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Uncharted Entrepreneurship - hosted by Brent Peterson out of the Minnesota chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization – brings you daring stories straight from the trailblazing entrepreneurs who are unmapping business frontiers across every industry. Settle in around our virtual campfire as Brent sits down to pick the brains of startup pioneers, visionary founders, and intrepid CEOs whose origin stories - marked by unexpected twists, lessons, and stumbles along unpaved paths - will inspire your own trek in launching a boundary-pushing venture. Trading war stories, strategies, and even warnings, these audacious guests invite fellow founders and future leaders into their confidential circles in a uniquely transparent, wise, and motivational way. So join us off the beaten business trails to light your entrepreneurial fire!
Brent (00:01.046)
Welcome to this episode. Today I have Caleb O'Dowd. Caleb, go ahead, introduce yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life.
Caleb (00:09.629)
Whew, great stuff. Well, thank you for having me, Brent. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I'm Caleb O'Dowd. I have been a professional marketer, direct response marketer for almost 19 years now. A little disturbing for me to be able to say such a thing, but I first got my start in marketing at the age of 21, and I had the opportunity to move.
from my hometown in Ireland all the way to another universe in Miami Beach. And I had the opportunity to live with and work with one of the greatest direct response marketers and advertisers who ever lived, a man by the name of Gary Halbert. And I had the opportunity to learn from him personally. I worked shoulder to shoulder with him for three years. During that time, he got me into business.
I went from never knowing a single thing about business to growing a business that generated over a million dollars our first year in business which was in great, you know, greatly due to Gary and in a very, very small way due to my brother and I. We were business partners but we took that knowledge. We went on to do really great things.
had several different businesses, both online and offline. We have used direct response marketing to generate over $150 million in sales for the companies that we have owned and operated. We've done big things in direct mail, which most people are unaware of. We've done big things. We were the largest direct response newspaper advertisers in America for several years running. We were literally carpet bombing.
the country with newspaper ads on a daily basis for several years running. We got into the internet, became, we had some of the top offers on the CPA networks. Not sure if anyone would understand that, but they were large volume, massive volume affiliate marketing campaigns. We were doing three to five million a month in sales there.
Caleb (02:35.185)
in that business. We've since gone into webinars and product launches and VSL campaigns, high volume affiliate marketing. I have invented a couple of business models along the way and here I am today. We teach marketing, we teach advertising, we teach customer acquisition to internet business owners, we teach monetization strategies.
And that's it. Don't know if that's been a great introduction there. It seems terribly self-branded, but that's the story.
Brent (03:09.577)
Now that's super.
How about passions? What about anything you do other than work?
Caleb (03:17.701)
Yeah, I guess my main passion, I'm a dad, I have a four year old son, I'm a husband, and I'm into investing, I'm into investing in luxury watches, particularly, and into meditation and spirituality, I guess. Those would be my primary passions as of now in life. Yeah, yeah.
Brent (03:44.427)
That's awesome, thank you. All right, so before we get going on direct marketing or direct response marketing, I like that. You have graciously volunteered to tell me, or I'll tell you a joke, and then you're gonna just say, should that joke be free, or do you think we should charge for it?
Caleb (04:06.963)
Okay.
Brent (04:08.318)
I did manage to find a little Irish joke, and you'll see why it's little in a minute. I might tell you two jokes just because you're Irish, but let's just go with it. We'll see how it rolls here. We can always edit this whole thing out if it's just a disaster, right? So anyways, here we go. Ready? Why can't you borrow money from a leprechaun?
Caleb (04:20.037)
Okay.
Caleb (04:31.241)
Okay. Yeah.
Caleb (04:37.137)
I don't know. Oh, okay. I would say we should give that one away for free.
Brent (04:37.186)
they're always a little short.
Brent (04:47.438)
Okay. All right, one more. What do you call a fake Irish stone? A sham rock. See sham-rock, yeah. All right. We're gonna stop while you're ahead. All right, Caleb, I...
Caleb (04:53.081)
I don't know. You could charge for that one. Charge for that one. Yeah, if this just skips ahead, you know that the jokes didn't make it.
Brent (05:09.31)
Right, yeah, I have a little button on YouTube to bounce ahead, skip jokes, like the intros for Netflix. All right, so, direct response marketing, tell me a little bit about that, it sounds a little bit like a SWAT team or like a medical team that's coming and just gonna drop in with a helicopter and save you.
