Step Up Your Marketing Game with Jerry Fletcher
In this video, you will learn who Jerry Fletcher is. 30 years ago, Jerry was CEO of the largest business advertising company in Portland, Oregon, and transitioned to his own business called ‘Digimar’ which all started in a garage. As years went by, he became a CEO of Advertising Company again and got fired because he put the company to employee stock option purchase which the Board of Directors didn’t like but this act made him memorable and respected by employees. Today, Jerry is working with high end Executive Consultants kind of folks like the ones working under Management, Leadership, Negotiators, CPA’s, etc.. Jerry’s role is to support them to be in the 6 figure arena. He also shared how you can step up your marketing game by following this in order -- Memorable/Unforgettable/Legendary. Now, Jerry plans to conquer the speaking business world with Andy Audate at Progression Conference Tour.
“Make your plan today to get your business ready for tomorrow”
You will learn:
- What is Stenography?
- High end marketing strategies
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Transcriptions:
Andy Audate
I want to change lives. I want to show people how to progress in their money. I want to show people how to progress their mindset. I want to show people how to progress in their brand so that way they can take care of their family. Take care of the finances and experience freedom.
Alright, so welcome to the progression show, man. I am so excited because our guests have long made it in his business to understand how to develop a brand. And you know what I'm talking about when I say go global this man is right behind that. You know some people that he has worked with, you might be familiar with it.You know, Intel Tektronix secret. I mean, freight lane Freightliner. Oh my gosh. These huge companies. The person I'm bringing up to you today on the progressive show is behind them. Jerry, he's the CEO of his own marketing and consulting forum. He's now going into his 30th year and he's been a professional speaker with international credentials.He's an author of three books as well. He has a seven audio program series and. For video programs, let's bring to the stage, bring to the front page. Jerry Fletcher. Thank you so much, Jerry, for being a part of the progressive show today.
Jerry Fletcher
Well thank you for having me. And it's like, who's that guy you're talking about?He sounds pretty cool. I like to talk to him,
Andy Audate
Man This dude obviously I was just talking about, which is you, by the way, who's phenomenal in the business space. A good friend, a mentor. And I just want to look up to as a brother who is in the same space as me and brand domination and teaching people how to grow their brands.
Jerry, let's backtrack a bit. So I see what you're doing. Now. You have a successful business. You're going into your 30th year and running your enterprise and supporting so many entrepreneurs, brands, and companies to grow and scale their marketing and get known in the space. But before. This before you started doing this, who was Jerry.What were you doing before? Let's say 30 years ago.
Jerry Fletcher
Well at that point, when I started doing this I was the CEO of a, the largest business, a business advertising agency in Portland, Oregon which most people don't know about is, you know, come from. Yeah. They know about Nike and Weiden and Kennedy.Well, we were the flip side. Why didn't you get to do that? All the consumer stuff. We did all the business stuff and it was kind of fun. I. Basically helped introduce new products, new services, new companies for all over the world. I think probably the. Probably the most, the best known one. And it's not that well known, but it was really kind of fun. It was an outfit called Digimark which I helped name and I was their marketing consultant initially.and we started out literally in a garage, just like the most high tech garage.
Andy Audate
In a garage.That's crazy.
Jerry Fletcher
A dirt floor garage. Okay. Where the guy that invented this, this whole thing, uh, he asked me to come in and take a look at it and I did. And I'm like, so all I see is a picture of a little girl on the screen.He said, yeah. But what you don't see is what's behind it. They are called steganography, which is where you hide information in graphics.
Andy Audate
How do you say that word?
Jerry Fletcher
Steganography
Andy Audate
how do you spell it?
Jerry Fletcher
Yo good. Glock s t e g a n o g r a p h y I think.
Andy Audate
Wow. So that I definitely, so the definition of steganography is a technique of hiding secret data within an ordinary non secret file or a message in order to avoid the detection.The secret data is Dennis drafted. At its destination, the use of stick Innography can be combined with encryption as an extra step for hiding or protecting data. So in art you're saying in art there's beta in this experience that you had there was data that was being hidden. And through the photo.
Jerry Fletcher
you could hide it in a photo.You could hide it in a piece of art. You could hide it in a three dimensional object. If you knew how to do it. The fact is that this, this, this self was revolutionary and of course, We started trying to figure out where to sell it, who would buy it, who would use it right. And what it came down to was that people that had anything to do with money and with financial paperwork, that sort of thing, we're really interested in it.So it's now used in, let's see, or you've heard of the GA, which is the top eight countries in the world and the ones with the biggest financial operations, right. It's now used by seven of those eight countries. It is not used in the United States because of a quote. It was not invented here,
Andy Audate
Who would use it though?Who knows the military. Who uses anybody?
