven by the likes of anyone that was super creative. So that would be Walt Disney and that would be Richard Branson. It would be Spielberg and people like that. And I’m sure anyone who’s right brained and that’s the creative side of your head would be probably the same.
You have to hold those people in high esteem. I’ve been to all the Disney parks a hundred times and, My wife hates me I’ll be measuring the bricks on Main Street to make sure they’re the 3 quarter size, to enhance the fantasy feeling. And she’s going, would you just get on the ride, but these days, yeah, Elon Musk. When you, you look at who’s, At the moment, probably the [00:44:00] most innovative, creative being on the planet with a massively high IQ Elon Musk. No question about that. Yeah, it’s, it, isn’t it amazing to watch? And I think the great thing is too, that you can watch some of these people.
You don’t have to agree with everything that they do or say, but their ability to think outside of the square and to come up with something that really is next level. And so that’s what I wanted to ask you about is that how much of. What you’re doing these days is a balance between coming here. We’ll do it for you versus inspiring people to be able to do it themselves.
And how do you actually inspire people to, to think outside of the square? If they’re not in that part of their brain, most of the time. Great question. And probably 80, 20, 80 percent packaged and 20% advice. I can’t say inspire because I’m not a consultant. All of my Clients say that I’m an insult and a marketing insult and I love that.
That’s funny, because if you are either gifted or cursed with sarcasm then what happens when you are [00:45:00] holding an event or group webinars or zoom calls and this, that and the other You can’t help yourself but be sarcastic and I often cop it back as a contest so that, and in fact, I had one event on the Gold Coast about a year ago, and we had, 60 or 70 clients in the room, and at the end of the two day conference, I said does anybody want to make comments?
And one guy put his hand up and said, JD, I’ve been here for two days. Yeah, I want to make a comment. I said, what is it? He said, not once have you insulted me. I said, and he goes I want to make a complaint. You’ve insulted everyone else. And I said hang around for another 10 minutes. So it’s all a joke, but we get on pretty well.
It’s the Aussie sense of humor, of course. I have to say that Yeah, probably 80, 20, 80 percent businesses just want it done for them. And so we do for example, that Facebook contest formula. You can run off and do that tomorrow yourself right now. But we had a client last week who just came on board and he runs a landscaping business and he gave away a 2, 000.
value landscape makeover, and he spent 290 over three days and got one entry.[00:46:00]
And when he rang me to say, JD, that didn’t exactly work. I looked at his ad, it was just awful. And I explained to him that we had another company come on board about a week earlier who has medical equipment. people. So they’re walking frames. And we gave away a wheelie walker, which was worth 500, which is a walking frame for older people.
And we put it on Facebook and because of the, yeah, I guess just, the little tricks that we play, he got 822 leads in one week. And he spent, Not much more than what this guy spent. So therefore, 822 leads versus one. I think it might be best if you’ve got a sore tooth to go to a dentist, and the inspiration thing I have to say to you is that because of my sarcasm, I don’t know how inspirational I am, but with the advisory staff, normally that’s the business that has someone in their business that can execute. The advice is not much good. If I give it to the butcher and baker who’s just there with his husband or, sorry, with her husband, or, it might be if it’s a husband, he’s there with his wife.
They want the done for you. They haven’t got time to be inspired. Yeah. And it’s an interesting point. And I think also [00:47:00] hopefully the podcasts and other things are good ways of inspiring people to do those things. I wanted to ask you one final question on that subject before we have to wrap things up.
But I. Get there and you’ve got someone who’s got 822 leads. How does someone on that size cope with 822 leads? Because most people, that’s dream stuff that they’re going if we actually had, 20 legitimate leads, so we could ring, four or five a day, we’d actually be quite happy with that.
When you suddenly. Get those kinds of numbers. How do you actually not do yourself a disservice and actually manage that? Do you need the AIs to actually be part of the package to, to be able to implement? What do you do? Mate, the reason I’m smiling and giggling at this end, because I only just got off the phone with him before we got on to do this.
And he said to me, JD, had you not implemented what we did a week ago, then he didn’t know what he was going to do because he said to me when this came in the first week and he used a couple of colorful words to say what the so and so am I going to do? And I said because he’s [00:48:00] only got five people working for him but he has a warehouse of all of this equipment, wheelchairs and scooters and walking frames and all that sort of stuff.
Then we just got the robot. So therefore the robot just rings all of the people to say, look and most of these people are in their seventies and eighties. And the robot rings and says, look, you didn’t win, but we’ve got this special deal for you. You obviously do. have some sort of interest in this Walker.
But it’s not just with the Walker. We’ve got other things. They’ve got CPAP, machines, they’ve got all sorts of things for older people. And what we’re happy to do is that we’ll give you the equivalent, if you like, a second prize. And that is a hundred dollar voucher that you can put towards any of these other things.
And the interesting thing is that the robot, because he had run a few himself beforehand, by the way, and then he realized he’d never get through 800. The robot is beating his conversion. So I said to him I said, mate, that shows you how bad you are as a salesperson. A and it’s the truth, isn’t it?
Because so many people get into business because they’re good at what they do, or they’re passionate about the product or service that they’re selling, but they’re not necessarily [00:49:00] great at the sales process. And I’ll be the first to put up my hand and say, the selling part is not my forte.
Yeah. And I know that the efficiency is one thing too, isn’t it? Because. The AI is going to be quite efficient in how it handles things and what it does. It’s not going to get sidetracked. It’s not going to turn a, what should be a five minute call into a one hour call, which can happen. I’ve, I’ve had those, I remember walking, I think the classic was because my business, name that most people will know is come together and which is a great name.
And it’s also got, it’s linked back when I originally thought of the name, it had its roots immediately to the Beatles song come together. And that often triggers people. And I had this conversation with someone. And he said, Oh, the Beatles come together. And he started singing to me and we just went off on this tangent.
And after an hour, I’m just going, what the hell have this guy’s vocal been doing? Where did I go? It just went wrong. The robot would never have stood for that one. We’ve called our robots AI journey. So we have a business called AI engage journey. com [00:50:00] and essentially we tell everyone, aside from the wizardry of the technology, she doesn’t get sick.
She doesn’t take days off. She doesn’t have any relatives that pass away and she doesn’t get in any moods. Imagine if you had an employee like that. Goodness, man, yeah, it’s a way to go, a way to go. So we’ve got to, we’ve got to wrap things up. So I’m going to do something. Look, I’m going to ask one question then I’m going to get a, get, ask you one other question.
Normally I just finish with this question. And the question is what’s the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish they knew in advance they were going to have? What’s the aha moment, is that what you said? Yeah, that’s an easy one to answer. And, it’s just how.
How obvious this stuff should be to them because really, whilst I thank you very much for your kind compliments, and we’ve only known each other for a short time, so it was lovely of you to say that, and I’ve got a reasonable track record, not everything I touch turns to gold, but there’s a reasonable track record there.
The aha moment that they get is how [00:51:00] simple The concept is and yes, is there some inherent DNA of creativity? Of course there is. But when I give the answer and I, you were at the event last week and I gave this very simple example, a little country town we lived in in country, New South Wales in the Hunter Valley.
It was just a little main street and there was a hairdresser there that had been there forever. And my wife would go there to get her hair done. And the hairdresser’s name was Kimberly. And she said to go. Would John have any of that wow stuff because I’m in trouble and my wife said to her, what are you talking about?
She said, I’ve been the only hairdresser in town for a thousand years and all of a sudden there’s a lady that’s opened across the road, directly across the road from me and she’s stolen all of the men because men don’t care where they get their hair cut. And she has 10 haircuts for men. And she said, I charge 55 for a men’s haircut.
So either I’ve got to drop to 9 or I’ve got to do some heavy advertising on Facebook. And can John help me out? Is there any wow factor idea that he has? Because I’ve lost all the men that just walk across the road for 10. They’re going to get the haircut there. So Gail comes home and of course this was a [00:52:00] freebie.
And I went, Oh, thanks Gail. Another freebie, and but I knew Kimberly, so I thought I’d do it. And two days later I came back to her and I said, look, here’s the answer to it. And what we did is put a sandwich board outside her hairdressing shop. And the sandwich board said, we fixed 10 haircuts. I love it.
Yeah. And I know the story of the event that you’re at last week. And so therefore Kimberly’s aha moment was, Oh my God, it was that simple. But of course it’s not that simple for people who are not in the marketing or advertising or the ideas game. And so I always say, when you are a dentist and you go to university and you come out with a dentist certificate, did they ever teach you how to get clients?
Answer is no. Yeah. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a builder, or a doctor, or a dentist, or a butcher, or a baker, they all go and get the certificates from, college or university, but no one ever teaches them how to get customers. And therefore, that’s where we fill that gap. They are very good technicians.
They’re just not marketers. I love it. Now to wrap things up, two things. One is that you’ve got to show us the book. I know you’ve shown me the book. [00:53:00] We’ve got to, we’ve got to see the book. Now, unfortunately for people who are just listening in and missed this, and I encourage you to go back and watch the video on YouTube if you haven’t.
Take a look at this book. John, tell us about the book. Yes, it’s it’s, we are called the Institute of Wow, but because I do things like this gigantic tabloid sized book, which is leather bound with gold tip edges and all sorts of things, most of my clients and most of my mates don’t call it the Institute of Wow, they call it the Institute of Wank.
So therefore I’ll take that, I’ll take that as a compliment. This book, if you’re not watching on video, but you’re listening, it’s the size of the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, so it’s the size of a tabloid newspaper, and it’s called The Wow Manifesto. And I released this a few years back because I thought, okay if we’re going to write a book, and everyone who, has some degree of knowledge is expected to write a book on whatever their knowledge is, in this it’s just case study after case study.
So this is really A gigantic swipe file, okay of just direct response ideas that have worked. Everything from the puppy dog sale, through to how to win a million dollars if you buy this product. And [00:54:00] yeah, there’s basically, look, if you do get this, and I’ll show you how to get it in a moment because that’s our evil plan, of course Anthony.
But yeah, if you do get it, it’ll be a swipe file from heaven. You’ll be able to go through this book and just swipe ideas and use them for your business. And the reason I’m happy to give Do that is because, as Anthony, I live to give. Absolutely. Absolutely. And and we’re going to include all the details on how to get in contact with JD and to be able to get ahold of the of the book as well.
Can I just say to you, Anthony, the way that they can do this, and this is my evil plan. And and this is absolutely wrapping up all the stuff that we’ve just discussed. Remember I told you in the early part of the interview that I have this robot phoning the right people, not people, but the right people and inviting them to have an hour.
Zoom webinar with me. Absolutely. I’m gonna do that and whoever has the zoom webinar with me, you’ll be on with half a dozen other business owners. So it’s a group call, but whoever that has that with me gets the book. Okay. Digital version of the book. Do you mind if I just give you the URL.
Absolutely good. It’s . This is sounded [00:55:00] really corny. This is terribly, I can’t believe I came up with this domain name, but anyway, get more jd.com . Now, if that’s, if that’s not ridiculous, I dunno, is, but anyway, get my name is John Dey, but I get called jd, so get more jd.com. If you go to that page, then you will be able to just simply register to have an hour with me the following week.
So we don’t mess around. It’ll be the following week and it’ll be you and half a dozen other business owners. And I will give you the book. Fantastic. I love it. I love it. So the last thing that I’ve got to do is in the spirit of it because you alluded to it before when you’re at the conference and you did it last week.
So beautifully, I’m going to get you to wrap up what the podcast has been, what your experience has been on the podcast. This is like Johnny Carson just telling a guest to wrap up the Tonight Show. That’s unusual. Absolutely. Why not? Yeah, full marks to you. That’s fantastic. You’re out thinking outside the square and that’s my sort of person.
Okay. Look, I’d like to say Anthony, I, to wrap everything up and, you’ve run this [00:56:00] webinar, sorry, you run this podcast. Now for how long, mate, would this be 12 months you’ve been doing podcasts or? This podcast is now into its second year. After two years, we’ve done it. You know what?
I have been a guest on podcasts to the tune of probably between five and 10 a week for the last six months. And so I’ve been a guest on a lot of podcasts, so I can compare you against, a lot of them, and some of them have claimed to be in the top five podcasts. Podcast audiences with matchmaker FM and with pod match and all these things.
But I’ve gotta say to you all of all the podcasters that I’ve I’ve been a guest of, I’d like to say this was the very best run podcast I have ever been on. You’d like to say it, I’d like to say that, but I can’t. , I said See your line then should have been Oh, thank you, jd. I no.
Don’t thank me. I’d like to say it was the best, but I can’t. It’s pretty ordinary, to be honest with you. Oh, I love it. I love it. But it reminds me, and I’m going to finish up with this. When I was when I was at university, I went to university out at out at Bathurst, at Charles Sturt [00:57:00] University, and a couple of years before me had finished a very well known a very well known radio personality, Andrew Denton.
Yep. And Andrew wasn’t big on coming back. He made it big on triple M in those days and everything. And somehow they got him to come back and they, we got him on the local community station said, would you record a promo for us? And his promo was very simple. He said, when I’m in Bathurst, I choose to listen to two MCE.
However, fortunately, I’m only in Bathurst once every 10 years, and it was very spontaneous and very well delivered. So I love a bit of sarcasm. So fantastic. JD, thank you so much for being an incredibly entertaining guests on the program. And I know that everyone’s got so many things out of this, which I’ve loved.
So as well, so much for being part of it. My absolute pleasure. Pleasure. And all sarcasm aside, it’s been very enjoyable. You’ve been a great host. Thanks, man. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t [00:58:00] forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bytes is proudly brought to you by Podcasts Done For You, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance to the world.
Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes. We look forward to your company next time on BizBytes.