Caleb (05:13.53)
All right, let's go.
Caleb (05:34.925)
Yeah, it's, I mean, it's, so what is direct response marketing and advertising? It is when you ask, you create an advertisement or you create an advertising campaign or a marketing strategy that essentially asks the customer to buy now. You're asking them to respond immediately.
directly to your advertising. As opposed to what a lot of companies do in the form of branding, which is they'll put out some funny advertisement. The whole idea is to keep the brand in your mind so that when it comes time for you to be in the store, you purchase their product.
So direct response is where the rubber meets the road. It's what separates the men from the boys because to get a direct response, to create an advertisement that actually gets that person, gets a prospect to take out their credit card and buy immediately requires an elite level understanding of marketing, advertising, strategic planning, human psychology and all.
whole slew of other skills in order to succeed consistently and repeatedly and reliably. So it is in the whole genre of marketing, it is the highest level of mastery in the entire genre of advertising and marketing. It's an elite level skill.
Brent (07:27.242)
So would you say that Iron Brew has done the opposite of that by just implanting that brand in your head?
Caleb (07:37.317)
Um, I am not too familiar with iron brew, you know, so I would
Brent (07:42.666)
Alright, sorry. Guinness, how about Guinness? Brilliant.
Caleb (07:47.613)
Guinness, yeah. I mean, you know, these guys have been at it for a very long time. I, you know, like the, you know, these guys, it's not that branding doesn't work, it's that it's a very different job. It's a very different form of marketing and advertising. And that stuff isn't really tracked. So you never really know what is actually working for you or not. The amount of...
branding ads that are allowed to exist, even though they have no impact on sales whatsoever, greatly eclipses the quantity of branding ads that actually are effective. With direct response, you know instantaneously because it's measured. You know when I spend a dollar, how much does that...
investment give me back in return and you know that within a remarkably short period of time. Whereas with things like branding you don't know that at all. There are ways to kind of track that but they're very loose, they're very general, they're not in any way accurate or scientific. There was a great book written on my genre of marketing here called Scientific Advertising.
And that's really what it is that we do. We do scientific advertising. We do things that are measured, tracked. We do a lot of testing. We do a lot of optimizing. We figure out things and, you know, we come up with ideas to test and, you know, those test results either succeed or fail. If they fail, we learn something. And if they succeed, then we scale it. And it's a very scientific approach to marketing and advertising.
Whereas branding is not. By the way, this is not, I'm not trying to sell anybody on direct response versus branding, and I'm not trying to put down branding. They're just two opposite ends of the spectrum. They're just two different things, and both have their place.
Brent (10:02.03)
Can you equate, from a web standpoint, can you equate it to, branding would be more like SEO and trying to just build that organic look or search for your business and direct response is gonna be more like PPC, where you're just putting an ad out there and you're expecting somebody to click immediately.
Caleb (10:25.357)
SEO can be very much direct response. You know, there's a lot of SEO pages that are designed to get somebody to purchase right then and there. So I wouldn't be able to draw a comparison between PPC versus SEO because both of them can be used to achieve a branding objective versus a direct response advertising objective. The best kind of
generality description of the two is that branding is designed to essentially keep a company's presence in your mind, whereas direct response is designed to get a sale instantly. So both have their place, but the objectives are very different. The objectives are very different and the strategic approach too.
those objectives is radically different. So if you guys ever remember the famous Budweiser ads, like Budweiser, the frog ads, yeah, that went viral. That went viral. Everyone was sharing that, everyone was talking about that. That whole thing was a very, very good example of a branding ad. It created something clever and fun.
that went viral and got Budweiser in front of everyone's mind and you know Like their brand was implanted in your mind via that fun entertaining You know experience direct response is the complete opposite of that direct responses is not That the goal is to literally get your prospect to take out their credit card and buy now or buy within them
very, very short period of time. So that would be, I guess, my best approach to, or my best attempt rather to describe the difference between branding and direct response. But certainly SEO and PPC can be their tools and they can be used to accomplish multiple objectives.
Brent (12:44.846)
Tell me a little bit about building an ad. If we were to build a killer offer that converts, what would be the components in that to build that out?
Caleb (12:58.821)
I think that there are so many things that need to be factored in there and yet I have found that I've spent, excuse me, 19 years working on mastering the art of creating effective offers because really one of the biggest reasons why your direct response ads will succeed or fail is because of the offer.
