Impact Innovators
From Paramedic to Marketing Guru: Mike’s Journey of Empathy and Innovation
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Ready to transform your marketing strategy with insights from an unexpected journey? Join us as we sit down with best-selling author and marketing expert Mike, who shares his remarkable transition from paramedic to marketing guru. Discover how watching an episode of Baywatch led him to a career-saving lives, only to pivot again to saving businesses with his innovative marketing techniques. From playing street hockey in Hamilton to advancing his paramedic training in the States, Mike’s narrative is a testament to the power of bold decisions and adaptability.
In this episode, Mike reveals his secret to effective marketing: empathy and education. Learn why simply offering discounts isn’t enough and how understanding and addressing customer pain points can build lasting relationships. Get ready to challenge the status quo as Mike exposes the pitfalls of overpromising in marketing and shares strategies for capturing hearts and convincing minds. Drawing on historical examples like Claude Hopkins' success with Schlitz Brewery, Mike teaches us how even overlooked practices can set your business apart.
But it’s not all business—Mike’s stories about rescuing dogs and building a cliff-side cabin show the importance of balancing passion projects with practical necessities. Navigate the entrepreneurial roller coaster as Mike recounts his high-risk, high-reward ventures, like selling properties to buy an abandoned sawmill with no prior research. Listen in for actionable ideas on aligning marketing funnels with the right audience, backed by relatable anecdotes and real-world examples. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned marketer, this episode is packed with insights to elevate your game.
Send us a text message. Got a question about the show or topic we discussed?
Ready to transform your marketing strategy with insights from an unexpected journey? Join us as we sit down with best-selling author and marketing expert Mike, who shares his remarkable transition from paramedic to marketing guru. Discover how watching an episode of Baywatch led him to a career-saving lives, only to pivot again to saving businesses with his innovative marketing techniques. From playing street hockey in Hamilton to advancing his paramedic training in the States, Mike’s narrative is a testament to the power of bold decisions and adaptability.
In this episode, Mike reveals his secret to effective marketing: empathy and education. Learn why simply offering discounts isn’t enough and how understanding and addressing customer pain points can build lasting relationships. Get ready to challenge the status quo as Mike exposes the pitfalls of overpromising in marketing and shares strategies for capturing hearts and convincing minds. Drawing on historical examples like Claude Hopkins' success with Schlitz Brewery, Mike teaches us how even overlooked practices can set your business apart.
But it’s not all business—Mike’s stories about rescuing dogs and building a cliff-side cabin show the importance of balancing passion projects with practical necessities. Navigate the entrepreneurial roller coaster as Mike recounts his high-risk, high-reward ventures, like selling properties to buy an abandoned sawmill with no prior research. Listen in for actionable ideas on aligning marketing funnels with the right audience, backed by relatable anecdotes and real-world examples. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned marketer, this episode is packed with insights to elevate your game.
And we're go time. Everybody, welcome to the podcast. This is the Impact Innovators podcast, where we talk to founders about the stories that they have that's worth sharing. It's a podcast with real stories, real founders, and we come together to inspire you with real, actionable ideas. Mike is a marketing guy who uses all of his skills to help you scale up your business and grow it, and he's also a best selling author on Amazon, which we're going to get into in a little bit. So, mike, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, shane. So I think we're going to start off with just tell us a little bit about as a kid, did you grow up dreaming about being the marketing medic guy? I did. I had no goals.
Speaker 2:growing up, I was just living day by day playing street hockey with my buddies and living the life in.
Speaker 1:Hamilton, the life in Hamilton. Oh, I had a great group of friends.
Speaker 2:It was me and Randy and Tim and then Darren, and Darren had an older brother named Sean and Sean had his group of friends. My group of friends just always played sports against Sean's group of friends. In the winter we'd play hockey against each other, In the summer we'd play baseball and football against each other and yeah, it was just a great life just hanging out with my buds.
Speaker 1:Nice, that's the way it used to be, anyway. So what did you dream about doing? What was?
Speaker 2:your dream. I always liked the outdoors, like in high school. I was part of the outdoor ed program there and we went camping winter camping and that's just something I wanted to do. So in the later years of high school, my dream was to be a wolf biologist.
Speaker 1:Yes, interesting, and so why wolf biologists specifically?
Speaker 2:oh, because I liked wolves okay, yeah, good so it wasn't really the best career choice all right.
Speaker 1:So somehow, along the way, you came from being a canadian boy playing hockey in the streets with your buddies and became a medic, an emergency medic on a helicopter. How did you go through all of this and then eventually become the marketing medic, and what exactly does marketing medic mean?
Speaker 2:there's actually a cool story for me how I became a medic. So I was going to the university of Guelph studying wildlife biology. I just finished my microbiology exam and, if anybody's taken microbiology, you just go from microscope to microscope and you look at a red dot and you have to answer like what stage of pubescence that dot is in. And after that exam I'm like I hate this. I hate this so much. Sounds like a lot of fun, oh yeah, so I I was living in Guelph, but I went home to my parents' place for the weekend. They weren't around, so I got the house to myself and I was just going to sit downstairs and watch TV. And what was on the TV was Baywatch, with the Hoff, with Pamela Anderson running on a beach. You're dating yourself. Yeah, I watched this pilot episode of Baywatch.
Speaker 2:I'm like lifeguard, yes, cause I was a lifeguard at the time working in a pool. I'm like I want to be a lifeguard, but I'm in Canada and we don't have oceans and beaches. Actually, we do have Pamela Anderson in Canada, but we don't have the other stuff. Right? Yeah, she went to Hollywood and so I said, okay, realistically, I don't want to be a swimming pool lifeguard in a building. I want to be like a beach lifeguard, but that's not going to happen in Canada. So what is similar to that I was like like an ambulance person is like a lifeguard. I wonder what's involved with that.
Speaker 2:So the next day I went to the library, I went to the career center and I found a bunch of colleges that were offering the program, and on Monday I called Niagara college and I said hey, I want to join your program. And the receptionist, who answered, said oh, I'm sorry, but applications were due like six weeks ago. We're having our last interview day tomorrow, so maybe next round. You know what? Why don't you just come tomorrow and you can fill out the application then and go through the process? And so I was in.
