EP 225: The Happy Meal for Startups? with Marco Torres

In the podcast episode, Marco Torres, Founder of MarketingBoost.com, discusses the importance of incentive-based marketing for startups and solo entrepreneurs. Drawing parallels from McDonald’s and Amazon, he emphasizes the significance of adding value to offers through “Value-Add-Incentives” as opposed to providing discounts. With a community of over 27,000 business owners in his Facebook Group, Marco’s insights focus on boosting sales and scaling businesses with affordable subscription programs and value-added marketing techniques.

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EP 225: The Happy Meal for Startups? with Marco Torres

What can Startups learn from MCDonalds and Amazon? Marco Torres is the Founder of MarketingBoost.com, he has helped thousands of business owners worldwide boost sales and scale their businesses through the use of incentive-based marketing. He teaches entrepreneurs how to soar sales & marketing through the use of “Value-Add-Incentives” instead of discounts. His Facebook Group is home to more than 27,000 active business owners who are raking in sales with his advice and amazingly affordable subscription program.

In this episode we cover marketing and sales for startups and solo entrepreneurs, Marco shares a methodology from Amazon and McDonalds where entrepreneurs can add value to their offer through value added marketing.

Guest Links: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/6101960marcotorres/

Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/marketingboostofficial

Marketing Boost: https://www.marketingboost.com/

Marketing Solutions: https://marketingboostsolutions.com/

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Transcript:

(This Transcript is AI generated)

Hello and welcome to the Human Innovation Podcast, the podcast for innovative leaders. I'm your host, Jens Heitland, and today my guest is Marco Torres. He's the founder of marketing boost.com. He has helped thousands of business owners worldwide boost sales and scale their businesses by as much as fivefold through the use of incentive based marketing. He teaches entrepreneurs how to soar sales and marketing through the use of value, add incentives instead of discounts. His Facebook group is home to more than 27,000 active business users who are ranking in sales with the advice and amazingly affordable subscription program.

In this episode, we cover marketing and sales for startups and solo entrepreneurs. Marco shares a methodology from Amazon and McDonald's where entrepreneurs can add value to their offer through value added marketing. Please welcome to the show, Marco to Torres. 

Really looking forward to learn from you about sales and marketing today.

That's one thing I've been doing for quite some time. If you happen to be watching this video, you can tell I'm no spring chicken, so I've been around. 

Yeah. So be, before we go into sales and marketing specifically for startups and smaller businesses today, tell us a little bit about what brought you into the entrepreneurship direction and how did you get started?

Thankfully my parents were both good examples of risk takers. And entrepreneur spirit. My father was bilingual Mexican descendants and we were born in Texas and he was offered the opportunity to go to Puerto Rico, to run the general electric credit.

And he picked up the whole family. We moved 2000 miles away at the first in his family to ever leave the community. A lot of my family still live in San Antonio 50 years later. So anyway we grew up in Puerto Rico and I started a paper route at age nine again, one of the things my dad taught me, and if you're not doing this for your children, you should make 'em, earn it.

Don't just hand out cash here's your weekly allowance. Make 'em do things to earn it and start realizing the value of earning a dollar bill or a $20 bill, or whatever it is. I had to earn my money started a paper route by age nine, and by the time I was 12, I had the biggest paper route, I was featured on the front page of the newspaper for building the biggest paper route they'd ever seen.

I went on to open up five Mexican restaurants with my mother and my older brother by the time I was 23. I learned, everything about the restaurant business and mind you, to do that, my father says, you guys wanna be in the restaurant business you don't know anything about it.

You better go work for other restaurants first. that's another takeaway that anybody listening to this can do. If you wanna start your own business, one of the ways to do it is go work for somebody else in that field that you think you want to be involved with. And do learn all the ins and outs while somebody else is paying you, even if they're not paying you next to nothing, even if you're an apprentice, but you need to learn the ins and outs. Back when my brother and I did it, we went back to Texas and we worked at a bunch of different restaurants. And we went in there with the old little Kodak, cameras that you'd have to spin like this to take pictures. But we were taking pictures of everything.

We were funnel hacking before funnels. We were taking pictures of the stainless steel tables, the equipment, the inventory sheets, the refrigerator, all the equipment they use and how they use it. And we were learning everything there was to learn about the restaurant business.