It's critical, it's essential. So probably the biggest breakthrough that I myself have made in creating offers is a macro understanding of what really you need to do to create a killer offer because there's a lot of, like it breaks down into a number of different kind of jobs thereafter. But usually it starts like when I teach this stuff, I always tell my clients,
the difference between how everybody kind of, the difference between what people think a good offer is and the reality of what a good offer is. What a lot of marketers think a good offer is, is an offer that gives people a lot of value at a discount. So, you know, like if you get, you know, $3,000 worth of bonuses, but...
you know, you get it all for 97 bucks. That's usually what a lot of people think a great offer is. It is a high value, you know, offer that's given away at a steeply discounted rate. But that's a very, very limited and very inaccurate and quite frankly, a very inappropriate belief of what a truly, truly killer, amazing offer should do. So...
A lot of the times the strategic approach to creating offers that people have is they want to succeed. And they want to succeed, therefore they attempt to succeed by putting lots of things into their offers. You know, if you buy my stuff, I'm going to give you this. I'm going to also give you that. I'm going to give you the other. The problem with that is that it's when you're trying to succeed, you're very disconnected from the reality of what's going on with your prospect.
Caleb (15:24.849)
because your prospect doesn't care about your attempt to sell them something. The only thing your prospect really cares about is whether this solution is exactly a fit for their needs. So the big shift in thinking that I have discovered that has led to some enormous breakthroughs for myself and my clients is don't try and succeed, and by succeeding I mean don't try and load up your offers with lots of value.
There's nothing wrong with that, but that's the cherry on top. It's not the big kahuna reason why people buy. What you wanna do is you wanna come at it from the perspective of creating an offer that is designed not to fail. And an offer that's designed to not fail factors in all of the reasons why someone would say no. So if you come at it from the perspective of forget trying to create an offer, come at it from the perspective of
Why would somebody not buy what I have to sell? List out all of the reasons why someone would not buy. Is there three reasons? Is there 10 reasons? Is there 20 reasons? Is there just one reason? Why would somebody say no thanks, not for me? And then what you do is once you've identified all of the reasons why someone would say no, then your job is to create solutions.
that convincingly, compellingly, and completely overcome each one of those reasons why someone would say no. And when you create solutions to each one of the reasons why someone would say no, then magically what you end up with is an offer that is a truly outstanding offer that is designed to not fail. And
Therefore, everything that you put into your offer, when you approach it from this perspective, is designed to overcome all of the reasons why someone would say no. So if you remove all of the reasons why someone would not buy what it is that you have to offer, what is the only other opportunity left on the table? To buy. So what I teach people is, don't try and create a killer offer. Don't try and succeed in doing that. Throw it out the window.
Caleb (17:50.585)
Start from the perspective of why would somebody not buy what it is that I have to offer? So I'll give you an example. We teach people a variety of different customer acquisition strategies. We also work closely with coaches a lot and coaches usually, you know, they're looking to acquire clients. So we teach them methods.
for acquiring clients using cold traffic, i.e. in this instance, in this example, Facebook traffic. And what we set down and discovered was that a lot of coaches don't know how to set up a Facebook ad account. A lot of coaches don't know how to create winning ads. A lot of coaches don't know how to...
run ad campaigns and optimize their ad campaigns. And there's a lot of other things to it there as well. And normally when competitors of mine are advertising to coaches, they come up with these offers like, hey, I'll teach you how to acquire customers. And the prospect in the prospect's head, the coach is saying, yeah, but I don't know how to use Facebook.
But because the advertiser, the marketer is so disconnected, he's trying to succeed, he'll say, well, I'm going to give you my book. And the book is called How I Went From Sleeping on My Mom's Couch to Being a Millionaire, whatever. And the coach is like, yeah, but I still don't understand. I still don't know how to use Facebook ads. And then the...
Next bonus will be, yeah, well, you know, I'm also gonna let you in on like my Facebook community where you can talk to other people. And on the other end of the spectrum, the coach is like, yeah, but you don't understand, like, I don't know how to use Facebook ads. This all sounds very interesting, but I'm not gonna buy it because I don't use, I don't know how to use Facebook ads. So this is the disconnection that happens when you're trying to succeed. Whereas when you come at it from the perspective that we come at it from, which is...
