Ep536: Allan Dib – Make Your 1-Page Marketing Plan

Andrew Stotz 00:00
All right. Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning in our community. We know that to win in investing, you must take risks, but to win big, you have got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. To reduce risk in your life, go to my worst investment ever.com today and take the risk reduction assessment I created from the lessons I've learned from more than 500 guests, fellow risk takers, this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guest, Alan Dib. Alan, are you ready to join the mission?

Allan Dib 00:43
I am ready. I'm ready to go.

Andrew Stotz 00:47
Yeah, well, I am super excited to have you on the show. And I want to introduce you to the audience. Alan DIB is a serial entrepreneur, rebellious marketer. And number one best selling author. His book, the one page marketing plan has been an international best seller for the past four years now and helps businesses all over the world develop and improve their marketing capabilities using the one page marketing plan framework. Alan, take a minute and tell us what's that unique value that you are bringing to this darn world.

Allan Dib 01:22
I'm really proud of being able to be someone who takes complex business and marketing topics and really simplifies them for people who need that in their businesses and in their lives. So that's really what I feel like I was put on earth to do is really help business owners just understand complex concepts in an easy to understand why.

Andrew Stotz 01:49
It's interesting, because I say almost the exact same thing, but about finance. Nice. And I have a course called finance made ridiculously simple. But when I look at marketing, it seems so hard. Does, you know and funny that people always say, oh, finance is hard. But as a finance guy, marketing is very hard. In fact, nowadays, you're not even competing just against your competitor, you're competing against just a distracting device. Basically, you're a distraction. And I just, I want to ask first question is, when did you first get the idea to write this book? Had you already been kind of working with the notes over the years with clients? Or had you just came to you and said, I'm going to take six months and write this or what was the origin of coming up with the idea of writing the book.

Allan Dib 02:41
So the origin was, I started my business career and life as a dead broke it geek, I was not in marketing, I had no idea about business or sales, any of those things, I was good at technical stuff to do with it. And computers. And I really struggled to get clients in the door. And that took me on a decade long journey to learn marketing. Anyway, fast forward. A few years, I sold that business and did very well out of it another business and grew up very fast and sold that as well. And I started working in a consulting capacity with a lot of clients. And I wanted them to put together a marketing plan, right? Because if we don't have a plan, we kind of plan to fail, right? So I was working with clients on their marketing. And I wanted them to put together a marketing plan. And I got a lot of pushback, it was like too difficult, don't know where to start. hire consultants don't know what to do. All that sort of stuff. So I've put together a framework where in literally a single page, people could easily create a sophisticated marketing plan for their business so that they had clarity on what to do. Because here's the big problem. A lot of people do random acts of marketing will try. We'll do it a pay per click campaign, we'll do whatever. And none of those things are bad things. But we're just kind of throwing spaghetti against the wall. Right? So we're trying to random things. And so, you know, there's a good reason why anyone where the stakes are high follows a plan, you know, your pilot follows a flight plan, your doctor follows a medical treatment plan, the military follows a military operations plan. And so to me, in business, there's nothing more high stakes than figuring out how are we going to get clients and revenue in the door. And if you don't have a plan that you're going to get random results, you're going to do random stuff, you're going to get random results, but nothing. I don't think I'm saying anything controversial there. So basically, I wanted my clients to put together a plan. Like I said, I've got a lot of pushback. And so I created the one page marketing plan framework, worked incredibly well for my clients. And I thought, you know, really got to get this out to the wider, wider community and hence the reason I wrote the book.

Andrew Stotz 04:55
How long did it take you from the time that you thought I want to make this into a book now and It being pressing the button on, you know it being published.

Allan Dib 05:04
The funny thing is, it was in my mind for maybe five years to actually get it done. It took me less than two months, I locked myself basically in a room and just wrote for hours and hours of every day. So the procrastination was about five, five years, the actual getting it done was about two months.

