Book Club Discussion - The No BS Guide to Brand Building by Direct Response

Mickey Gamonal, David Pearl and Paula Williams discuss Dan S. Kennedy’s No BS Brand Building by Direct Response – The Ultimate No Holds Barred Plan to Creating and Profiting from a Powerful Brand Without Buying It.

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Mickey Gamonal:

Today we are… Well, I guess we’ll go through with the intros first and then I’ll say what the book is. So my name is Michael Gamonal with Gamonal Tutors. I do the ASVAB Domination Project. So if you or anyone you know is going into the military and wants to know how to get in at the highest level, go ahead and reach out to me.

David Pearl:

Great.

Paula Williams:

Fantastic.

Mickey Gamonal:

Go ahead, Mom. Do you want to do your little pitch?

Paula Williams:

Okay. I am Paula Williams with ABCI. ABCI’s mission is to help aviation companies sell more of their products and services so that they can keep the industry going and so that they can keep people flying around, which is really important especially now. Our latest project is our Aviation Sales Course, which we just started this month. It seems to be going really, really well, so I’m really pleased with that.

Mickey Gamonal:

Nice. Go ahead, David.

David Pearl:

Okay. My name is Dave Pearl. I’m an aviation writer. If you need something in writing to support your business in whatever form, I can write it for you. I like to think that my words can give wings to your ideas. You can reach me at … This isn’t active yet, but it soon will be. I’m at TheFlyWriter.com.

Paula Williams:

Excellent.

Mickey Gamonal:

Wings to words, I like it.

Paula Williams:

Yeah. That’s really good. You’ve done a lot of work on that since we’ve talked last.

David Pearl:

Yes. Well, I mean that’s the whole point of this. Thinking about it is one thing. I’m trying to go more to the action side now. I’ve thought about this stuff probably for years. So now, it’s time to put some action behind it.

Paula Williams:

Right.

Mickey Gamonal:

Oh yeah.

Paula Williams:

Understood.

Mickey Gamonal:

So today we are discussing the No, it’s a long title, like Dan Kennedy likes to do. But it is No B.S. Guide to Brand Building by Direct Response: The Ultimate no Holds Barred to Creating and Profiting from a Powerful Brand Without Buying It by Dan S. Kennedy.

Generally speaking, this book is exactly what is says it’s about. It’s about building and profiting from a powerful brand that you did not pay for. The entire book does talk about methods for building brands, but the overall tone of this book is you should never pay for a brand. A brand should be a “happy by-product”. He says it like seven times in here. Your brand should be a happy by-product of your product, and your marketing, and your sales, and whatever you do, your brand kind of comes from that.

You don’t pay a million dollars for the Nike swoosh. The Nike swoosh is seen everywhere and then it’s used as a marketing campaign. It’s that kind of idea that you’re not paying designers and pretty words and things like that. You’re actually releasing and producing amazing things, which make people associate your brand with positive benefits. At least that’s the way I saw it. We can do a quick round seeing if anybody has any other quick thoughts about the overall theme of this book.

David Pearl:

Mickey, I thought you captured it quite well there. As I’ve read through it, and I have to acknowledge that I’ve only got about halfway through it up until now. But I figure I got the gist of it early on. I haven’t gotten to the final part. But I really like the idea that it’s walk your talk first. Establish some credibility with either the service you’re providing or the product you’re distributing, whatever that is. Get people to buy those.

Because getting a brand is going to be based on how good that service is, how much they like that product. Then once you’ve accomplished job one, then you can move onto making people get that warm and fuzzy feeling about your project, your product rather. I thought what I took from just the section I read most recently about how they were this fitness company, Iron Tribe, I think.

Paula Williams:

Iron Tribe, right?

David Pearl:

They captured something that was very successful. People were enrolling in their fitness clubs left and right. But then the same people that were enrolling were not feeling comfortable with the marketing, which is, “Oh, we need to have something better.” Yet it was working for them. I thought, yeah that was kind of a nice disconnect. We see that all the time meaning, well, you don’t have the glossy brochure or your materials don’t look as good as the stuff for the companies we’re not buying from.

It’s like, “Hey, I’m a member of this group but I’m a little bit embarrassed with kind of the chintzy-looking stuff. But yet I’m buying it.” So I thought, well, they felt that they had the customers coming in. When they reached the stage where it was more, “Hey, let’s make them happy,” then it was almost a nice problem to have. They’ve already got the people in the door. Let’s give them something that they want.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah. So if I remember correctly, the statement behind that is “Buyers are liars.” Right? Which means that they want to be talked to in a certain way, but then when they continue to get that kind of marketing material like, “Hey, this works. Hey, this works.” They’re like, why is this guy appealing so much to, “Hey, this works.” Why doesn’t he just rely on his brand because I believe in it so much?

