Good morning and welcome to the Monday morning marketing podcast. I'm Esther
and I'm Melanie.
And today we're joined by John C. Morley, serial entrepreneur, engineer, marketing specialist and talk show host. Welcome, John.
Thank you. It is a pleasure to be with you ladies this morning.
So, John, tell us a bit more about yourself. Like it says in your in your intro, you are a marketing specialist, but also an engineer. That's not normal, if you don't mind me saying that.
So I kind of break the norm in a good way. And I think sometimes when you break the norm, a lot of people would say to you, you have to think outside the box. Well, I crushed the box. I kicked the box to the curve. No boxes for me. So how did I go from and I still am an engineer, by the way. We actually, my I.T. company actually provide services to Wall Street, things like that. But how do I get from here to marketing, I guess, is the question, you ladies.
Yes, yes.
Well, it's very simple. About seven years ago, I had one of the largest marketing advertising companies. And for security reasons, I won't mention their name, but they're one of the top in New York. They're on there on the Wall Street. And I kept writing them checks every single week. And I never saw anything. And, you know, you're dealing with a bad firm when the way they treat you is based on what you pay them. I think that's a problem. So I'm going to use three amounts of money for right now. A dollar. OK, let's call five dollars and ten dollars. Those are not the amounts. When I wrote them a check for a dollar for services or a deposit or what have you. They said, John, let's go ahead and do a quick breakfast at Dunkin Doughnuts or we'll just bring doughnuts to your office or bagels. How about that? Yes, I wrote them a check for five dollars. Let's go to Houlihan's, which they're not in business anymore, or let's go to Friday's or let's go to one of these quick places and have a lunch, right? Fine. Very nice. But if I sent them ten dollars, let's go to Ruth Chris or Steakhouse or something like that, and we'll do that for a nice dinner. Sounds good. So I decided that one time I was going to test this and instead of sending them the five dollars for lunch, because I had noticed that that lunch had been different based on what was being paid. And so instead of sending them five dollars one time, I said, let me just send the dollar just to test this, calls you back and says "hi, John, this is such and such from Brian's office, just want to reach out to you. Brian wanted me to call you because we needed to change this from, let's say if I paid the five to the dollar. We need to make this a quick breakfast because he actually has to pick up his car in the afternoon" or if let's say we were doing lunch. "Oh, John, my his wife just called him and he has to pick up his mother in law at the airport. She's making a surprise visit and he doesn't how long that's going to take". So he asked if we could do a late dinner like eight or nine o'clock at Ruth Chris". So there was some, I guess, coincidence, you would say, to the amount of money I was paying and the way I was being taken out for lunch or meetings, but what really kind of kick the deal out of their ballpark is when we had a problem producing, you probably seen these journals before and they're like, I'd say like 8,9 by 11. And they basically were like a fold, like, you don't see them too much anymore. And that was very popular back then. So we want to produce one for my company, Jaymore, which is Jaymore.com which is one of my I.T. companies. And that particular thing that we worked on, they did a spell checking. They checked every supposedly perfect. Well, they told me when I went out there to see their office because I went for an office tour, that the deadline is tomorrow. So that's fantastic. We can make changes. I see you missed a few things here. Oh, John, we can't. Why not? Well your deadline, sir, was yesterday. Our deadline is today. So will you print it? No, we don't print it, we're the middleman. So what is it going to take since this is your error? Well, you did sign off on it. I did, but I was trusting you were going to go through everything a second time so we can make today the deadline for you to change it. It'll be five dollars more. That's not right. Yeah. Will cost us more money. Meanwhile, I found out because I called their printer. Did you charge anything? Oh, no, no. And it's a big client like that. We sometimes will charge you like three dollars for a regular phone, but we don't charge them. So I was a little annoyed, to say the least. And now I realise that somebody doesn't have my back.
Yeah.