Speaker 2:I just finished my third year of biology in university and so the testing that we had for ambulance college we had to do a biology test which was basically identifying how the knee was different than the elbow. It was the most basic of biology. And then we had to do a one mile run test, and I was a triathlete at the time, so I completely crushed everybody in both the academics and the fitness. And then, when it came time for the interview. I had three years of life experience, which most of the other candidates didn't have because they were applying right out of high school. So I basically got accepted into the program and within a 48 hour period, I decided not to be a wildlife biologist but to be a paramedic instead. I made a complete 180 degree career change on a whim, and that's how I became a medic to start.
Speaker 1:Very cool. And you were not just a medic, but you were a special kind of medic, weren't you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and my first job was in Hamilton and they had a pilot program for true paramedics ambulance attendants for just glorified taxi drivers so you could put oxygen on people, we could set a splint and put them on the stretcher and drive them to the hospital. But Hamilton had a pilot program for true paramedics that started IVs and gave drugs and intubated and did all this cool stuff. So I said, you know what? I'm going to apply to a bunch of paramedic programs in the United States, which I did. And they said you can do that if you want, but we're not going to recognize your qualifications if you ever try to come back. And so I applied to Northern California and Washington and Colorado and I got accepted into the Colorado Swedish Medical Center program and did my true paramedic training there. And then I got recruited from there by the Copper Mountain Fire Department to be their medical officer. And so I went right out of school to be a firefighter paramedic at Copper Mountain, which is a ski resort.
Speaker 2:After a few years I just was missing the woods of Canada. I was missing Canada. So I decided to come home and while I was gone, paramedics exploded in Ontario. They started training people and everything I somehow found my way into Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto. I met a woman there and she was overseeing a brand new helicopter program that was launching in Ontario. Because of my relationship with her, I ended up getting hired as the chief paramedic for Canadian Helicopters to launch four helicopter bases across the province. I opened bases in London, ottawa, kenora and Moosonee. Once those four bases were opened, I managed the Ottawa base Sounds like some pretty exciting stuff.
Speaker 2:Sadly, the memories are more the bad ones. It's been a few years and, yeah, I have a little bit of PTSD going on. It's more like the ones that you couldn't save that stick with you more than the ones you did save. Actually, one of my best memories is it was a nothing call. I don't even know what was wrong with the woman, but what I remember is getting a card in the mail at the base afterwards, like with the written thank you for helping her, because that never happened.
Speaker 2:Yeah, really, it was just cool in that one instance and maybe this is probably where the empathy comes in it was really cool to be recognized, and again it wasn't. I took her to the hospital and I was just nice to her, and so that meant a lot to me.
Speaker 1:Very cool, so hospital and I was just nice to her and so that meant a lot to me. Very cool. So tell us a little story. What is it about going through that process that has led you to where you are now as the marketing medic?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think one of the things that set me apart from a lot of the other medics was I strongly believe in the relationship you have with the people that you're serving. So one of my best examples for that I was working with the Englewood Fire Department and we responded to a call of a child with some sort of injury. We didn't know what it was and so it was. In the evening we go to the house, we knock on the door, nobody answers and we open the door and the father yells come in, we're in the kitchen. When we get in the kitchen we find a father with this nine-year-old girl, and they were putting venison deer meat through a meat grinder oh, I don't want to know that yeah, you know what happened here.
Speaker 2:So he'd been doing this with his daughter for years and they just got a new machine and it was all great until it isn't right. So what happened was the phone rang and this is how we've all had experiences like this. As he turned in the phone, she stuck her arm in the meat grinder. What a meat grinder does is it grabs the meat and pulls in. He was able to unplug the machine and stop it in time, but her arm was in this meat grinder. So, as a paramedic, we're trained exactly what to do. We assess the scene for any dangers. The meat grinder is not going to hurt us. The father's not going to hurt us. Then we assess the patient for her level of consciousness for LOA. She knew we were there, everything was good on that front. Then we assess her ABCs, her airway, breathing, circulation, right, and then that was all good. But then what we do is we would start an IV, administer morphine for the pain, put on the stretcher, take her to the hospital. That is what we do by the book, right?
Speaker 2:Standard operating procedure. The thing the damage that had been done to her hand was done. There, damage that had been done to her hand was done. There was nothing we could do to change it, nothing anybody could do to change what had been done. So I could have followed the SOPs by the book and got to the hospital as soon as possible, or I could take time to build a rapport with her.
Speaker 2:Because can you imagine like we're firefighters, like I'm 6'2", my partners are all over 6 feet tall. We are big, burly, manly, menly men right coming in and attacking this little girl. So she's afraid because her arms in this machine and she's afraid because she's got these three big guys on her probably smart, right. So I started by just building a rapport with her and, yeah, just telling her dad jokes and just getting her mind off her. I actually sometimes with kids I would get another needle and I would jab myself with the needle first and say, yeah, I felt that there's a prick, but it doesn't hurt that bad. So I showed her that and then I slowly started the IV for her. And what was so cool? I remember we had to get her into the surgery and her dad had to go into surgery as well, because her dad had to dismantle the machine. The surgeons didn't know how to do that, and then, once the machine was off her arm, the surgeons didn't know how to do that.
Speaker 2:And then, once the machine was off arm, the surgeons would have to go into work to control whatever bleeding they would. Yeah, but by the time we got to the hospital she wasn't screaming anymore, she wasn't crying anymore, and she was actually telling me stories about her dog and the like, the games that she'd play with her dog before she'd go to school in the morning.
Speaker 1:I love that, and so.
Speaker 2:So most people would not have done what you did there where you helped her. You basically gave her empathy and helped talk her through the situation to calm her down. Yeah, because the way the meat grinder works is it grinds, it doesn't really cut, so she wasn't bleeding anymore. Had she been actively bleeding, then life is more important than you gotta go by the, but she wasn't bleeding and you know what.