It’s like he’s saying, hey, this works over and over again because that’s what got you in the door. That’s the reason that they do this. People don’t take that into account, right? We create a brand in our own idea. Right? I think it’s the saying that you yourself as a person doesn’t exist. Everyone who interacts with you creates their own version of you. Dave, I know A, B and C about you but I don’t know the comprehensive who you are. No one does except for you. It’s the same thing with your brand. As people learn A, B and C about your brand, they get their own ideas of what D, E and F are.

Then they go back and look at A, B and C, and they’re like, “This doesn’t line up with D, E and F.” Then they all upset. I think he described in the book, ended up doing like a dual marketing scheme, a front end and a back end.

David Pearl:

Right. That was a concept that I guess looking at it, from my perspective, this is also new to me. I’m thinking, yeah, marketing, sales and so forth. But I think we have to recognize even as individuals, like myself, that we’ve got a brand. Whatever it is, we’re not used to calling it that, but people have a perception of us as are we good at what we do? Can we be trusted? Do we have integrity? Those types of things are all part of a service brand, I think. We have to be mindful of that as we go out into the world.

We can’t represent that we are something that we’re not or that we’re going to produce something that we can’t, deliver something on a schedule that we can’t meet, all those types of things. I think we have to be mindful of that’s part of the brand. That’s not what we’re selling, we’re selling at least, I’d be selling, “Hey, do you want me to write an email campaign for you? Do you want me to do a newsletter?” Some specific thing like that. But attached to the promise to write an email is those other things, which I think all constitute part of the brand.

Paula Williams:

Right? We spell a brand refresh product, ABCI does, but we won’t sell it to a startup. The reason for that is because if you don’t have any customers that I can talk to, I have no idea what your brand is or should be. I can’t talk to you about what your intentions are and everything else because it’s all just words, up until the point where you’ve had some delivery, and you’ve had some success, and you’ve had some experiences with customers, if your brand is your sum total of customers’ opinions of you, then there is no brand until you’ve been in business for some amount of time.

We’re not Coke or Pepsi or Nike. So we can’t afford to be spending money on something that doesn’t exist. If it doesn’t exist, we’re not going to make it up for you. I think there’s something dishonest about doing that. But I do think when we do a brand refresh for people, the process is basically we interview your customers. We look at your materials and things like that and we say, “Do these lineup?”

For Iron Tribe Fitness, if we were to do a brand refresh for them, we’d say, “You know what, people love you because you are no frills people love you because of the benefits that they get out of this. We focus on the customer stories and forget the glossy brochures.” It’s basically all about getting people into some kind of a challenge. I think Iron Tribe fitness would have been much better off doing maybe a fitness weekend or something like that following Mickey’s business model, doing a challenge first and then giving people a taste of this is what you get when you work with us as opposed to having a beautiful logo and beautiful brochures and beautiful documents and things like that, because that’s …

I think people are almost suspicious when things are too glossy or too perfect because it looks like you bought your brand. So yeah, even though you can buy a brand refresh from us, you can’t buy a brand from us.

Mickey Gamonal:

Right.

David Pearl:

Right. I mean, I just liked the idea of the book is very upfront is do the work first.t The work, it’s going to be different for all of us. But the work for me is to get people that want me to write for them. So that’s where the rubber kind of hits the road. I’m reminded of I don’t know if it was a joke or just something that Steve Martin mentioned. He said he was going to write a book, 10 Easy Steps to $1 Million Into $10 Million. Step one, earn a million dollars.

Paula Williams:

Right.

David Pearl:

So I that’s what I kind of say is that all this other stuff sounds really great. But until until I have that first million, until I have those first 10 clients or whatever it is that we’re talking about in the sales course, none of the other stuff matters until you’ve done that, then you’ve got something to build with. You don’t have a foundation. You don’t start decorating the roof until you’ve got the-

Mickey Gamonal:

Foundation.

David Pearl:

The basement in, right? So I think there’s a tendency for us to get caught up in the … I don’t know, the frivolous or with the window dressing. We don’t stay focused on, you know, the important stuff. I think that message was very clear in this book.

Mickey Gamonal:

Well yeah, I mean, what do you do when you’re a kid who learns how to play guitar? You imagine being a rock star, right? You don’t imagine practicing because that’s not like what you’re going to imagine. You don’t imagine playing small shows. You imagine opening for Kiss or something crazy like that, right?