And so I decided that I need to do what's best for me and my company, and nobody was helping me get my company to the next level. And I didn't know what to do and I've been to school and all these these companies and these non profits, but nobody really wanted it, they really could help me they had an idea but they were like pie in the sky. They didn't really know how to put them on paper. I mean, they all have great intentions, nothing wrong with them, but they don't actually do the work for you. They give you some pointers, but you still got to do a lot of it on your own. And I realise that my copier was coming up for renewal. So I went down to the Xerox office and negotiated a deal for a new copier, which I got. And then I saw this great big Xerox preproduction machine. Wow. So I looked at it. We had done the deal for the other machine. He says "John let's go to lunch". Looked at the machine, went to lunch, came back. I fell in love with this machine. This machine was to the tune. I'm going to say about a hundred fifty thousand us. I'm not sure what that is in the currency, but it was quite a bit of money and
a lot of money. Yeah, a lot of money.
And I went to my I kind of fell in love with it, but I didn't have the money for it yet. So I went to my bank the next day and I said, Hey, Bank, I think I'm going to be starting another company because that's what I thought my plan was going to be because obviously I wasn't buying for my IT company. But I said I think I'm going to be starting a new company. I need some money for a new production machine. OK, how much do you need. One hundred fifty grand. When do you need the money. We could have it tomorrow. Next week is fine, I go back to them now, I have the money, now I have my leverage. We get the money up two weeks. Oh, that's plenty of time. I didn't want to tell them I had it too soon. Long story short, I got the machine, but then I realised I didn't know what a fiery word was, not what it is, because it's the device that actually does imaging advanced imaging for printing. So I went through about 60 hours of fiery train. I also realised even though I had some graphic experience, I wasn't a graphic artist, so I had to hire one of those. But part time and then what I realised was that I didn't have a place for this printer, so my I.T. company basically rent my rented space for this printer to my new company that didn't even exist yet. Neighbourhood publications are preconditions that you are free connexion dotcom. And I decided that for two dollars a month, Jaymore was going to rent space to neighbourhood publications and start the company and all this other stuff for the legal stuff, which will have to happen before the printer was being delivered. But I gotta get going. And I did all this myself, so this is why I told them I needed more time. So I said, give me a month because I need to think about it. What I thought about I came back with them once. I had the companies all set up. Then I came back and did the papers. Because now I had a reason, even though Jaymore was still basically doing the deal the least because the other company had had nothing. I got my first client, but first I started putting all my own stuff for Jaymore for postcards, for flyers, for banners. And it was great because I could come up with an idea in the middle of the night. It could be designed and it could be printed and in the mailboxes the same or the next day. And that's powerful. And I realised that I'm onto something. Not only can I build a creative ad agency, but I actually can print the darn stuff in-house and be a full fledged print production centre. Well, that didn't happen. That actually didn't happen to about a year or two ago when I realised that this machine's expensive to run and you can't exist on just a few clients. But I made the plunge to build a full modern print production centre about a year or two ago. We were supposed to open last year. We never open until we're open as we're operating, but we never opened our doors and we're strictly on appointments because of covid. And so it was just really breathtaking the fact that we could print things but was very unique about us is that I always want to help people tell stories. And I said, you know, John you're good storyteller and you're actually pretty good at marketing. But what always stopped me in the past and I leave this is a lesson for the ladies and gentlemen listening today is that when someone tells you you can't do something. OK, Henry Ford said, if you believe that. You're right. No one tells you that you can do something. You're also right. So I was starting to let other people's programming affect me and what I could be. And that's when I realised that, hey, everyone told me that you don't know marketing. And that's true. I didn't have a formal degree in it, but I could learn it and I did learn it and people were starting to knock me. And this is why I say something else. If everybody likes you in business and I don't think people should hate you, but if everyone is just revering you to the nines, you're not bringing your A games, you got to bring your A game. And so I realised if you get a few haters or you get a few people that are just not so palsy with you, they're afraid of you.
Yeah.
My own local shipping company in town was afraid of me because we're a production centre. There are a little copy place.
Yeah.