Jerry Fletcher
Anybody can use it.The primary use is in things that like money. It's one of the ways that only other currencies in the world make sure that it's their currency and there, there are ways to check it and you just put it into a computer and it'll read it and it's either there or it's not, but it's also used as a way to make sure that copyrights are maintained on all kinds of photography.
And so on. All of the stuff you see online, one of the capabilities they have is to give photographers the ability to put that into their activities any kind of prints that are making even the digital print have it. So it's used in all kinds of things. Where do you want to hide that information, but where you want to make sure that you've got something that says this is mine.Okay. Very, very straightforward. It was a fun company. We took it through the point of actually taking it public. That was a party. Oh man. Can you imagine being in a room in a party where there's four or five, six, eight tables of people, big eights or tens or whatever, and there's nobody in the room worth less than $4 million down.That is one hell of a party. So anyway, so I have, yeah, when I started out, literally this was shown to me because I told the lead vendor that something else he wanted to do was not going to work. We tried it anyway and he said, you're right. It didn't work. Let me show you something else. And when he showed it to me, I was going, Oh my God.
Oh my God. I went home, told my wife, I've just seen the next Xerox. And she went, what. She couldn't understand what I was talking about because it's a very difficult thing to understand. But anyway that was fun. That was my first really big consulting gig and I really had a fun time with it.
Andy Audate
so what are you doing now or what do you, what do you do nowadays these days?I'm more working with high end executive consultant kinds of folks.Management types, leadership types, negotiators certified financial planners, lawyers, accountants, really high end folks.and the reason is most of them get to a certain point and they need a little something more to take them over the edge, to get them into the six figure comfortable kind of arena.And what I helped them do was figure out how to identify themselves probably. Well, one of the best ones that I've had any, still a client for after what, seven years, eight years true. Jim was out there. He was doing fine. He was, you know, making a living, but he wasn't doing as well as he was hoping to.and he decided that he was going to stop going into companies and reworking they'll make sure they were okay. You know, the guy you hire is the, as the COO or the CEO to take care of it and get it back up and running. Right. He got tired of that. And he said, well, I'm going to start consulting. Well, We were having breakfast.And I said, Jim, do you realize, of course, that you're going to have to have a full team. And he went, what do you mean? I said, what, when you go into a company, what you do is you, you, you, you could give a command and people will say you know, say jump. And they say how high.But when you're a consultant, you don't have that ability.
Do you have to convince or persuade or find a way to get people to do what you think needs to be done? And you're not in control. And that gave him pause. And about a week later, he called me. He said, okay, we need to talk. I said, fine. We agreed that I'd rework his website.
And then I asked him some questions and I started asking questions and it's the same questions I always ask, which is like the basic thing that I do, which is 32nd marketing.And the first question is okay, so how do people identify you? Anyone? What do you mean? They just call me by my name. I said, well, yeah, but. How do they know what you do? He said, well, I ended up stumbling around. I said, okay, have you got any testimonials? And he said, he said, yeah. I said, okay, let me look at the testimonials.So I looked at the sheet of testimonials and on one of those testimonials that said working with him was like driving through the fog. Hmm. Isn't that interesting? And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, this guy is talking about how you helped them get to clarity.What if we just simply said that you're the defogger and Jim looked at me and said, you're nuts.No, I'm not. Let's try it. So we tried it about a week later, my phone rings, he said, Everybody understands it. Nobody forgets it and you know what my revenues are going up. Okay. So he's been with me now for eight years, I tend to do all kinds of good things for him helping with all of his publications and all of his special activities.The thing you'll find interesting is that one of the things I suggested to him early on is you need to start speaking. In order to get more clients. Yeah. And he said, and he said, well, okay, fine. But how do I do that? Said, well, for starters, you've written this book about succession and succession planning.
Andy Audate
Why would that be important though? Why would that be important for him to start speaking?
Jerry Fletcher
If you want to get to. More clients more quickly than any other way. That's the best way. I know if you're doing it one at a time, that's tough. But if you can speak to anywhere up to a hundred, 200 people in a room you're going to do better.Okay. In the case of high end consultants, they tend to speak to no more than 20 to 30 in the room but it's a way for them to get new clients very quickly and very cleanly. So we did the thing in succession. But what we did was combine his activities with that of a mergers and acquisition firm and the law firm, because all those things are needed if you're going to have someone by your firm.And so they started doing it, but they needed a partner to get a way to get this whole thing done. So what they did was they partnered with banks again at my suggestion. Now they're on there, I believe the third or fourth bank. And they've now done the presentation. I think six times every time they do it, each one of them profits with new clients.And the key there is that they're providing great information. At the right time. And literally the phone may ring the next day, or it may ring a year later, but because of what they do, they're generating business for Jim. That's pretty straight forward. He gets it right up front because he's, he explains how you have to do things today to get your business ready for the sale tomorrow.It's just very powerful. And the thing that happens. Because of some of the other things that he does, in fact, when we're building a new product on right now, in fact, we're about to launch a new, speaking setup for that. But one of the things he does, we can, you know, we finally had kept interviewing folks.