You imagine like these extreme ideas. I think with our businesses, it’s the same idea, The same thing where I want to have this big huge truck that’s totally wrapped in marketing materials so that people see this while going down the road AND they’re like, “Wow, Gamonal Tutors. I need to go talk to that guy.” But that’s glossy finish, right? That’s not teaching anybody anything. That’s not providing value for any of my clients. It’s not doing anything. So as nice as it is to think about and aspire to and put up on the wall as a one day thing, it’s not going to be the first step, it can’t be the first. Because if it were the first step, they’ll call me.

I’ll say, hey. They won’t say, “Hi, I want tutoring.” I’ll be like, “Right on.” I won’t know what I’m doing. If I don’t have any background information on what I do for a living, you can’t build that kind of brand. The reason that Nike and Southwest and all these people have those things is they’ve established this brand over many years. {eople have been buying it for many years.

The thing is Nike’s died. That’s the other thing that people forget is like big companies. He mentions it in here is like-

David Pearl:

Yeah. Kodak, yeah.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah. Kodak, Kodak. That was one of his main ones. It sounds like you remember that one. Do you want to go into that a little bit?

David Pearl:

Well, what I remember about, I mean because I’ve got a few years on you. But they were ubiquitous, everywhere. You got Kodak camera, their Kodak film. I don’t know if it’s their fault, specifically but they did not adapt. They didn’t go digital when everybody was going digital. For most of us now, I mean it was a status symbol to have a nice camera. I got my big camera overseas but I’m not a photographer. I don’t think I used it more than 20 times the whole time I got it. It certainly didn’t justify the expense.

But it was really nice. What did I put in it? I put Kodak film in it. I mean, that was their mainstay. You put it on Kodak paper. The process would take a week or two weeks. You send the film off. But the technology changed in my adult lifetime. Kodak didn’t adapt to it. They certainly … There were a lot of companies. I mean, Nikon and Olympus, they were adapting their cameras to the new technology. Kodak could have, but apparently said, “Hey, we’re Kodak. We don’t need to worry about this, this will never change.” Because they didn’t adapt they’re an afterthought now.

Mickey Gamonal:

Dan would argue that it’s 100% their fault because nobody’s going to look out for their brand but them. It’s nobody’s responsibilities to keep Kodak alive except for Kodak. So i they missed that kind of thing, there could have been an argument for it back in the day. No, we need to stick to this film. Even in this book, there’s a dance with the dance with the girl or the guy that brought you into the dance. He talks about using direct sales marketing. Then as soon as you start getting big for your britches, you’re going to want to go find outsource your marketing, outsource your branding, all that. He’s like, “Don’t forget about direct response marketing,” what in his opinion is going to bring anyone.

Paula Williams:

Right. What I actually really like about one of the points that he makes that I really like from the book is that long-term strategy. You start with almost no branding. So you lead with your offer. Here’s what I can do for you because nobody cares who you are until they know what you can do for them. So you lead with your offer. Then you start sneaking in your branding over time. So that if somebody’s been doing business with ABCI, for more than a year, I want their office to be covered in ABCI stuff. I want them to have binders, and I want them to have a bookshelf full of stuff and I want them to have a coffee mug and a leather binder with our logo on it, and all of that stuff over the course of a couple of years of doing business with us.

That way, we become entrenched in their their company and they think of us whenever they think of remember that great session we did with those guys. We need to get back to that thought so that our branding has some substance behind it, but they’re constantly reminded of it. So there is a place for the visual branding. But it’s not upfront. You don’t lead with it, you lead with the offer.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah, yeah.

David Pearl:

What I’m thinking about is, Paula, with your clients, they’re in a diverse. I mean, you’re not just dealing with the aircraft brokers, and you’re not just dealing with you got flight schools and all these other types of things. I think how do you translate this? It’s not amorphous, but it’s a big idea thing down to the level where writers and the people involved in the maintenance facilities and so forth, that they can stay focused on doing what they do to the point where they’re going to have … Then they can just shift more to brand renewal or brand or refreshing or whatever, brand refreshing, right? This is the term you use.

Paula Williams:

Yeah. Yeah. With your business, David, you may do someone’s website. You may do all the copywriting for their website or for a big product launch or something like that, but then they may not need you for another six months or something along those lines. So in that meantime, they may have people come and go, and forget about you and see other people’s advertising and other kinds of things. So after you’ve delivered a fantastic job for them, what I would do probably is send them a bunch of swag so that they will have it on their desk.

