Are You Winning or Losing the Marketing Game? How to Create a Top Marketing Strategy

Audio Transcription

In the game of football, there are winners and there are losers. Don’t talk about layoffs. You kidding me? Play offs. I just hope we can win a game and the game of business. There are winners and there are losers. What we want to do is make a leap. Frog product video is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been and super easy to use. This is what iphone is,

okay, the game of politics. There are winners and there are losers. We will have so much winning that you may get bored with winning. Believe me, I agree. You’ll never get bored with winning. We never get bored today. Show the marketing Guru and best selling author Phillip Stutts teaches us how to create a game-changing and winning marketing strategies.

Sean,

you are going to love today’s show. This man, Mr Phillip Stutts is the best selling author of fire them now an Amazon bestseller and one of the masterminds behind the curtain of political marketing with more than 20 years of political and marketing experience stuff, has worked with fortune 200 companies and has over two decades of experience working with billions of dollars in political ad spend and these contributed to helping candidates win over 1000 election victories, including the u s house campaigns, dozens of us senate campaigns,

and even three US presidential victory. Zay. I’m excited she referred to him as, here’s what. Here’s the two phrases I’ve been kind of working on. Okay. The two, the two that I think most apt, you know, represent Mr Stetson. Is he the puppeteer or is he the king maker and he’s been on the Gary Vee show. He’s been on the Dr drew podcast, MSNBC, Espn, CNN, Fox News, Phillip Stutts. Welcome onto the show, sir. How are you? I’m a maker. It’s a pub. Is ready to roll this side. I’m fired up. I’m going to start off with

with the, the, the tough questions. He defensive ones first. Fill up your, your career. Uh, is, is massive. It’s epic. However, I would love to start today’s show by starting at the very beginning of your, of your career and, and when you first launched your career. I mean, what, what was your first job out of school?

My first job was the 1996 Republican national convention out in San Diego. Representing and working for Bob Dole in the President Clinton’s reelection campaign against him. And that was, I, I will tell you this, I went out there because I only love two things in my life. College sports and politics and I went out from, from Alabama, so I moved out to California for the first time in my life at 22 to work on this convention that was going this Republican political presidential convention and I just fell in love with it. And you know, when you work in politics is going to sound crass, but it’s true. It’s like smoking crack cocaine. And let me explain why because you want to get off the pipe but you can’t. And everybody that has ever worked in politics, and I’m dead serious. This is what we’re all saying, politics is like when the campaign ends and you ended up working for a presidential campaign or a big race and you put all your love and energy and passion and purpose into getting someone elected and then it’s over and like, you know, there was like a three year period in my career where I literally had like 21 days off total and when the campaign ends, all you want to do is sleep and you say, I will never do that again.

And then about a week later you go, man, where’s my next hit? I got to get them another campaign. And that’s literally what it’s like to work on one.

I have to ask you this because I’m in 2007 when I received the entrepreneur of the year for the state of Oklahoma and then tells an eight, there was a u s chamber award for, for quality. Um, and I got asked to fly out there to DC to meet some of these people. And so I met. I’ll mention them. Really? They’re really great people. I met, I had a, a great, uh, I really enjoyed meeting in inhofe, Jim inhofe. I met Tom Coburn and met some really neat people, but there was a lot of people I met were, I said, oh no, how did you get an office? I mean, there’s a lot of, a lot of people that, I mean I remember there was a guy who was supposed to give a keynote Philip to a group of small business owners and he is still an office today, I believe in.

This guy was talking about the inequality of the bowl series, you know, how at this point we didn’t have a playoff system for the polls and he was going on a rant about how, what he’s doing to fix the bowl series and fix it and change it. And everyone in the audience who’s a small business owner was like, why is he it? So it seemed like there was a detachment between the politicians representing, uh, the, the people who had voted for them. Could you talk to us from an insider perspective? Do you feel like many politicians are truly that detached from their constituencies? Or do you think that most politicians are pretty dialed in or I just like to get your take kind of the behind the scenes look because you are behind the scenes.

So I would tell you this, like if you, you know, you do, you see these polls that like congress has like a seven percent approval rate, but then you say, but what about your congressman? And then they go, Oh yeah, I love that guy. He’s like 75 percent approval rating or that congresswoman and, and that is typically what you see. And I, I’ve been fortunate enough, I had not worked for any duds, there’ve been a couple of duds along the way and I fired them because, you know, you’re either doing this for the right reasons or you’re not. And that, you know, those people that you talk about, they absolutely exist. Uh, I’ve avoided those and I’m kind of proud to say I haven’t done a lot of those kind of campaigns or worked for a lot of politicians like that

Z. has a hot question for you. I got to know wandering minds. Curious minds have to know you. Say you’re big into sports, you say you’re from Alabama. Are you a roll tide or Your War Eagle?