Caleb (19:57.629)
find out all of the reasons why someone would say no and then give solutions to that, the opposite happens. So in our case, when a coach comes to us and says, hey, listen, this sounds fantastic, but I don't know how to create, I don't know how to like set up a Facebook ad account, we say, hey, listen, don't worry about it. We'll set up your Facebook ad account for you so you don't have to. And now that objection is removed from the table. And now the person says, oh, okay, cool, great, but I don't know how to create any Facebook ads. And we say,
No problem, we'll create all your ads for you. And the person is like, wow, that's amazing. Okay, that sounds fabulous. The only other thing is, I really don't know how to create like any ad campaigns. I don't know how to test ads, I don't know how to optimize ads, I don't know how to target the best prospects for my business. And we say, hey, no worries. Like, we'll do that for you. We'll create your ad campaigns, we'll test your ad campaigns, we'll optimize your ad campaigns, and we'll get you the best cost per beat.
We'll get you the highest quality prospects at the lowest possible cost. And systematically, we go through the journey of removing each and every last objection that people have to the sale. And as a result, what we end up with is a super offer. We call them mafia offers after the Don Carleone.
uh... you know godfather movie a mafia offers an offer that you cannot refuse you know it we come out from the perspective of maximum service that gives the prospect the maximum likelihood of success because our goal is not put our wants needs desires out into the market place our goal is to
do everything humanly possible to get our client or our prospect from where they are to where they wanna be. So to create this mafia offer, to create a killer offer, to create a superpower offer, that is what you need to do. You need to come at it from the perspective of what are all the reasons why someone would say no and then you need to create compelling, convincing and completely like.
Caleb (22:18.405)
effective solutions so that there's no wiggle room, there's no buts, you know. So if someone says hey I don't know how to create ads and we say okay no worries we'll create them for you, there's no buts in that, you know. Whereas if we say hey yeah like we'll give you like a whole bunch of templates then people can say yeah but I might not be able to use them. We don't allow any buts. Our solutions to objections are complete.
so that there's no wiggle room. You can't get out of it. If you have a problem with ads, we'll write the ads for you. Now that's done, that objection is over, it's complete. There's no if, ands, or buts about it. That's done, and the sale gets made. So this has been the biggest breakthrough in terms of our strategic approach to creating winning offers. And what also happens when you command the art and act.
creating killer offers from this perspective, is you end up being the dominating force in your niche because no one has an offer like this. Everybody else is bringing lame horses to the race. We're bringing elite level masterfully designed offers to the marketplace that the market just, the prospects just aren't getting from any other marketer. So we're going from zero to enormous levels of success.
in pretty quick, you know, at a pretty quick speed because our offers are designed to not get a no. We don't come at it from the perspective of just loading value into an offer. It doesn't, people don't want that. It's not that that's not important. Everybody loves a good deal but it's a cherry on top. If you think that's the entire strategy you're missing the whole nature of the beast there. Brent, have I have I've overspoken?
Brent (24:17.623)
For these type of offers, does it matter the cost of the offer? I have to believe that as it gets more expensive, the time frame for closing and the need for conversation increases and the likelihood of closing decreases as the cost of it gets more expensive.
Caleb (24:36.209)
Well, this is just an example of an offer that we use for like targeting coaches. So, you know, that type of offer. Yeah, because there's a lot of done for you services there. You know, like a lot of the coaches that we serve, they sell 10 to 15 to $20,000 coaching packages. So, you know, if we can offer them a service that is the equivalent of one sale.
not only does, like if we charge a coach $10,000 for this, that's a very acceptable price point for that coach because that could be the equivalent of one sale for him or her. But that gives us the freedom to put all of these services in there. But if we're selling something like, you name it, you know, a gadget, a piece of technology.
health product of some description. The same strategy applies. It's just that there wouldn't be that category of solutions in place. You know, like if you're selling a health product, like perhaps a health supplement or I know somebody that's selling an infrared sauna, an in-home infrared sauna.
then there wouldn't be any done for you services associated with that. You would just find out what are all of the reasons why someone would say no to purchasing an infrared sauna at home. And then you just systematically create solutions for that. And that would be a different category of solutions that would not necessarily be done for you. So it's more the concept rather than an instruction to do done for you services. It could be, you know, regardless of what you're selling.
The question is just why would someone say no one? What are the solutions that I need to put in place to make sure that no one says?