This way, you’re not wasting your swag and just throwing it around in a trade show or something like that. You’re sending it to someone who has already invested in your work and had a great experience with you. That way, when somebody else comes to their office and sees it and says, “Oh, you work with this guy? I need a copywriter. Tell me about him,” or next time they need something done, and they have another product that needs to be launched or whatever, they see your stuff. They’re getting your emails, they’re getting your logos coming across as a visual shorthand of the relationship that you had in the great time that you had together, and the work that you did, and the great results that you got for them. So that’s the function of a brand. Without that initial relationship, you’re just throwing, doing the T shirt cannon.

David Pearl:

Right.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah. Pennies into the ocean.

Paula Williams:

Right.

Mickey Gamonal:

I think that’s a really good point. The Iron Tribe section talks about that a lot is you want to have evangelists, evangelists.

Paula Williams:

Evangelists. Yeah.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah. For your brand.

David Pearl:

Got his tattoos.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah. Right? Yeah. One guy had the Iron Tribe tattoo. But yeah, that’s the thing, right? Like, you want to have people who love what you do so much that they help themselves to talk about you. Because at the end of the day, I could send a Gamonal Tutors t-shirt to 50 recruiter offices or I could send it to five students that I’ve had.

The five students that I have are actually going to wear the thing, you know what I mean? They’re recruiting in offices, they’re going to be like, “Oh, who needs a new t shirt? Oh, I got a million. To hell with it.” Right? But the people that I’ve worked with, those are people who are going to see the shirt and be like, “Wow, this is really nice. This is something.” They relate it back to the experience they had. It really affirms even if the tutoring didn’t go great, right? They’re going to think, “Man, must have went really well. I got a free t-shirt.” It builds. It’s spending your money in such a more beneficial way. You’re spending your marketing dollars. If you can put it into someone who’s already invested in you. You’re multiplying it basically. Spending it one for one or one for error.

Paula Williams:

They worked hard for that t-shirt, right?

Mickey Gamonal:

Exactly. Yeah, they showed up to 12 hours’ worth of sessions. They read the book, they worked on all … They submitted all their surveys and all of their Google Drive work. Da, da, da. Yeah, they can look at that as a symbol of ownership. I can even write you know, some crappy ad copy. It’s not going to take much thought like, “Hey, you did great. I hope this represents me.” I’m … Then that’s it.

Paula Williams:

Yeah. Show us your brand tattoo. Can we see that?

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah, I do have a brand tattoo, actually. But the tattoo came before my logo came.

Paula Williams:

Still it’s a good story.

David Pearl:

Right.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah. It’s funny, I actually … I met up with a buddy last night, he had a pie tattoo. So we had to get together and take some math tattoos.

Paula Williams:

The math nerd tattoos.

Mickey Gamonal:

Exactly.

David Pearl:

How many places did he take it out to?

Mickey Gamonal:

The tattoo? Taking out what?

David Pearl:

No. He didn’t put 3.14? That’s not his tattoo, right?

Mickey Gamonal:

He just does like a whole back, like a whole back with, yeah.

David Pearl:

I know that on Pi Day, they have contests to see how many players … Somebody will take it out, 10,000 spots or something like that I’m thinking that’s far above my ability to comprehend or appreciate.

Paula Williams:

Right.

Mickey Gamonal:

Well, it’s close to 10 divided by seven or something. No, no, no, it would have been 25? I’m not sure. There is a simple fraction that’s like really, really close. But of course, it’s not there because fractions, although they repeat, they don’t … Pi is unique in that it doesn’t repeat. Fractions do repeat if they go on forever.

Paula Williams:

Right. But it’s probably accurate enough for anything in real life that anybody would do.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah.

David Pearl:

Close enough for anything I’m going to design I think.

Mickey Gamonal:

Right, right. That’s the kicker about pi, right? Is it a real life thing? No. It’s really a philosophical question.

David Pearl:

Yeah.

Paula Williams:

Do numbers really exist? Do we really exist?

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah. Exactly. If these numbers don’t really exist, how can you define a circle? Yeah, I’ll start. I’ll go down a rabbit hole.

Paula Williams:

There we go.

Mickey Gamonal:

Those are not my best tutoring sessions, just talking to myself.

David Pearl:

Well, I’m thinking that if the guys are struggling for the ASDA math at that level is probably a major challenge for them.

Mickey Gamonal:

Absolutely.

David Pearl:

Right.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah. I send them out like a very basic like child flashcard game app. I just tell them to work through that. As soon as they get those foundations down, then we can start working on other stuff, but yeah. Go ahead.