Uh, I’m the University of Alabama graduate, so

December 29th. We’re Alabama. I mean we’re Oklahoma. I’m a big fan and we made it and so and so. We got to smell a watch party or you go to the game and if so can you get me a really good seat? The Alabama section. You got it. Alright, perfect. Payments shirts red. It’s round. It’s already. Philip, I want to ask you this question now. This next question here before we get into the more about your career, I have one more question that might see this question might come across as passive-aggressive. That’s how you roll though Philip. What percentage of your strategies are derived directly from the plot line of House of cards? Zero point zero. Oh, I have a rowing machine.

Question is the girl into the subway and I’ve seen that. Yeah.

Who has, that’s not a, that’s not a good strategy, right? We move on. Okay. So when did you begin focusing on becoming a, an expert political marketer? When did that idea occur to you self?

It’s kind of what are the ultimate startup company? No political campaigns start at zero in the polls are zero name idea, zero brand awareness. They start with $0. Most candidates are not sell funders. They have to raise money and you when you get on these campaigns, you have to learn to do it all against ultimate startup company. You start with zero, you build it, you know, to hopefully six, seven, eight figures and then the one difference is you have to spend every dime within about a nine month period of raising it and you know, I was fortunate enough to be in every aspect of that on the political campaigns and I just fell in love with it. Started realizing that because you know, I noticed this also play on your website, but you talk about speed a lot and I think that’s one of the key differentiators in politics in the way that people put market in politics because we have election day.

There’s this ultimate deadline. It’s a scorecard and because we’re we’re running political campaigns for the government is they have to report all of our expenditures. I have to report for every candidate I worked for, some of my competitors and know who I worked for and they are going to savage me after the campaign. If I lose a race, if I win a race, then I can go around bragging and doing everything I need to do to promote and market my own business. When you think like that, first of all, you put your clients’ outcomes first every time because you got to win or you’re out of business and you will only succeed if they succeed. And so those principles. Those were the main reasons I wrote the book, but those principles are lost in today’s marketing economy and I just felt like, you know what? We don’t get a lot of things right in politics, but the way we market to voters were this the same thing as you should be doing to marketing to customers. And so that sort of the point of it

that is fascinating because according to Forbes, which is kind of our Business Bible, you know, 80 to 90 percent of businesses fail and I think they feel because they don’t have the mindset of what you just said from Phillip Stutts and that is we have to win or we’re out of business. True. I’m judging on the latest greatest thing I’d just done.

Yeah. The subtitle of the book is the seven lives digital marketers sell and like one of them is this in over 20 years of political and corporate marketing, I have never had a longterm contract. Every contract I have in politics is month to month. Every single one. There’s no way I can get out of it. That is how every contract for any vendor or any marketer in politics works. And when I translated that over to business, I was shot because here’s the deal. If my contract is every single month and I can and anybody can, my clients can find me at anytime. How much more responsive and innovative quick, fast am I going to move for them versus, Hey, I got a 12 month contract, I’m going to go home early tonight. Like that doesn’t happen for me because I’m dead on the corporate side or the political side if I’m not producing results.

Philip, during your career you’ve worked with both businesses and politicians for, for helping them with their marketing needs. From your perspective, what do politicians know about marketing that most business owners don’t?

I call it the three R’s. Okay. And and, and if, if every business enter adopted these three hours, they would have explicit business and it just is proof. I loaned myself less than four years ago, $100,000 to start my own marketing agency and we built it to over 20 million in less than four years on the three r’s and that his reputation, relationships and referrals, and if everybody looked at their marketing in those three ways, that what they would have transformational results. I have never. Not one time have I ever run an ad for my own company. Everything I do is based on my reputation, which then helps me build relationships, which then gets me referrals, everything I do, and if you think about it, that’s where I learned. I learned that from politics because the candidate has to build the relationship with the voters, right? And and, and, and the reputation is the status.

You have to build status of the reputation is the status that, that candidate delivers the relationship he builds with voters. Listen, the one thing we forget about today in today’s marketing is you got to build the relationship, not an online relationship. A personal relationship. Politicians go out and they do town halls and they walk and parades and they go door to door and they get to know voters. Now, in the state of Florida, if you’re running for a statewide office, you can’t get to know every voter, but so that’s when you’re creative comes in play and you’ve got to create unbelievable connecting creative that really drives home just like we wouldn’t. Politics list. I always say this like people hate negative ads and politics, but we do it because it works. We know how to make that connection with the voter to go on a want that guy, and so that is the thing, and then when you do all of those, it becomes a referral system and in politics that way it works is the politician has the reputation. He built the relationship and then those relationships go out and refer their friends, their family to vote for that candidate. Now, when I translated that into my own business, that is what has grown as 200 percent, or maybe it’s 200 percent or whatever it is, uh, from that initial investment to over 20 million on business because that’s all we focus on. If I can build the reputation and I can build relationships, then I’m going to get everything through referrals and that sort of out I’d, I would tell businesses more than anything else.