Revolutionise your service delivery, data driven transformation. Join us as Jason MacLean from Freepoint Technology shares unique insights on measuring and improving manufacturing performance. Now I know what you’re saying. You’re in professional services. You’re a management consultant. There is so much we can learn from what manufacturing does.

They’ve got real time data that enhances productivity. That’s something we can all learn from. You’re going to be able to reduce downtimes and foster continuous improvement in your business. We’ll talk everything from AI to change management. It’s an episode you don’t want to miss. Let’s get into Biz Bites.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Biz Bites. And my guest today is someone we met online, but we actually got to meet in person, which is a rarity considering he’s way on the other side of the world. Jason is. All about measuring performance, improving excellence as a result of that in a very interesting way.

I’m gonna let him introduce himself. Jason. Welcome to the program. Thank you. Yeah, Jason MacLean. I’m director of enterprise accounts and sales here at three point technologies in London, Ontario, Canada. Pleased to meet you and see you again. Yes, that’s the great little story that we had where we actually had an opportunity.

We engage with each other and unbeknownst to me. You were traveling to to Sydney and we actually got a chance to meet in person, share, share a drink or two, and and discuss a whole lot of different things that we’re going to touch on some of those as we go through it go through the episode today.

Just tell me, I guess that’s the first thing is the business itself is not just located there. You obviously were in Sydney amongst other places in Australia for Yeah. What we do is primarily in the manufacturing sectors. We have software and hardware that we bring into the manufacturing environment where we can attach sensors and different types of software solutions to measure performance.

A lot of my customer base is in Australia and New Zealand, so I try to make it down at least once a year. To, visit all the customers. I don’t always get to see all of them, but I try. Yeah, so we connect all these sensors and limit switches and software to a manufacturer’s environment and we can pick up downtime, count measure performance and benchmarking.

We have scheduling solutions for production scheduling where, you can optimize your output. Standardised work instructions, the list goes on, but that’s primarily what we do. We come in and give that manufacturer the visibility from the shop floor perspective that they may not have had.

Before I think what’s interesting about this space is that particularly I know a lot of my audience are in the professional services or consulting type spaces, but ultimately, there’s a lot of similarities here because it’s still people driven, even though there’s a fair amount of equipment and automation that might be involved in the process, there’s still people that are driving the quality of the workmanship that’s happening along the way, let alone the end quality of the product itself.

Yeah, I felt like our solution gives you that visibility from, say, production supervisor or management standpoint to see that action and that activity on the shop floor. If anything, it’ll boost productivity and quality because the team members on the shop floor. typically want to do a good job and they want to be rewarded for that.

This gives us a visibility of that activity, right? Yeah, I find it boosts that morale, it boosts the quality output of whatever product that manufacturer is making, and and that OEE, if you want to call it that, right? I think it’s interesting too, because most people would assume that once you put Whatever equipment you need in place, that efficiency just happens.

That’s not necessarily the case, right? No, typically, what I see with my customers anyway is, if you deploy our solution on the shop floor and you show the visibility give that visibility, whether that’s on big screen TVs hanging up on the shop floor or maybe it’s operator monitors that they can view their own activity.

You typically see about a 15 percent increase in productivity across the entire shop. And that’s not with, that’s without doing anything. That’s just showing what, because people are going to see that. They’re going to see their own metrics and their own KPIs and try to improve. That’s just human nature, right?

Whether it’s competitive from shift to shift, or it’s just them challenging themselves. But yeah, when you start really diving into, say, the reports and all the metrics that we do capture, and then form plans, whether it’s continuous improvement projects, to make processes or environments better that’s when you see The real ROI, right?

Yeah, I think that’s, it’s interesting as well. I just want to touch on the initial reaction that you have from people because they’re effectively being monitored. And so the one part is to go as you described it as being competitive and going, Oh, I’ve got, and that willingness to want to improve, but is there the other side where people are going?

Hang on big brothers watching me a little bit too closely. We hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Bites podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business, where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world? Come talk to us at Podcasts Done For You.

That’s what we’re all about. We even offer a service where I’ll anchor the program for you. So all you have to do is show up for a conversation. But don’t worry about that. We will. Do everything to design a program that suits you. From the strategy right through to publishing and of course, helping you share it.

So come talk to us, podcast done for you. com. au details in the show notes below. Now back to biz bites, but is there the other side where people are going? Hang on, Big Brother’s watching me a little bit too closely. Oh yeah, you get that. It’s all in the approach. I try to be as hands on with the deployment as I can.

There are some customers that they want to do all that onboarding and set up themselves. And deployment is in their control. And that’s fine, but you do have that, that mentality that Big Brother’s watching every move that I make now, or You also have that, depending on how you deploy solutions is You know, you’re giving the team member a voice and the ability to tell their side of the story.

So if there was quality defects, if there was downtime, I’m giving you a solution where you can enter in that information now. Or it’s captured in real time and you aren’t going to have That big brother coming down from the head office to, to question you, the story is already told, right? It’s all in the approach, I believe.

If you just deploy a solution on the shop floor and don’t get that team member feedback and interaction, then I think that big brother mentality is what’s going to stick, right? Yeah, that’s, it is an important thing, isn’t it? I think for any business and automation is becoming more and more a part of, of businesses all the time now, and it is about how you manage that human interaction that is going to become more and more critical in that process of not only deploying it, but overseeing it.

Yeah, and the more lean customer, like I know a lot of companies are trying to run as lean as possible, especially post covid. I think having a solution in place like ours it eliminates that need to have You know, supervisors walking the shop floor as much as they used to pick up, say, Excel sheets, or team members writing down things on paper, and it has to get entered in later on.

It’s a huge time savings to have a solution like ours on the shop floor with companies running as lean as they do. Or at least as lean as they try to run, right? Yeah. I think that’s an interesting point too, isn’t it? That, that how lean are they trying to run? Because that’s one of the things that people are seeing is okay.

Invest in the technology, eliminate the people. Therefore, greater greater profit, but it’s not necessarily that way, is it? And some of it is also changing the changing. There might be some jobs that are lost, but there are new jobs that are being created as a result as well, aren’t there? Yes, that’s right.

Like I’ll use my perspective and my experience with our solution specifically. Like I was with Toyota Motor Manufacturing for 21 years and then I went to a Tier 2 automotive supplier as a maintenance manager and I actually brought this solution that I’m promoting to, every day into a environment where there was nothing.