And I wasn't trying to compete with anybody because I mean, we're not here to do resumes. We're here to print books, flyers, banners. We have our own system now that that does books for plays, square bounds, all that kind of stuff. But the thing was, it's not just about the printing ladies, it's about the whole concept. So I realised that to be a leader in this, I had to get really good on my game with my stories about myself.
It's all about the stories.
And I like the fact you put in house as well, John, the fact that, you know, handing over the power to somebody else just wasn't working for you. And at the end of the day, you got more honesty and more graft and more hard work done by bringing in in-house and bringing the experts to work for you rather than you being a client of theirs. I think that's the lesson here.
Nobody knows you better than you know yourself. Nobody can tell your story better than you
if you wanted to market your podcast, the greatest person is yourself because you know your show and what your market is. So I always believed that the best relationship starts with the client and it starts with under promise, basically under promising and over delivering. I don't try to get people into long contracts. I just try to find out what their problem is and solve it. And a lot of times one of the biggest things right now and this just boom because of cofee. And it's not even in the printing, it's just in the marketing. I'm very well known on LinkedIn for my banner on creation service. And it's not just graphic. And you can see it basically by going to LinkedIn.com/in/john the letter C, MORWYIV. And if you look at that, you'll see my banner profile. Now, that wasn't just a stock profile. That wasn't something that I bought online. That wasn't the default profile, because most people write, they leave the default LinkedIn profile and they think it's so great or they go buy something on one of these stock photo sites for twenty dollars and they think it's fantastic. But you know something, ladies? It's not what's about them. It's something that impresses. So if you have to try to be something else that you're not, don't do that. Because if the story about you is not true, it may not come out today, but it will eventually come out. And then that's going to bring your reputation down. So then I realise that what other printers don't do is they don't print on anything. So I decided we're going to print on anything. Now, there's limitations, obviously, in print, on paper, plastic, metal, glass, wood, with different types of printing technology. We can print on things that are going to plastic bottle. We can print on mugs using a different technology. But the point is, it's about telling your story. So if we tell your story on LinkedIn and then it's about a promotional item, it's not about a tchotchke, it's about something that's a high quality item that somebody is going to be able to give, say, oh, gee, I got a mug from John, oh his story is amazing. I want to do that. So that's what I do, I give people a dream when they don't have one, and if they have a dream, I amplify. So what I do on the Lincoln banner profile service is this is something we just started with covid, and it all started with me because I realised that even always good stories, I wasn't steping up my game. I wasn't telling people what I did, even though I knew what I did. I wasn't even doing it for myself.
Yeah,
So, I got to start with myself first and when I can start with myself, then I can branch out to others. So right around the COVID time I said, gee, you know, we're going to do, I tell my graphics team, let's create a LinkedIn profile. How do we do that? I'm not sure yet, but it's me about a story. I'm going to tell you what the story is. So it's very similar to how I do a clients. I set up about a 90 minute call with them. We go through and ask them some questions. They get two Lincoln banner comps, they come back to us for usually two or three rounds of changes and they tell us what they like, what they didn't like. But I get into what made them the person they are. And I don't ask them what they did in grade school. I usually get things from high school up into college and I find out where their commonalities are. And then I look at trends in the market and I say, hmm, that's something I can build a story with. And then we build a linkedIn banner profile. Then we teach people how to network for free. We teach them after we teach that, we explain to people that it's not about being in a free networking event every single day because I also run paid events. So it's about you have to balance yourself and realise what's working for you. I would say to you that there's a balance and if you're going to these events, you have to realise that when you go to a free event, there's no free lunches. Right? So you may not be getting the quality of the people. So see what it's like in your market. There's lots of different groups out there, but I find that the groups that actually generate business are the ones where people pay a small initial, nothing big. And so by telling people stories, the next thing we do is we help them get into a calendar automation because let's face it, calendar automation, when you book people for shows or clients need to book people for appointments, they waste a lot of their day trying to figure out their calendar. And, you know, ladies, that's an excuse.
Yeah,
well, you know, let me check my calendar, OK? Let me give you my calendar link and you can find a time on my calendar.
Yeah.