I’m gonna. Read a notable quotable to you from a Robert Greene, the best selling author of 48 laws of power. And I’d like to get your take on this about reputation. He writes, reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone, you can intimidate and when once it slips, whoever you are vulnerable and will be attacked on all sides, make your reputation on a salable, always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen with your career. How have you protected your reputation? Or maybe when was, when was the time that, uh, your reputation was what was attacked and you had to, you had to defend it.

My reputation has ever been attacked and I don’t mean that like I’m mistake freedom stakes, but I would tell you that if anything, my reputation was probably been under fire within my own company a long time ago because I was a terrible manager. I treated people poorly and I was pretty selfish and I don’t, you know, your listeners may not know, but I have a, uh, an incurable disease that I’m, I’m fighting through right now. And through that diagnosis I sort of flipped the switch and, uh, decided to live a different life. And because of that it has drawn me closer to listening to people, to being present for people. And it’s really probably made my reputation a little bit better. The other part of this is our whole business is about winning. You know, I think it gets lost in the business world when it’s talked about, hey, what’s your brand management and hold that kind of stuff.

We care about winning or losing. Are you winning or losing? And my reputation in the company we built is bigger because we win a lot more than we’ve lost. I’m think. I’m trying to think of this. We won 206 per a political races in the last two years and I think we had something like 250 clients. We didn’t win them all but we went a lot more than we lost. And that ensures my reputation. People want to build relationships because I’m winning and they want to give me business because they want to be with someone that wins rather than someone that doesn’t win. And so when we translated that over to business, we’ve had explosive results for Canada for companies.

So you, you, I’ve heard you say, and again, if I’m getting out of context or messing it up, I don’t want to mess with your reputation. I’ve heard you say that this, this rare, rare, rare disease has actually a saved your life. Are you at liberty to share with us about this disease and what you mean by that? When you say it’s actually a saved your life?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean I’ll even go further if you gave him the chance to go back to 2012 and I was diagnosed with this rare esophageal disease called Achalasia. Um, I would say, and you said, hey, we’re going to go back to 2012 and you don’t have to have this and you can, you can just start your life from that point on without the disease. I’d take the disease every time because what happened with the disease is like a lot of business owners. I stuck my head in the sand for a long time. Uh, I modeled poor behavior from people in my past. Um, and I explained how, what those results were. Um, and, and the disease sort of woke me up, you know, people don’t make a lot of change until the pain is too strong. Right. And unfortunately I had to feel a lot of pain to change and, and, and I begged people now try not to be in that position, whether it be in your health or your marriage or your personal life or your work and, and basically, you know, I’ve gone through this whole area for five years.

That’s disease guys. I did nothing. I, I knew I had an incurable disease and I did not even Google the disease. What I basically listened to my doctors from the Mayo Clinic, I took the medications that have longterm dementia effects, but they work in the short term and I went on my way and then about two years ago, those same doctors told me, you’re going to be on a feeding tube in about five years. And I said, Whoa, I don’t want to do that. And they. And um, by the way, I’m 44 now. And I said, well, I don’t want to be on a feeding tube in my forties. And they said, well, your disease is what it is, take your medicine and we’ll see you in six months. And I just decided I had to live a different life. That changed everything for me. It’s changed the way that I look and build relationships that changed the way I’m transparent about whatever I do.

Um, and it, it really has enhanced my life. It has made my life better. The, the long story short, I decided after that doctors, is that I wanted to find a cure to the disease that has never had a cure before. And it’s a rare disease that you can imagine. There’s no money behind the cure or research. But I said, you know, screw it. I’m going to draw it anyway. And over the last two years, I worked with a bunch of doctors. We’ve assembled a team around me and, uh, come January, I’m going to start at Johns Hopkins, the first ever one man clinical trial where they won’t set in certain stem cells into my esophagus to try to regenerate a, what is basically a debt esophagus. And um, that is, it’s never been done on animals. Never been done with people. It’s the I don’t know what’s going to happen.

It may work. It may not. I don’t know, but you can imagine that I go for it and I live in I. I’m very grateful for the life I have. I’m very grateful for the people that supported me along the way and none of that would’ve happened had I not been diagnosed with the disease and what I’m really passionate about is that we are in such a disruptive moment in history and so many business owners are not taking and you see this in your own coaching business. They are stuck. They don’t know what to do. They don’t know where to go. They know this disruptive economy is happening. They know their business may be disrupted, they’re not changing, and I felt compelled to talk to those people and tell them my story.