And I found there was a little bit of that big brother mentality at first. I changed my approach and I was giving the team members the ability to, say, call for help in a process. They no longer had to leave the process to find somebody, like maintenance or a supervisor. They could tell their side of the story.

I as a maintenance manager was able to showcase through all the reports that I was generating with our solutions that I was understaffed. So I was inefficient because I didn’t have enough maintenance team members. That gave me some of the metrics that I needed to go to the front office and say, Hey, we need to hire somebody.

And this is the reason why. Whatever those reasons were at the time. So I got two new maintenance team members out of that. One electrician, one millwright. You can, it depends on how you want to use and analyze the data, right? You can. Promoted that you need more people, or you could use it as a time savings and eliminate some of those old outdated, antiquated tasks.

Yeah, I think it is an important perspective that people understand that it is perspective, right? That it is about how you want to drive into it, because a lot of it is fear based. That we’re bringing in the machines are going to take over, we don’t have any work, what are we going to do? And it’s actually not really that’s not a fair perspective on how things work.

Going. And as you say, there are opportunities then where if you improve efficiencies in one area, it may create new positions in order to support that drive, not only for greater efficiencies, but for increased productivity. Absolutely. 100%. 100%. And there’s a lot of fluff out there, like whether it’s marketing or I see a lot of posts on LinkedIn where they’re talking about Industry 5.

0 now, and I don’t even know what that is, right? The, Industry 4. 0, I know it gets tossed out there a lot I don’t think the majority of manufacturers out there are at Industry 2 or 3. 0, A lot of fluff. There’s a lot of over exaggeration with regard to AIs taking over everything and Yeah, AI has some pretty cool stuff, but at the end of the day, it’s just cool stuff.

It’s cool tech. It’s not a solution. It’s not a permanent solution. You need to have those team members, managers, supervisors, leads on the shop floor driving these changes, right? Yeah, absolutely. You still need that human element in there. And so talk to me about that. The human element itself, once you come in there and how much of what you’re doing is improving the balance between what the machines are doing, what the human element is doing, how does that, how do you find that blend?

Because some of it is, some of it I imagine is improving what the machines can do as well as what the human element can do. From a Consultative base, like I’ve been in manufacturing, say, all my career. Some of these pain points that some of the manufacturing leaders are trying to solve, I’ve been through.

I can put myself in their shoes. And we can deploy our solutions tailored to those pain points. Which is great. But, yeah, driving change on the shop floor. You need to have a, what’s your cause, what’s your purpose, what’s your reason for doing this? Is it just to check a box, or are you trying to improve a process for X, Y, Z reasons?

Benchmarking is a big one. Do you know your throughput, your OEE, where you’re supposed to be at versus where you are in real time. You’d be surprised how many manufacturing sites don’t know their OEE don’t know their throughput, what it’s expected to be. They know what it costs for, say, downtime.

But they don’t know their throughput. They don’t know their OEE. And if they do, it’s written in a binder somewhere and nobody knows where it is. Running into that a fair bit. Having those questions in mind or those tasks in mind. Okay, we’re going to benchmark. We’re going to try to improve this process by identifying bottlenecks, identifying, is there excessive steps in a process that don’t need to be there?

Or maybe you need to rebalance your entire line, right? Is the job that you’re doing underburdened, and the job that the person beside you is doing is overburdened, and that’s why you overcycle on that process all the time creating a bottleneck. If you don’t have tools to visualize all that, then you’ll never know.

So we try to give that ability and that visual, visual shop floor perspective where you can see all the bottlenecks right away in real time. I think most people can relate to that. I think particularly any business owners that are listening right now, is no matter what size your business is, I think you, everyone would be nodding their heads and going, I realize I’m probably a bottleneck at some point in my business.

But it’s actually understanding how. How vast that bottleneck might be and how, how easy it may be to unblock it and to go around that. And I think that’s that is such an important aspect for any business to fully understand. Yeah, and it could be something simple as you’ve been monitoring your process for a month or two.

And you’re looking at before and after data. And, hey, at the end of the day, you make a plan to save. Whether it’s a couple seconds, in some cases, or a few minutes of whatever task that team member is doing or that machine is doing. It could be as simple as an equipment, move or change.

It could be in some cases we’ve had some locations that re engineered the entire process just because it’s non profitable, but they always thought it was a big money maker. Once you start visualizing it and showing it, reporting out on these benchmarks, you’re able to make some critical changes and some, I’m not going to say smarter decisions, but some quicker decisions on specific processes, right?

I think one of the interesting things about processes for any business is there’s history, and often, The reason you started doing something was a valid reason, and it might be because of, where things were placed or the opportunities, and then everything has been built around that, and you haven’t gone back and questioned why that, or whether that decision that was made in the first place is now still relevant and could be changed, and I bet that’s something that you see all the time in business.

Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s that this is the way we’ve always done it kind of attitude where You know, in some cases it fits, but in a lot of cases it doesn’t anymore. The whole point of continuous improvement is it’s continuous, right? Yeah, it’s a great idea, let’s implement it, and then let’s build on that, right?

It’s, once is never enough. Let’s continue, it’s continuous improvements. Let’s continue to build on whatever that good idea was and optimize that process. And then go back to it every year, right? Go back to the changes that we’ve made. Reevaluate, before and afters and put a plan together to make it even better or more efficient.

I find, yeah, a lot of customers out there, including past businesses that I’ve been in. It’s that this is the way we’ve always done it. We’re comfortable this way. So that’s the way we’re going to stick with. It’s not always the best case. No, and it’s funny because when we met, you told me a story that stuck with me.

About you walking into a particular manufacturing place and just questioning the placement of equipment. And they were looking to replicate that placement of equipment in a new facility without questioning why it was there in the first place. I don’t know if you remember that example, but I do.

Yeah. Talk everyone through it. Yeah, it was a industrial bakery and I was just getting a tour of the facility, not a customer of mine, but potential. And we walked through, and they were showing me different processes, and I just happened to glance at the end of the line where all the material comes off, and it was, being picked up by a forklift and driven about five minutes down to the warehouse where it gets wrapped up in shrink wrap, the skid does, and then brought all the way back to that process to get parked in a freezer beside that process.

So it’s just a simple, why don’t you move that Wrapping device right to the end of the line and eliminate all that travel time. And I guess, being that was the way they’d always done it, they were just nose blind to it. They didn’t see it right away as a waste, but it was about, I don’t know, what did they say?

I say, that idea, they did implement it. They did move the equipment saved them about, 20 minutes every hour of just travel time back and forth to the forklift. Just lost time, right? A double handling of material and that was a bottleneck because the product would stack up and stack up while the forklift operator was traveling around with this material.

And that was just something that I noticed being a fresh set of eyes on site, right? Now using solutions that will visualize all of your data and all of your machines and processes would have easily identified that the end of that line is a bottleneck, but they already knew that. They just didn’t know that there was such an easy fix, right?

I think that’s the key, isn’t it? So there are solutions. Sometimes you get so close to something in your business that you can’t, you might be able to see, as you said, the bottleneck, but having to see the solution, sometimes the obvious is really there and you just can’t see it because you’re so close to it.

And it was free for them, aside from hooking up some hydro, right? It was a free, they already had the equipment they just had to get their electrician to hook up a new outlet to plug that equipment in, and there, they saved 20 minutes per hour, just in travel time. It was a huge savings for them, and it eliminated that bottleneck so much that they did replicate that in that second facility, and on that second line that they were installing.

A little pat on the back to me, I feel good about it, it’s always nice to have a different perspective I don’t think any ideas are bad ideas, but I do think that this is the way that we’ve always done it, and this is how it’s going to stay, isn’t It isn’t always the best course of action.

It is a big thing to do to look at something and say, and businesses that have been around for a number of years, sometimes decades and to walk in and say what if we were starting today? How would we do it? What would we do that’s different and completely go with a blank canvas? And that is a difficult thing to do for a lot of businesses.

But this is the whole idea, isn’t it, really, that you, when you start measuring efficiencies and things, you can start to see that, hang on, maybe there is another way to do this. It could be a group effort. Nobody I’d be lying to you if I said change management in any course is easy. And never, it’s never easy, right?

It’s bad. You can’t do it by yourself, especially in a manufacturing environment. You can’t have one person trying to drive change across the entire organization. But having tools in place specific to people in the roles and it starts from the top down, not the bottom up driving some of this change and continuous improvement is definitely key for success.

And make it a group effort, not an individual effort. You’ll find that it’ll be a lot easier to follow some of these things through versus, uh, one person trying to lead the whole herd, right? Yeah, and I think you make it a really important point because Often businesses come in and they will bring some tech or something into the business and they’ll, champion that piece of tech.

But what they’ve forgotten about is the change management process because it impacts people around them. So you do need a specific change management team depending on the size of your business to help people come to grips with what is being done and what the implications are for it.

And What the positive outcomes could be. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s be honest. Once you start measuring things that you haven’t measured in the past it might look really bad. You know what I mean? It might be worse than you thought it was. And I’ve seen that out there too, where somebody started measuring something and they’re like, What’s going on here?

This is twice as bad as I thought I was doing. But it’s true, and it’s real. So let’s put a plan together and get you to the next step where you can go to your betters or your counterparts and go, here’s where we are. We didn’t know where we were. Here’s where we are, and it’s bad. But now we have a plan forward to get to that next step, all right?

And the next time that you have to present out your findings or some of those changes that you’ve made, maybe you were here and now you’re up here, right? Yeah, it’s That’s what I see out there anyway, for sure. Let me come back to that in a minute, but I just wanted to ask you about, when you’re starting to drive efficiencies in people, there is a danger as well that you, while machines are designed to operate at near optimum capacity consistently humans are not.

As much as we would like to. Walk into the office at nine o’clock on a, on any given day and say we’re going a hundred percent until five o’clock. It’s just, that’s just not the reality. People don’t perform at their optimum peak level every day. So how do you manage that?