Brent (26:42.362)
So a practical way of looking at it, or an example of somebody that does well at this in a maybe not so great way, is the timeshare salesperson where you have to sit through a 90 minute meeting, and they have an objection, they have a response to everything you say of why you shouldn't buy this timeshare.
Caleb (27:05.99)
Fabulous.
Brent (27:06.098)
Is that kind of the idea that we're going down here, but you're giving this in terms of a rather, well I suppose you still need to have those selling points or responses to objections in your ad, right? But you have it more targeted in an ad, is that correct?
Caleb (27:28.753)
Yeah, well there's the sales message and then there's the offer. So there's different types of objections. So I guess somebody might say, hey, I'm not interested in timeshare at all. That might be an objection that's not necessarily associated with the offer. So the discussion that we had is about the offer. It's about why wouldn't you buy a particular product?
but an objection might be something associated with the big idea. It might be associated with working with your company. So there's different types of objections. I'm sure that like those guys, I know nothing about TimeShare by the way, but I know that that's a very successful industry. And if those guys have it dialed in to that degree where.
you know, they have masterfully put together objections, or rebuttals to objections, then they're killing it. You know? It's not like if this concept is, well, you should take it into everything that you do. Like, one of the reasons why we've been so successful.
with launching businesses in so many different niches and industries is because we come at things from that perspective. We never try and succeed. If you try and succeed, you're just coming up with harebrained ideas like, wow, I wonder, will this work? Let's give it a shot. And you end up taking risks, you end up taking chances, you end up cutting corners. And what I learned pretty abruptly in my early career is that the failure rate in business is extraordinarily high.
The game is not about succeeding. The game is about trying not to fail. And there's an enormously different strategic approach to the task of succeeding in business when you come at it from that perspective. So this is not just a tactic for creating an offer. This is an entire strategic approach to succeeding in business. You've got to understand the amount of reasons why you will fail.
Caleb (29:34.289)
are quite extensive. There's quite a laundry list. But if you come at it from the perspective of, hey, I just want to succeed, as I said, you're going to cut corners, you're going to come up with harebrained ideas, you're going to take unnecessary risks, you're not going to calculate the risks that you're taking. You're just going to jump in and give it a good old shot there. But that doesn't work. It's just like strategically.
systematically and statistically that just doesn't work. But if you come at it from the perspective of, okay, how can this go wrong for me? How can I fail? And you identify all of those reasons, then the task of eliminating reasons why you would fail is the fastest, surest, highest likelihood strategy of you being successful. It is a strategic approach to success.
You have a very low success rate when you try and succeed, but you have a significantly higher success rate when you try to avoid failing. It's a completely different strategy. And we've had very, very high success rates avoiding failure at all costs. It sounds funny, but it's very hard.
Brent (30:56.622)
Talk a little bit about that, because I think the typical approach for a marketing company that would come to you would say something like, hey, we're going to succeed in selling more widgets. We're going to increase the amount of widgets that we're going to sell.
Brent (31:13.206)
It doesn't sound like a good approach if you're a marketing agency to a customer selling the widgets, right? I can understand the approach from the customer that they would like to sell me as many as possible. So let's look at how to not fail in selling those. But tell us how would you approach then a client in that wording? Because it doesn't, it doesn't, it wouldn't always resonate with the user who's selling the widgets.
Caleb (31:39.941)
Well, they wouldn't be coming to me if they were succeeding to the extent that they were happy with. So clearly, their existing approach is not working. Usually, businesses that hire consultants and hire coaches, they're broken businesses, something ain't working, and they're at risk of going out of business.
which means that essentially there's no security in what they're doing. There's no reliability. They cannot trust the existing business model that they have at play to not only grow their sales, but to safely and securely maintain their position in the marketplace. So they're at risk.