David Pearl:

I was going to say, when I was teaching English as a second language for some international students at the local community college, several young men because the military was an avenue for them.

Mickey Gamonal:

You can get schiz and chip.

David Pearl:

That’s exactly right. So I was helping some of those gentlemen find a recruiter and find a book to prepare for the ASDA. But the challenge they had was not so much they didn’t know how to do it. It’s just they couldn’t comprehend the questions well enough. Being conversational in English is one thing, understanding English well enough to answer questions on a test is quite something different. Your ability in English has to be much higher to focus on the academic side. So you can get by, go to the bank, go to store and so forth and survive. If someone asked you to write something of any length or respond to a particular question, then that’s a lot more difficult.

Mickey Gamonal:

For sure. That’s a struggle, no doubt. So a couple other things that I wanted to talk about the book specifically. He really harps on Iron Tribe. I don’t know if you guys saw on the back of the book, there’s even like a, “Start franchising with us today.”

David Pearl:

Yes, yes.

Mickey Gamonal:

I love it.

David Pearl:

It’s a nice sales piece.

Mickey Gamonal:

Right? I love the hustle, I love the hustle i this book. They are very straightforward, like this is a hustle. They’re telling me I’m trying to get you to buy more stuff. At the end of the day, you have the choice anyway. So why not?

Paula Williams:

Right.

Mickey Gamonal:

But yeah. I wanted to mention Iron Tribe used it for about everything. One thing that really stuck out to me was unique selling proposition and dynamic core story. It’s really just like a small part of a chapter, I think it’s like no more than five, 10 pages. But I thought it was really good. The word “unique” of course, meaning you separate yourself from everything else. So a unique selling proposition means that you probably pretty much sell something that nobody else sells. So you have to figure out what that is to differentiate yourself. I think that goes a long ways towards creating your brand is what makes you special, right? Otherwise, you would just have a generic brand. I thought that was good. What was the other one? The DSP.

Paula Williams:

Dynamic.

Mickey Gamonal:

You know this a little better than me.

Paula Williams:

Yeah. Your dynamic story.

Mickey Gamonal:

this a little better than? Yeah, your dynamic story.

Paula Williams:

What is what is that one? I think you could write a book on these ones, you probably could at least do it pretty well. Yeah. This is the second time actually that we’ve done this book, that we’ve used this book in our … I think the last time was probably four or five years ago. So this is part of the reason that we built our lab, our marketing lab was modeled to begin with on Iron Tribe Fitness.

If we were to put together some challenges, and some companionship, and some assistance, and some camaraderie and other things, how would we do that for marketing the way that they do for fitness? So putting together the Facebook group and other things builds a story, builds a collective story that is common to a bunch of people and is also very, very helpful to people. You’ll notice if you’ve been hanging out with any of our folks, a lot of them hang out with each other at events or in doing business and stuff like that.

They found ways to a lot of people that are on our podcast or also on Adam’s podcast, a lot of people that work with a broker also work with an appraiser. A lot of people that work with a web developer also work with a copywriter. So all of those things are dynamic and collaborative. We do not control any of that. So part of that is just getting out of the middle of that and not controlling what’s going to happen with your tribe, and letting them be its own organism, letting it be its own organism.

David Pearl:

Right. I recall the references in the marketing lab, to the tribe. I wonder if it was that before you read the book or if because you read the book, you used that same idea of a group of like-minded people working together to achieve a collaborative goal.

Paula Williams:

Right. Prior to about five years ago, it was all very informal. We would introduce our customers to each other. We had our breakfast at NBAA, things like that, but we didn’t have a Facebook group. We did book discussions, but it was just John and me. We didn’t include everybody else. So it was a lot less organic and a lot less organized. We didn’t have the infrastructure. Honestly, Facebook groups weren’t very good five years ago. So, that wasn’t a possibility. So the technologies evolved, and the group has evolved. I couldn’t be happier with the people in it. You get a couple of David’s and Jeremy’s and Bene’s and other people like that that are very, very sociable and helpful to each other. Everything goes in its own direction, which is fantastic.

Mickey Gamonal:

How does that relate to dynamic core story? So like that specific-

Paula Williams:

Core story.

Mickey Gamonal:

Right.

Paula Williams:

Right. Okay, sorry. I got off base a little bit. Dynamic core story. What’s changing in your story. Our story became less about John and me and more about the tribe. So every other marketing company on the planet can build you a brochure, build you a website, build you any of these things. But there is none other that can provide a group of aviation professionals who networks together to accomplish sales and marketing goals. So that’s our dynamic core story. The group is it, so that is the story really.