And eventually we had five successful restaurants that we sold to Taco Bell when they came to the island of Puerto Rico. Where we had developed those restaurants. If you don't mind me hogging the microphone here, I went on to get into internet marketing in very early adapter. In 1996, I started online marketing and became an email marketer, especially back before, when everybody had an A O L account. So it goes way back.

And I was a spammer before they called it spam. But back then people loved their email. Actually, they still do, but back then your computer would ding. You've got mail and people loved it and they would love to buy stuff from these emails and websites. And I've made a fortune.

But I've been around watching this entire, History of the internet developed before Facebook, before Google, I was doing pay-per-click ads when it was overture and so on. It's been a real journey watching the development of the internet but one thing I'll say again is there's never been a better time for anybody to be an entrepreneur online than it is today.

I think it's very competitive, obviously, but the tools and the ability to learn these things is amazing compared to where they were when I got started that you can be building your product line, your website your automation and be successful, very quickly in compared to what it used to take to get going online.

Yeah. No, I agree. It's a fascinating time. Specifically if we take 2023, there are challenging times out there in the business world, but challenging times are the times where you can win. That's what I learned from one of my mentors.

Exactly. You know it, that if you can find a way to separate yourself from everybody else a little bit, then you can start to throttle it up and move forward.

Yeah, let's use that to jump into startups. So startups that are maybe in their first year solo entrepreneurs and smaller companies that are trying to figure out how to get big and how to win in this world, what are the recommendations you would give to a founder that is getting started and has not that much experience when it comes to marketing and sales?

What are the steps you would recommend them to do?

For starters, you better have the right mindset and you've gotta realize that success doesn't come overnight. There's a learning curve and there's time you're gonna have to put into it. And if you don't have a support mechanism, maybe it's a spouse who's earning an income while you are building your new business.

Or you're keeping your job and you're burning the candle at both ends and you come home from your job and you get on the computer and start working on building your business, et cetera, then that's what you're gonna have to do. And you're gonna have to realize that it is a. A real commitment to burning that candle at both ends and driving at it until you know you can get somewhere.

And the other thing I think too many solopreneurs make is they wanna do it all themselves. And they feel like nobody else can do it like I can here and no one else is gonna give it the dedication that I am here. So I have to be the one to do it all. And honestly, if you're thinking small like that, you will stay small.

So you wanna build a team early on, quickly. You wanna hire some people that are better than you at areas where you're not good at, such as building your landing page, building your funnel, setting up your automation, helping you create your offers. And in today's world, so easy to find quality talent anywhere in the world for that matter.

That you can grab 'em from Fiverr or from any other places where you can review their work ethic and reviews. Hire slowly and fire quickly. But you need a team. You need one or two people, at least one other assistant that you can start delegating things to.

So that you can begin to work on the bigger picture while you're delegating some work to others and not try to do it all yourself. Trying to do it all yourself is, I think, a big mistake. It's worth the investment to hire someone to help you get the job done.

Yeah, if we use a digital platform as an example, you already mentioned funnels and automations and so on. Young, talented team, they're building a platform. What are the steps when it comes to building the right marketing engine? I've seen a lot of things. There are people who are market themselves first as a personal brand, and then they're trying to build that over to the business brand and market both sides.

What are recommendations and what works on long-term from your expertise?

Good question. In my case, I built my brands, my businesses first, and then I am worried about my personal brand. And my personal later on, but it can work the other way around. You do need some credibility, right? In other words, you start trying to build your YouTube channel all about you and all about what you can do and what have you, and trying to be a Kardashian when you know, if you don't, if you don't have some credibility.

First, have you built a business? Are you successful or did you build it? Did you do it for somebody else? It's okay if you haven't built your own businesses, but if you did it in the corporate world, and if you've been, like before I went, launched into my own businesses, I worked in the corporate world as well in addition to having my own restaurants and everything else.

When I moved to the United States from Puerto Rico, I did get into the corporate world. And I did that for, 15 years or so and did very well. And, I took, I had, of course, I had a big wake up call in 2008. 2008 came around and. Bam. I lost everything, before you knew it.

I was, I had one of my best sales years ever, you might say. I, 2009, I sold my house, I sold my cars, I sold my furniture, I sold. So it was a great sales year, but not in a good way. And in my career, I've sold over a billion dollars worth of. Products and services for the companies that I've worked for, or my clients or my own businesses combined.