So the very first thing that we do with businesses is find out why are they at risk? What is the hole in the bucket that is causing like severe leakages in the business? And that if those things don't get fixed, the business is doomed. So a lot of the times, money solves almost every problem in business.
and it's the lack of money that causes most problems in business. Sure there's relationship issues, there's employee issues or whatever, but if we're talking just about the reasons why businesses succeed versus fail, you know statistically speaking it's we're not generating enough customers, we're not making enough money. That's pretty much the big kahuna. There isn't enough profit.
at least in the companies that I serve anyway. So the very first thing that we wanna do with companies is find out like where the risk is. And a lot of the times what we find is that the company is just not making enough money. They don't have a system in place that is generating enough profits to allow that company to acquire more customers and then monetize those customers because at the end of the day,
Caleb (34:04.089)
any business really boils down to two primary marketing activities and that is acquisition and monetization. So a business must acquire and it must monetize. And those two activities are intricately linked to one another and yet uniquely different to one another. And what we always find is that...
almost every company is far too focused on acquisition and not on monetization. The secret to succeeding and scaling direct response businesses has pretty much been sent in stone by the masters of this trade long, long ago, long before the internet ever came out. And the real secret to success boils down to a single statement that is pretty much
like set in stone in this industry, and that is, whoever can afford to pay the most to acquire a customer wins. And very few people understand the true depth and magnitude and power of that statement. Because if you know how to spend more to acquire a customer than any and all of your competitors, then you will essentially
be able to acquire more customers than any and all of your competitors. The question becomes, how do you acquire, how do you spend more to acquire customers than all of your competitors at a profit? And we get into this then discussion of monetization. So what we do for businesses is essentially we find out first and foremost,
is the problem that you're not making enough money. Yeah, the problem is almost always that you're not making enough money. The reason why you're not making enough money is because you're not monetizing the customers and prospects that you have to the extent of what is possible. So we have what we call a multi-channel marketing monetization machine. Lots of ends in that whole thing. But what we use is we create a strategic approach that...
Caleb (36:28.049)
is a 90-day strategy in its infancy where we use a variety of different multi-channel marketing strategies that would include offline and online marketing channels, things like direct mail, SMS, ringless voicemail, email, retargeting, and so forth, to monetize.
customers and prospects over a 90 day period. Because a lot of the times when someone acquires a customer, that's it. They don't do anymore, they're looking to make a profit on the first sale. We don't do that. We look to make 10 sales, 10, we look to make 10 attempts over a 90 day period in an enormously strategic way to sell more stuff to each new customer and prospect that comes through our door. Once we have that 90 day,
monetization machine in place, we now have a lot of excess profit in the business. We now have a lot of excess revenue floating around that we didn't have in, you know, beforehand. And now, if a customer costs us $100, if we can spend $100 to get, say for example, 100 sales a day, okay? So it costs us $100 per sale.
and we cannot go past generating 100 sales a day because we've got this monetization machine in place, this 90 day machine that's generating so much more money from us now. We can take a little bit of that money that this machine is generating and now instead of spending $100 to acquire a hundred dollars per customer to acquire a hundred customers per day, we now can take.
chunk we can take perhaps another hundred dollars from an extra $300 that we make per customer and now we can afford to spend $200 to acquire a customer when everybody else is still at $100. So perhaps now in this theoretical example we are now because we're able to spend $200 perhaps we can now spend we can now generate 200 sales.
Caleb (38:50.077)
per day and effectively because of this strategy, we've now doubled the size of the business. But we haven't just doubled the size of the business there. We haven't just doubled revenue. We haven't just doubled sales. We have done a lot of things because when you take in two times more customers, that's two times more customers that are now going into this monetization machine. So oftentimes that doubling of front end sales equates to
you know, a two to three X or more increase in the total profit that's generated on the backend. But more so than that, we're after bringing stability, we're after bringing dependability, we're after bringing reliability into the business that was never there before. And that's just phase one. Phase two then is to essentially duplicate that 90-day monetization machine by adding another 90 days on it.
So now that there's a completely automated six month monetization machine in place, now we're after 4Xing, 5Xing, 6Xing the profitability of the business. So now what we're able to do is take another $100 from that increase in monetization on the back end, and now we're able to spend $300 to acquire a customer. And now, perhaps in this theoretical example, now we're generating 300 customers.
a day. So now we're after three xing the front end volume of this company but we're really after about 10 xing the profit of the whole company. Now please don't be too attentive to my numbers in this theoretical example. It's not, these numbers are not accurate. What I'm trying to convey here is a strategy, a strategic approach to growing businesses, to scaling businesses, to dominating niches.
to essentially becoming the number one player in the game because if you truly understand what it takes to acquire customers on the front end and you truly understand what it takes to monetize customers on the back end, then you're playing the game in a very intelligent, very strategic manner that will essentially put your business streets ahead of almost everybody else in the game because no one is doing that.