Mickey Gamonal:

Wow, because it’s constantly changing. The the core of it, I guess, would be the aviation aviation side, because that’s more of the uniqueness that comes with it.

Paula Williams:

Right. We’ve completely lost control of it. I mean, we get people in the group that want to take this in the direction of UAVs. As an example, this is one thing that we’ve been thinking about, how is this going to change in the next five, 10, 15 years? Will we consider that aviation? Yeah, I think we’ll consider that aviation. We will let the group evolve in that direction, but we’re not going to push it that way. We’ve done a couple of podcasts about UAV. So that’s a dynamic component to the story. But the group controls the story. We don’t control the story.

Mickey Gamonal:

Nice. I like it. That keeps the dynamic too. That keeps it so that you’re not too set.

Paula Williams:

Right, exactly. So that’s our dynamic core story. I’m sure you probably have or will develop a different one, and probably want that to be something entirely different because you’re centered around the military. Each of your students is going to evolve and start doing things differently.

David Pearl:

Right. Yeah. I think we were a storytelling species. In our DNA probably until the last relatively modern history anyway, I mean, the printing press really came around what, is that 1100, 1200 somewhere around there, Gutenberg Printing Press.

Paula Williams:

Right.

David Pearl:

But really until then, the only people that were writing were very educated people. It wasn’t even 1% of the population. So most of the people until the printing press, maybe until your widespread education, literacy, the stories were still told word of mouth, songs, things, things like that. So we are ingrained in our being, our stories. Children love to hear stories and I think they love to hear stories that are told, not just read to them.

So we have that, it’s a very powerful medium. We ignore that at our peril I think if we don’t share the stories. Our own stories, I think people that work with us want to know, our story. Somebody is coming in new wants to know this story of someone who has been here has has used, has used our product, has benefited from our services such that they can feel an affinity towards that person. They can say, “Hey, there was somebody who was just where I am six months, a year ago. This is the experience they’ve had.”

I can take some comfort, some confidence, some inspiration from that person’s example. I believe that’s very motivating to me, because I’ve seen it in myself. I’ve seen it youth groups that I’ve had, how I can transfix a group of kids by telling a story. But the same group of kids, if I start saying, “Well, hey guys, this is what you need to do.” I start instructing, I start doing … They’re gone, I lost them right there. But they’ll listen to a five-minute story with rapt attention.

Paula Williams:

Yep.

Mickey Gamonal:

You sound like a writer. You sound like you have some hidden agenda here.

David Pearl:

Well, yeah.

Paula Williams:

No, that’s this dynamic core story, is being able to tell stories and being able to keep people in rapt attention for five minutes at a time.

David Pearl:

Right. Well, I don’t know if I have five minutes maybe. With today’s, with your generation, Mickey, I’m not sure if I can keep them for five minutes. I have to work a little faster, got to get something that they can deal with on the smartphone.

Mickey Gamonal:

Well, that’s the thing, right? You got to get their attention first. But after that, I think as soon as you got them, I think we’re even more committed than previous generations.

Paula Williams:

Yeah.

Mickey Gamonal:

I think that’s something that people overlook is that yeah, our generation, sure, we’re easily distracted because there’s a million things going on all the time, right? We have seven different things that give us notification all day long. So with all of those devices yelling at us non stop, you have to cut through that.

Paula Williams:

You have to earn.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah, as soon as you earn our attention, we’re devout, man, we’re into it.

Paula Williams:

Sorry, if you ever doubted the attention span of young people, look at Game of Thrones or look at some of these really, really long involved series on Netflix that are really popular. People are watching for entire weeks at a time, these intertwined stories that are just amazingly complicated. It’s so much more complicated than TV from 15 years ago, where everything was wrapped up in half an hour.

Mickey Gamonal:

Well, and you see, you see it in the gaming community. If you look at people who are into Twitch, or like watching people’s live stream their, Call of Duty or whatever. I’ve never really been into it myself. But these guys will sit and watch the same gamer play the same game for 20 hours 30 hours, whatever, like an obscene amount of time. They’re just playing the stupid … They have the game right next to them. They could play it themselves. But these guys, they’re into it, they love that storytelling component that you guys … I think that that’s something that is timeless and powerful.

