Mr G, Author at Frank Giovinazzi

Sometimes there’s a perfectly logical reason to do things the hard way

Today is a great day. I went over to Staples with printed copies of MANIPULATION and How to Create Million Dollar Products. I wanted to have them spiral bound as print book samples.

They are 120 pages and 250 pages respectively. Both started life as audio products.

In each case I worked from written notes and outlines, then just got in front of the microphone and said what I had to say.

They are both available at the website as digital courses.

But I wanted to turn them into books. So I took the MP4s and had them transcribed using an online service. Total cost about $325.

Modern digital transcription is pretty good. It captures all the words and once I had all the files transferred I had a rough draft of each book.

At that point I could have spent another $500 or so, maybe $750, and had an editor clean up the text. Then I would have had the physical books I wanted and life would be grand.

However.

I chose the hard route.

I went through each file, approximately 200, and hand-edited each one, often listening against the audio file. Some of the words were garbled, not captured correctly or the syntax was backwards. A lot of it was punctuation and formatting.

It was painful. I did not like doing it. It seemed like it was going to take forever, which lasted about 3 weeks.

But I decided to hit myself in the face on this one for a good reason. Listening to the recordings while reading the transcription and cleaning it up, all contributed to helping me get the information deeper into my bones.

Both products are legit. If you go through the Million Dollar Products program, you will understand the formula and be able to spin one out of your imagination. MANIPULATION will change the way you think about marketing forever.

Of course I know the material, I spoke and wrote the words. Point here is that going through rich material, even stuff you know benefits you. For each of those products I recommend going through them at least 3 times.

This applies to anything you “know.” I do situps every day. They are boring and painful. They help me keep a 30-inch waist. When I catch myself being bored, I go deeper into the exercise. Concentrate on the single repetition I am doing, maybe add a little nuance to the effort. I am getting better at situps everyday.

In both cases, for my books and my situps, you probably would not be able to tell anything different about me from day to day. But it changes the way I feel, about my product and myself and I know that it comes across.

Sometimes the hard way is the smart way.

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A quick lesson in stacking emotional triggers

By Mr G

No matter what you’re selling, people buy for a range of emotional triggers. Even when you and I buy the same thing, such as a new pair of shoes, we might be motivated one month by a desire to look good (for status), while the next month we might be thinking we want to conform in a bid for normalcy.

This is why we have to present multiple emotional triggers in all our marketing – not just to cater to one person’s shifting moods, but to deal with the reality that you are trying to entice multiple people who all have different emotional triggers to make the decision to purchase the same exact thing.

My example is country club membership. And specifically the one our family belongs to. We have a social membership which is good for the restaurant and the pool. We don’t play golf.

Now even the introduction of social memberships is a relatively new phenomenon in the world of country club marketing. It used to be you joined for the golf or the tennis or both and the dining was part of the package.

Well, country clubs are funded by paying members. Someone figured out there was a market for people who either didn’t want the sports function, or couldn’t afford. Presto, they invented a new tier of membership, the social.

It makes sense because the restaurant is there and they are paying the staff. In the old days, the golfers were drinkers and the restaurants were a drag on revenue because they didn’t sell enough food to justify their expense.

But social membership is not free. I think it’s $5k to join and $3k a year.

Now in our family we have different emotional triggers for this purchase.

Julie joined as a sense of accomplishment for her hard work and success. So basically, status, or accomplishment or reward.

I go there because it’s not Applebee’s. For me it’s exclusion. I don’t have to, don’t want to deal with drunks, tattoos or shady parking lots. I don’t even care about the insider status aspect, I just like the fact that it’s NOT Applebees. Food’s about the same, by the way.

Recently an acquaintance of ours joined the same club at the same membership tier. And this person proceeded to make a Facebook/Instagram production of every trip, every meal she gets at the club. She has clearly joined for the emotional trigger of showing off, or superiority. And we can’t stand it, just think it is completely opposite the idea of belonging.

But she doesn’t. And that’s her emotional trigger.

Now I happen to know the marketing director down there. And I know she has her hands full with the members, who are basically just customers, many of whom are entitled and demanding.

So she has to make sure, with every marketing message, that she gets across not exactly competing, but different emotional triggers that include but are not limited to: reward, exclusion, superiority, community, normalcy, family, value and so on.

And she has to do that not only because of our small sample size of three different people and their emotional triggers but taking into account the hundreds of people she needs to bring in the door and maintain as members.

My best advice is to make a list of all the emotional triggers your customers might possibly have. There is a good chance that in order to make the sale you might have to hit one customer with several, but there is a perfect chance that you are going to be talking to different people who each have their own emotional triggers for considering your product.

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Friendly reminder to check your ratio

By Mr G

Just like you can’t eat all day and expect to avoid Type 2 diabetes, the ratio of our activities to preferred results is something we have to monitor.