But boy, that year was rough and I had to reinvent myself and start all over. If you're listening, you might be in that spot where you're having to reinvent yourself. 

I hit, I've, 2008 hit when I was losing everything, foreclosure, you name it. I was thinking to myself, holy schmucks, why me? Why now? Why at my age, why am I in my mid forties having to start over from zero and feeling like a victim? And was not able, I swore I'm gonna be able to bounce from this.

I'm gonna be able to just slide right on over into, into another level position. And similarly, and it never came. And so having to reinvent myself and get going from scratch, as you say, startup. Was very challenging. And the way I finally came about doing it was I went back and got together with other friends of mine and colleagues that were in a similar position and none of us had a lot of capital, none of us could afford to hire each other either.

And as I mentioned at the beginning of this call about building a team. We couldn't afford to hire each other, but we, formed a team and we formed partnerships and we were four of us and we built one of the fastest growing travel sites in North America at the time, we focused on dividing and conquering.

I focused on sales. Another one focused on marketing. The other one focused on our hotel and resort relationships. The fourth one focused on the accounting and bill paying and so on and so forth. And together we built a machine. That, literally is now traveled over a million people.

And from there we ended up building what we offer today, which I'm most proud of, is the business that I operate called marketing boost.com. That's a quick story on I and when you ask, how do you go about building that, that. That's startup and it's, you've obviously gotta be careful because your funds are tight.

So you've got to make sure that you can, when you do find the marketing mix that's working, when you are finding, your Facebook ads are converting and your YouTube ads are converting or whatever, once you find that magic and it is, you put a dollar in, you get $2 out, then you gotta be able to throw more throw more gas on the fire and keep spending until it stops working, and then, and keep working on new ideas along the way.

So everything starts with sales and marketing. And one thing I'll say is as part of the process, before you can go out and start spending a lot of money on marketing, you better make sure you have your sales systems in place. What do you have? When you generate a lead?

Do you have a good flow system to immediately contact that lead to follow up with it, to get 'em on a phone call? To have your sales team go through a quality process and sales pitch, whether that be you or somebody you've hired as a salesperson and are they closing sales? And if not, do you know why they're not closing?

And once you've finally got it down to where, okay, for every tent prospects we get, we're closing three. And now you can go spend some more marketing money and get them in the door and continue to improve, or maintain the closing rate with the marketing and so on.

So it's a balance back and forth, always trying to tweak and improve the sales process as well as the marketing process. But yeah you've gotta build the sales side first and make sure that they're closing before you spend too much money in marketing.

Yeah. How do you get to a specific volume from a lead perspective, if you don't do digital marketing yet, or let's say you do organic digital marketing, where you post on social media. How do you get to the level that you get? A couple of leads flowing in. Is it then more cold calling or what?

What would you recommend to a startup that's getting started?

First thing I'd recommend is in today's world, there's software by provided by many. My company also provides these technologies as well. But you need to be able to have a system, whereas the lead comes into your database. That one, you have a database, that you're not running this from your Gmail account, that the leads are popping in somewhere into a CRM of some sort platform that are so affordable in today's world.

That's dropping into a C R m, that's doing a immediate email text message, maybe even a voicemail broadcast sequence. There's even technology today where you can use artificial intelligence to send people video message. That's personalized with the, you saying, hello Jens, how are you?

Thank you for signing up for our pro. And so it can sound like you personally made a little video for this person with artificial intelligence, or you can use a simple voicemail broadcasting. I do that currently where people join my Facebook group and if made you on my Facebook group.

I ask for name, phone number, obviously the name I get, but I ask 'em for phone number and email. To receive some of our best information about our Facebook group. And if they about 50% give me their email and phone number, and they immediately go into my CRM and I'm following up with an instant voicemail broadcast to say, Hey, welcome to the Facebook group.

Welcome to our community. I'm gonna be sending you some more information for you to click here, take this, do this action, whatever. And they get that voicemail instantly from my crm. Then they get the text message and the email. And we're getting them to book appointments with my team, for example. But that used to be something that would take all kinds of, genius tech guys to put together and in today's world, you can.

Put that together in minutes and have leads coming in that are getting automated messaging, getting them to book an appointment with you on your calendar or your sales team. And when they do that, then you wanna make sure you have the automation in place to send them reminders to show up on time for the appointment.