Cause I like to interview the folks that he's worked with and get testimonials, which we get on video. And one of the things that we found was that they kept saying the same thing. Yeah. He really gives you clarity, takes you through the fog East of the defogger, but he's really fast. He makes you get the answers in a hurry.So I said, Jimmy, I said, let's call with your let's let's change to the defogger and accelerator. What do you think? He said fine. Let's do it. They did it about, Oh, I think it was November of last year. One of his clients, his former clients who ran a physical therapy operation, the largest in this part of the country.Spoke at the convention for physical therapy companies in the United States, he'd been the former president, but he couldn't speak until he left that presidency of that organization. But he'd sold his company based on the information in the, in the direction that Jim had provided. And in that a speech that he made, he said, you know, this is the guy that helped me and how it had a picture of him up on the screen and said, he's the defogger and accelerator.When he finished the owner of the largest physical therapy company in the country, walked up to him and said, where do I get me? Some of the stuff?
Andy Audate
Ha, ha ha. So it's used bringing them through that journey and getting him clear on how to communicate his products and services. I supported him in the growth of his business.
Jerry Fletcher
That's what I do these days. And I do it for a number of really high end kinds of consultants. It's, it's, it's, it's very rewarding because I get to use all my skills and I get to help them build their skills. And we, we, we don't just stick to that. There are situations like value based pricing and value based proposals and that sort of thing that some high end consultants are really not that familiar with a needle, a little help with, Again, I'm in the process now with a couple of new ones.
And one of the things they're discovering is that what they thought they had to sell is not what they sell. So you have to have someone that you can talk to who can understand the vernacular of the folks, the words that are used by the kind of folks you're selling to in order to help it, help them understand who you are and what you do.I mean, 32nd Mark is very simple. I mean, literally, I, I had to figure out how to do this, to get rid of that elevator pitch. You've heard about elevator pitches.I want you to do this as a friend, take the elevator pitch and put it out to pasture, get rid of it because you don't want to hear it. And more importantly, you don't want to do it.
Andy Audate
So what you're saying is that the elevator pitch has gone. The new wave is 32nd marketing.
Jerry Fletcher
Well, I don't know whether it's the new wave or not, but it's what I teach.And the fact is, I mean, let's, let's get real 32nd marketing replaces the elevator pitch in a way, but it doesn't, what's a little bit of sense for instance. You've been somewhere and somebody comes up to you and they start telling you all about themselves and just on and on and on. And then they hand you a card or they hand you a brochure and they leave and you feel bloody they're in the water, right?
A hundred percent. Okay. That's the elevator pitch. Okay. Now, remember, you know, you know this as well as I do, you know, you've got three seconds to identify yourself three seconds, whether it's online or in person or whatever. Okay. So if you've got that, if somebody says to you, what do you do? You have to have an answer.Okay. And it has to be an answer that you can deliver in three seconds or less. Okay. And it has to be something that will get their attention. I call it their hook, a memorable hook. Okay, well, I'll give you an example. When I was, my daughter was going to go to college and I had to have something to do, and I was a consultant.
I said, well, what can I do? Well, I can do web pages. So I said, I started saying in meetings and reminding white people and so on, I build web pages that make rain, but they would kind of look like you're like what? That's a hook. Okay. Now you go from the hook to what I call the whole to the pitch and the close.Okay. The hole for that was, you know how, since your niece or your nephew went off to college, you haven't been able to get somebody to do something for you to fix your website. You just can't get anybody's attention. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, what we do is we build you a website that not only can you change every picture on, you can change every word on it, but we'll fix it so that you won't screw up the navigation.Would you be interested in finding out more about that? I took my daughter through college and grad school. With that simple way of identifying what I did. I don't do that anymore. These days. Instead of doing websites, I get asked to look at websites and say, okay, strategically, what should we do? And how should we change it?Which I do. Okay. Because it's, there's a big difference. So then we'll always go ahead.
Andy Audate
So, so now what's one of the biggest tips for, let's say an entrepreneur that's year zero. I'm not, not either one through six. Okay. One being one being at this time, one through six, how many years they've been in business, what would be the biggest strategic factor that can change the way that people are going to grow a business?