Andrew Stotz 05:27
That's how life goes. Yeah, exactly the things we fear the things we know. Yeah. Well, before we get into the question, since we've got you on the line, what I'd like to do is maybe I could, I'm gonna grab the book off my bookshelf, I'm, you know, such a keen reader. And I've enjoyed the book so much. So I want to just grab the book number one, and I want to just read a few passages for the listeners just to the ones that stood out to me. And then maybe you could give your thoughts on one or two of those or something like that. So one second. So here's the book, nice one page marketing plan. And the first thing that came up, and this was on page 10, I just loved this. It says, invariably, when someone makes a mess of something, it often becomes clear in the aftermath that they didn't have a plan. Exactly. That just like, oh, yeah, just really didn't have, you know, in some ways, I've been thinking about, like politics, and what's going on, and all of these different, you know, agendas that have been pushed different ways. And I realize, when they start falling apart, you realize they never really had a plan. You know, government, Germany is an interesting case where they really had a passion to go green. But they didn't really think it through to the extent that it wasn't accelerating as fast as what they thought. And then they were kind of left without a plan. So that was one thing. I just, I'll just read off a couple of others. And then, but this one was just going through some of the great headlines, and you know, you saying, you know, you'll use headlines extensively in your marketing when writing email, subject lines, sales letterhead, you know, headlines, web page titles. And it's like, you know, here's a sample of some of the best ones out there. And it just got me thinking like, I could think also, and I explained to you before we went on that, you know, I tried to think of things that are original and all that. But you know, reality is, is that there's so much we can learn from but here's, here's some like Who else wants a screen star figure, amazing secret discovered by one legged golfer adds 50 yards to your drives, eliminate hooks and slices, and can slash up to 10 strokes from your game almost over nine. Have you ever seen a grown man cry and open letter to every overweight person in Portland? That was just highlighting the importance of this? You know, first of all, the message I got is, you know, you got to grab people's attention number one. But the other part that you are highlighting, I think is it, you know, look at what other people are doing, you know, you don't have to do it in a vacuum. Here's another one, I just got a couple more. And then maybe we'll just come back and talk about the things that stand out for you. But this I thought was very interesting. And I've written different books. And I haven't really put them to good use. As I realized after reading this books, people are conditioned to almost never throw books out. Big bonus points. If you wrote a book, books are an amazing positioning tool and catapult you from salesperson to educator, an expert authority instantly. I'm doing this right now with this book. Smart ass. That's good. I liked it. And then here's a very powerful one for listeners out there. If you have a business, you started up a business, it's going pretty well. You feel excited, like maybe you're going to sell it one day. And Alan says it's a sad situation, when a business owner goes to sell their business and finds out after putting in many years of hard work, that their business is worthless, it's not so much the business itself is worse, it's that they are the business and without them, there is no real business to sell. In this case. In cases like this, they can't sell it for any reasonable sum beyond the value. And it's just the idea of building in that consistency, building in the valid valuable asset, scalability, that type of thing. And then this one, this one, I really would love to hear your thoughts on this one. And that is a general rule of thumb is about 10% of your customers would pay you 10 times more and 1% of your customers would pay you 100 times more. Having only a single option leaves an enormous amount of money on the table. There's many other quotes that I've highlighted but I think we stop there and just out of those what are some things that you would help us with for the listeners that have never read the book, but also for me that you know, you know the has read the book

Allan Dib 10:00
So one of the key things I'll say, and I see this all the time in the marketplace where people feel like having a good product or a good service, is what's going to get them the attention that they want or deserve. And so it's very natural as human beings to have this desire for meritocracy, right, we want the best person to get the best result, we want the best product to work best in the marketplace. And unfortunately, our world is not a meritocracy, like if it was, I think firefighters, nurses, librarians, they would be the best paid people in our society, right? Because they deserve you know, this, but they don't. And what I've come to realize in life is we don't get what we deserve, we get what we negotiate. And so a lot of your success in business is going to come from you marketing yourself, right? So one of the things early on that kind of really just kept me up at night. And I just was trying to figure it out. I'm like, there can be two people in the same marketplace selling the same product or service yet one does really, really well, the other one struggled or plateaus at a mediocre level. And to me the question of what is the difference? You know, what's the difference between this person selling apples and that person selling apples? And of course, the answer is marketing. Right? And a lot of people neglect that they kind of come back to meritocracy type thinking. And it ends up being wishful thinking, unfortunately, you know, like I said, I wish that firefighters and nurses were the best paid people in our society. But that's just not the case. So we need in the absence of a meritocracy, we need to figure out how do we get our share of attention and clients and conversions and sales. And that's really what marketing is all about.