Because there has to be some, there are always outside circumstances. There are always reasons why someone may not be able to perform at a particular, at the highest level on a day to day basis. So how do you, Manage that shift in a business on a day to day basis. From a manufacturing perspective, I say you have to build in some of that and do a process cycle time and there’s tag time.

You got to give a team member the ability to stop what they’re doing. Get a drink of water or stretch or what have you in between whatever tasks they’re doing. But you can never, yeah, you’re right, you can’t expect 100 percent out of everybody all the time. I don’t find that a lot of manufacturers out there are setting targets at 100%.

Like I know from my Toyota days, it was 95%, throughput throughout the shop. And a lot of those days we do that, nothing was ever perfect, like there was lunchtime builds, there was break builds, there was making up for downtime, there was making up for, if a team member went home sick and somebody else had to cover them and things like that.

I think it’s just having plans in place that, with the expectation that, Nobody’s ever going to operate at 100%. Now a team member operating at 50%. That’s a different discussion, like whether that’s recertifications, retraining, or maybe they just don’t want to be there anymore. I don’t know, but you’ll find that out there as well. I was going to say you must it must uncover a fair bit of What happens in every business, right? Where there are people that are not performing at their optimal level. And when you’ve got the data to understand that is happening consistently, you’ve got really a couple of choices, don’t you?

Understand why it’s happening and whether that can change in the current environment or realize that it’s the wrong person in the wrong job. With the data that you get and that you collect, if you’re analyzing it and scrutinizing it and doing it properly Yeah, you’ll be able to identify that there’s either an abnormality in the process or inconsistencies between maybe two or three people that do that same job.

And then it might be a retraining exercise that you have to do. It might be Like an overburden is, you could be, you go down to the process and see what that issue is, and maybe, I’m shorter in stature, so maybe I have trouble reaching something that somebody six foot doesn’t. So it takes me longer.

So yeah, it’s all what you do with that data. As I say, most team members aren’t trying to do a bad job, most want to do a real good job. And, You get a little pat on the back at the end of the day, week, month, whatever it might be, but everybody’s there to do their job and go home safe and sound.

It’s not always a team member’s fault. It could be the process and how it’s set up as well. But with that data that you get and that you capture and analyze and scrutinize, Go to the process and see. Watch. The team members, they do that job day in, day out. They’re going to know it better than any supervisor or engineer or manager.

They’re going to tell you or show you exactly what the problem is, right? Yeah, take that data that you’re capturing, go to the shop floor and see what the problem is for yourself. And I gather you’ve collected a lot of very interesting data. I don’t know whether that data is necessarily pulled across all all the places that you deal with, or you just look at that individually.

But tell me about some of the interesting finds that you’ve had, because there are efficiencies that can be quite easy to overcome if you’re aware of them. If you’re aware of what they are, that can happen in any business, right? I’ll give you one example that just comes to mind is I had one of my customers call me up one day and he’s I’ve had this solution hooked up to my CNC machines for two years.

And he says, it doesn’t make sense to me. It shows that I’m a hundred percent uptime every day and I can’t get it. my product out to my customers, on time, like any day of the week, and he’s I don’t understand what’s going on. So I said, all right, we’ll go to the shop floor and, ensure that the machines are actually on and running.

He says your solution is telling us that it is, right? I’m like, okay, great. Why don’t I come down to your site and take a look and see what I see versus see what he’s yep, come on site. So I made a day trip of it. Went on site to that customer’s location. They had 21 CNC machines on the shop floor and what the operators had been doing, not all of them, but some of them had been doing, is they caught wind that The way that customer was monitoring and tracking their productivity was if the CNC machine was on.

Not if the CNC machine was cutting chips, making chips, cutting the part, right? The team members would dial down the spindles, so they wouldn’t have to have, say, certain amount of change overs per day, leave it for the night shift guys, stuff like that. That’s what I saw right away is, yeah, it shows that you’re up because you’re monitoring your powers on, but you’re not monitoring your spindle load.

Showing that you’re actually being productive on that machine. So once they started tracking that, then you get into the real truth of, okay, are we really at 100 percent efficiency here? No, you’re at about 63. That’s why you’re not getting parts out. They have since changed their logics and their controllers that The operators can’t dial down the machines when it’s running these programs, unless they get supervisor passwords or buy offs or whatever it might be.

So their throughput has improved and they are able to get product out the door now. But it, yeah, their efficiency was never really at a hundred percent. They just thought it was. Yeah, I can imagine. And it’s, and I suppose it happens in any business and sometimes it’s not really meant with malicious intent.

It’s just, we can ease things up here. We don’t have to stress out and they’re not thinking about the bigger picture because there’s the element of people being employed and yes, they’ve got some some pride in their work. But it’s limited to those who are sitting at the top and are going this is about making money.

And this is about being able to pay for all of those team members that you’ve got sitting there and everything else that you want to be able to do. So it’s finding that balance, isn’t it? Between that strategic need and what is happening at a human level. On the floor. Yeah, 100%, 100%.

But yeah, at the end of the day, you gotta go and see. So you take your data that you capture, whatever that might be, whatever’s important to that specific manufacturer or individual, and then go and see for yourself You’re not going to solve any problems by sitting behind the computer, right? You need to be out there on the shop floor with that data in hand, analyzing these, whatever those metrics were that you captured, and then what’s next, right?

Continuous improvement. What are you going to do with all that information that you’ve got? Is it because team members are dialing down the spindles, right? Slowing it down so they don’t have massive changeovers. Is it because you’re expecting too much out of somebody? Is it the process is imbalanced but it’s coming up with that countermeasure or that plan for change and then seeing that through, right?

Yeah. And I imagine there’s lots of. Other interesting bits of data that you collect along the way. And in fact, I seem to recall that you mentioned to me there was one where you collected about the amount of toilet breaks that people were taking and how long that was taking up in a business and how that can drive inefficiency.

And that can happen anywhere, right? That sort of thing. That sort of thing. So you’re collecting the data about when people are taking breaks and for how long and how often that’s can surprise a lot of businesses. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, like I know that I’ll speak to me as a maintenance manager.

I’d always often oversee production as well if I was covering for holidays or whatever from production managers. I would see team members either late to line late back to a process from lunch, excessive bathroom breaks, and, one or two a day, okay, great, that’s you’re right but, if you’re gone for a half hour at a time, three or four times a day, come on, that adds up if you’re hourly, right?

And I often found that, I’ll speak to my perspective, when I deployed this solution as a maintenance manager, I found that one of the processes, main reasons for never making target or having terrible OEE was not down time, which everybody blamed it on, it was team members being late.

Returning back from lunch on afternoon shift. Equates to about 430, 000 in lost product because the line wasn’t running at all, or that machine wasn’t running at all. Not because it was broken down or missing parts or a team member was working too slow. It was idle time, right? Idle time was a silent killer.

That’s what we, I noticed and identified on that. for that. Within probably four months of just watching, right? Yeah it’s amazing, isn’t it? Because often business owners will give some liberties to their staff. And it’s not necessarily that those stuff again are deliberately trying to take advantage, but you give a little bit and that little bit extends and it continues and continues.

And suddenly, it adds up if you’ve got a few people that are consistently taking 10 minutes longer for lunch than you would otherwise have allowed. That accumulates very quickly and the bottom line can be huge. And again, that applies to any business. It doesn’t, whether it’s manufacturing or whether you’re producing a product or a different product or service, that is a consistent thing.

You lose that time multiplied by the amount of team members multiplied by the flow on effect, even from some team members being late and delaying the others. And then take that over a week and take that over a month and over a year and it can be a significant amount of drop in efficiency. Oh, absolutely.

What’s a team member rate? Hourly and then if they were gone an extra 20 minutes a day times, I don’t know how many working days you guys have in Australia, but 268 working days here in Canada. So how many hours over those course of those days? What’s that cost to you in wages where the team member just wasn’t there?

And then you start factoring in, okay, all of those hours of non runtime or ridal time at the machine that operator is supposed to be managing and running. What’s that cost to the business? It’s huge. It’s a huge input, impact on non business for sure. And you times that by however many processes or team members you’ve got, it can be catastrophic, right?

And I think this is the hard part as we come full circle a little bit in terms of you’ve got this, on one hand, you’ve got this obvious thing of that there’s inefficiencies here that’s costing the business. On the other hand, you’ve got this idea that, hang on, Big brothers watching me and telling me I’m taking 10 minutes too long for lunch or taking too many toilet breaks during the day.

It’s hard to bring those two back together. Isn’t it? I imagine that, that it causes some conflict in trying to, a be able to implement that Idea of watching those kinds of things in the first place and be what those what the outcomes of those things are. I don’t think anybody really deploys a solution on the shop floor aiming to improve productivity.

With the intent that they’re going to monitor you know how often their team members are going for break or late back to the line or you know when they swipe in or swipe out. I think that Information just presents itself over time, like all signs point to Joe who’s late every day after lunch the story told itself, it doesn’t necessarily, you don’t necessarily need to go looking for it visualizing the shop floor or a process it will identify it.

Bye. If the line is late to start or the machine is late to start or if it’s lost some productivity due to a team member being late where they can police themselves, so to speak, or big brother themselves and make those appropriate changes oh, if I keep doing this, people are going to notice, right?

But it becomes pretty self evident. Through the data that you collect, where the problems are, and whether that’s bottlenecks or whether that’s team members late back to the line you don’t necessarily have to chase after it or take that big brother approach. It’s there for everybody to see.

You don’t have to showcase it to everybody it could be strictly upper management to view that or supervisors, but yeah, it’s gonna, it’s gonna air itself and show itself. You don’t have to look for it. Just wanted to come back to something that you talked about a little bit earlier on. And this whole idea of moving into, you talked about whether it’s a 5.

0 version of things. Talk me through the different stages because, I think often these terms get thrown around, right? And you go, okay this is the base model. And 2. 0 became this idea, very early on that we’re just introducing some tech or some initial efficiencies. But have those lines been broken?