Speaker 2:Uh, with the shock or whatever, like the pain wasn't really that bad either, and we've proved that by the fact that she wasn't crying by the time we got to the hospital, like she was traumatized. It was a bad situation, but a big part of it was in her head right, and so by getting into her head with her and helping her deal with it we had one of the first things we did was we put a towel over the arm and over it so she couldn't see it anymore. But yeah, that's just one of my biggest and best stories of how empathy served the patient. I think more so within my medical training.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting. So you mentioned too about just understanding the level of awareness which is, I think, probably the foundation of how to be empathetic to somebody and understand their situation, which, as you mentioned, it's really key in the marketing world. So what do you think were the specific skills that you ported over to working with your clients to help them scale their business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Sunnybrook Hospital taught me about level of awareness in the paramedic world and Eugene Swartz taught me about level of awareness in the marketing world. And so, in the marketing world, when we're talking about level of awareness, we're talking about how aware is your audience about their problem? Okay, so are they completely unaware of their problem? Do they know they have a problem but they're not doing anything about it? Do they know they have a problem and they're looking for different solutions? Or have they chosen a solution? They're like, yeah, that's what I want to do? Or have they even at the highest level? Are they most aware and said, yes, I want Shane Johnson's Arthritis Cream 501, right? And so it's super important, when you're approaching your audience, to understand their level of awareness. Because, shane, like I just created some Arthritis Cream 501 for you.
Speaker 2:If you were to offer the majority of the population 50% discount on your cream, very few people would take you up on that, because they don't know who you are, they don't know what makes your cream different, and they might not even know that the pain that they have in their elbow because they're 24 years old is arthritis right. And so this is what so many businesses do wrong. They think they can just put a sale price out there and they're getting all these buys coming in. But what you need to do first is you need to educate your audience. You need to understand, with empathy, where they are on this pyramid. So if they are problem aware, like a 24 year old with joint pain thinking arthritis, if you target a 24 year olds with joint pain, you could educate them what arthritis actually is and how, by definition, that elbow pain is arthritis and how, with the special copper molecule that you have in your cream, you can help alleviate that pain. But you have to work them up through the process of understanding before you're going to make the sale.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. So would it be fair to say that you, because you have this level of empathy, you've been there before and you've lived the story that they're living, that you're describing their problem to them in a way that they've never even been able to describe it or enunciate it themselves and what the potential solutions are to help solve it. So, because of that, you're building a trust. I guess. Yeah, trust in marketing is key Trust in marketing is on a spiral decline.
Speaker 2:Today is the worst time to market to people, and it's only going to get worse tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, A lot of marketers. We tend to ruin everything that we do. We find something that's working and we just overdo it.
Speaker 2:Like. Something I'm seeing in my Facebook feeds right now is cause I'm over 50 is all these calisthenics for men over 50 and how you could lose like 20 pounds in two weeks with these calisthenics.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we all know, and the exercise is ripped right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but we all know that weight loss doesn't come from the gym, it comes from the fork making these promises that if I do these calisthenics for two weeks I'm going to lose all this weight and that's not and I can eat whatever I want. Then yeah, and I'm not saying calisthenics are bad, but it's not being marketed truthfully.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And so every time we're lied to, we're just become more and more distrustful about everything.
Speaker 1:So we're touching on the borders of some of the things that you teach in this book that you became a bestseller on Amazon for called empathic marketing. Do you have some steps or something, that quick action kind of thing, that you could share with our listeners to help them figure out how they could do some better marketing or how they can choose a better marketer to help them with their businesses?
Speaker 2:Two things the first is capturing the heart and the second is convincing the mind. So, by capturing the heart, you want to make a big, bold promise, but one that you can deliver on. And then, because everybody's making these big, bold, audacious promises, lose 20 pounds in 14 days with calisthenics. That captures my heart. If I believe that I can lose 20 pounds in 14 days with calisthenics, I would do it, but they're not backing it up by convincing my mind.
Speaker 2:Okay, and so this is where you have to have what I call your big differentiator, what Eugene Schwartz refers to as your unique mechanism. This is something that differentiates you from your competition. So if this calisthenics thing addressed my let's call it false living belief for how weight loss or gain is through your diet, if they could say, because of these calisthenics we activate this hard to activate hormone in your body that stops the fat building from occurring oh, okay, Cause I always thought it was from your food. But if this special calisthenics activates this hormone, that makes sense. So maybe calisthenics can help me lose weight. But you have to have that big differentiator to convince the mind. And if you have some scientific background, if you have some stats to back it up, some testimonials, then those will go a long way as well.
Speaker 1:What advice would you give to? Let's say, you've got a business that's just standard boring I'm not going to say boring, just normal stuff. Let's say you're a plumber or you're a contractor or, I don't know, you're a lawyer. How do these people define what is?
Speaker 2:unique to the way that they deliver the results to their customers.
Speaker 1:This is a 12-hour workshop. What if they don't have 12 hours?
Speaker 2:Yeah, coming up with that big differentiator. That, I think, is one of the most crucial things for a business to do, and there's actually two different types of big differentiators that you could have. The first is to identify something that everybody else in your industry is doing but nobody is talking about. Okay, so one of the biggest examples from that is Claude Hopkins. When he went to Schlitz Brewery, they hired Claude he's this famous copywriter to help them with their marketing and he toured through the brewery and he was amazed by all the steps they were taking to make sure that their beer was so pure, like it was brewed in a special chamber where the air was filtered twice. The bottles were pasteurized like seven times, like all this effort was done to make sure it was super pure.
Speaker 2:And so when they finished the tour, claude asked the brewmaster there. He said why aren't you guys talking about this? Amazing, this is the way we all do it. If you don't do it this way, you're going to have bad beer. I didn't know this. Other people don't know this. So if we start talking about the purity of your beer and this two-step air filtration, the seven-step pasteurization, that's going to set you apart from everybody else. So that's something that a business can look at. It's something that makes your business work, but nobody else is talking about.