 And so on. And then, get 'em on your zoom call or go visit 'em in person. And hopefully you've got a good enough product and service and you're likable and trustable enough that people are gonna buy your service. And that might take some time for you to figure out how do I make that sales pitch?

How do I overcome objections? And all of that is a process that it can be learned is the one thing I would say. It's not a, I've been at it for so long that it's like back of my hand, but for anybody new out there learning how to sell, Is challenging and it's always scary. People are afraid, I'm not born, I don't like salespeople.

I'm not a boring salesman. But it's a learned process and it's, as Zig Ziglar used to say, one of the first books that I get was influenced by was if you can help enough other people get what they want in life. You'll get what you want. And so if your product or service is truly a good fit for your prospect, if you can truly help them achieve their goal or dream, then you can believe in your product, make the pitch.

And if you believe in your product and you have the solution, then you can feel confident to ask for the order and overcome the objection, and don't give up because you truly believe you're there to help them. And if you're, if it's not a good fit, you should walk away. You should refer them to somebody else or.

Not just try to make the sale for the purpose of making a sale. 

Yeah. Do you remember your first sale?

I don't remember my first sale. I know it was those door-to-door sales going to sell subscriptions to the newspapers. I don't recall the first ones, but I do recall that it, I eventually got good at it and enjoyed it, and I built my sales route, my paper route. So big. One of the ways I did that was again, I recruited my buddies to help me deliver the papers cuz the route got so big and I had to focus on the sales, new subscriptions and more importantly, collections. Cuz back then there was no internet to pay your bill. We had to go door to door and collect cash or a check.

For the delivery of the newspapers every week. So I had to learn to run spreadsheets and know who owes me what, and so it was a real little business back when and but anyway, no, I don't recall the.

And it's quite interesting because you just said from what you did, selling newspapers is the same when we look into building a startup, really starting the simple thing getting in front of the customer and then trying to sell something and then fine tuning that over time. Funnily enough, yesterday or the day before, we have had a guy here who is selling window cleaning to all the houses where we live here in the Netherlands. And he's doing that door to door. He's just saying, Hey, we are coming tomorrow if you're interested, we are at your neighbor's place so we can do yours. Half the price the first time. So he's trying to hook you and then he's directly selling you subscription, which was fascinating because I'm always listening to salespeople because always when someone tries to sell something to you, then you learn.

That, that's a really good point. And a lot of people don't do that either. They are annoyed by any kind of sales call or telemarketing call, or they're annoyed by a TV commercial or what have you. Or even a YouTube ad. You sometimes need to be a student of sales and marketing. If I always need, for example, I'll buy stuff online on with good sales funnels that grab my attention from the Facebook ad, and I'll click through and they grab my attention, and then I, follow the funnel and I'll buy stuff just to go through the entire funnel and screenshot the entire process because,

if it grabbed my attention, they were good at it. And if it kept me going through the whole flow and it made me want to buy the product, even though I may or may not need it, I'm often buying it, as long as it's not some $20,000 coaching program. But I might start with a third. I might start with their $97 trip wire.

Just to see their flow, and then make that investment of $50, a hundred dollars or whatever to see their entire flow. And I know they're gonna, try to upsell me on who the heck knows what. But I will at least go through their first flow and get into their email sequencing and get into their text message sequencing, because that's the genius, that's the smart of the marketing.

And what are they doing to get me to open that front door? What are they doing? And door to door is obviously the old school way to do it, and it's a great way to practice learning, talking to people, and overcoming objections quickly because when they open that door or answer a phone, you've got seconds.

To make an impression and you've got less than 10 seconds on a phone call to get them to listen to the next 15 seconds, and you've gotta be good and you've gotta have a good script and it needs to be powerful.

Yeah. The interesting is you mentioned already that there needs to be a proper value to what they want. So one thing is, of course, most of the time at least, there needs to be a need from, hey, they need something or they want something at least. And that means you need to provide them value in different ways.

What are other ways you can provide values, obviously with your product, but how can you do that in smarter ways? I've seen that you have a couple of interesting things, what you do.

Jens, yeah, definitely. You need to check out Marketing Boost and I'll, we'll cover that real quickly here but what Marketing Boost does we provide, what we call the wow surprise and delight factor. We help business owners worldwide. We serve the entrepreneurs around the globe, providing them with travel incentives they can use to make their offer stand out from the crowd and have something different that helps grab attention, helps within those first few seconds, grab their attention and get them into your flow but for example, what do I mean by that?