I am glad you’re reading this 8-page newsletter. It’s designed to give you information and advice to help you make money. It’s also meant to be a brief touchpoint, after which you get back to the business of your business.

Which is not to be endlessly buying books and programs and listening to podcasts about the business you wished was doing better.

How much work are you actually doing? And how much of that is actual work, vice admin functions that allow you to say to yourself, at least I’m doing something.

No.

I hope you have defined what is the actual work of your business. A rational and short list is: serving customers and doing marketing to get more customers.

As a bonus you can add, developing more products to get more money out of existing customers.

This is where the bulk of your ratio lies. The short list.

For me it is writing and marketing.

For Julie it is running the school and marketing.

For Tim Cook of Apple, it is selling iPhones, developing new products and marketing.

The other stuff is important. You have to study marketing, you have to read what’s going on, you should dip your toe into things like good podcasts and email lists.

My best-case scenario for you is that this magazine, as well as my books, fall into the small part of the ratio and that you go back to the actual work of your business excited to take their money and then find new ways to take their money.

Keep an eye on your ratio and you’ll be fine.

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Empty storefronts – doom or opportunity?

By Mr G

I was driving down the road the other day. The lack of traffic was still eerie after months of Covid-induced restrictions.

You can’t miss the shocking number of empty storefronts – especially the ones that used to house business – unless you’re trying to avoid dealing with reality.

With all the apocalyptic news coverage you might expect my reaction to be negative and full of fright.

But I experienced a sense of peace back of an odd sensation.

And let me tell you, it’s gonna’ be alright.

Businesses are going to come roaring back. The sun is going to shine and we, as a whole, will experience a moment of happiness and gratitude for it all.

The sensation I experienced was that of a burgeoning, and desperate, need for people to get back to living.

And for us, living means business.

I had an appreciation in that few moments, of how much people need to transact commerce.

Not just the store owners and entrepreneurs, but the people.

They need us just as much as we need them.

They need to walk into stores and say hello. They need to buy things they don’t need maybe, or get something fixed or dream about next summer, when they’re going to be grilling.

In that moment, I knew, without a shadow in the sky, that business is a vital function of human society. It’s how we get to know each other, it’s how we feel useful, it’s how we feel alive.

The spending of money is a proxy for the human need to exchange energy with one another. To confirm our suspicions, to bolster our beliefs, to give us meaning and to contribute, either as proprietors or customers, to the feeling that life is an ongoing process in which we each play a vital role.

It was a good feeling, not just for me as a business owner, but as a human being.

(But seriously folks, if you’re considering renting retail space, holy cow is it gonna’ be cheap!)

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Have you found “your blue patch of ground”?

By Mr G

There are very few new businesses in the world. Those that look new are in the realm of automation – using software to do things faster and more efficiently, and often at much larger scale.

So yes, we have new tools that have replaced notebooks and index cards. Or printing presses and TV studios. But we are all in the business of reaching people with our product and selling it to them.

Once we understand this, it does help to study example of those that came before us. Go back 100 years or a 1,000 and it’s, have I got a deal for you!

So the problem many of us come up against is feeling like we are copying those that came before us. We feel that way because many times we are still selling a hamburger, for which I will gladly pay you Tuesday.

But our goal remains – to find our blue patch of ground.

I blurted this phrase out when I finished the MANIPULATION book. That is my study of emotional triggers that make people buy. Yes, I am certain it has been covered before. At the same time, it felt like I had moved into a new space occupied only by me. And it was a great feeling!

Likewise, my wife has spent this year expanding her business form a solo practitioner into a full-fledged school, with faculty and multiple programs. She started in life as a second-generation music teacher. But somehow she got a vision of how to move it into her own blue patch of ground. It took work, and experimentation and a lot of noodling to get there for her. It also required investment that wasn’t always easy.

But now her thing has a heartbeat. It is it’s own thing, and exists on its own real estate. And the marketplace is responding.

Finding your own blue patch of ground takes more effort than using a slightly goofy phrase. If you are doing something and ever get even the slightest feeling that you are a fuzzy Xerox copy, I would say that is the time to get excited.

That means you have likely mastered the motions of the form, and if you’re not bored, you are feeling the itch to go big. To do something a little different, to re-position your offering so that it has more value to your customers and remains interesting to you.

And so I will end this newsletter by violating something I said just a few pages ago. It will take some time and it will take the discipline of thinking. You will want to iterate your current offer, or maybe you have a new idea you want to work on. You might want to go to the archives of the Internet and search the history of your industry – what has been tried and failed and what has been done but forgotten? What is the customer looking for, that they can’t describe but will know it when they see it?

Finding a blue patch of ground is an exciting moment. It might come to you in the shower or behind the wheel.

I don’t know what your blue patch of ground looks like. But I know that it will feel real, like a living thing with a heartbeat – and that it wants to run!

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