Speaker 1:It's interesting you bring up the story about Clotsey Hopkins, because a number of years ago I had a home recreational business pools, hot tubs, pool tables and in the wintertime we had to sell pool tables and sometimes it was just to pay the rent because we didn't really sell that many. But anyway, I took a trip to where they made these pool tables down in Tucson, arizona, close to the Mexican border, and I got a chance to tour where they made them. And there's these craftsmen that have been working on these pool tables for more than 30 years, and so I filmed the whole process, which to the average person, or especially to the people that worked there, seemed like it's just passe, it's boring, it's just what they do. And they had this little emblem that they stamped into the pool tables and had the image of a Spanish mission church, which was right on the border. So I got to tour that little Spanish mission and I said what's so special about it? And they said there's two turrets that go up. One of them, if you notice it, doesn't have a bell in it, it's unfinished. And they said, no, it's been like that since the 1700s when they first built it, and the reason for that is because they consider this a work of art and with any work of art it's always changing and forming new art. And when you walked into this Spanish Mission, it looked like Michelangelo had painted in there. It was just gorgeous.
Speaker 1:I wrote this whole marketing story and put some pictures out and I bought all the coffee table books they had with the Spanish Mission and I told everyone this story rather than tell them about the features of the pool table. And the sales went crazy because people loved that story and it gave them a story to tell other people that came over to play on their pool table. So yeah, the power of just leveling up with that kind of a story. A lot of us working in our businesses we think it's just the normal stuff, it's how we do what we do, but to the people that you're serving, they don't know that story. So just telling your story sometimes is a really cool differentiating factor, right, and that's the crux of empathy right there, like we're always looking at our business.
Speaker 2:We're always looking at the world through our lens, and if something mundane that we do day after day, then that we forget that the outside isn't seeing it the same way. And so this is one of the hardest things for business when you're coming up with that big differentiator is to step outside of your life, look at your business from the inside and try to say, oh, you know, that's interesting to an outsider, but it's not to an inside.
Speaker 1:So let's peel back the layers of this onion a little. Let's get a little deeper on this empathy thing. Simon Sinek, in his famous TED talk, said the mind can be convinced, but the heart must be one. People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it, and what you do simply proves what you believe. So, mike, why do you do what you do? What's your big? Why? Where did you get to this whole empathic marketing that the marketing medic espouses? Wow, it's the empathy.
Speaker 2:I think we just all have passions and for some reason I just am passionate about seeing the world through other people's eyes. I love being objective. I I don't think I judge, I like not being judgmental, and it's just. It's just fun for me to to see the world through other people's eyes and try to imagine what what they're going through.
Speaker 2:One of the things that you and I talked about a previous chat was how I've been riding motorcycles for 30 years and I have yet, knock on wood, I've never had a close call, even with getting in an accident. But that's because so many motorcycle riders are in the moment right, they're leaning into the thing, they're watching their RPMs and they're just like them and their bike. They forget there's an outside world. And so when I'm coming up to an intersection and I have a green light and I see a car stopped coming towards me in that left-hand turn lane, I'm thinking what are they thinking? Or what do they see? Can they see me?
Speaker 2:Because there's so many motorcycle accidents happen because that oncoming car is going to turn left in front of you, because they just you're a small motorcycle, they don't see you, and so that's just part of the way I live is, I'm always seeing the world through the eyes of the people around me. So I see the world through that driver and I'm like does he, can he see me Right? Is the sun behind me? If the sun's behind me, you're not, or like you're glaring into his eyes. So I'm always expecting the unexpected and that's the way I live every day of my life.
Speaker 1:It's pretty much in everything I do. Most people just live inside their own heads.
Speaker 1:They don't see outside of their cell phone and they're driving and they're only thinking about themselves, whereas you have this tendency like you're this kick-ass guy who helps people grow their business through your marketing and advertising, and you've written this book about how to get into the empathy level so that you can do it even better, and I think a lot of people don't really get to see that side of Mike because you're always in the business mode kind of thing I know I've talked to you in the past about. You've got this real heart connected, empathic connection to your dogs. You rescue dogs, yeah, and I know there was a. Maybe two or three years ago you lost a dog and I remember talking to you and you were very broken up about that. Yeah, tell us about your dogs.
Speaker 1:Shane's determined to be my shrink and try to figure me out here, but there's something behind this and it's funny if you really look at like a dog's nature.
Speaker 2:They are 100% unbridled empathy, like they are on this world to serve us emotionally and physically or whatever way they can Cause. When I'm like frustrated or angry or whatever, my dogs can sense that and they are on me like trying to give me hugs and trying to make me feel better, and I'm in a place where I'm like just and I'm getting angrier, and as I'm getting angry because they're harassing me, they want to help me more, and so I think this is where I quite often and now we're going down a dark path.
Speaker 2:But this is quite often where, like abuse comes in towards animals or towards spouses or whatever, because you lash out at somebody trying to help you, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you don't want to be seen as weak, yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm human and, like I say, when I'm sitting in the thing and Fred's putting his face, I just want to punch him and get him away from me. But I'm like, wait a minute, why are you doing this? And he knows he's doing this because he can feel my stress and he wants to help me through it. And once you can put yourself in somebody else's position and understand why they're doing something, it allows you to process it a lot better. You're trying to sell something to somebody. Put yourself in their mind, and they don't trust you. So try to think what are they seeing in me that makes me untrustworthy? And what can I say or do to prove that I am somebody they should invest in?
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm. So do you think that it's not just dogs you have there? You've got a lot of rescue dogs and they seem to rotate through the arc that you call your off-grid place there, but you've also got horses. Do you feel that your animals help ground you to that level of empathy?
Speaker 2:I'm a dog guy. We got the horses, so we got the alpacas because it was an impulse. But no, I'm 100% a dog person. I love all animals. We have a pet fox that was not a pet fox, but a fox that comes by every evening and has his chicken dinner.
Speaker 1:It's a wild fox.
Speaker 2:It's a wild fox that we feed, yeah every night at 6 o'clock he comes and it's funny, all the dogs they know when the fox is being fed because they all wait on the deck and they all bark at the fox and the fox is there and looks at them.
Speaker 1:Okay. So next question, mike have you during this whole process you've changed careers a couple times, you've done a lot of different things. I feel like you've got an eclectic background, but you've taken skills and somehow ported those skills from each career, each business that you've had and we've talked a lot about some of the successes you've had about a setback in your business or maybe even your life that it ported over to your business. And during that setback, was there anything, maybe unexpectedly, that you might've learned that help you on the flip side?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's funny because I guess I'm an optimist in a lot's funny Cause I'm only. I guess I'm an optimist in a lot of ways. So I don't really see setbacks as setbacks, I just see them as little bumps in the road and I'm always confident, even while you're in them. Yeah, I always. I'm not saying I'm not stressed or whatever, but I know it's going to work out. But I think the biggest mistake I made and I and I think a lot of us do this in business is I got too comfortable in my business. So I was basically working for one client.