Paula Williams:

Mickey, I think your dynamic story is what’s different about you from every other tutor is that you actually were in … You were wading through the creek at Fort Benning not too long ago. None of the other tutors have actually been there and done that. They’re kind of classroom people. Whereas you can really show them how it applies and how that benefits them.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah, no, absolutely. I agree. We’ve been in talks about kind of updating my copy as far as my sales copy goes. But one of the mistakes that I make is because somebody said, “Oh, why should someone buy from you?” Right? Because I was looking for feedback on my website. Somebody says, “Okay. I looked through this, and I don’t understand why I should buy from you.” I’m like, “Oh well.” Then I lay out all these reasons for why I’m the greatest thing on earth, right?

Then it’s not about the customer anymore. So you really got to strike a balance and not necessarily a balance, but even find a synergy there, where you should work with me because I’m the best for you. That’s going to be what really propels the business. That’s going to be the what gets the conversions and all the hard numbers, the no BS numbers that I’m looking for.

Paula Williams:

Right. Because they don’t care about what you’ve done. They care about what you can do for them.

David Pearl:

I think that’s, that’s a message that’s hard for people with big egos like me to accept,. Hey, I’m good. Look at me.

Mickey Gamonal:

Right. Well, you got these stories. You got the same thing I have where you could be like, “I was in the Navy, I was telling people not to crash and burn. I was saving lives, kicking ass.” You get a platform to say that kind of thing. You realize people might actually want to hear it. Then it’s game over. How are you ever going to talk about anybody else? What else could matter?

David Pearl:

Yeah, yeah. There I was.

Paula Williams:

There I was. It’s all about me.

David Pearl:

Right.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yep.

David Pearl:

Yeah.

Mickey Gamonal:

I think that’s what happens to Nike too, or not Nike, but Kodak. We’ll say, Blockbuster. I mean, Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix. They mentioned that in the book is Blockbuster was given the chance to buy Netflix. Netflix didn’t start out as this badass streaming service. It started out sending DVDs in the mail.

David Pearl:

Right. I belong to Netflix back then.

Mickey Gamonal:

You’re still a believer.

Paula Williams:

Greatest idea ever.

Mickey Gamonal:

If you you were in it before it was cool.

David Pearl:

Oh, yeah. I had to get out of it because it was too overwhelming to even try to sift through all the lists of titles. Then you have to put them back in and mail them back. I did it for a couple of years. But I just said there’s just too many movies out there. It was hard for me to stay on top of it. But yes, I remember those little red envelopes.

Paula Williams:

So if Kodak had been all about their customers, they would have noticed the shift. If they hadn’t gotten too egotistical about, “This is who we are.” Nobody cares who you are, you don’t care who your customers are. So being true to your customers is one thing and if they went all artistic and said, “Well, we’re only going to serve the film community,” and had done that shift and started charging more for their products and being a niche artist deal, they may have survived that way. Or if they had gone digital, they may have survived that way. So they had to pass, two opportunities and missed them both.

Mickey Gamonal:

There’s always more ways to classify your people, right? You can classify them into blue shoes and brown shoes or purists and consumers, whatever you want to classify them to. You can pivot your business in whichever direction. I think that’s something that the small businesses are really good at. Because we have to be, right? We don’t have a choice we have to go where the dollars are. But big businesses have the capital to make those huge mistakes, and just say, “No, I’m going to sit on this even though everything’s changing around me.” I’m going to clutch my printing press and my film. I’m going down with Fuji.” Nobody can talk you out of that because you have got a ton of success. If I was the CEO of Kodak, I was saying, “No, we’re going to do what’s gotten us our success,” nobody can say that I’m wrong. There’s no one who can argue with that. That’s where things, I would imagine, get sticky, but I’d love to be able to have the power to make that kind of mistake one day.

Paula Williams:

Right. I mean, David, if you had the history of Bob Bly or something like that, it would be a lot harder for you to pivot because he has built so much of a customer base over such a long time. His customers now are wanting those long form emails and other kinds of things. So he would have a really hard time pivoting. You’ve got the opportunity to do anything you want. You can go after the old school customers, you can go after the new kids on the block. It sounds like you’re doing both with the chat venue and also, I know you’ve written some some long form stuff for us. It’s fantastic as well.

David Pearl:

I mean, that’s exciting for me. It’s a little intimidating from the standpoint of, well, I’m much more comfortable you say just turn the computer off and start writing. I mean, that’s the world I grew up in. The long form sales letter, once you get the stuff that you’re supposed to be putting in, the writing part is not as challenging as the organizing and trying to cut it down. But what I find my biggest challenge is trying to operate these new platforms.

I’ll see this thing and say, “Yeah, I understand what it’s supposed to do, but then manipulating it.” I’d rather just say, all right, well, I still want to go to the library. I still want to … That’s the world I grew up in.

Paula Williams:

The library.