Those lines are very clear now at what’s 2. 0, what’s 3. 0, what’s 4. 0, and indeed what 5. 0 is going to be. At this point in time, there’s, like I said, there’s so much made up stuff out there and fluff out there and marketing, just, let’s call it Industry 5. 0 today and yesterday it was something completely different.

I try not to, fall victim to that. Um, I don’t know, I find a lot of manufacturers out there are just trying to do their best, trying to stay competitive whether that’s through cost and or profits or throughput or maybe they’re moving sites to different locations, whatever it might be, maybe it’s continuous improvement initiatives, so on and so forth. And yeah, solutions, tech is part of it. Industry 4. 0 from my perspective is getting your major ERPs in place, getting your MRPs in place, which is, managing assets or inventory. Getting your MES systems, manufacturing execution systems in place, which is some of that visual management and reporting and KPI collection type info.

But there’s, CMMS and the maintenance management systems, call it what you want. It all falls under that Industry 4. 0 umbrella. And a lot of businesses, one, don’t have, like a lot of these solutions are, like an ERP system is pretty expensive. And it’s a big job for someone to take on, you need somebody full time dedicated to it.

A lot of companies running lean out there don’t have the assets to assign to this. I’d say a lot of them aren’t close to that industry 4. gap yet. Some are, whatever 0 is. Trying to catch up with All this Industry 4. 0 stuff. I think Industry 5. 0 is more like, okay, take all the solutions that you’ve currently got from Industry 4.

0 and now add AI into the mix, or it’s going to do it all for you. I don’t think it works like that. I haven’t seen it. I’ve seen some pretty cool tech out there. We have some too with AI, where it’s AI reporting or AI scheduling, where it’ll optimize your schedule. Whether it’s to run most efficiently or make the most profit.

Things like that, which, yeah, it’s cool. But, you’ve been in business for however long without this stuff. You know, You could probably get by without all the cool fancy tech. Yeah, I don’t know, I’d just say be mindful of what you’re looking for and what you truly, really need.

There’s, like I said, there’s a lot of stuff out there, a lot of fluff, a lot of, it’s just a, I don’t even know what to call it, just a hot topic for the week, flavor of the month, maybe, visualize your shop floor, get your, whatever solution is going to organize you the best. And set you up for success and then stick with it and build on it.

Not every solution is going to, take place of say four or five or six different key individuals. You can free them up or get rid of them, I just wanted to touch on lastly Toyota, because you had a lot of experience in Toyota and we look at Toyota as being this huge, big brand.

And I assume one of the technology leaders I don’t know if, in terms of not just manufacturing overall, but in terms of as a business brand, they’ve always seemed to be a real leader in that space. What can you learn from The way a company like that is operating and what can be relevant for smaller businesses in running.

And indeed, you know how much emphasis is there on a company in a company like that to continue to improve and to continue to bring new technology in. I know that I would try to do a special project as a team lead on. We had different KPIs that we were responsible for safety, quality, cost, productivity.

team member development, right? So I would try to do a special project on each KPI every year. Which could be a huge project, or it could be just a little change in a process that bettered that process for a team member. What I find is, Toyota was really good at monitoring and tracking, their throughput, their OEE, their downtime.

But also From a team member’s perspective, always trying to make the process better for who is doing the job day in, day out. And better meaning more efficient, less steps, less burden. And, that levelness or evenness of each process along the way. So that process flow. And that’s what I find when I’m going into a, Manufacturer’s environment where they might be struggling a bit is I take some of that mindset that I brought from Toyota with me and I try to adapt that in other places.

Where would this fit in their organization or where would this fit in that organization? And then that continuous improvement mindset where, once is never enough. You always have to build on it and better it and better it, right? Absolutely. Look, there’s so much that we could continue to talk about, but we’re pretty much out of time and I just wanted to finish with a question that I like to ask all of my guests is what is the aha moment that people have when they start working with you that you want to let more people know that they’re going to have it if they come and start to deal with you?

The aha moment? Yeah. When they see how much money they start saving. When they see that ROI start populating, that’s the ra ha moment, right? They can take that either money saved or, that throughput, the production that they’ve made that they weren’t making in the past and start benchmarking and proving that out across different lines, different sites or locations.

But at the end of the day, it comes to profit, right? We’re going to see more profit, less downtime, less waste. Yep. And ah ha! I should keep doing this. I love it. I love it. And look, thank you so much for being generous with your time. And I think what’s really interesting for people that have been listening in, that are even from different spaces, they may not be in manufacturing, is that there’s so much to learn from each of these industries.

And that All the efficiencies and things that you’re looking at are exactly the same in most other businesses, that they can look at the things that they’re doing. The machines, maybe a big or small factor in what they do, but the human element is there and the efficiencies that you can drive and the way you can monitor and then the things that you can bring in to change a business are huge.

And I appreciate the insights. I appreciate the time and I hope to be back soon to maybe we’ll meet up for another. I definitely look forward to that one for sure. And of course, we’re going to include all of the information in the show notes about how to get in touch with you and to look at Shiftworks, which is the business and MachineMonitoring.

com, which is the which is the website. And people will be able to get a hold of all of that information in the show notes. Again, thank you so much for being part of BizByte. No, I appreciate it. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by Podcasts Done For You, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance to the world. Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes. We look forward to your company next time on BizBytes.

Mastering Brand Impact Video Strategies for B2B Success. In this episode of Biz Bites, we look under the hood at the influence of video in marketing and the important role it can play in connecting with your audience and ultimately driving more people to your business. I’m joined by a thought leader in this brand story film space, Didier from Fixon Media Group, and you’re going to get some vital insights into how to influence your brand impact.

Through subtle engaging video content, you’ll discover the importance of aligning visuals with brand messaging and get actionable tips for small businesses to harness video marketing effectively. We’re going to discuss everything from what you can learn from the big brands to how you can implement on a budget.

Stay tuned for this episode of Biz Bites.

Hello everyone. Welcome to Biz Bites again, and we have a very special guest. I’m really excited about this because it’s an area that I’ve been endlessly fascinated in because it goes alongside of what we do in terms of audio production. We’re going to talk a little bit about video and the influence of video generally in marketing terms with Didier.

Welcome to the program. Anthony, thank you for having me. How’s things? Yeah. Very good. Look, I think what we should do first of all, is get you to introduce yourself to the audience and tell a little bit about what it is that you do. Certainly. So I run Fixon Media Group, which is a small little video production company down in Melbourne.

And we specialise in the production of brand story films. So what a brand story film is. Some people call it a modern day commercial. So you think back to the past decades, what a commercial looks like. It’s fast, it’s in your face, there’s graphics bouncing around everywhere. It’s very intrusive to your watching and to your viewing in your everyday life in general.

So what we’ve found is that A lot of brands and in particular the customers of these brands, they don’t want to be intruded anymore. They want to go about their life as an everyday without being bombarded with advertisements because we see 50 to 400 advertisements every single day on average. How does a brand then communicate what they need to communicate to their customers?

If customers are held back and they don’t want to be intruded by advertisements. So this is where the brand story film comes in. You communicate your message to your customers, but you do it in a way that is subconscious and unobtrusive. Yeah. I think it’s really important for people to understand who maybe listening in who get the idea of marketing and maybe you’ve heard about brand and brand story, but I think that the.

What people don’t fully under appreciate is that you have to break it up in. There’s the written message. If you like, there’s that core thing that many people focus most of their attention on, what are we going to do to summarize who our brand is and what it’s about, then there’s the way that you talk about it, which most people think in terms of a pitch, particularly because they’re the opportunities you get, particularly at a networking style function.

But of course there are opportunities around here around podcasting is another good example. But then the visual is quite a different element again, it’s a different layer. So I look at it and go that the text version is the non personality one, the audio one brings in the personality.

The visual just takes it to a different level, doesn’t it? Because visuals it’s not even people aren’t even listening as intently to the words as much as they are absorbing what they’re seeing on screen. 100 percent correct. And you’ve described perfectly the three types of learning styles, right?

The three types of learning behaviors, the written form, reading, the audio form in listening, and then the video, which is watching and learning and seeing it happen in front of you. And then you’ve got the fourth side of things as well, which is the hands on, and that’s even better for learning. So when 65 percent of the population more inclined to be video based learners, visual learners, or hands on learners, then there’s a huge opportunity for businesses to be using video and workshops even to another degree to improve the knowledge of their, the user base and engage their customers as opposed to the written form and the audio form, which of course do both have incredibly influential parts of marketing too these days.

I have a background of having worked in television for a little while and television news. And one of the things that really fascinated me about the transition from working in radio to working in television was that in radio you could report things immediately and you could definitely talk about anything.

Yeah, obviously legally speaking, but you could talk about it. You could talk about anything. Whereas the problem with television is that you can only do stuff. That you can see. So if you can’t see it, you can’t really report on it because people need to see that visual, which I always found fascinating because it’s really talking to the pictures rather than, as I said, in the audio based medium where you’re creating pictures with your voice.

So it’s really quite an interesting flip on how that goes and how. In a sense, you’re almost restricted by it. Yeah, definitely. And it’s an interesting perspective there. You think of what we’re seeing on social media these days. I don’t go two seconds on Facebook without seeing a news.

com. au article pop up, and it’s just absolute rubbish journalism, but they can report on it because it’s in the written form and it’s easily consumable. And then you take that to the next level. You go on the radio and they’re talking about Davo’s called in from Perth and he’s got a story about the Huntsman in his.

And it’s we don’t need to hear about this, but you can report on it. And then you look at the TV news, and it’s gotta be the latest thing in the courtroom, or the latest murder, or whatever it is, because it’s got the visuals there. And it’s such a contrast between each of them. And is one or the other better?

Maybe not. But they each offer their own individual positives and their own individual negatives as well. I think the big thing about the visuals is that it’s what people are becoming more and more used to, obviously with social media, particularly as you raise their, people pick whichever platform you prefer, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, whatever it is, we’re driven by the visuals and it’s what makes you turn on to want to, Whether it’s read, listen or watch something, the visuals play an important part, but particularly particularly video based, platforms like TikTok and even Facebook and Instagram these days are driven largely by video feeds.