Caleb (41:13.925)
If you add up the totality of marketers in the game that's using direct response, the totality of business owners using direct response marketing, and then you compare it to the quantity of people that are playing the game at that level of sophistication, you're talking about a microscopic level of competition of people who are doing that. Very few guys are doing that. And as a result, most business owners are struggling. But the people who do this type of thing, they're thriving. They're thriving.
They have the most valuable metric in the whole game. It's called LTV. It's called lifetime value. It means that every time you acquire a customer, let's say it costs you 100 bucks to acquire a customer, you have a six month runway in place, and hopefully a 12 month runway, where you know that every time you acquire a $100 customer, that customer is worth $500 to you over the course of 12 months.
So now you were able to make enormously strategic decisions. You're able to say, I think I'll take an extra 100 bucks out of that, or 150 bucks, or perhaps 200 bucks out of that. And I'll use that to double or triple the quantity of front end guys that I take, which again, as I said, when those clients and leads filter through that process, your profits are just a magnitude bigger than what they were.
every one of your competitors profits would be. Brent have I...
Brent (42:45.886)
No, that's awesome. Thank you. I can definitely hear the passion that you have for this. Caleb, we have a few minutes left here. If you had some advice to give somebody that's say they're running an e-commerce business, how would you say they start by doing, how would you tell them to start out this? What kind of advice would you give them?
Caleb (43:12.746)
I would say you need to have a... If you wanna survive and thrive and have a business that operates independently of you in an automated manner.
then you need to be playing this game because it's all about the monetization. The biggest hole in almost every online business and pretty much offline business, the biggest gap is monetization. Everybody is so focused on, there's a saying that I love, too busy making money to start a real business. And I think a lot of business owners get into that place. They're so focused on acquisition.
that they get stuck on the hamster wheel of acquiring customers and they're trying to make a profit on the acquisition. And as a result, they never end up with a real business. They're too busy making money to start a real business. So you really need to understand the strategy at play. You really need to understand that the real money comes from what you do with a new customer once that customer comes through your door, as well as a prospect. So, you know, I think it's really about
you know, what we spoke about here today, I think there's so much to add. It's just there's such an enormous answer to that question. But I think, you know, to try and encapsulate the topics that we spoke about here today, I think the best thing that you can do is to first of all, begin by creating this mafia offer, this no fail offer, because that will explode your front end sales. And that will really, really take what you do to another level. It'll bring so many more sales into your business.
and then what that will do is it will relieve some of the pressure that you're under to continuously acquire but it'll only do that for a period of time but you need to use that period of time wisely to get this monetization strategy in place but you know really it's more of a warning that I think I have and that is that the people that don't do that they're they either in best-case scenario they end up being lifelong strugglers in business
Caleb (45:28.977)
and worst case scenario they just get weeded out of business completely. We're at a kind of a junction in modern internet marketing I feel where there's very little middle class, very few middle class business owners getting to success anymore. The cost of traffic is rising, conversions are declining and the amount of competition is skyrocketing. So you're either...
You're either good or you're failing. You're either winning big or you're losing. And the way to win big is to play the game that I just described to you guys there.
Brent (46:10.114)
That's awesome. Caleb, as I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you'd like. What would you like to plug today?
Caleb (46:20.202)
Yeah, you know, if anybody is interested in, you know,
any of the stuff that they heard here today. I have a website, it's called multichannelmarketing.com. M-U-L-T-I, channel, C-H-A-N-N-E-L, and then marketing. So multichannelmarketing.com. And you can go there, you can find out what I do, how I do it. I have a book that is coming out, probably in the next 60 days,
The ultimate multi-channel marketing funnel and you know everything I described in a great degree of more things that I haven't spoken about are going to be in that book and of course I'm biased but I feel confident that the information in that book is quite transformational for you know a lot of business owners so if anybody would like to join my
Caleb (47:25.813)
sign up there you'll be added to everything that I'm up to and that would be my shameless plug please go to multichannelmarketing.com
Brent (47:36.234)
That's awesome. Yeah, that's a great URL, by the way. And I'll make sure I put all these on the show notes. Caleb O'Dowd, it's been such a pleasure talking to you today. So many interesting topics. Thank you.
Caleb (47:40.937)
Thank you, Brent.
Caleb (47:45.277)
Thank you, Brian. Thank you so much for having me. I greatly appreciate it.