Speaker 2:And this is when I first started in the quick funnels world with Russell Brunson and I'm getting going, I'm doing all this stuff and I asked Russell I'm like what's my goal here, what's the end game? And it was funny. Russell said you just want to serve one client. Just find that one client that you can serve, that'll take care of you. A few years ago I got that one client and I was making six figures with him alone and then I had my other business on the side. So it's doing really well and I just got super comfortable. I was working with him and the problem was is that I did too good a job for him because he had a five-year plan to retirement and after two and a half years he's like you know what, mike, I'm just burnt out and I don't need to work anymore. So I think I'm going to call it. And he retired and I was like, oh, didn't see that coming. But that's fine, cause I'm the marketing medic and I'm really good at what I do.
Speaker 2:I can get a client to replace you overnight and you know, I could not, because I was doing all of my social media stuff on his behalf. I wasn't doing anything on my behalf. Like, when I found him, he actually found me because I was on stage at ClickFunnels. I was doing something with ClickFunnels on stage there and he came up to me afterward and I turned him away. At that point I don't remember meeting him.
Speaker 2:He just told me that I knew I wanted to work with you, but you didn't want to work with me and I turned him away and so he hired somebody else and he worked with him for a couple of years and then he contacted me out of the blue and said hey, mike, do you remember me? I was like no, anyway, but it's because he saw me at ClickFunnels and he wanted to work with me then and I wouldn't work with him and he found somebody else. And then he kept seeing me in social media and he knew I was still in the game. So when he lost his previous media buyer, he contacted me because I was out there, and once I started working with him, I got lazy and complacent. I wasn't doing my own stuff anymore, and so it took me like six, eight months of getting myself out there before I could start attracting the client base again. Something for all of us to remember is to always spend some portion of your day working on your businesses and not in it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. You got to do your own stuff, not just the stuff for other people, that's right. Yeah, interesting. I have a lot of clients that kind of fall into that trap. They haven't produced any kind of level of content, and that level of content really allows you to tap into the blue ocean and show empathy for your audience, help them get a little closer to their desired end result, solve a couple of their issues. Maybe you don't get them all the way there, but you're essentially helping them and that's building your trust foundation, exactly. So here's another question for you what's the riskiest thing that you've ever done as it relates to business, and did it pay off? Sometimes we try things, and that's what being an entrepreneur, being a founder, is all about. We need to try new things very quickly and test them to see which ones aren't working, so we can get the ones that are. So maybe tell us a story where something you took a risk on that maybe didn't work, and then then the flip side, something that did work.
Speaker 2:Okay, so that's really easy. This is insane. What I did, as I mentioned, I was a helicopter paramedic and as a firefighter. We all have side hustles, and so I have a master's degree in business management and I've done work with Colorado outward bound. So when I came back from the United States to Canada, I'm like you know what I'm going to do. My side hustle is going to be corporate team building, and this was in the late 1990s. The high-tech sector in Ottawa was booming Ottawa.
Speaker 2:I don't know if it's known as Silicon Valley North right, Because all the high-tech companies are in Ottawa and they were just doing work on team building like crazy and so I had a cottage with 50 acres and I'd create like an outdoor experiential leadership program out there and I was attracting business and I was doing pretty well and that's when I fell off a cliff. I had a cliff on that property. I fell 35 feet off the cliff. I broke my arm, my leg and my back and I said you know what, as much as I love being a helicopter paramedic and saving lives, two things I didn't like.
Speaker 2:One, I hated being the boss. I hated all the administration, hated all the politics. And two, I am not a night person. Like I have to go to bed. My body shuts down at nine o'clock, 10 o'clock at the latest. So any calls that we got, like at two in the morning, I just ached all over it. It was. It's not good for my health. So when I fell off the cliff I said you know what, I'm just not going to go back to being a paramedic, I'm going to go all in on this corporate team building, because it's a sure thing. I sold my house, I sold my cottage and I bought an abandoned sawmill, a 6,000 square foot building that three walls and a roof on 164 acres.
Speaker 2:That's pretty risky. Yeah, I'm going to turn this. And I didn't do any research. I just assumed that when I bought the property, I'd go to the bank and they'd give me this huge construction loan and I would build the place all up. And I'm a firefighter, I'm a paramedic, I don't know how to build anything, but for some reason I figured I could do it. What ended up happening was the banks then educated me to the fact that we don't give construction loans for abandoned sawmills. It starts with an-.
Speaker 1:It's not a good investment for you.
Speaker 2:No, it starts with an architect and a blueprint. That's the first. We'll give you $5,000 to get the blueprint right, because, hey, that's their standard operating price.
Speaker 2:You have to have the blueprint first, and then we will release another $10,000 for you to pour the foundation and once the foundation's in, then we'll release another $20,000 for you to frame it and then, once that's inspected, then we'll release right, that's how it's done. It's not an ad hoc. So, no, you can't have any money for it, oops, oops. And so Nortel was one of the biggest employers in Ottawa. They were huge. I did automatic defibrillation training and I was going into Nortel all the time as a defibrillator trainer and they were telling me how much money they had and how much money they were spending on training. So I was doing the corporate team building with Nortel and I'd done a couple of events with them and I was driving to talk to their HR department to make me like the go-to source for team building within Nortel. And as I'm this is a true story. As I'm driving there I hear on the radio oh, nortel Industries reports like record third quarter losses. They took some losses, no biggie. One of my dreams as a medic and hearing about Nortel was to buy their stock, because their stock just kept doubling and splitting and doubling and splitting. It was just exploding. I remember when the stock dropped to a hundred dollars a share. I'm like man, I wish I had money. And then it dropped to $10 a share. And then it dropped to a dollar a share and even at a dollar. I was like they're going to bounce back. But within a few months it was removed from the index. When Nortel was gone, mitel was gone, jds Uniphase was gone. When Nortel was gone, mitel was gone, jds Uniphase was gone. They were all gone. All that business that I had planted my flag in had disappeared, dried up. So that was quite a big failure.