I feel like there’s a big separation that’s happening right now. There’s others, a plumber, let’s say who is good at plumbing and back in the day he used to get to the customer by advertising in a magazine or advertising in the yellow pages or just putting up a sign, but now because you know 90 percent of people are marketing or are going online to search for the products and services are looking to buy the plumber is now separated from his customers and I think what’s allowed you to become successful and Dr z and a lot of entrepreneurs who’ve had success over the decades is you have changed with those times and Z. Your optometry clinic when you started out, it was all yellow page ads, right? I mean it was all yellow pages ads and newspaper ads. Every night you throw in a value pack and Florida, but yet see you’ve done well over the last several decades and you have a question for one of fellow, a marketing guru. Mr Phillip Stutts. What’s your next question? I’ve got two questions for you. Actually the same question, but it’s two different categories. What’s your, in your mind, what’s your biggest victory on the political will? Could say the political business side of your life and what’s the biggest victory on the business? Who taking your personal business out of it? A business you’ve coached, what’s the say as much about them as you can, but what were your two biggest victories in those two genres?

Uh, I was the national director for President Bush’s reelection in 2004. So that was a incredible night, especially because the early exit polling had come back. St John Kerry was going to win the election. Um, and so, you know, for a year of my life I did nothing but go around the states all over the country and, and, and, you know, help put together. There was sort of marketing campaigns to get out of the boat. And that was, that was a pretty special moment for me. Becca in 2004 and then on the business side. So one of the things I think we get in politics, and I hope business owners understand this, there’s not much difference between these two worlds. What we, how we look at voters when, when I meet with a candidate, uh, in politics, the first thing I say is what do you believe? And then I’m going to go find out through research with the voters believe in, then I’m going to find out where there’s alignment and that’s how I’m going to put together a marketing campaign for that political candidate.

And in business, you’d be shocked by how many people have come to us businesses and say, uh, well, we, we bought this product. Uh, it was, uh, we got 30 leads for $10,000 and I go, how’d that work out for you? And they go, oh, we didn’t get to this through bad leads. So it didn’t really work for us. And my thing is everything starts with a strategy and everything starts with what your customers feel. And so the wind that I have on business is we worked with a $20 million company who had built their business on a marketing campaign that they guest and the guest for discounts. And they guessed it during the economic downturn in 2008 to 2011. And they built this company very quickly and very big and then all of a sudden they had this complete stop. I mean it was like they screeching hall and they haven’t stopped marketing to discounts for years and they couldn’t figure it out.

And they came to us and they said, well, we spent one point $6 million dollars in the last two years and we’ve actually lost business. And so what we did is the same thing we do in politics. We went out in, in research, we have a partnership with the largest data and analytics, a collection of information and Customer Collection Company and the company. And the more, I mean in the United States. And we went in and we did a complete psycho graphical research project on their customer base. And what we found was that their customers thought discounts were cheap and they didn’t want to buy discounts. That they wanted to buy higher standard. That they wanted a quality product rather than a cheap, cheap perception of product. That they were actually bundling their services. The customers were in the weight. We’ve found in their research that they were bundling their cable, their Internet, and that’s how they looked at discounts because it’s smarter in the tie or standard and that this was a family owned business and they had never told their family story before and so what we ended up doing was completely changing their marketing program because that’s what the customers want, not what they want to talk about, what the customer wants, and we went in and put a put a whole new strategy before we went out and ran a bunch of ads and did a bunch.

I spent a ton of money. We tested a bunch of messages based on that research and then we honed in on the one that was crushing everything and we shoved all our chips on the table and we’ve grown that company $2, million dollars in the last six months. So it is now $22 million dollar company. They had lost one point $6 million in business on more on their marketing. So that has been the most gratifying thing was the principles that we have employed in politics are now totally absolute work in this kind of world and this kind of disruptive economy.

Now on the, on the, on the political side, you said get out the vote. Was Your, was your highlight they’re getting out the vote for President Bush. Have you, do you work on either side of the aisle or do you only stick on one side of the aisle?

Yeah, that’s a good question because I get asked this a lot. I think in a, in it right now, the ethics of our business is you pick a side, it doesn’t mean you pick a side on issues because you can have bipartisan issues, but on the candidate side you go republican or Democrat. But with trump and with a, again, the disruption is happening in politics to trump is a massive disruption and politics and I can definitely see in the future that that model is going to be disrupted and people were going to work for candidates that represent their values and they don’t come. You know, they’re not across party lines. So I think that’s coming for sure. Uh, but right now the ethics of our businesses. Pick a side.

What is one of the most common attributes that you’ve seen or maybe characteristics that crossover between like the successful candidates and successful business owners? Is there like some crossover characteristics you’ve seen from each side?