Andrew Stotz 11:57
It's interesting, you know, I use a similar, I had two clients, one that they're both in pretty good industries, and they had good management teams, good CEOs, but one was doing poorly. And one was doing really well on a financial basis. And I was trying to figure out, like, I remember leaving and thinking to myself, like, what is the difference here, if I individually talk to each manager, the marketing manager was smart, and very experienced, sales, production, you know, everything. And my conclusion was, it was the CEOs ability to coordinate the activities of the management team, like if they a management teams, naturally, everybody's going to go in their own direction. So being able to coordinate them and coordinate that effort, kind of what was what I see, but maybe I need to think also a little bit more about the marketing. That's

Allan Dib 12:46
called herding cats.

Andrew Stotz 12:50
But I mean, I could see that one of those two CEOs, he kind of berated people, and then he kind of talked down to them. And when you look at I just as an as an as a, you know, a mentor. On the financial side, as I observe this, I just could see that there was something about the way the high level staff that were on the management team just didn't, didn't appreciate that. And it just made it harder for him to get them to work in a concentrated way. So I think, for the listeners out there, get the book, and you'll find that it's gotten a lot of good value, I'll have the links in the show notes. And you'll find that you can start to construct your marketing plan. And I've been working on trying to improve mine and I'm inspired by talking to you so I really appreciate you taking the time and now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thinking it will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to an end. Tell us your story.

Allan Dib 13:57
So I think my worst investment as I said, I started my business career as a dead broke it geek and I was trying to figure out the game of marketing, you know, why were my inferior competitors doing better than I was right? And the answer was of course marketing and so I being a bit slow on the uptake I finally figured that out and then I tried to figure it all out myself and it cost me a decade in terms of time which is very expensive. I mean, you take it all I mean I spent hundreds and 1000s of dollars on trial and error on testing on all of those sorts of things. And that's expensive but even more expensive as a decade of my life in my prime when I when I could have shortcut that process to maybe a year or six months or something like that had I got the right mentors had I got the right coaching had I got the right people to to walk me through so that was an extremely expensive mistake. So it cost me that decade in time. And so I came to understand something that a mentor once told me, he said, pay once cry once, right? So say get the right people. And a lot of the time, when we've got problems in life, or in business or wherever, we often try to figure out the how, when a better question would be the who, right? Who can fix this? Who can, who can come in and do this, rather than trying to figure out the how, because unless that's your area of expertise, and often it's not, you're going to spend a long time on trial and error on trying to figure it out on doing it the stupid, dumb, expensive way, when you can now bring in an expert, and just help you in a very, very short amount of time. And so that's something that I do now, whenever I have a business problem, personal problem, whatever, I will bring in the expert that will help me shortcut that process, because time is so expensive.

Andrew Stotz 15:59
And why didn't you do it? In the old days? Was it us? Like, I can figure this out? It's not that complicated. Or I can do this quickly? Or I What was it that kind of?

Allan Dib 16:08
Well, I'm kind of from an engineering background. And as an engineer, you put your head to the grindstone and you've got a problem, you just work harder at it and longer at it and try to figure it out. Like I'm a smart guy, I can figure stuff out, right? And so I think that's the kind of mindset and it's, it's a mindset I've seen in with many people who are academically very smart, right? So in school were taught to have all the answers, right? So if you're, if you come to a test, you need to have all the right answers. If you come, if you're not really good at math, and you bring in your friend who's really great at math, that's called cheating in school, and didn't get thrown out or expelled or whatever for that. But in business, that's a very smart thing to do that you're bad at math, and you bring in the math expert, and he solves a problem for it. That's a very smart way of doing it in a business context. So often, what we're taught academically is completely opposite to what works in the real world. And so I kind of had those academic smarts where I'm like, I'm a smart guy, I can work this out, I'll test and trial it and things like that. And I'll work harder and longer at it. But it's very expensive from a time perspective.

Andrew Stotz 17:21
So how would you describe the lessons that you learn if you would, just to summarize?

Allan Dib 17:26
So what I do now, and what's a much better approach, and I do that with my clients who are coaching clients is like, we see a problem. And we figured out that who not the how often, I mean, so you need to know, you need to know the basics, right? You need to know why you're doing something. But very often we figure out, okay, great, we need to solve this problem. This is the person who's going to come in and help you shortcut that process. So how can we take it from us having to learn it, figure it out, trial and error, all of that sort of stuff to hate, these are the exact steps that you need to take to get that result? And we know, and we've got that process. So using experts in using expertise, just worth their weight in gold I use all the time now in my life. And in my business.

