Thinking Out Loud with Dean Jackson
Hosted by Dean Jackson
Short, unscripted marketing thinking from Dean Jackson.
Dean Jackson thinks out loud about marketing, referrals, positioning, and the small ideas that quietly change how a business grows. Short, unscripted episodes. The raw thinking behind BreakthroughDNA and the 8 Profit Activators.
How to Stay in Front of Your Customers Without Spending More Money
In 1997 staying in front of the people who raised their hand meant mailing them every two weeks. Now it's free, it's infinite, and they can reply.
These Old School Marketing Plays Actually Work Better Today
In 1997 a lead generation business card cost five cents and landed at random. A static Meta ad costs less and lands on exactly the people you choose.
News Flash: People Are Lazy. Here’s How to Build Your Business Around It.
In 1997 Jerry Ballinger told me people don't do what they could do. The fix isn't better instructions... it's building for what they will actually do.
How to Actually Finish the Ideas You Start
A magazine spotted in an airport lounge became a finished, printed kit for By Referral Only members. One idea, carried all the way to something you can hold.
How to Find Clarity on What Matters When EVERYTHING Feels Urgent (In 5 Minutes)
When everything feels urgent, ask what's real in the next 100 hours... then the next 100 minutes. A five-minute journal exercise from 1997.
How To Get The Most People to Buy Now AND Later
Most people who see your ad are interested but not ready, and a buy-now-only offer gives them nothing to say. Jeffrey Lant's egregious error number 13.
How to Show Up Right When People Are Ready to Buy
Eight tiny yellow postcards, mailed weekly into one neighborhood ahead of the fall listing wave, took Julie from zero to five of the next 25 listings.
How to Use the "6 Weapons of Influence" to Sell Anything Fast
A 1997 journal page that turned Cialdini's six weapons of influence into a worksheet, and the ad for six Muskoka lots that fired all six at once.
How Taking Action On Your Intuition Actually Pays Off
A page in Dean's 1997 journal, one phone call to the local cable company, and the $500 TV show that meant he never lost a listing on the nights it aired.
How One Idea Turned a $4M/yr Restaurant Into $11M/yr
Gamal Aziz looked at a perfectly good $4 million restaurant in the MGM Grand and asked how high is high. The answer took it to $11 million a year.
How to Get New Customers in Any Market in 45 Days
The 1997 Dan Kennedy keynote that laid out the right message, the right market and the right media, plus the three-step campaign Dean built from it.
How To Use Constraints as a Multiplier
Ten rules from a 1997 journal page for who Dean would take on as a client, and why constraints on who you work with are a multiplier, not a limiter.
How to Write Headlines That Attract Your Very Best Prospects [Samples Inside]
A bus bench that proves itself, a billboard behind trees, and the headline formulas from a 1997 journal page that Dean still uses to this day.
How To Say What You Do So Clearly It Sells Itself
Russell Oliver built a Toronto empire on four words. Stop Your Divorce did it in three. Here's how to find the three or four that say what you do.
How to Figure Out Why People Actually Buy Your Stuff
A 1997 journal page, a book about arguing like an attorney, and the six questions that get you inside your prospect's head before you write a word.
The Easiest Way to Sell a "Horse" [Details Inside]
A Tupperware sign in a front lawn, a $20,000 turtle-shell ad that sold nothing, and the $200 classified that filled a San Francisco loft in one weekend.
How To Stop Your Best Ideas From Dying in Your Notebooks
Woody Allen's drawer of yellow pads, Dan Sullivan's book a quarter, and why no idea in your journal comes to life until it gets out into the real world.
Structure Doesn't Slow You Down. It Lets You Fly.
A 1997 journal spread, Jerry Ballinger's Ferrari Mind Tuneup, and why running your day like a slalom race beats wandering it like a toddler at a picnic.
How to Write Copy That Leads People to "Yes"
Jeffrey Lant's egregious error number twelve, written on page 172 in 1997, and a recorded call where a prospect says your own ad copy back to you.
Creativity Isn't a Gift. It's a Formula.
Still on journal four, 1997: why Max Martin's hit-song chassis and the 8 Profit Activators are the same trick, and the formula sitting underneath both.
The Poolside Sketch That Still Runs My Whole Business
1997, around a pool in Encinitas with Eben and Joe. The seven-step storyboard sketched that afternoon still runs my business, one profit activator heavier.
You Can't Want What You Want Until You Know What You Want
Yesterday, it's okay to want what you want. Today, how you work out what that is: Dan Sullivan's 25-year question, and a property improvement plan for life.
It's Ok To Want What You Want [Here's How To Get It]
February 1997, a month into Florida, and the page where thirty-year-old me listed the day he actually wanted... plus why two hours a day makes you world class.
How to Get Referrals While You're Still Doing the Work
A 1997 page on turning one listing into more than one transaction: the weekly seller call, the one question at the end, and why customers notice for you.