Regardless of whether you use marketing, boost incentives in general can be hugely powerful to help. You acquire leads or clients or what have you. For example, one that we'll all recognize is Jeff Bezos from Amazon, decades ago, I don't know how long ago it was about a decade ago. He came up with Amazon Prime, and back then even none of us were even really into videos streaming much back then.

But what he offered was when you paid the $99 for Amazon Prime, You got the incentive, which was free shipping. So we were hooked on the free shipping, which was ingenious because then now before we bought anything else, we'd go see if Amazon had it. And before long, Amazon had everything. So now we knew we could go to, if we saw something on whatever.

Wherever in the world. We saw something, we'd go see if Amazon had it, cause we could get it shipped to our door for free because we were a Prime member. Eventually we started watching the videos as well, and then we had an even more benefits now. But that's a huge example of adding value, having an incentive to go with buying the Amazon Prime product.

Annie created loyalty and everything all in one idea. It was genius. That's why he still does it today. Another example is McDonald's, they have the Happy Meal. They draw parents into McDonald's over Burger King or any other fast food because they, if they've got children, they're gonna come in to get the Happy Meal cuz the kids are gonna get the burger, the sandwich the soda.

But more importantly, the toy, the, they're gonna include the incentive, which is the seasonal toy from the next upcoming movie and yada. And they're, the kids want to get the Happy Meal and the kids are busy playing with the toy, and Mom and dad might actually be able to talk while having lunch. And so the Happy Meal has generated billions of dollars for McDonald's every single year that they've been doing it now for probably close to 20 years. And so what is your Happy Meal? What is your adult Happy Meal that you're. In using to help stand out from the crowd, et cetera, and that's where Marketing Boost comes in Jens

do you mind if I throw a little elevator pitch on what Marketing Boost is?

Go ahead.

Thanks. So with Marketing Boost, we give away. We allow our members that sign up with us to, to have access to giveaways, such as complimentary hotel stays from three to seven late stays in 125 destinations around the world.

For example, Jens, you could have your, this. Podcast and you could say, Hey, stay till the end of this live podcast broadcast we're doing and we're giving away. We're gonna give away to two winners, seven nights in Pettet Thailand, or five nights in Cancun, Mexico, or three nights in, France, or whatever it might be, some destination that would be attractive to your local audience or what have you.

That's why we have 125 destinations. We also have hotel savings cards that come increments of 1, 2, 3, and 500 and restaurant savings vouchers. And so we teach our members how to use those incentives with different calls to action to get people to, for example, that guide knocking on your door for the window cleaning service.

He might have said, look, if you let me give you a free quote. Let me give you a look at how many windows you've got. I'll give you a free quote, and just for listening and getting the free quote, I'm gonna give you a hundred dollars. Hotel savings card, good at over a million hotels worldwide for your next hotel truck booking.

Whether you sign up for our service or not. And now you might say, okay, come on in. Take a look around and see how many windows we got and what the, what, make a quote. And then whether if, even if you said I'm not, I gotta think about it. My wife's not home, whatever. Now he's got a reason to ask you for your phone number, your name, and your email to send you that restaurant that rather that hotel savings voucher.

And he's now, he's got your contact information to follow up. So they can be used as a tool to generate the client information. And you're gonna get accurate information cuz they wanna receive that incentive they were promised. And now you've got a lead that you can put into your C r m flow and send them a follow up email, follow up text message or voicemail broadcast and get them to book a, a zoom call where we can go over that quote again, and et cetera, et cetera.

And that works regardless of what industry you're in. We're seeing these travel incentives being used from everything from door to door salesman like you were talking about to To car dealerships, to online retailers, to business coaches. I'll give you an example about one guy. He recently made over $400,000 in four days by adding Marketing Boost incentive a a complimentary hotel state to his subscription plan.

He's, he had members paying in 97 a month. He said, Hey, if you'll step up and pay for a year in advance, I'll give you five nights in your choice of Hawaii or Can't cook. And if you pay for six months in advance, you get a choice of Las Vegas, three nights or San Diego. And he had about 300 of them step up and pay for the year in advance.