Andrew Stotz 18:20
Maybe I'll summarize a couple of things that I'm thinking about. First of all, I thought, you know, one of the big problems is okay, so yeah, if we say it's who the question is, who, how do we find that person, and I would just wrote down who not you. So maybe we start with the first point is that you have to come to the recognition that you're not going to be the one that's going to solve this. And that's a hard recognition, number one, because you want to think that you can do it, that's the first thing. The second thing I was thinking about, it's the same thing with financial advice, you know, if you don't know much about the stock market, and you know, that you need to invest for your retirement, you know, to go out and try to figure it out, you know, it could be a decade of losses and adjust, it could be a lot of pain. You know, at the end, you could learn it, you know, maybe and maybe not, you know, in a sense, you came out the other end of that process, you know, as an expert in marketing, it was just that it was very, you know, a long arduous process. So then, so you do have this small number of people that just say I'm going to do this myself fine, but for the majority of people, the next challenge they face is how do I find the right person, you know, and how do I find you know, that that that's a problem number one problem number two is that you get someone in particularly with marketing and I've seen this is that get someone in and you know, they're pretty good. They may not be the best, but let's say I can't afford the best right now for it. So I get some of this pretty good, but, you know, they just can't come up with the voice of my product. It's just really, they just don't, they don't come up with that and I just think ah, I gotta write this content, I gotta write this copy again. And I'm just like, these are all the things that are going in my mind when I think about it. Maybe you could add to that a little bit.

Allan Dib 20:10
Yeah, they're really good points. And there's something that we need to deal with all the time. So, in terms of people not doing it as well as you do, that's always going to be the case. But my rule of thumb is, if someone can do it 80%, as well as I would have done it, I'll let it go. If, if, because that gives me leverage. But if it's less than 80%, then there's a coaching opportunity. And so in terms of writing in your own voice, there are solutions to that. So for example, in our team, we generate a lot of content. So we generate emails, we generate blog posts, PR releases, all sorts of things. And I have a team of copywriters now like, it's not just me history. In fact, I do very little writing these days. I've got a team of copywriters. And so how do we make sure that they're writing in my voice in the way that I'm doing it. And so we've come up with a process called a copywriting style guide. So like, just like a graphic designer will come up with a style guide, say, Okay, we use these colors, we use these logos, we use these fonts. And this is how we do it. So that's what a great graphic design style guide looks like. Well, we do the exact same with words. So what words do we use? What sentences do we use? How do I open an email? How do I typically structure things? What sentence structure do we use? How do we write in terms of addressing the audience and things like that? So we have a copywriting style guide. And that definitely helps our copywriters write in my voice and write the way that I would expect. So with certain language, certain phrases, certain sentences, and that exact exact process that we took that directly from the graphic design industry where they have visual and logos designed style guides.

Andrew Stotz 22:03
Actually, it made me think also, maybe I'm being mistaken, I'm thinking that it needs to be in my voice. And maybe it needs to be in the voice of the customer, too. So yeah, you get me thinking, Now I'm going to combine I use the as two separate questions, but I'm going to combine these into one. And I want to think about a young man or a woman out there who has a business, it's growing, you know, they're doing okay, but they don't have a big budget. So they can't afford the big service. And then let's think of another person who has got to the point where it's like, I really need to allocate some serious budget to marketing now. So for both of these two, two people, and I want to think about your company, your resources, what you have, that's free, what you have that's paid that type of thing. So that because I mean, my God, if we can somehow piggyback on what you learn and what you're teaching. That would be great. So the question really is, what one action would you recommend our listeners take, and what would be the product or services that you provide that they should go out for person that's just got a low budget, and a person that says I'm ready to spend because I now see the value.