9 Journal Prompts for Thinking Through Anything
People keep asking what I do in my journal. Here are the nine prompts, off a page from 1997, that turn a blank notebook into where your ideas start.
Think Big. Start Small. Keep Going.
January 1997, journal four, a page listing every business under one category... plus what I'd tell my thirty-years-ago self about finishing just one of them.
3 Things Your Future Self Will Thank You for Starting Today
Forty days into reading my 1996 journals out loud: the three things that compounded for thirty years, and that your 2056 self will thank you for starting.
Do Old-School Free Recorded Messages Still Work Today?
Free recorded messages were the highest-response thing we had in 1996, and the hiring system in my tickle trunk shows why the same idea works as video today.
Good Marketing Never Gets Old (Proof Inside)
Straight out of my tickle trunk: the 1996 postcards and free recorded messages still pulling in 2026, and why the constraints made the copy so good.
How to Know What To Do When Something Goes Wrong With a Customer
Three questions Steve Kross gave me thirty years ago for when something goes wrong with a customer, and the $5,000 mistake a KFC cashier made unknowingly.
"WOW" Experiences Don't Happen By Accident
Page 111 of journal three: the seven-phase buyer wow cycle. A wow never happens by accident. You storyboard the journey, then build one in on purpose.
9 Reasons “Time Management” Fails Your Entrepreneurial ADHD Brain
Nine reasons time management never works, especially for the entrepreneurial ADHD brain. All nine on one page of journal three, and they still explain my week.
The Most Underrated Day in Your Week
Dan Sullivan gave me free days, focus days and buffer days in 1996. Thirty years on, it's the buffer day, the one everybody wastes, that's the power move.
Some Ideas Are Worth Having Even If They Never Happen.
I found a 1996 journal page titled “Eben’s brilliant idea number 1009”... and it’s a good reminder that the ideas you’ll never build are still worth having.
Your Relationships Are Worth More Than Your Marketing
A November 1996 page from the day Eben and I interviewed the authors of The One to One Future... and eight ideas from that book still run everything I do.
How I Get Ideas From My Head, to My Journal, to the World
Journal number three, and a pattern is emerging: two tools I use to take an idea from a page in my journal and walk it, box by box, into the real world.
This Idea Cut Ad Spend By 87%... And Tripled The Response
Page 8 of journal three: the dentist ad I shrank from a full page to a business card, and tripled the response by talking only to people who needed him now.
What Happens When You Treat Every Lead Like You're Responsible for Helping Them
One line I added to an old recorded message changed everything. Treat every lead like you're personally responsible for helping them get what they came for.
The More Helpful You Become, The Less You Have to Sell
Page 170 of my 1996 journal, one idea I've never let go of: stop chasing the few people ready to buy, and appoint yourself advocate for your whole category.
How to Get 6 Months of Marketing Ideas for Your Business on One Page
Page 179 of my 1996 journal held 26 marketing ideas, all from one question at the top. Pick one a week and a single page becomes six months of marketing.
If My Life Depended on One Letter, Here's Exactly What I'd Send
Gary Halbert's old provocation still runs everything I do: if your life depended on mailing one letter and getting a response, what would you actually do?
The More Routine My Life Gets, The More Freedom I Have
Yesterday, driving variation out of your marketing. Today I went looking for it in my own days, and found five zones where less variety buys more freedom.
How to Turn Your Advertising From a Slot Machine to a Vending Machine
Deming taught me in 1996 that variation is in everything. Drive it out, and your advertising behaves like a vending machine instead of a slot machine.
(Great Lifestyle + Money) × Time to Enjoy It = True Success (to me..)
Somewhere in my 1996 journal I wrote out my perfect lifestyle, and 30 years later I can't punch a single hole in it. Turns out these are the good old days.
Inside My 1996 Content Factory vs Today
In 1996 it took $2,400 and weeks of work to build 24 marketing newsletters. Today that's done by lunchtime with AI, but the durable advantage hasn't changed.
I Know Exactly What To Do... So Why Don't I Do It?
Thirty years perfecting my schedule, and the one thing I still can't crack is doing the most important thing when there's no deadline holding me to it.
I Almost Can't Believe I've Gotten Away With This Daily Schedule Over 30 Years
I found my daily schedule on page 31 of a 1996 journal, and thirty years later I'm still running the same rhythm. Same bands of time, same protected block.
I Predict These 7 Business Categories Will Survive & Thrive In The NEXT 30 Years
Page 20 of my 1996 journal listed the seven things people spend money on. Thirty years later, every one of them is still standing, and still wide open.
Stop Trying to Convince People. Just Start Telling the Truth & Watch What Happens…
Summer 1996: the most exciting thing you can do in marketing is tell the truth. Put your sword down, say here's my dilemma, and watch people lean in.
30 years later people still spend their money on these core things.