Jerry Fletcher
The biggest factor for those individuals in that one to six range. First thing is to find a way to identify yourself so that you are memorable. Okay. You can't go anywhere. If you're not memorable. If people don't know who you are and what you do. You're not going anywhere.
Andy Audate
So number one is to be memorable.
Jerry Fletcher
Yeah. Number one is to be memorable. Second thing that I would advise if they get started, they get off the ground and they're working. There's really three steps in where you want to be in terms of running any kind of entrepreneurial business. First be memorable, second, get to unforgettable. Okay.And third, try to become legendary. You're on your way to becoming legendary. Okay. Just because of what you're doing and how you're doing it. But let's talk about that first piece. Memorable is that memorable hook? What do you do? That's the answer to that question. You have to be able to do it and do it in their words, their terms quickly and unforgettably.
Okay. Just, just, just gotta be memorable. Okay. That will help you. If you understand how they're there, they're gated what they're looking for to get a little bit into trust and you can get the brand. You can do all that in 30 seconds or less. Think about that 30 seconds or less to get you to a brand. Okay.Now from brand to unforgettable, Whoa, first they have to work with you. They have to be involved with you as they have to engage in some way. And if they do and you deliver and you deliver not only what they expected, but like you did last weekend, you go pass the expectation and give them a little bit more.You are going to be unforgettable. And when you're unforgettable, they're going to recommend you and refer you. Now there's a difference between a referral and a recommendation or referral is just, Hey, here's the guy's name on email. You might want to talk to him. Okay. The recommendation is a little different.And what I try to teach people is this. If you're going to be recommended the best way to do it is to do it over a meal, have that person who wants to recommend you invite the person they're recommending you to. Sit down over lunch, and then don't say anything, let the person who's recommending you, tell them about you and how you work and what you deliver and how it worked for them.At the end of that conversation, all you have to do is turn to that person you're being recommended to and say, what would you like to talk about that?
Andy Audate
Ah, I see. So as long as you provide a great amount of value, as long as you give a good amount of value, they go past, past what they expect essentially will give them more value than they expect.And then the difference between recommendation or referral or referral is here's a name and number. On a piece of paper or here's an email address, however, yeah. However it's delivered. And then a recommendation is that, Hey, I need you to meet this person and to do it over something like dinner, where you're connecting with the person and that person talks about you.You don't talk about yourself. Right. How awful. So now where's Jerry. I know you're speaking at the progression conference. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about what you're going to be speaking on when you're speaking on the progression conference tour.
Jerry Fletcher
Well, I'm going to be in San Diego with you.Mmm. And possibly Las Vegas, we haven't finished up that one, but anyway, that's where I'll be. And I'll be speaking on 32nd marketing. Now, the thing is, I'm going to tell a little bit of my story, where I came from and how it worked out and so on, which starts with basically the fact that I got fired. I was a CEO of an advertising agency.
My board fired me. Did you own it, but they didn't know. No, actually, I got fired after I had put it through an employee stock option purchase, so its employees owned it, but the board of directors could fire me yet, which is fine, but that's where I'll start. And I'll talk about how that happened and where I got to.And then I'm going to teach people how to develop that hook that memorable hook right in the conference, right there. At that time.
Andy Audate
When you're speaking at the progression conference, you're going to share your story, of course, but you're going to also share how to create that 32nd advertisement. That 32nd marketing.In person at the progression conference, where would be speaking out,
Jerry Fletcher
You got it. They're going to learn how to get, build themselves a memorable hook right there. And so, and to make that makes all the difference in, in, in getting things started. I can't give them all the 32nd marketing in, in. In an hour.no way I can do that. That takes two days, or it takes a month in terms of the program that I use to train people on that. But the reality is that piece that memorable hook is so important that I mean literally the most dance question in North America is what do you do? Yeah. If you don't have an answer for that, that makes you memorable.You've just blown it.
Andy Audate
Wow. Wow. You gotta be able to answer that. And that's what Jared is going to bring it to you at the progressive conference. And today on the progressive show Jerry's bringing to you, Hey, how do you create that 32nd marketing where you throw away the elevator pitch? Because that's just drowning people in information about you.And no one cares. No one cares about what you want to do. They want to be able to convey a message, get people to be hooked on you, become memorable, be unforgettable, and then eventually do business with you and then pass it, forget it, and go about getting a referral. You should be recommended. And Jerry's going to be breaking that down to you.Add the progression conference where he'll be speaking. I think of you so much for your time and for being on the progressive show.
Jerry Fletcher
My pleasure. Thank you so much.