David Pearl:

But the library is online. Everything that I was taught about, check your sources and stuff, I don’t have as great a comfort level that the research that I do online is credible because I can’t check the sources quite as easily. I can’t vet the material. I’m still in the back of my mind, this is just some guy saying this as opposed to it’s been proven through some sort of scientific process.

I have to overcome a lot of my reticence on that. Then just the facility of using the material, press a button. It doesn’t do exactly what I expected it to do. Then fighting off that sense of frustration that I have and saying, “No, no, I can learn it.”

Paula Williams:

Got to keep going. Right?

David Pearl:

I mean I kind of feel like I’m back in some class back in college where I didn’t know anything. I’m not used to be in the guy that doesn’t know anything. People have come to me for years for advice and my kids and all that stuff. I’m not the expert in a lot of this new stuff. It’s a humbling experience in some ways.

Paula Williams:

Right. Well, and that’s become part of I think everybody’s dynamic story, is right now, everybody is in this shift because of COVID and because of everything else. Everybody’s had to shift the way that they do business. That becomes part of your dynamic story. How did you handle it? How did you serve your people? How did they feel about it? Did you do the right thing, the wrong thing? Did you help? Did you hurt? Did you not respond? I know both of you are in situations where you’re having to do online stuff when you would have done classroom stuff ,where you would have done in person meetings and other things. That’s become part of your story, whether you want it to or not.

David Pearl:

Right. Well, I mean I look at this whole situation. You don’t know if you’ve got a good sailboat until you’ve sailed it in a storm. You don’t know if you’ve got a good airplane until you’ve put it through these flight tests. I kind of see what we’re going through now is it’s a test. Yes, it’s intimidating. I don’t think anything good is to be obtained by just putting my head in a hole and worrying about how tough it is. There’s certainly a lot of people have things a lot more challenging than I do. I’m pretty comfortable compared to a lot of people.

Paula Williams:

There’s plenty of people doing enough complaining for the rest of us.

David Pearl:

Right. I just liked this mentality that movie a couple years ago. In fact, Paula, this was a line of thought that I was taking on the thing that I did for you until I just looked and I said, “I don’t think I can be that strident about it.” If you remember the movie, The Martian. At the end, he talks about how you deal with what might be an overwhelming problem. He says, “At some point when you’re a space traveler, you’re going to hit something that you think hey, this could end me.” This could be it.

I guess we could look at COVID to say, “Yeah, this could be it. We don’t think so. But it’s a big challenge.” You can either say, “Yeah, I accept it, and I’m not going to do anything.” Or you say, “Hey, I’m going to do it, I love doing it.” Yeah. I’m going to science the shit out of it, is what his …

Paula Williams:

We’re going to market the shit out of that.

David Pearl:

Right. So that to me, that’s kind of what people on aviation do, all the way back to the first guys. Nobody thought that they could do it. Wilbur and Orville, so they applied science to it. They started testing things out. They weren’t wind tunnels, but they came up with it. They figured it out. Matt’s character in the movie kind of sums it up.

Paula Williams:

That’s what they started doing. Yep.

David Pearl:

Yeah, he says, “You find a problem and you work it. Then you work another problem.” Then he said, “If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.” That’s the way I see what we’re doing here. There’s a way to do it. It may take longer than we want it to, and it may be harder or whatever, but we break it down. We do the math, we keep working the problem, we find a way out again. That’s really resonated.

Mickey Gamonal:

Wow. Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. I can’t argue with that. I think that’s a good note. I don’t even want to top it. Does anybody have any final words on the book or anything like that?

Paula Williams:

No, let’s pitch out and call it a day. I think it’s hard to beat that.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Cool. My name is Michael Gamonal. If you’re going into the United States military, look me up for Gamonal Tutors. You can find me on Facebook or Instagram. Send me a message, and we’ll make sure that you’re getting in the highest possible way. Okay.

Paula Williams:

Paula Williams, ABCI. We are starting to do free live trainings every Wednesday in our Facebook group. So if you can join us there, it’s a private group, aviation only and salespeople only. So you’ll have to request entrance. But we’re going to be doing those free trainings until our next course starts which will be in October. So that’s our sales force. Then of course, we have marketing services as well.

David Pearl:

Hi. I’m Dave Pearl, the Fly Writer. If you’ve got a writing need, I am writing whatever it is. Let me put wings to your writing.

Paula Williams:

Fantastic. All right.

Mickey Gamonal:

That’s good. All right.

Paula Williams:

Are we good?

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah. That’s great.

David Pearl:

Thanks a lot.