It is one that is just so obvious, but it is so glaring and it is personal relationships. Everybody in the world right now has a phone in front of their, their head, right? They’ve got their phone, they’re scrolling through their phone. So every marketer comes out and says, well, you got to have a digital marketing strategy. Listen, I own to digital marketing agencies and I’m telling you that’s not the tip of the spear because in politics, the reason our candidates are so successful is they build a personal connection with the voters. And so what I try to get every business owner to do is figure out what these customers care about and build a connection both personally and through your creative. And when you do that, you have explosive results and not many people doing it right now. And it’s crazy, I don’t understand it. Listen, when you’re competing with all of that digital marketing and you know all the ads, all the banners, all the videos, all that people don’t give a damn about your product unless they have a connection with you. So you’ve got to go build the connection first and use your marketing to reinforce that brand and reinforce that conversion because that’s why people will watch a video because they know who you are, not because it just randomly popped up on CNN when you wanted to watch the news video,

you know, you, uh, you, your, your, your new book, your best book, fire them. Now you, you break down seven lies that digital marketers are telling people. And I really liked for you to break a couple of these down here. A line number one ally that you have experienced digital marketers I’m selling to a somewhat clueless consumers, is that you must sign a long term contract and sometimes even fork over a huge signing bonus. Philip, can you, can you break this down?

Yeah. So I talked about this just a little while ago, but I will on top of it, I had a friend of mine, so I interviewed over 100 ceos for this book and you guys know this. Everyone on them came back with the same frustration, a marketing firm and they sold a bunch of things and it didn’t work out. They, we didn’t get any oral lot but they made money but we didn’t make money so we fired them many times. These ceos had gone through two or three marketing agencies in the last three or four years and so I started trying to figure out what are the common things that are most frustrating parts that we would never do in politics but marketers are doing now. And one of them is this longterm contract. And in fact one of the, one of the guys I talked to is a vc guy out of silicon valley and he said, hey, we hired this marketing agency to help all of our startups because we saw how important that was.

And I’m like, oh yeah, that’s really smart. And he said, yeah, they required. We signed a $75,000 signing bonus to work with them and went hold on the marketing agency as a signing bonus. He said, an 18 month contract and I go an 18 month contract. He goes, yeah. I go, well, what happened? He goes, well, after nine months, everything was a complete failure. We had to fire him. I said, what happened to the last nine months? The contract? Well, we had to pay it off and I went, oh my God. That would never happen in politics because like I said, every contract I’ve ever signed, it’s month to month, and so when I introduced that as a marketing agency in my my business marketing agency, when we went to clients and said, you know, you were month to month, either we prove it to you and we’re growing your business or or we’re not around anymore that everyone went, what do you mean that never seen that one before, and I get, why are these businesses taking back control? Why don’t they take control of their own business and be. The marketing agency should make a ton of money. Only if the business makes a ton of money. First,

I don’t want to slam all marketing agencies and Tulsa because that would not be ethical, but I would say all of the, all of the marketing agencies I’ve used, I would like to slam. So I have hired them and there was one for that. I hired, I remember this, the guy says, we’re going to help you with your logo. It was for the DJ business and I said, okay, and unnamed guide so far in the past, and we can talk about it now, Phil, if it’s okay, it’s in the past. He would come in like every two weeks with this new obscure logo. And I would say, well, what is this? And he’s, what it represents is he would talk and that sort of represents the trust between the brides and the growers. And then I’d say, okay, uh, I don’t want to approve that. Can we meet next week to see another revision? And he’d say, well, what we’re gonna do is we’re going to go back and we’re going to talk to the team and brainstorming. Ideation.

Yes.

So long story short, I’m not kidding, my wife could vouch for this. I dropped over 10 grand on a logo. I wasn’t happy with, uh, my first marketing video I ever made for dj connection cost me well over $5,000. Um, in all of these things were terrible. And so the reason why I built my firm make your life epic, you know, years ago, 12 years ago now, was that I just wanted to have a month to month thing where if I wanted some logos and print pieces, great. And if I liked you then I’ll keep using it and I could never find any companies at all that operated. That way I couldn’t find a single one is a DJ company. My first company, Dj Connection Dot Com. Philip, if I came to your Christmas party and I was trying to woo you and try to get your account, this was my pitch.

And Philip, I’m not trying to pitch you because I’m no longer in the business, but I would say though, you might say fill up your company is reputable. You guys are doing great. I’m sure you already have a DJ company. How happy were you with last year’s entertainment on a scale of one to 10, you know, and someone might say a seven or an eight, and I said, okay, I would like to do this year’s party for you. You’re this year’s Christmas party for $1, and you’re like, oh, a dollar. I said, yeah, if you’re happy you can use me again. And for weddings I’d tell people I’ll do your wedding for a dollar and if you’re happy you can pay me the other 500. And that’s how I got my first events because I see you did this. You had to do the same thing with your optometry clinic when you’re in the head crazy deals, logos because you’re trying to get a lifetime buy in from your clients. You want your clients to come back year after year. If you’re not going to have an optometry patient sign a contract saying, I hereby swear to buy glasses from Dr Robert Zoellner. There’s no one else does that. No one else does that. That’s going on with these marketing firms. It’s crazy. I take these, especially these website companies or oh, they’re the fill up website companies, website companies fill up, educate us.