Another 120 or so, pay for six months and in combination of over $400,000 in four days, and now that's an ongoing part of his. Monthly process. So there's just a million ways to skin the cat with these incentives, Jan's, everything from using them at trade shows, lead generation, sweepstakes on and on.

I can go with ideas there but that's the idea in a nutshell, is having these incentives that you can add, incredible value, whatever your call to action is. And they're very affordable. This our subscription, one last pitch here is only $37 a month. So it's a no-brainer to consider becoming a marketing Boost member.

Okay, let me try to recap if I understood it right. So you are a company that is helping other companies and you are the provider of the Happy Meal, if I understand. You're right. And the Happy Meal that you provide others to use is a voucher for travel or a travel experience.

Exactly. So we, yeah, we provide that what I call wild delight, surprise factor, or we help fulfill your clients and your staff hopes and dreams with a travel experience. And the way we came about doing this, let me let you finish answering your questions. Go ahead.

No. Yeah. I'm interested in how you do that. So do you then have a platform or do you have. Let's say a travel company that's doing that for you, or how do you organize that? Let's say if I'm the startup founder and say, oh, that sounds interesting, Marco, tell me more.

How does that work?

Good question and I'm glad you asked. So when we started this business we actually wanted people to give us more video testimonials. I. From the travel we were selling, cause we're definitely in the travel business and we fulfill those trips with our website called Redeem vacations.com.

But when we were launching this, we were, we had another travel website and we were trying to get people to give us a video testimonial and we could get almost nobody to do it. So we came up with an idea to offer a bonus trip. If they would go that extra mile and film the selfie video from the resort beach or pool and brag about the hotel brand and brag about ours, and if they did that, we'd give 'em a complimentary trip.

That turned out to be huge. Before we knew it, we had dozens and dozens of these video reviews coming in. But then we had to either stop the campaign because it, every time they, we had to pay for those rooms, which wasn't cheap. And so we either were gonna stop the campaign or figure out a way to do this more affordably.

Because we were in the high volume travel company, we went back to our travel partners. And when we started this, we were only doing Orlando in Las Vegas in the US here, and we said to people, look, if we went back to the hotels in Orlando and Las Vegas, we said, look, we've got, you've got a problem.

We think we can help you fix it. Your hotel, let's be honest, it's not full year round. You've got rooms, sure, you're sold out for certain holidays, certain weekends, certain special events, but the majority of the year, 70% of the year, 35 or 40% of your rooms are going empty. We can help you put warm bodies, couples, individuals, families in those hotel rooms.

They're gonna spend money at the restaurant, the bar, the spa, the casino, the gift shop. The excursion desk, they'll book extra rooms, maybe stay an extra night. Maybe they'll come back next year and pay full price. Anyway, we requested that they give us access to this inventory of rooms that were not being sold and give it to us for next to nothing or free or what have you.

And we've negotiated different deals with each hotel, but at the end of the day, we were getting access now to rooms for next to Nothing, and now we could fulfill those trips that we were giving away to our own clients. And then we thought to ourselves, Man, can you imagine if we had more hotels on board with this?

If we had destinations all over the world that we could help fill what would otherwise be empty hotel rooms. We'd have another standalone business, and that is eventually what became marketing boost.com. So we have contracts with hotels around the world. Where we help them fill those rooms that would otherwise go empty.

And these are all three, four, and five star hotels based on TripAdvisor reviews. There's never any kind of timeshare or sales presentation required. There's no hoops to jump through. It's all powered by a platform we call redeem vacations.com. So your client receives the incentive. Digitally via email or text message and or printed.

You can print the certificates and hand deliver them as well. And then your client get, activates that certificate by paying one thing that's not included, or, here's the three disclaimers, Jen. There's Airfare is not included, or transportation to and from the hotel. Food and beverage is not included and neither are the government.

Hotels in taxes, hotel taxes and fees. So the client pays an activation fee, which covers the government taxes, and then they get a free room. And they're on the hook for their own transportation, their own food and beverage, and we teach our members, that's all you really have to disclose. And we recommend and show you how to do that, in your ad campaigns, et cetera.

Hey, airfare not included. Neither's, food and beverage, neither's, government taxes and fees. The client pays the activation fee and then they have 18 months to select travel dates. and then because we're providing those rooms that are otherwise gonna go empty, that means it can't travel on Christmas week.