Speaker 2:And I've got this property, which, oh so how did I build it? You say, if you couldn't get any loans, I can apply for credit cards. I had great credit. They would give me credit cards like nobody's business. So I had all the credit cards, all of Maxwell women, and at one point I was using one getting a cash advance from one credit card to pay off the other credit card and go into this thing. And yeah, we were.
Speaker 2:Or did you have the place built? No, so it was getting closer and the first time I went to the bank it needs to be 70% completed before we can give you a mortgage. Okay, I don't know what? 70% is like 70% of all the rooms. But anyway, it didn't matter, because they just said that they didn't mean it. So I go back to the bank. Hey, we're 70% done. Oh, did we say 70? We meant like 80. What's 10% more? Okay, I'll go install a couple more doors, but anyway, the house had to be pretty much built and it's funny because I was totally tapped.
Speaker 2:The entire house was pretty much done, except for our en suite bathroom. It was not touched at all. It was just a empty shell, no drywall, nothing. I was like the house isn't 100%, oh no. And anyway, when the guy came to inspect the place, everything looked good and I was trying to steer him away from the bathroom door. He's, what's behind that door? Storage. I'm like, yeah, storage, okay, so he didn't, but it was. We were two days from bankruptcy, two days we would have lost everything. And then, national bank props the national bank they stepped in and they gave us a mortgage to pay off all our credit cards and all our debt.
Speaker 1:So how does that port over?
Speaker 2:to the business world for you. Yeah, so I completely failed at the team building stuff. I didn't know how to market, didn't know anything about marketing at the time I was doing some cold calling, didn't know how to do anything, anyways. But then once there was no businesses left to cold call, I was like, what are we going to do? And so I realized, as a business, one of the things you can do best is identify a problem that is out there that's not being addressed and there's no solution, right? And so I saw that racing Ottawa has a big race community but there wasn't a lot of trail racing and no-shoe racing didn't exist.
Speaker 1:No-shoe racing did not exist in Canada. Snowshoe racing didn't exist. Snowshoe racing did not exist in Canada, snowshoe racing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so I said you know what? I'm going to start a trail and snowshoe series here at the property that we call the art and I am literally the oldest trail and snowshoe racing organization in Canada Wow.
Speaker 1:It didn't exist.
Speaker 2:They were still the oldest. And the reason I knew snowshoe racing existed is because I snowshoe raced in Colorado, so it existed there, but it wasn't here, and so I was like, okay, yeah, so that started bringing money, that we could do this, and then, I looked back at what I did in high school.
Speaker 2:I was in the outdoor ed program. I'm like, oh, I know how to do outdoor ed. So we created an outdoor ed program here that I marketed to high school. So now we've actually got a group coming up in two weeks to do a three day camping trip here. So there was another stream of income. And then, as we're building the place, my girlfriend, fiance and I were going to get married and her father said I'm going to give you $10,000 for your wedding.
Speaker 1:Nice wedding presents.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so to spend on your wedding, right? And I said, could I buy drywall with that money? He goes, it's your money, however, you want it to spend on your wedding. So we were able to transform our property into a great place to have a wedding. So we spent that $10,000 on insulation and drywall and paint.
Speaker 1:So wait, you were going to get married, yeah. And you were thinking about how can I create multiple streams of income off the property that we've already invested in? So you built your own wedding chapel yeah, to get married in. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So Monique and I got married here and we didn't have plumbing so we brought porta potties in. Yeah, didn't have any grass yet this was it was still hard under construction. The indoor venue had drywall up and it was painted and had a concrete floor. The ceiling was wide open with all the cobwebs and pipes and everything. But at the end of the wedding everybody to the person said this is the best wedding we've ever been to. It was just so much fun. Some people want a more rustic home party cottage feel wedding, so I was like Cool off grid in the forest.
Speaker 1:You've got a nice little reception area there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was working with the church before and then they changed the rules, so I'm not now, but yeah, I officiate weddings, for you could officiate weddings. Yeah, For eight or 10 years I did it. And this again is going into the empathy and looking into nowadays when it comes to weddings. Right, Like weddings nowadays cost $30,000. Crazy, Right? Or do you want to spend $5,000 on the party and $25,000 towards your mortgage?
Speaker 1:Or not just themselves, but for everyone for that day that they're going to remember forever. So you've created what? Two or three different streams of income just from the property.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the weddings, the outdoor ed camps and the and the Mad Trapper Trails. Doshi series.
Speaker 1:And you're still doing each of those, even to this day, while you're doing the marketing and advertising you're doing to help businesses scale up, and doing your own thing and writing a book and hosting a podcast. How do you find time for all of this? What's your daily routine?
Speaker 2:to keep the creativity flowing and not burn out, I think you just said it, it's if I was only doing one thing, I would get burned out and my computer, my desk day, stops at two o'clock every day, right, and then I usually don't sit at the computer on Fridays at all. I'll check my emails because it's still a business day, but I won't do any real work. So I'm always doing something else. I'm building what we're calling the cliff side cabin. This is a 12 by 12 little cabinet on a cliff on our property. It's got a beautiful view and it's where our outdoor camping area is.
Speaker 2:And I was working hard at building that and then I stopped because I need to build a greenhouse. So now I'm building a greenhouse. It's growing season, yeah, exactly. So I was like, oh, the greenhouse has to take priority, because I don't need the income right now from the rental, but I do need to get the plants into the greenhouse, like we need. We've got oh, I wish I could show you I've got all these lights. I don't know if I'm going pink at all, but I've got these grow lamps over here on my left.
Speaker 2:Growing vegetables, of course. Yes, yeah, this, entrepreneurs especially, is the shiny object syndrome, right. So like the cabin was the shiny object, I was gung-ho on that and I was building it as like it's about 80 finished right, and then I dropped that to work on the greenhouse oh, go ahead, so it's just super important that you follow things through to the finish.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying I had to finish the the cabin before the greenhouse, but I have committed myself as soon as that greenhouse is done, I'm back to the cabin. You gotta, if you start something, there's a reason. You started something. You need to see it through to the end.