Oh, so it gets rid of that excuse. I'm all about getting rid of excuses. And I always say that if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. And so what I do is I help people get so passionate about their stories and then they get to share that story to other people might now have a reason to go to a networking event. You see, I had a profile. Now you have a story.
Yeah and that's what some people. Yeah. And that's what some people are afraid of. They're like, I have nothing to say. But then everybody has something to say and everything, you know, whatever they say can be turned into a story and can be turned into a way to market themselves to their audience because your audience could be going through exactly the same as what you did or what you have overcome or what problem you have right now. And that's a great way to relate to people, is by the stories that you tell, the stories, the authentic stories that you tell because you have to be authentic and like you were saying, if you don't tell a story that's true to you, it will come back and bite you.
Exactly. And I tell people, you know, one of the biggest problems and I'm not going to mention the company's name, but back and I've learnt things have kind of clicked even with big companies and I've learnt things that are happening. And I will tell you that one of the biggest companies, they have a letter in the alphabet starts with a C. I'm not going to mention a very big marketing company, but our tech company threw them out because they stopped taking your clients and they don't have the technology. So you have to be true to your brand and you have to focus on what you're about. Once you lose that, then it's only a matter of time before your company falls out.
It's all about customer experience, isn't it?
Yes. Disney and I actually took their course when I was very young. Disney actually spends millions of dollars on this, and I was very fortunate to go to Disney University when I was on...
Disney University?
Yes, Disney University.
Oh my god
yes, there are different programmes you can go to, young and in your teens and stuff. So it was very interesting and one was about customer experience. And it leads me to the story about the reason you do everything in life. It's it's to avoid pain and gain or to gain pleasure. But in Disney, the reason people spend money is for the experience. And to leave you with something, read the book about fish. And there's a guy who goes to one fish store and I'll just cut to the chase real quick. Those one fish story, he goes and pays a dollar. He goes to this fish store, the very high end one. I'm going to cut the chase of all the other ones, kind of like in between. This one over here is like three times the amount as the first one. Why do you buy it the last one? Because the last one they hit in your bag. "Hi. Hi, Esther. Hi, Melanie. Glad to see you. And what would you like for your catch". And you get to catch your dinner, they throw you. So it's a bound experience. People are willing to pay for experience. That's why you pay more money when you go to nicer restaurants. It's not just because of food. Is the experience, entertainment? I want to be entertained.
Very true, John. I think I mean, you've left us with so much information and knowledge. I mean, I can see Melanie here your mind blown and she's really wishing she could go to Disney University now.
Sent your daughter.
You could actually go online now during COVID, but you can actually take the test online and pick which programme you want. And that's their customer service as a programme. And there's some programmes on business and it's very interesting. And then they teach you how it is that they make money. But the one thing I'll leave you with about Disney, you pay a fee for tickets if you want to go into there. Let's say when there are parks and you want to go behind the scenes, you pay for somebody to be with you and you learn the Disney magic. You notice that when you're out there, everything is like perfect. I got news for you. That's all on stage. When you come behind the doors behind SeaWorld or behind the attraction, you're off stage. Costumes aren't on. So it's all about an appearance when you're on stage. Disney's on stage. Hotels are on stage. And I think that's what people don't realise. You have to know that when you're offstage, obviously, there's going to be a difference. You have some downtime, but you have to realise your image on stage has to be perfect all time or you need to get off stage.
Well, John, thank you so much for joining us today. It has been so informative and so insightful and we hope to
where can we find out more about you, John?
So you can actually go to the link here? You can go to Linkedin.com/in/johncmorlwyiv because I'm fourth generation. You also can reach out to me directly via phone at nine seven three three nine nine seven three two nine one six two seven one. And my extension is one zero eight. But if you connect with me on LinkedIn or you visit my marketing company at our Corporate Connexion.com, I'll be happy to send you a calendar invite and have a 15 minute consultation with you and give you some tips and pointers that may just put you in the right direction.
And that's why we appreciate it. Thank you.
Yes, thank you, John. And we'll be back next week with more Monday morning marketing. Thanks, guys. Bye bye.