The contextual certainties of life, from babies to retirement, never change. Organize a whole category as people's advocate and you win.
How I talk my ADHD brain into doing the thing I'm procrastinating now
The trick I use to beat procrastination: write out a dialogue with yourself to break a vague task into specific steps, then pin down a real time and place.
A 7-Step Checklist That Instantly Improves Any Ad, Postcard, or Mailer
A seven-step checklist I've used for 30 years on any ad, postcard, or mailer, starting with one target market and a headline that tells the whole story.
You Don't Actually Want More Money
You don't want a sum of money, you want a feeling: peace and the agency to live how you choose. Marketing is the lever that funds that life.
Why the Best Marketers Make Ads That Don't Look Like Ads
The fourth cornerstone of an enduring marketer is design: package your message so it looks like content, not an ad. People read content differently.
90% of Copywriting Comes Down to 4 Words
Everything worth knowing about copywriting fits under four words from Jeffrey Lant's Cash Copy: you get benefit now. If a word doesn't fit, cut it.
The Psychology Behind Why People Buy
Why Cialdini's Influence never goes obsolete, and how reciprocity and commitment-and-consistency quietly drive buying decisions you never notice.
Turning Buyer Psychology Into A Marketing Model
How I turned buyer psychology into a repeatable model: don't convince anyone, just get people to raise their hand, then treat them like they'll buy.
Master These 4 Marketing Skills First...
The four skills every marketing thing I've built traces back to: behavioral psychology, mental models, copywriting, and design. Master these first.
The Less I Do, the Richer I Get.
The less I do, the more I make. How I mapped out a system where every step gets done by someone else, and I still get paid for deals I never touched.
If You're in Business & Have ADHD -- Watch This...
Why I build every business as a duplicatable model I can copy 5,000 times, and how being wired for novelty means I create the system but never scale it.
These 3 Principles Built A $2 Trillion Company
Thirty years of journals say people don't change. Build your business around what customers will always want, and the payoff compounds.
Cold Calling Worked. That’s Why I Stopped Doing It.
Cold calls work, but the result stops the moment you do. That's why I put everything into intellectual property that keeps working for years.
If I Ran Your Marketing, Here’s Exactly What I’d Do...
Exactly how I'd rebuild your marketing from scratch, from picking the highest-value market to using a book to make your best prospects raise their hand.
How I tricked my ADHD brain into building my business & life
Instead of fighting my ADHD, I ask my mind a guiding question, paint the ideal, and list the ways to get there. It can't help but solve it.
The 1996 Marketing Idea That Changed My Life
If you help enough other people get what they want, you can get anything you want. That one idea took my marketing far beyond real estate.
I haven't made a cold call in 35 years… here's how
The lead-getting system I built in 1988, a guide to local home prices, replaced cold calls for good and became the model I've used ever since.
I journaled everyday for 30 years & here's what I know so far...
Turning 60, I opened the first of hundreds of daily journals I've kept since 1996 to trace the vector-changing moments that shaped everything.
Establishing a BRAND
A brand is a buying reflex affecting now decisions. You don't have to beat Coca-Cola, you just have to win the individual moment someone chooses.
who not how zoom
In under 90 minutes I'm live on Zoom with Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy on their new book Who Not How. Join at ilovemarketingzoom.com.
Lee Iacocca target market
Lee Iacocca sold the Mustang to 18-year-old boomers, then the minivan to those same buyers at 38. Demography is an inevitability worth getting in front of.
Ideas versus execution
"Ideas without execution are worthless" misses the point. You can't execute nothing, and the only thing that beats flawless execution is a better idea.
Love is pain
To experience love you have to be willing to experience pain. The heart is a muscle, and heartbreak is how it grows stronger.
The tyranny of convenience
Convenience is the most powerful, most underrated force shaping every decision we make. Make things effortless and people will flock to you.
Execution arbitrage
There's never been a better time to be an idea person. Bundle up a high-value outcome, outsource the execution for a fraction, and pocket the difference.
Specialized data
Richard Viguerie hand-wrote 12,000 donor names to own a list no one else had. In a world run by algorithms, the hard-to-gather data is the edge.
When is a diet pill worth $153
A $153 diet pill outsold the $19 ones by speaking to one exact frustration. The friction stopping people is where the opportunity is.
Working backwards
The man who ran the MGM Grand booked the gap between what he earned and what he could earn as a loss. That mindset changes everything.
What's in a name
Naming is everything. The closer a name gets to exactly what someone's looking for, the more it sells, even when the product inside doesn't change.
Live referral field report
A lunchtime sushi recommendation shows the referral formula in action, and why doing the whole thing for someone raises your status in the tribe.
Secret psychology of referrals
Referrals happen in conversation. Instead of asking clients to spread the word, hand them the exact words to say the moment it comes up.
Thinking Out Loud Episode One
The very first episode of Thinking Out Loud, recorded live from Genius Network.
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