Well yeah. Hey, we build websites do, but I will tell you this, that that probably is a business editors. Most frustrating point website is a resume, right? And it needs to be a dynamic and it needs to have people go, Ooh, I’m very interested in what these you are. You got sit this earlier. Everybody is going, what? Ninety percent of people going on search to figure out what to buy. It’s not always tell, you know, companies like they’re going, they’re searching for what they want, which is what you’re providing, but it is the fact that this, when you’re there is a menu of 10 companies that are competing for that customer’s business. What makes you stand out? That is the whole point and it is not. Everything comes back to building the personal relationship. Everything comes back to making them entertained or for them to say, I want to buy into that.

One of the things that I’ll I’ll give you because we spend a lot of money on the research, the client, any company that leads right now with that, they give a portion of their profits to charity that is rushing for clients right now because if you go in and let’s just take a pest control company and you’re a pest control company, and somebody goes, oh my God, I got bugs in my house and they go Google pest control company in 20 companies come up and you click on one and it said, hey, we give our percentage of our profits to a charity. Then that customer is more likely much. I think I had stats I cannot remember for the life of because they’re not in front of me. By the way. There’s this book called cause written by Jackie Freiberg and it breaks down a Lulu lemon tom shoes.

We’ve had her on the show. There’s so much data that supports what you’re saying. Sorry, back to you. I just want to tell you there’s still the thrive nation. If your website leads with, hey, this is our mission as a company than you, or I mean it’s like 68 percent more likely to convert that customer. So that’s just one freebie that we’ve spent a lot of money to understand, um, and, and how to do it properly. And, and, you know, think about this, there’s going to be a downturn in the economy. Guys, we all agree with this. We’ve gone way too long on this bullet, this bullet economy, right? And so if there is a downturn, what is going to be the difference that makes the difference for customers to choose you? And my thing is that a customer and a downturn, event economy can’t give as much money away to charity, but if there’s a company that they hire that gives money to charity, then that makes them feel good too.

And they’re more willing to hire you. You don’t feel it. There’s a lot of allies that marketing companies tell their customers. I’m gonna. Have you break down a line number four here in just a second, but this is a lie. A chip, a chip without. Without our permission. You. You’ve heard of Watergate? Yeah. Maybe. Sure. Chuck has done and kind of the political theme. Jeff has done marketing gate where he, without their permission, Z has miked other marketing firms and you set it up. So this is one of their tips that they said at one of their most recent pitches to a client. I’m going to cue it up. It’s a little bit out there, but we’ll see if. Phil, if you could break this down. Probably my best tip is tip number eight. Always keep bags of your own poop collected throughout your stay and just have it ready. That’s probably not a good idea.

We had to fire them after that. Okay, so why number four? Philip, your product or service is amazing. So let’s start there. Right? Every business owner is. You guys are business owners. How proud of you of your business. I’m dead serious. I’m not. This isn’t a joke. How proud are you of of what you’ve created, what you dealt? Very proud. Scale of one to 10. I’m a 10. I’m going to love it. Too many times business owners think that way and then they go, well, I just need to tell people how great my product and services because it is great. I created it doesn’t mean the customer wants it or what it. It converts 20 percent of the time, but if you understood what the customer really wanted out of your product, when, if you knew what drove them, if you knew what platforms they went to more than anything else and you could then change that 20 percent conversion rate to 60 percent conversion rate, why wouldn’t you do it?

And every marketer goes in there and just, you know, we see this a lot in politics too, by the way. Oh my gosh, you are one heck of a politician. My God, you could be president one day. So my point is is that I go by what the data says, what the customer says. They’re purchasing decisions, the reasons and the motivations behind why they buy these things. And We build campaigns based on that, not on how great your product and services, by the way, if the customer thinks their product and services great like apple, well then that’s what we’re going to do. But that’s not usually what happens. And I think what, again, people forget in politics, it’s all about the voter. That’s all we care about. What is the boater think? I loved the politician. But what is the voter thing I’ve got to convince the voter? And if that’s your mentality that all you’re thinking about is what does the customer think? And that’s the first thing I go in and talk to businesses about.

Still, you’re a very, very successful guy and obviously if you’ve probably made a few mistakes along the way, um, if you had to go back and give yourself some powerful, some powerful, powerful, powerful old school advice, you can go back and talk to a younger version of yourself and say, younger self, this is me frons. I’m sell 10 years back. You up. What advice would you give, uh, the 10 year younger version of yourself?

Yeah, I don’t think I really became, I don’t, I don’t think I led the right way until my late thirties and I probably would go back and, and try to figure out my own psychology so that I could serve people better, but I have to say this, I don’t know if I’d give that person advice because I’m here where I am because of the mistakes and the idiot idiocracy that I employed in my own personal life in my own business life for so long that eventually I think I came out of this much stronger and better than I could have had avoided those mistakes. Political answer. You should be president of United States of America. Unbelievable. Let’s just start there.