They're not gonna be able to get Easter week, they're not gonna be able to get major holidays around the world. So we're gonna provide about 32 to 35 weeks of inventory out of 52 in each destination. So if your client can be a little bit flexible, we're gonna give them great accommodations.

And all they're paying is the government taxes. And our, some of our clients choose to pay those fees for the client, but most of them just do a proper disclaimer what's included and what's not. And, but if you make a, if if you sell that $30,000 business coaching plan, you might wanna go ahead and cover that, those taxes, which is, 30 to $50 a night depending upon the hotel and the resort and destination.

If you wanna pay that for your client, you can, but most of our members don't. We just do a proper disclosure and send that incentive. And if they activate it, great, and if they don't.

Yeah, so if I'm the entrepreneur, I'm the startup founders, then I have access to your platform where I basically then give all my subscribers. Let's say I have a platform, I have subscribers. They're subscribing for a month or a year, and if they, I want to have this value add. If they subscribe for a year already, then they get a free travel voucher and then I'm linking them through your platform, or how does that work?

Or are they not in contact with you at all?

They're not in contact with us until you send them the incentive, either manually one by one based on who did what, or you can automate the process. We do have the tools to automate based on the customer's call to action. You can automate the sending of that incentive. So that is something that can be done.

That's cool. And then they can decide themselves where to go. Let's say they're in Europe and they say, I want to go to Ette and want to use this voucher there instead of around the corner here.

That can be done as well. We don't always recommend that process because then you become a travel agent yourself. So if you give them the, for example, you gave them choose any of one to 125 destinations. Now they're gonna be clicking around. There's too many choices to make.

Then they're gonna be asking you questions what about this trip in pcat? What kind of hotel? What is this? What is that? Like? Where, how do I need a passport? You in, instead of, for example we teach our members, you're better off doing a promo saying this month we're doing a promo.

You get. Seven nights in Bali or Pke where you get five nights or three nights somewhere in Australia or you get three nights. We have a bunch of destinations in Europe. I don't remember if I have Amsterdam. But the point being is that we recommend you always do promotions that include three to five destinations max, so that the client does not have so many choices that they end up making the choice of none.

Yeah. That's fascinating. No, I can imagine that it works if you do, especially things that are a little bit more expensive, where. Travel is, let's say if you sell something for $5, that's, I'm not sure if that's going to work, but if you sell something, like you said, 20,000, even if it is, let's say a yearly package that's 1,500, $2,000 

exactly right. We definitely teach our members to use what I call micro incentives for a micro call to action. So you could use a hundred dollars hotel savings card. To book a no obligation zoom call with your team. For example, you wouldn't give somebody here's seven nights in Pettet Thailand just for joining our Zoom call.

It would be like, man, that sounds too good to be true. It's gotta be bs. But if if you were to say with that $1,500 purchase by paying for the year in advance of my service, bam, I'm gonna reward you with this five night stay in Pettet, Thailand. And the reason we can do that, we also teach you how to position this, where you know, we're saying the, hey, we have an incredible relationship with our travel partner, redeem vacations.com, and they're helping us with this promotion I have.

I currently have a limited amount of these incentives. So you create scarcity and urgency. By saying, I've got just a handful of these available. If you are one of the ones to take action this week, you can get the the seven nights in Pettet, Thailand. If you were to pay this off in full before Friday, we will give you a bonus of the following so you can create scarcity and urgency and guide people or incentivize them to take whatever the call to action is you're trying to achieve.

Such as pay you in full sign up for the product B to go with product A with our upsell funnel, et cetera. And use the smaller incentives like the, the hotel savings voucher for a hundred, 2, 3, 5 for smaller calls to action booking no obligation zoom call or et cetera.

You can get, you get the idea.

Yeah, I'm just thinking out loud here. Let's say I'm a startup and you said something around $40, what was it?

$37 a month is all it costs us.

that's a subscription I do with my startup to your platform. Then I can offer this value to my potential client's, customers, and you teach me on top of that.

Correct.

So I'm. I'm having a business relationship with you. I'm helping my clients, or I help my clients to have even more value, and I get a sales training on top of that.

Because what you just explained is basically a sales training

and marketing. 

A little bit of a sales training is included as well. And we have our Facebook group for example we don't provide for $37 a month and we're not providing one-on-one coaching obviously but we are, doing one to many. So for example, my Facebook group has over 30,000 entrepreneurs in our Facebook group where we are constantly promoting live of.