They are. And. I think a lot of brands when they look at social media, they think about, Oh, we need to jump on the different trends and what forth. We hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Bites podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business, where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world?

Come talk to us at Podcasts Done For You. That’s what we’re all about. We even offer a service where I’ll anchor the program for you. So all you have to do is show up for a conversation, but don’t worry about that. We will. Do everything to design a program that suits you from the strategy right through to publishing and of course helping you share it.

So come talk to us, podcastdoneforyou. com. au details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites. I think a lot of brands, when they look at social media, they think about We need to jump on the different trends and what forth and I always go back to what’s the message that you’re wanting to share To your customers and are the customers actually on this platform because there’s no use trying to put out Different forms of video across each of these platforms if your customers aren’t actually there and the real opportunity lies Where your customers are so there’s no use jumping on as many platforms as you possibly can There’s this platforms coming out every second week at the moment.

You don’t have to jump on them You can just stay where you are. If that’s where your customers aren’t, you don’t have to jump on TikTok and YouTube if they’re not there. Yeah. And I think also the challenge with whether they’re there or not is also about whether they’re there for that purpose, because I think you could argue that there are, for example, we’re targeting.

Professional services, business leaders and thought leaders. Are they on TikTok? I’d be crazy to think that they’re not on TikTok at all. There’s definitely going to be a percentage of them on TikTok, but are they on TikTok to think about business? I would argue not. We don’t position ourselves on TikTok for that reason.

It’s a reason why, you know, as a business, I put more energy into LinkedIn than any of the other platforms because it is fundamentally a business based platform. And I think that’s part of it as well, isn’t it? That. It’s that some of these feeds in these videos are really about trying to escape as opposed to doing business.

So you’re right. You have to choose the right place for the right audience. Yeah. And there’s probably validity in going on the likes of TikTok and Instagram. If your customers aren’t. 100 percent there for the purpose of being in that frame of mind where they’re wanting to learn or be educated in the professional services space, definitely.

But of course, there is going to be that percentage, as you touched on, that are on these platforms. So maybe the occasional post, which is a bit more informative, educational, like you would post with WhatLeadership on LinkedIn, maybe there is an opportunity there. But then you can also look at the other side of things is if they’re 95%, they’re predominantly going to be looking to consume entertaining content to, as you said, escape the world that they’re in currently.

And then can you as a brand position yourselves without going too crazy, jumping on trends and what for still maintain your brand essence. Can you position yourself in a way that. Can create this entertaining and engaging content that could be the outlier for your customer. But they go on there, they see your brand, they’re escaping from their world, but they’re also building a bit more of a connection with your brand in doing so.

That’s probably the ideal situation to be in. Yeah, it’s absolutely, it’s different for every business, right? It depends what business you’re in and who the audience is that you’re trying to attract and for what purpose. That’s something that every. Everyone has to consider.

And it all goes back down to the brand story, right? When you’re trying to write that it’s about understanding the audience in the first place and where they hang out, because whatever you build, whether it is text, audio, video is going to be. dependent on who they are and where they are. Correct.

And brand story, it’s definitely a term that has popped up more so in the past five to 10 years or so, as opposed to previously, and there would definitely be terminologies that would relate to what a brand story of today is. But I think the key message there is you really need to understand what it is about your business that connects you to.

The ideal customer that you have as your avatar there, because it’s those core values and those core beliefs that you hold that a competitor may not hold that really make you different. And we talk about in business all the time. You’ve got to be different. You’ve got to have your key points of difference.

And that can be, that’s fantastic. But the real connection then comes from what you believe in and what you value. I like to use the example of all of our friends that we have around us. The reason that we’re friends with them is because. At a core level at base level. There’s something that we connect with them on whether that be through sport or Literature or whatever it is.

We’ve got some form of connection there So we can bring that into business as well as a business if you value Let’s take a brand Qantas, for example I don’t know if they’ve had some negative pr in the past 12 18 months, of course, but at the core they value Connection and they value families and bringing them all together so if I as a customer look at Qantas and I see that in their marketing and in particular their video marketing where that emotion can be so easily conveyed as opposed to audio or the text if I see that I’m going to be a lot more convinced that I need to go with there as opposed to a brand like Virgin which Through the advertisements it’s a little bit more funky, it’s a bit more pop, they’ve got the pinks and the purples coming in everywhere, and it’s a bit more of a funny environment.

If I lean that way then 100 percent I’ll go version, but if I’m looking for more of that connection and that, that family orientated approach, then I’m going to lean towards conscious a bit more. I want to explore this a bit more, but I just want to point out to people that are listening in. What we’re going to do is bring it back to what you can do, particularly as a smaller brand, because it’s all very well to talk about your Qantas’s and these people who have, multi million dollar advertising budgets that they can do lots of different things.

If you’re a small business, that’s a little bit harder, you’re not operating on the same scale, but there is stuff that we can learn from that and bring back to those small business and make it You know, do things like what you’re doing in a more affordable fashion. But I think what’s really interesting about what you’re talking about is that, that these big brands spend a lot of time trying to create a story.

And I think the great example is probably two great examples for me is this. The banks often like to tell a story about family or business, depending on who they’re trying to target. And so you see these wonderful ads where they try to have everyday people and tell a bit of a story in a 32nd bit. The other ones that I think are really obvious to me.

Car ads. It’s the minute they choose who is going to be in the car is the story that they start to tell. Because if you see a, let’s say, a 20, 30 something year old female driving a car, the likelihood that the 50 year old male is going to want that same car is going to be lessened because the visual relationship is with someone who’s younger and female.

And so those choices are very deliberate. And why you see at times that they’ll marry the two that probably won’t put a 20 year old. Don’t tend to put a 20 year old male with a, sorry, 10 year old female with a 50 year old man. Although interestingly enough, I do recall, and I can’t remember which brand it was, but there is certainly a, an ad out there at the moment, which shows a family growing with a car to the point where the, I think the P plates are going on or that they’re taking to a, clearly taking to something where there’s a band and they’re putting a whole lot of equipment in there so that the child has.

Grown older and it’s potentially then driving the car and there are variations of people, male and female sharing utes and I always find those things are endlessly fascinating about the story that they’re trying to tell in a very short space of time and very conscious of who they’re putting in the vehicle.

I 100 percent agree, Anthony, and car advertisements for me, when I look at them. They’ve got some parts of it which is amazing and then other parts I look at and I think they probably should be doing things a little bit differently there and the connection side of things and the relatability side of things that you touched on just there is what they do incredibly well and even to the degree of A situation that is by no means relatable at all, you think of the old Toyota Hilux commercial back in the day where the car falls off the cliff and then it ends up in the water and he’s on the beach and he finds it again.

Obviously that’s not going to happen to anyone and if it did it would be one out of a trillion chances of that happening. But the message there is the connection to the car, the connection to the brand, the love of the Hilux and all the benefits that it brings with that. That, that, that purchase of a car.

That’s what they do incredibly well, not just Toyota, but across the board at all the car brands. But then the side of things that they don’t do so well is they still lean towards that older day method of, this is a commercial. Because they’re all the same at the end of the day. A person jumps in the car.

They turn on the ignition, they start driving through water, or forest land, or bumpy roads, or whatever the situation is, and then they have a shot at the end of the film where it’s just six cars in a row, and the brand’s logo on there. So from the start, you still kinda know that it’s a commercial, and you know it’s a car commercial, but they do an incredibly good job.

Of bringing that tone down a little bit by introducing the female 30 year old driver or the retired grandparents taking on IKEA or something like that. And they bring that brand essence in, in that way. They do that incredibly well, but the commercial side of things, making it not so much of a commercial, they still got room for improvement there, I think.

Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because essentially what they’re doing is he’s making. The vehicle that they’re promoting aspirational and aspirational in the sense of people wanting to relate to the circumstance, whether it’s it used to be driving fast, which they can’t legally do anymore unless they’re putting it on an actual racetrack, but it’s.

That whole scenery, that idea of, having a road to yourself and driving along, or whether it’s, four wheel driving or taking the kids down to the beach or whatever the relatability section of it is. And of course they then, as you say, often tie it back in the end going if you think that this is, Too aspirational.

We’ve actually got a range. You, this might be the top of the range, one that you’re looking at here, but there is a range. So trying to bring people in nevertheless regardless of whether they think it’s looking too expensive, because I find that’s the really interesting challenge when you look at some of what traditionally have been lower end brands.

And I think key is a great example and something that I’d encourage people who are listening in right now to have a think about, because Kia’s undergone a huge transition because when Kia came into the market, I don’t know how many years ago, it really was the base brand, it was if you’re just think, I just need a car to get me from A to B, and I hope that it’s going to work for a few years, then, That was Kia.

But Kia is not in that category anymore. It’s helped by the fact that there have been multiple other brands that have entered the market since then. But if you look at the way Kia has positioned itself now, it’s trying to up The impression of the brand that it is much more, it’s much more of an accepted quality brand and that they can be inventive and leading in certain areas so that way they can charge for that as well.

But it’s a nice balance, isn’t it? Because no key is not going to say they’re Mercedes Benz. And I don’t believe that they’re trying to get to that level off what you would expect to pay for a vehicle. But it’s interesting how that transition has happened, and that even with their branding, if you were to, Google it and look back at their logo at what it started up and where it is now, you look at the where they enter the market in the ads and where their ads are now.

They’re vastly different in the shape of the cars and the things that they’re doing with it are incredibly different. So I love that what the visual does. As well as anything else is it really helps that transition of brands because often that happens in business, whatever size you’re at, that there are, you don’t necessarily always stay aimed at the same segment or that segment may grow and alter.

So there are other opportunities. And I think it’s a great example to see how that. Transitions and happens. I agree. And if we compare those three formats, written audio, visual, and the, their ability to convey a transformation of a brand, I’ll use the example. There’s a guy that I follow on LinkedIn and every week I see his posts pop up.