You, uh, you have, uh, been very purposeful about designing your life. How do you spend the first four hours of your typical day there, Phillip?

You know, I’m on the road a lot so every day is different and you know, I had this crazy routine where I, I get up at 4:30 and I do tim and I work out and then I have breakfast with my family and then I’d go to work and I spend the first two hours of work studying and reading every single day because I think that’s the difference that makes the difference in growing a company. But

when I do that I get so crazily focused and so manic and trying maintain that kind of a routine that I neglect sometimes the on people in my life. And so what I’ve tried to learn to do is just to kind of diversify that morning. So some mornings I do that, some mornings I sleep in with my wife, some mornings I just have breakfast, my little girl and take her to school. Other mornings I’m on the road, I would tell you I, everybody has their own routine. I would prefer to get up at 4:30 and do everything I said, but that’s probably not the best thing for me. So I kinda, I spice it up a little bit and change it up.

I want to offer a little editorial. For the listeners out there who are going, he’s preaching against a routine or Philip, could it be said that your default is one of intensity and maniacal obsession over something? Yes. Yeah, I mean it, it can be said that. I mean, you can get that way. I can get that way too where it’s like, you know, if you hone in on a goal, if one of our skills that we can put on blinders and didn’t delay gratification till we get there, but if we’re being honest, if we’re not careful. So you have three kids,

I worked for your family, right?

Right. And I, you know what I’m saying? So again, it’s, I think for anybody out there who’s listening and your default setting is not putting on blinders and your default setting is sleeping until noon when possible and not doing your to do lists, you probably want to have the reverse strategy. We want to know thyself. I think that’s the big idea. Know Thy Self, fill up your book here. Uh, your, your, your, your book here is a, is a fire them now, the name of the book, fire them now, what inspired you to write fire them now and what is this book about? At its core

it is the fact that I had this disease and I stuck my head in the sand and then I kept seeing the economy changed and I kept saying businesses that weren’t innovative and I kept saying the things that we did in, in politics and how we can translate them over to businesses. And then we tried a couple of experiments and had great results and I went, my God, this is incredible. And then I started talking to ceos who said, uh, I’ve had my head in the sand. I know the economy is changing. I don’t know how the marketing world is working anymore. I just hired a digital marketing agency because I don’t know the rules change every five seconds they’ve changed every five minutes. Facebook has one thing one day and all of a sudden there’s, they completely changed the rules on you. And they said, I just hired somebody and then all of a sudden those guys took all our money and we didn’t make anything and I went and I just kept saying this frustration in the marketplace and I just went, man, somebody has to tell the story of how we kind of get it right in politics and political marketing.

And the one thing I will never forget, I was in China with Peter Diamandis and I was sitting on a bus going to a, I think a ten cent the company tencent. And we were, I was sitting next to a fortune 500 CEO. And again, I was interviewing him for the book and he’s telling me the exact story I just told you. And I looked over at him and I’m like, good God man. Just fire them now. And uhm, title if that’s a true story. I really said it to him. And I was like, but that should be the title. And so that’s where it came from.

So you,

uh, you mentioned, you said t m, I believe you were referring to a transcendental meditation. Do you do a Metta time meditation time? Do you do this everyday? Twice a day for 20 minutes. Where are you when you do this? What does this look like? I bought a nice chair and I sit in it and I put my. I usually throw the hat over, put my timer on my staff please. I’m going to meditate, leave me alone. That’s, that’s usually how it happened.

And what are you doing when you meditate? I mean, what does that look like? What? What do you doing?

Can Meditation you just say a mantra for 20 straight minutes and it sounds awful unless you kind of understand it. And then what I realized that you got to set this earlier, like I can’t turn my brain off ever. So it is a chance for me to turn my brain off twice a day and recharge my batteries.

What did you, can you share more? Maybe one of the mantras you’ve said in the past?

Well, no, it’s one mantra. That’s all I ever say. That repeated over and over again and in the world that is kind of a person that ever knows it.

Okay, okay, well I, I, this is what I believe you said and I know that I’m probably wrong, but I’m going to guess and you can see you can’t tell me if I’m actually getting it right here. This is what I think you said. Here we go. Beautiful Man. And people like me. My name is Philip steins. Beautiful Man. People like me. That’s what I think you should be saying. You know what? I feel recharged right now. And you only did it for like five seconds. Do you expose the Philip? Don’t even know what that is. If you drink a lot of fish oil over there,

I’m pouring it down my throat.