Bands live webinars. We have our, constant update. We have people, other members are it's consumer generated content. So we've got our members posting ideas on how they're using the incentives for their business. We have onboarding training calls for everybody who joins immediately, that we give you ideas and visuals on how to use these incentives.

And then I have my own podcast show yours here, Jens, where we're interviewing people and again, always coaching and training one to many on how to succeed using in business in general with all types of business tips, but over and above also with the idea of using our incentives.

Yeah, I'm. I love the example and the Happy Meal is definitely that sticks in, in, in my head. So you're a provider of Happy Meals in my brain right now. Happy Meals for Entrepreneurs.

Yeah that's exactly right. Happy Meal for.

No very cool. And of course, I will put links as well into the show notes for. All of this, I would love to go get to the last part of the podcast where I'm asking a couple of questions that are maybe not related to what we talked until now. First one is, if you could work with a project that is impacting every human being on earth, what project would you choose to work with and why?

If I could work on a project that was influencing. I'm not in a position to do this right now, but if I could, if I had a magic wand, to work on a project that was impacting everyone around the world, it would be something in the world of providing, of getting into the food business and competing with. Competing with the Bill Gates of the world who's trying to get us all to eat, fake food and what have you and come up with a way to again, I'm, again, I'm not in a position and I'm no expert on this, but if I had my wishes, I would be loving to get, find ways to. Make more food edible and get more quality food into the hands of consumers around the world.

Cause I think too many of us are eating too much garbage processed food, which is killing all of us. So how that how that could happen. I have no idea. So I, but it's not even something I've really put on my scope. But, other than that I would be looking at. And what I'm already doing, which is trying to reach out, get people to become entrepreneurs and step up into the business world and find a product or service, something that they are an expert at, that they can build a business on and not depend on having a job.

Which is what I do every day, which is why I love and am motivated by marketing Boost cuz that I provide that Happy meal as you described. And that is my passion right now. It is my passion to help wanna be entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs to start getting the confidence and the experience, and these successes, little successes that they need along the way.

To start being and generating an income without having to show up at a job.

Yeah. What advice would you give to a young innovator that's just getting started?

I would, keep at it. One, keep your dreams in front of you every day. Start your day with gratitude, with whatever you're at today. In other words, if you're living at home with mom and dad, then be grateful that you've got a roof over your head with mom and dad.

If you've just moved out, got your own apartment, then be grateful You can afford your first apartment and so forth. Start your day with gratitude. This is one area of my life that I still struggle with. I am one to have kind of anger management issues things that they don't go just right for me.

I am, I have broken way too many a telephone. I have slammed my fist into my desk when I can't get the tech technology to work, cuz I'm slow at learning technology and things still, I find, so my point is, And again I've still practiced this every day, and so I would teach, I would, if I could go back 30 years, I wouldn't be in this habit.

I have a bad habit of this anger problem. So what I would teach a younger person is before these habits get entrenched, be more thankful. You can't be angry and thankful at the same time.

Love

be angry and thankful at the same time ever. So if you can learn to live a life of more thankfulness, thankful for, the fact that you've got clean water to drink, if that's all you've got, you don't have any food, but you got clean water, then be thankful for the clean water and so on and over.

Find what you can be thankful for, and as you're thankful the, you'll have the proper mindset to. Keep going forward with building, taking whatever steps you need to take on a daily basis to move your business forward little by little, and that might also mean that you're not in business just yet, but that you are an apprentice to somebody else first.

But keep your dreams and keep your gratitude.

Let's say there are two or three who say, I want to know more about this Happy Meal thing. How can people reach you? Or where can people find you? Marco?

Two places I'd like to send them first to marketing boost solutions.com on marketing boost solutions.com. We do have a variety of products and services that we provide to help you grow your business from the automation technology that I was talking about. Including Facebook extension softwares and ways to generate free leads from Facebook and or go directly to marketing boost.com and you can sign up for that there.

And lastly look us up on Facebook at the official marketing Boost page.

Yeah, I will put links to that as well into the show notes as mentioned already so people can straightaway click through to you. And I'm, of course signed up for the Facebook group already. So Marco, thank you very much. Was a pleasure having you on the show. A lot of interesting nuggets for entrepreneurs and people who are starting out the business.

Thank you very much for the great value you have provided.

Thank you for having me.