And I feel like every three or four weeks, he’s got a different headline and he’s got a different message. I think it’s my stuff that he just pivot again, every four weeks. And it’s in that written form, so that’s all I’m seeing, and I’m getting very confused every time I see this different message pop up.

That’s a very small example, but if there was a video that conveyed a transformation, as a watcher of that, as a viewer of that, I’d probably be a bit more understanding of why the transformation has occurred, and why the pivot has occurred. And maybe he’s not pivoting every four weeks, and maybe there’s a reason behind changing that message every couple of weeks.

But if there is a major transformation, having that video there to convey that message of what’s the reason behind this, why is this happening, how does this change my relationship with you as a customer or a potential customer, how does that change that relationship, it’d be a lot more easier to understand and a lot more easy to communicate.

As opposed to doing it in that written form where there’s lots of room for interpretation and lots of room for misunderstanding. Yeah. And it’s interesting that you say that as well, because I think there’d be plenty of people who are out there listening at the moment who have either been involved or are involved or about to be involved in a transformation of a brand.

And that happens on many levels. So often it’s a change in ownership of a business. Or there’s an opportunity to move as I, I’ve worked with a brand a couple of years ago now, and they’ve just undergone the final part of the transition. So we’d mapped it out where initially that they had started with, okay.

That had a brand that was a sub brand for them. That was really a product more than a brand that mother rather than a master brand they’ve. They wanted to transition that to that being the master brand. But what they did was the tagline for that became the old brand name. So it was still that people could see the relationship between the two.

And there was a degree of. Being comfortable in being able to transition completely to removing that link to the old brand almost completely in the footer of their letterhead. It still has a reference to it because it’s a the registered entity. But other than that. They’ve transitioned completely out of it now.

And it does. And sometimes that does take time. And sometimes people walk in and can just change overnight because that’s necessary. Completely changing. Restaurants are a classic case for that because, one restaurant shuts down, a new one opens. They don’t want anything to do with the old ones.

New name, new logo, new menu. It’s a new restaurant, but sometimes there’s a change in management and it undergoes a slow change in doing that. And that happens in all types of businesses as well. And I think that visual those little things and explainers as you talk about are really important for people to understand.

What is happening because initially in the particular case I talked about was to reassure people that, Hey, we’re still the same people we’re just think that this better represents who we are and what we’re about. Get used to it for a little while. And then there’s a point where, Hey, you’ve become really used to it.

We’re just going full on now this, and we think that our new tagline is this. And by the time you’ve introduced the new tagline, you don’t even have to remember the original brand anymore because people have got so used to the master brand. Yeah, definitely. And I think one of the recent examples of a transformation or a brand that we can look at, and this is again, a very big brand, but let’s bring it down to the more small business level Jaguar, what a mishap of a brand transformation that they’ve had over the past couple of weeks, they’ve gone from this somewhat premium brand car brand, and they’ve introduced this completely off putting forefront of a brands that people were just like, Hey, this is a car brand anymore.

Like what’s going on here. And I think the lesson for small businesses that Jaguar have gone away from what built their brand and as important as it is to occasionally have to transform and change yourself and pivot, I think you still need to bring the core of the brand previously and keep bringing that.

As you move forward, even if it’s only a small little piece of that, bring that in there. And I don’t think Jaguar have done that with their new transformation. They’ve gone completely to the opposite side of the spectrum in terms of potential branding opportunities. And they’ve gone from this brand that people respect and recognize and think, this is quite quality.

And they’ve gone from premium and they’ve gone right down the bottom of people’s minds to thinking, are you premium anymore? Or are you entry level? Cause that’s what the branding looks like now. So the message there is, sorry, yeah, the message there is, where’s the 5 percent from previous, where, what have you taken from previous and brought it into the current day?

I can’t see it. And maybe you’ve got another opinion on that, Anthony, but where’s the continuity of the brand? Yeah, I think that it’s a case of sometimes people get too close to brands and you can see that what’s happened in a lot of cases. And there are some classic cases over the years where brands have transformed and it might just be a logo rather than the full brand story.

And someone internally has thought that it was a good idea and it’s suddenly it’s. gone wrong or they’ve not enabled enough of their audience to give an interpretation of it to understand whether this is the right thing or the wrong thing. And they release it and suddenly they have to backtrack a couple of weeks later because they realize they’ve made a big mistake.

And I think it’s one of the lessons that I would give to people in business. And I’m sure you’d echo this is that the P once you decide on some changes to your brand story, Don’t go and ask your family and friends whether it’s a good idea or not. And yes, ask your team about it, but you really need to get some research from your core audience.

Let them decide for you. If your audience is a particular group of people, grab some of those people that you trust, have conversations with them. Yes, you can. If you can afford it, do proper market research. But if you can’t afford to do that, you can have some very structured closed door conversations with a few people you trust, let them, don’t give them all of your biases presented to them and say, Hey, whether it’s a, whether it’s a video, whether it’s or whether it’s a logo say, Hey, we’re thinking of making some changes.

I’m not going to say anything, give us your reaction because the minute you say anything, you bias them and you don’t want to say, Oh, this is our choice or anything else. Just let them go because so many mistakes can be avoided by doing that. And there’ve been some classics over the years where people have got their logos completely wrong, where there are amusing cases where they’ve got them so wrong that people have seen things in the logo that for some unknown reason people internally didn’t see.

And they definitely can’t go forward with those brands because there’s a, serious mistake in what people are visually seeing. But there are also ones where people just look at it and they go, why? I don’t like it. Why would you change what’s been iconic? And so you do see a lot of brands that.

If they want to make some changes or become a little bit more modern, the refinements are minimal. If you go back and you look at Woolies is a good example you know how that brand has changed over the years is subtle. It’s, if you were to go back and look at Woolies, 40 years ago to today, yes, there’s a significant difference, but if you track it over the last sort of 10 years, year by year, there are.

Subtle little changes that they’ve brought in, which is just modernize the brand without it being dramatically different from where it began. Just a nice modern approach to it. But then there are ones that trans transition and you just go, Oh my goodness, what have you done? And so it’s an interesting exercise and as marketers, we get too close to brands as well.

So sometimes we also have to take a step back, 100 percent taking that step back and be so positive just having a different perspective on things And I love that example that you just provided there. Don’t show your family and your friends your thoughts on changes It’s no different to when you’re starting off a business.

Why go and ask your friends and your family Hey, what do you think of this new venture that i’m going on? Of course, they’re gonna say it’s good because they’re there to support they don’t want to let you down, right? Go and find 10 50 100 if you can thousands of people and test out That’s that theory get them to do a pre sign up get them to give them your their debit card as a a prepayment to say, yes I’m actually interested in this and I would purchase this because that’s going to be your true market research to say, okay, this is a viable option going forward or it’s not, and bringing it back to the brand transformation, the same thing, find a small little minute audience, test it out there.

Is it going to be viable? Yes. Let’s move forward. If it’s not, let’s take a step back, rethink, see if we can bring some other perspectives in and then make the change going forward. I think color is one of the biggest things that sees people unravel. Often I’ve seen it and been part of it where people internally, and it could be the CEO, it could be the business owner, it could just be senior management have said, Oh, but I really like this color and.

I’m like, yeah, but you are not the target audience. So what you like, even if you are the business owner may not be relevant at all, because if your audience is X and your Y, your opinion matters very little in that sense. And that’s a difficult thing to do as a business owner sometimes, because you have to, throw out your own opinions.

because you’re not the target audience. And I think, and that same can be said for family and friends more often than not, they’re not the target audience for your business. So if they’re not the target audience for your business, then unfortunately their opinion counts for nothing. And that is a difficult thing to get across with people because how many times have we all heard it in marketing going?

Yeah, but my wife says, Oh, but my, and it’s. Yes, but in a polite as possible way, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter one bit and colors are really interesting area. When I was first getting my business organized and probably still to today, I got so engrossed in color theory and the psychology behind colors.

And even when we’re doing. Video production stay for different brands. Color is still such a big part of that. You can see in the background here I’ve got my little blue light hanging there. You’ve got your purples behind you there And you’ve got the blue coming through the window up to your left side there Every color’s got a different meaning to it and That needs to be considered when undergoing a brand transformation, or producing a video, putting a text copy out, or a photograph, whatever it is.

It’s all got a subtle meaning behind it, and it’s all going to be interpreted by your customers in a specific way. And look, ultimately there’s going to be, if you’ve got a thousand people in your audience, there’s going to be a thousand different opinions on what that color means to them. But you can group them under certain specific areas and say, okay, this is going to be in the 90 percent dominant thought and message behind it.

That’s what we need to lean into and do we like that? Do we want that to be attributed to our brands? Maybe not. So let’s go for different color. Blues have got a big trust factor behind it. Green’s got a really renewing and, and growing meaning behind it. You think about, trees and bushes.

They’re all green and plants, right? So it’s got this growth element behind it. Do we want to lean into that? And again, this goes back to, who’s your customer, what do they think, what are they going to be interpreting your business of, and your brand of. Based on the colors here and it comes out in all the media that you put forward and you can own a color as well.

As we’ve seen with some brands where and no matter how outrageous that color can be sometimes on them, if you own it and you get associated with it, it triggers your memory to to going back to that. And certainly I see certain colors and it immediately triggers a brand. I wanted to bring this back to smaller businesses and perhaps a little bit more about what you’re.

How your business operates because you’re doing a lot of videos from what I’ve seen that are much more for Local brands and and doing ads and things for them. So tell me a little bit, firstly, how important do you think it is for smaller brands to still have a video presence and for that video presence to actually be Managed in a particular way that it’s not just someone editing something using their phone and doing something decent because there is a, there is an inclination for people to do that because they’ve got this tool in their pocket that they think that there’s suddenly they’re a videographer.

So how do you combat that spending money on video production and how affordable is it for smaller businesses to do? I think if we look at the small business side of things, there’s very much a. Demand out there and we see it across social media and linkedin etc. Etc. You have to be doing a video and Even though I’m from the video background.