Speaker 1:The greenhouse, you're trying to put some good, wholesome, organic vegetables on your table to eat.
Speaker 1:So that's important, but by the same token, you want to build another stream of income. So you've got some priorities there. So that's interesting. So you've got a lot of different balls. You're juggling Forest, forest Gump, forest Gump. Just let life take you through all the trials and tribulations and go to what you love. It seems to me like that's your story. You're doing what you love to do, with an ear towards trying to find the streams of income that will help you be able to sustain that way of life.
Speaker 2:And that's the way I've always lived. Like I say, when I decided I wanted to be a paramedic, that was for business, that was going to be my career, but I wasn't going to go to Cleveland to go to paramedic school, I was going to go to Colorado, I was going to go to Northern California, I was going to go to Washington. I've always had really cool things, but there's always been like a means to the madness. Right, I didn't go to Colorado to ski, I went to Colorado to get my paramedic training and then I skied all the time and sometimes you have to just have faith and I'm not religious by any means.
Speaker 2:But, like I say, when I left, uh, hamilton, my paramedic job and this was the funny thing Like before I left, I was part-time paramedic there, ambulance attendant, and they offered me a full-time position, I turned it down and nobody turns down full-time work if you're career-minded. I said no, I need the flexibility of my life right now. And then I said and next fall I'm going to go to Colorado to get my paramedic training. My boss said if you do that one, you're fired. Two, you will never work as a paramedic with the United States paramedic training, just so you know you're wasting your time. Yeah, I said okay, do what your heart wants to do. Yeah, and it all worked out. And the same thing buying this place and being two days away from losing it all and the team building wasn't going to work. It just wasn't. But you find a way, you make it happen.
Speaker 1:I resonate on such a great level because I did the same thing. I worked in the high-tech corporate world and I left early 2000, 2001. And everybody my bosses, the senior vice president of the company that I worked for my peers went. What are you crazy? Because I was leaving the, the company that I worked for my peers went. What are you crazy? Cause I was leaving the corporate world that I've been a part of for almost 20 years and I'm going to start this entrepreneurial venture opening a store selling hot tubs and pool tables, and they're like you're crazy Like I was doing consulting with the big six and it was just something that I really felt like my heart was pulling me towards, like I wanted to do something better.
Speaker 1:I didn't want to retire and go. Where did my life go? So I really believe in that. I don't remember it, though. Just go to where your heart tells you to go and just experience it, and it's okay if whatever you didn't work out, because in the end, you're going to find a new path, new doors open. I love that theme. Yeah, just thinking about something that's like a little counterintuitive to the normal advice that's out there, like marketing funnels, for instance. First of all. Explain to everyone what a marketing. I think most people know what a marketing funnel is, but there may be a few listeners that don't. So explain to everyone what is a marketing funnel, what is its purpose, and do you have some counterintuitive advice? For instance, I know a lot of people say just look at a marketing funnel that somebody else is doing and hack it Right. So what's your advice?
Speaker 2:for all that. So, yeah, so there's two definitions of a marketing funnel and what a true marketing funnel is from your first exposure to a potential client to the sale. Okay, so that first exposure might come through like a social media post, might come through a paid ad, it might come through a referral, it might come from them seeing your YouTube video, their first exposure. And then how do you walk them through this? So how we started this call was like, through their levels of problem awareness, how you walk them through that until they ultimately bought it. And that's what I see at TrueFunnel, and he brought funnels to the forefront. And what he sees as a funnel and his definition is a website.
Speaker 2:Funnels are just a website, but they take people on a journey. So what he wants you to do is when somebody lands on your page, you give them something for free, like some lead magnet, a spreadsheet, a PDF of video, training, right, and then from there you offer them something, a low price ticket for five cents, and then, once they buy that, then they buy something for $29.95. Then you offer them something for a hundred dollars and then five minutes later you've just sold them on a $10,000 product, because that's all it takes, work them up the pricing ladder right, and so one of the fallacies is that somebody from a cold exposure is going to see your marketing funnel website get your free thing and then five minutes later buy your $10,000 upsell. That's not going to happen, but chances are very slim.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If somebody goes through a funnel like that, it's because they know it will work for Russell Brunson. Russell Brunson can make a $10,000 sale from his first opt-in. But that person who makes that $10,000 buy has been stalking Russell for the last three years. He's listened to all his podcasts, he's watched all his videos, he's seen all of his stuff. Right, he's read his books. So when he finally clicks, then he's ready to make that journey.
Speaker 1:And we haven't seen the tens of thousands of dollars he's spent testing what's going to work there too right, you could be only one funnel away from your next million dollars.
Speaker 2:It's the quickest way to share the funnel hacking story. Yeah, so one of the things that launched my career is I got hired by a small bootcamp gym in California. They were circling the drain they're on the break of closure, yeah and they were two super fit dudes with like muscles bulging from everywhere and they wanted to attract that 20 something crowd in California that wanted the beach spots, because that's what they had, and so they were trying to hack Gold's Gym, la Fitness, orange Theory, like all the gyms that are attracting these 20 something. But when I went to this little hole in the wall bootcamp gym, I didn't see any 20 somethings there. It was all the 20 somethings parents that were there, these 30 and 40 year olds 50 year olds that were there that didn't have six packs.
Speaker 1:They didn't want six packs right, so they had a mismatch in their message to market match.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So. They're using all these stock photos, and you see the stock photos of the black and white photo of the girl covered in sweat with the six pack abs and the crop top. You could be just one, yeah, and that might get a 20-something's attention. But when they visit the gym and they see a bunch of old, flabby people there, like 20-somethings don't go to a gym to get fit, they go to the gym to be seen in a place where people are getting fit, and so they can do all the Instagram selfies and stuff. And so we stopped trying to hack Orange Theory and instead created a marketing message that attracted this 30, 40-something crowd Suddenly. So, ultimately, we got a 36 to one return on ad spend.