Okay. I know Z, I would like to ask, uh, uh, Philip here, I’ve got one final question for Philip Z. I’m sure you do as well. But, so this is my final question for you. For the listeners out there who they listen to our podcast because we really do try to get the WHO’s who on the show. You know, we’ve had pastor Craig Rochelle, pastor of the largest Protestant church in America. We’ve had the best pr guy in the history of America, at least for the Hollywood, the Pr Guy for Michael Jackson, Nike and Prince Michael Levine. We’ve had the former head of Harley Davidson on the show. We’ve had a lot of big names and you are sort of like the leader of the political marketing world. So I give you the floor, my friend. What advice would you give for all the listeners out there? What’s something that you want to share with all of the listeners who are just there taking notes you can share with the thrive nation? Anything you want?

Yeah. I think if you are a business owner or your marketer out there and you’re like, what, how do I take the first step? Or what is my company doing right? What could they improve upon? Um, I will absolutely for three. For your listeners that they go to Phillips Desk Dot com, back slash audit. It’s a free five minute marketing audit. Um, we’ve seen our businesses are the businesses. They’ve taken a grow up to 50 percent just by the recommendations we make. Basically, my team will spend two to three hours over your publicly available digital footprint will make, we’ll go through and figure out what you’re doing right, which you can improve. We’ll put together a

six page report and we’ll do a 30 minute consultation all for free. You don’t have to hire us. But um, that’s uh, that’s basically what we’re able to offer to help businesses that are either stuck because that’s kind of how I am in purpose driven and focused right now. Um, or those that are doing really well, we’ll tell them they’re doing great. And by the way, if they have a marketing agency that didn’t work for them, we’ll tell them what works and what should work and how they can go back and talk to their marketing and you’d see about improvement.

Wow. That’s like a Christmas. It’s like a Christmas present wrapped up. What’s that website again?

It’s a Phillip Stutts Dot Com backslash audit.

Oh, two l’s and Philip numb. I have a brother that’s fellow, but he’s the only one. Alan. Very, very good.

That’s awful. You should get rid of. Okay.

Well, so, so to him now, and then stats has three t’s, Stu tts, right? So Phillip Stutts. Now I’ve got a question for you, and I know this is not a political show, but you

are on the end,

you know stuff, you know, you know, you know stuff he knows like, you know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy. So I’m going to ask you in your humble opinion is I can’t refuse. That offer was free. I can’t refuse. Got To get my

push. Is trump going to win reelection?

I’m looking at a crystal ball right now and I’ll tell you, it says it’s 50 slash 50.

Oh Gosh, I should be our next president. Kabbah God, come on.

Don’t underestimate the guy. Everybody can. Every time they counted an audi comes back. Uh, we’re, I mean, the easy prediction is he’s going to get crushed in and he usually beats with the easy production.

I hope you don’t mind here, but I actually inserted a microphone into your offices today and somebody asked Phil earlier off off the show. They said to show fill up. When you think of Donald Trump, what first comes to your mind, and this is what Philip allegedly said. I like to. They say see abroad to get that booty down a smack on. I don’t know what that means. Sounds a lot like an excerpt from the airplane. I’m old enough to seem them a nice. Okay. Well, Hey Philip, thank you so much for being on the show. We like to end each and every show with a boom, which stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum. Philip, are you prepared to bring them with them? Let’s bring jumper. You Ready? Let’s do this here. You psychologically prepared, physically prepared? No, no, no. Never.

If you are like most humans that I know when you see gas stations and one sells gas for a little bit less and they’re next to each other, you might go for the one that sells gas for less money. It, it, it makes sense. You know, every little bit can help. I don’t really agree with that. I like to spend as much money as I possibly can on fossil fuels or just something I’m into. But here’s what’s weird though. Sometimes we save a few pennies here and there and ignore opportunities to save huge money. I’m talking about life changing money. If you switch today as an example to medicare for your healthcare, it could be a massive savings for you and your family. The typical savings for a family is about $500 a month. I repeat $500 a month. Ah, so. Okay. I have a quick question.

So when you said you could save like $500 a month, I mean, are you talking about actually being able to save $500 a month? Yes, that’s why I said the number. You could actually save $500 a month. Just think about that for a second. What would you do with all that extra money? Thrivers you can be buying a flat screen every single month. That’s 12 flat screens a year. $6,000 per year or 12 flat screens per year. Well, I have been trying to save up for 12 flat screens and this seems to be the most reasonable, prudent way to do it and yes, people love it. They love it because it works. It’s believers who share each other’s health care costs and now with over 400,000 people, a k, eight members of Medicare, again with over 400,000 members, there’s proof it works and it’s growing like crazy. It would be like having a seven foot tall third grader in your family. It’s like growing like a weed. It is. Taking off. Find out how much you could save and why Medicare is so popular. Go to medicare.com, forward slash clay. That’s Medicare. Him, ed. I share.com forward slash clay or call them at eight, four, four to five. Share for more info. That’s eight. Four, four, two, five. Share.