I don’t think that is the case I don’t think you have to do it if you’re a small business and you’ve only got one two Maybe you know three people involved in the business. You probably don’t have the time to actually go out and produce videos yourself and that’s okay. And maybe you don’t have that skill and that ability to do that either.

So look at where you’re best placed to be doing your marketing. Do you have a really good copy ability? If that’s the case then focus on your blog posts and writing articles and what forth. If you’ve got more of a And audio background and podcast is probably the best way to go about it. And if you’ve got the time and you’ve got the ability to do video, then go for video.

So I don’t think it’s a case of you have to do it as a small business. If you’ve got the time and you’ve got the resources to do it, then by all means do it. Going back to what you first asked the question there. How they go about doing that. I think your phone is definitely more than capable. And for small business where marketing resources are incredibly limited, there’s probably not much of a reason to go to someone like myself, who’s a professional and pay for those services when you can achieve 80 percent of the results.

On your own and it’s that last 20 percent where you do need to get a professional in to get that final little result that you’re after. So what that 80 percent would look like is if you’re producing videos for Instagram as an example, then you’re going to want to know the platform inside out. You’re going to want to know what are the best practices for posting reels.

You need to know what time your audience is going to be on there, or around about what time they’re going to be on there. You need to understand the message that your brain is putting forward, what you value, what you believe in, how you can connect with people. You’ve got to understand that you’ve got to get a hook in the first three seconds of the video to get people engaged.

That hook can be a visual hook, it can be a text hook, it can be the type of captions that you use, a whole different range of things. And if you can understand. All of those metrics and variables first off, then you can achieve 80 percent of the results and you can get the following, you can get the views, you can get the engagement.

And look, I’ll be completely honest, the views and the engagement, the follows, they’re really not that important at the end of the day. They’re vanity metrics. The real results are they coming through your website? They’re contacting you, they’re purchasing from you. That’s what we’re really wanting to track, but you can still achieve 80 percent of those results by doing everything yourself using the best practices.

And I think that’s probably really important to be clear about is you don’t have to go and pay for a professional to come in and do all of it. Once you achieve those 80 percent of those results yourself, and you can’t go any further because you actually do need to go to that next level now, then go to that next level.

Because by the time you get there, you’ve probably got the resources available to invest. Without it being too much of a hit on your profit margins. I think the big lesson for business owners is really that a lot of websites. are devoid of personality. And there’s only so much you can do in written text and often video is a great way to introduce that personality because people do business with people and That is, yes, despite all of the advance of AI coming in and they’re doing all sorts of things these days, including, selling to you and all the rest of it.

But when it comes down to it, in most of the businesses that are probably listening into this show is that you’re very much service driven. And if you’re a service driven business, you’re a people driven business, and therefore people want to see who the people are behind it, because how do you differentiate yourself from one business to the next is really about the people, the experiences and the stories, which gets back down to the brand story and being able to convey that.

And what I would ask is that. If you’ve got some tips for people who are wanting to convey a brand story, because it’s not, it is an art form to be able to do that, and yes, we talked about the multi million dollar budgets of the car companies and the Qantas’s and banks and all the rest of it.

And. They spend a lot of time and money and trying to get a brand story done in a 30 second ad or a series of 30 second ads. If you’re a smaller business, you don’t have that luxury and you may not have the expertise at hand. So are there some tips and tricks that people can have for getting a brand story across in a Small amount of time.

Definitely. So we could go really in depth to this. So I’ll keep it at the service level for now, if you look at what the big brands are doing in terms of their video marketing, they’ve got the longer form pieces, which are maybe 60 to 90 seconds, if not longer. And then they’ve got the really shorter form pieces, which are going on their social media.

And it’s like a top down approach. They have the big videos as I do first, and then the shorter form content comes from that. But amongst that. That funnel down, if you want to call it that, the same four variables are coming up time and time again, and these four variables can be answered by any size of business and made relative to that size of business and what they sell.

So the first question that is always worth asking is, what is it? That you actually sell as a business. What is it you actually sell? I love using a restaurant as an example because it’s a really easy business to understand. A restaurant doesn’t sell food. That’s the surface level. We want to go below the surface.

We want to really dig deep and what is it that you actually sell as a business. The restaurant, what they really sell is a location. A place for people to connect with each other, for families to come and connect, for friends for dates, etc. It’s a place for people to come and connect. And look, this is generalised, every restaurant you can give the same answer for.

But this is a really good starting point, and just Get people thinking about things. So what do you really sell as a business? What’s your true product or service? That’s the first question from there. It’s what is the impact of your business? And this is where it goes a little bit more individualized and unique because you’re going to have a different impact than what.

Your competitor will have a different business in another state, whatever the situation is. So what is the true impact of your business? And that’s going to stem from what is your product or service going generalized again, with the restaurant idea, what’s the potential impact while the impact is. A grandparent, they come from overseas to visit their grandchildren for the first time, they’ve never seen them before, because they’ve been overseas for six years, and they can connect in that restaurant, and they can make them for the first time, and they can have that experience.

That’s an example of an impact there, a very generalized example again, but you can see where that The final is coming. The third question is then what are the associated emotions of that? And it’s the emotions that you’re wanting to aim to convey through your videos. Whether it be a longer form brand story film or in those shorter content pieces.

What are the emotions? Going back to that impact, there’s going to be a lot of joy. There’s going to be a lot of elation. There’s going to be a lot of happiness. That’s the after. That’s after the impact has been experienced. Then there’s also the emotions of beforehand. And the before is probably more important because this is where you’re going to be able to hook people in, really get them engaged in your business.

The before is, there’s going to be a fair bit of guilt in there, it’s, they’re going to feel guilty that they’ve been away from their family for so long, they haven’t been able to welcome their grandkids into the world for six years. That’s pretty guilty, you’re going to be feeling pretty bad about yourself.

There’s probably a little bit of anger, there’s probably a little bit of sadness, sorrow. These are the emotions that you can use. In your shorter form pieces to create a story that hooks people in and gets them engaged in what they’re watching and then finally the fourth question and this is for me probably the most important aspect of all four is what are the core values and beliefs that your business holds because as we touch on at the start of the episode.

It’s this, it’s these connections and these, sorry, it’s these values and these beliefs that connect you to your customers and vice versa. And if you can identify those and find someone that holds those beliefs to a similar degree to you, then they’re going to be the perfect customer for your brand. So that’s probably the four questions I would ask for any size of business to start on this journey of video marketing.

What Is it a true product or service? What are the impacts of it? What are the associated emotions both before and after experiencing that impact? And then finally, what are your core values and your beliefs as a business? Fantastic. There’s so much value in, in what you’ve talked about just there. I want to point out to people that we’re going to leave some contact information, of course, as we always do in the show notes and also particularly some some show reels for Didi and what he’s done, particularly it’s a, there’s been some community type businesses that you’ve worked with as well as small businesses.

So there’s a lot of examples there of what you can do. And I think whether you end up being able to work with. With Didier or you just get some ideas from that. I think it’s fantastic. And I know there’s a a fact sheet that people can also get access to through that. If you just want to explain what that is we’ll include the link in the show notes.

Definitely. So it’s like a little cheat sheet, if you will, to, to video marketing, the 10 best practices that you can implement straight away. And that can be downloaded from our website fixonmedia. com. au. It just gives you a little rundown of the best practices. So it’s got ideas like use a call to action.

Don’t use your product and service as the main, variable in your marketing. Try and go a little bit deeper. It’s very basic tips, but they’re incredibly important because most businesses don’t do it. They don’t do the simple things. They try and go from level one to level 10 straight away. But as you touched on earlier with Woolworths, Instead of doing that massive transformation, they’ve done bit by bit by bit over the years.

So that’s probably the lesson for a lot of businesses is You can’t get to level 10 straight away when you’re at level 1 You’ve got to go level 1 to 2 to 3 So yeah, have a read through of that And if you want to learn anything further from there, then yeah Please do reach out be more than happy to share any information that you’d like to hear Fantastic.

I’ve got a final question I’m going to ask you in a minute, but just a reminder to everyone as well as all of those links in the show notes the way that Didi and I connected originally was through LinkedIn and and that’s a great place if you want to hang out with either of us and and see some of the things that we’re posting all the time you’ll get lots of great tips and things on there.

Also you’ve got your own podcast as well. So a quick shout out to that, to, to that what’s the name of the podcast? So people can have a listen in as well. Yeah. Thanks, Anthony. Marketing for the modern brand. So we interview a number of guests across marketing and branding across Australia.

And each week we’re diving into their specific individual area of expertise within marketing and branding and really diving into the juices of their expertise. Fantastic. I love it. Obviously I’m a bit biased as far as marketing is concerned, but it’s great to have you part of Biz Bites, which really continues to try and bring thought leaders to to the fore and and give people those little one percenters that can make a difference to their business.

So on that note, the final question that I have for you is just. What is the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they would have in advance? The aha moments?

I think a lot of it is to do with

The messaging side of things and that you don’t have to be flashy in people’s face all the time. You can get the same results by being a little bit more laid back, a little bit more subconscious and just being subtle through your communication to them. I think that’s probably the big aha moment that the days of being flashy and in people’s faces have gone.

People are sick of it. I’m sick of it. You’re sick of it. You’re and your listeners are sick of it. We can get the same result as a business by. Being subtle, being respectful and just engaging with people, connecting with people. And that’s a buzzword going around at the moment, connection and authenticity.

But there’s a reason for it. It’s because people are craving it. And the more we can lean into that as a business, the more success that there’s going to be. Fantastic. Really appreciate that. There’s some great insights. I hope everyone listening in has enjoyed that taking a lot of notes. down because there’s certainly some things that you can do with your brand at a local level that can make a real difference to it by just implementing some of these ideas.

So thank you so much for being so generous with your time and really appreciate you coming on the program on BizBytes. Anthony, thank you so much. It’s been phenomenal. And yeah, really looking forward to hearing more about what you’re coming up with over the coming year. So thank you. Appreciate it.

And thanks everyone for listening in. Of course, stay tuned for the next episode of this. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by Podcasts Done For You, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance.

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