Speaker 2:Within a year, though, the two gym owners quit their full-time jobs to work the gym full-time, so a huge success story, right? I became a little bit famous for that. It's funny because, while I was doing that, alex Ramosi was doing something similar in the same County, in Chino Hills. He was doing the big stadium sales pitch, right, and it's just funny because, like I say, alex Ramosi competing, and that turned out differently for both of us. So I suddenly thought I was like this, god at building gyms, and so I was contracted by a gym in Chicago who said hey, can you do for us what you did for them? So this Chicago bootcamp gym wanted me to come out there and do the same thing for them as I did for the gym in California. And so what I did is I tried to hack my own funnel and do the same thing.
Speaker 2:All the offers and the copy and everything was exactly the same, and we spent hundreds of dollars on ads and got zero sales and I was like this doesn't make any sense. Like it works so well in California. Why isn't it working? Because the audience offer mismatch. Again. This bootcamp gym was right in the heart of downtown Chicago. It was targeting executives. The executives were turned away a low price point offer that we had Right. So what we did is we quadrupled the price and instead of promoting like community and social and like the family atmosphere, we promoted the intensity of the workouts in the short time period, so people could hit the gym right before work, or they could come at lunch or right after the work. They could dynamic workout in a very short amount of time for a lot of money. And once we did that, then we started getting the result, but you can't just-.
Speaker 1:So you spoke exactly to their needs rather than the needs of somebody else. So understanding your market rounds back to everything you've talked about here building that level of empathy, understanding what they truly need, meeting them exactly where they are and then helping them get a couple of steps further. And so, with those busy executives, what do they want? They don't care about the price, they just want to pay for the result, and they want to get it quick, right. And so you were able to take something that was working in one environment, make a pivot and make it even better than it ever was Right. And so you might not have even been able to get there had you not made that initial mistake. If you had come out with something average and it was getting average results, you might not have ever gotten to that level that you did there.
Speaker 2:The thing is I want a pathic marking. Didn't exist when I was doing like I was just doing it. I hadn't defined it.
Speaker 1:Just part of your process, just part of the process I was doing it.
Speaker 2:So to your point. Once I made that mistake in Chicago I was like wait a minute, that didn't work. What did I do that worked? Oh, wait a minute. I went to the gym. I saw the gym owners. I talked, but I saw what they wanted.
Speaker 1:That's how you build a business is by understanding your audience first, makes a lot of sense. All right, we're just rounding into the one hour for the podcast. I want to finish with one question and then we're going to round it back to some stuff for you, and it builds on what you were just talking about in the sense of some emerging technologies like AI. Everybody wants to talk about AI. Now I've got an AI chat bot that acts as a CSR and everybody wants to talk about that, even though the advertising and all the other stuff I do is probably going to get them move their ball a lot quicker and a lot better. But everybody loves this AI. What's your sense of where this all fits into what you're talking about here?
Speaker 2:Because I'm on the more personal side of things, the more empathic side of things. I haven't really been using AI as, like I say, a customer service reps or as a bot, right? The way I used AI is to develop a better understanding of my audience. If you can go to a bootcamp gym and talk to the customers, that's super easy and a quick route to find out what your audience wants, sure, but most of the time you're just doing online research. So you're going onto Amazon, you're reading book reviews and your topics, see what they're talking about, right that. You're going to the different forums, you're going into the Facebook groups and just trying to understand them. But what's cool about AI is it can do all of that in a couple of seconds. So what I do is I create a prompts that teach AI about my hero, eugene Swartz, and breakthrough advertising. And I said from Eugene Swartz perspective and your understanding of levels of problem awareness. I'm serving a. Let's see who's a new client. Oh, so I'm actually working with a client now who does empathetic listening. So, instead of counseling or coaching, where people give you advice, these listeners just listen and let you talk through and they have your questions and they help you help yourself.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I go into AI and I say, yeah, I'm working with a client who is offering an empathetic listening service based on Eugene Schwartz level problem awareness. Where are they on this spectrum and what are their short-term difficulties and desires and what are their long-term dreads and dreams for this service? And then I have a bunch of different demographic things that I ask chat to come up with for me and it does all that. So I've got all this like cold data that I can use but which is helpful. But then from there, I say now, using this data, a 1500 word diary entry that's super emotional and visceral and gets down into their deepest, darkest fears and desires. And then, once it writes that out, oh my gosh, like you just understand your audience at a completely new level. So that's how I like to use it.
Speaker 2:I was working with a voice coach and he's coached some of the biggest names on Broadway and it was funny I didn't tell him chat GPT did this for me. I just sent him this diary entry and he's like I was literally teared up reading this person's. I don't know whose entry this is, but you, like, I don't know how you understand your audience. I've been doing this for 30 years and you tapped into things that I never even considered. I don't know how you did it and I didn't tell.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So you're saying, taking all of the learnings that you've learned over several years and you've written about in your book empathic marketing and you've shown the proof and results by working with your clients you've taken all that stuff and kind of condensed it down into a little process that you can use within AI to be able to get you the results. So you're using that AI as a researcher to get you the information to help you build that empathy level even stronger and in a much quicker way than you were ever able to in the past. Nice, all right. So, for we're going to finish this off with one last thing, and that is just. A lot of our listeners are probably wondering how can they get access to some of these tools and capabilities that you're talking about? Would getting your book help? Do you want to talk about some of that?
Speaker 2:Yes, you can put the link in the show notes, but I think it's wwwthemarketingmedicca backslash podcast and when you go to that page I've got a couple of different offers for you. Dot ca backslash podcast and when you go to that page I've got a couple of different offers for you. I've got a free plus shipping book offer. If you want to fast track things, you can actually speak to me, and I've got what I call a gap analysis offer from this podcast. You'll get a 50 coupon code so that you can speak to me for 30 minutes. I can help you understand where you are right now and the steps you need to get to where you want to be.
Speaker 1:So get the book. They can get the book at the marketingmedicca forward slash podcast as well, okay.
Speaker 1:Or go to Amazon and search for empathic marketing not empathetic, right, empathic, it's a different word that Mike has trademarked and they can get access to all these tools and processes that you use to develop your marketing and advertising to scale businesses. All right, mike, thank you so much for being a part of this podcast and, by the way, guys listen to Mike's podcast as well, which is called Because Business is Personal. Very good, lots of resources for you to get access to to help you grow your businesses. Thank you very much, mike, and say hello to all your dogs. I'm sure they're dying to go for a walk now.