Allan Dib 23:11
Okay. So if you've got no budget or very little budget, one thing that you can do immediately is create a plan. And the book is called The One page marketing plan, you can literally download the one page marketing plan Canvas from my website for free. And you can start creating a marketing plan for your business. Because remember, early on, we said, we don't want to do random acts of marketing. Why get random results? Right? We want to have a plan to approach right. So as you the quote, you read from my book, you know, when someone messes something up, usually they haven't got a plan, or maybe they haven't followed a plan, right? So that's number one, we want to create a plan, because that's the map that's going to help you through this territory. Now, if someone's thinking, hey, this sounds really good. I want to kind of go to the next level is you want to avoid the mistake that I made, which is trying to DIY trying to figure it all out on your own. I often tell people, the most expensive furniture in the world is IKEA, right? Because you've got to drive there. You spend an hour trying to get all the stuff through the checkout, then you drag it all home, then you've got to spend a half a day assembling it, you cut your hands up, it's missing a screw, you've got to go down to get a replacement screw. It's just the most

Andrew Stotz 24:30
expensive and it's being charged at my hourly rate.

Allan Dib 24:33
Exactly, exactly. And then and then the result is not really as good as if I had bought a decent piece of furniture. Right? So it's the most expensive furniture in the world. So my point is, if you want some help, there are resources available. So in my team, we offer a group program we offer individual programs and The whole point of those programs is to help you implement your marketing plan. And key. The three key parts of that are your tools, your assets and your processes. So tools are things like your CRM system, your content management system, and all of that. You may have all that, or done or you may not. But that's a key, then there's assets. So you're in the financial services space, he understands, well, income comes from assets, right? If you own a house, you can rent that out for rental income, if you've got stocks, you can derive dividend income. And the exact same thing is true of business and marketing. If you have good marketing assets, that's what's gonna get you new leads new prospects and new clients in the door. And so an example in my business of a marketing asset is my book, right? So you reached out to me to be on my podcast, why? Because I've got an asset out there in the marketplace that you felt was valuable. Now, in the absence of having any assets in your business. That's where you're going to have to do like cold calling, outreach, all of those sorts of things. And so if I had to wake up every morning and think, Okay, I need to make 20 cold calls, I would hate my life, right? So. So in the absence of having assets, that's where you've got to do all of this grinding this hard work, this outreach, this follow up all of this sort of stuff. So one of the key things that we help businesses do is develop their marketing assets in their business. So it's not necessarily a book for different businesses, it could be some kind of lead magnet could be a video series could be something where someone wants to engage with you at a higher level, it could be a quiz could be some kind of tool, whatever it is. And then the final key is the processes. So the way that we win at the game of marketing are the things that we do daily, weekly, monthly, it's not the big brand campaign, it's not the big new website relaunch or whatever, there's nothing wrong with those things. But they're not the things that are going to get you traction over the long term, it's the things that you do daily, weekly, monthly, so creating those processes. And then doing those over time. It's kind of like compound interest, right? So you don't win at investing in month one or month two, right, you win over 1015 20 years of compound interest of compound returns and things like that. So the exact same thing is true of marketing, we think about the longer game and creating those processes that are going to get you that result. So if you're open to something like that, I'm more than happy to have that discussion with you.

Andrew Stotz 27:24
Fantastic, well, listeners there you've gotten a great guideline, you know, from free, just go to success wise.com and download that you can go on, obviously, Amazon and other places to just get the book and you know, absorb it at a pretty low price. And then you've got a levels of service. And I really am interested in myself, I think I've come to a turning point. It could have been my worst investment ever. Holy crap. I thought I thought something else was but this could have been it. So Alright, so last question, what is your number one goal for the next 12 months.

Allan Dib 28:00
My number one goal is to get my next book out. And second to that is to launch my own podcast, I'm yet to launch my own podcast. So I'm really looking forward to doing that. So they're my top two goals for the next 12 months.

Andrew Stotz 28:16
Very exciting. And as soon as we get more on that, I'll ask you to send me the links, and I'll put it in the show notes so that everybody can follow that. Well listeners, there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. If you haven't yet taken the risk reduction assessment, I challenge you to go to my worst investment ever.com Right now, and start building wealth the easy way by reducing risk. As we conclude, Alan, I want to thank you again for joining our mission. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Allan Dib 28:57
My parting words are get better at marketing because the best marketer wins every time.

Andrew Stotz 29:04
Straight to the heart, ladies and gentlemen, and that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. This is your words podcast host Andrew Stotz saying thank you for joining our mission. And I'll see you on the upside.