How to get in the MarketMaker position

Good morning. Okay, we are winging our way through journal number eight. It's 1997. And one of the things that jumped out at me today was I saw a page where I was talking about an expansion for something we were doing called unixcontracts.com and what the essence of what we were doing was. Now I have a name for it that we. I call it now putting ourselves in the market maker position. And being a market maker is a very advantageous position to be in. And it goes all the way back to what we were doing in the late 80s when I was running the paper painting company with my friend we created.

We were out doing door knocking. We had, you know, people who we would hire, you know, call it. We were college kids. We had hired college kids to go out and do door knocking in the evenings and weekends looking for people who wanted to get painting jobs done that summer. And in, you know, networking meetings like that, we joined the Chamber of Commerce, of course, and all these things. We met other entrepreneurs and we were sharing what we were doing with that. And they said, oh, man, that's a good idea. I wish I had someone who could do that. And we heard that a few times.

And I had the brainstorm of, well, we've already got people out doing the door knocking. What if we just shifted the focus and in addition to looking for people that are looking to do painting, we just framed it as looking for people who were doing home improvement projects over the summer. And we had a checklist and, you know, clipboard for them as they would go out. And we could get them information and pricing for any of these list of things that we were doing. So painting, of course, was one of them. And that's what we were interested in. And we also had, you know, getting a new roof or windows or siding or deck or pool or fence or landscaping, driveway, all kinds of things that we were doing.

And of course, we would find people who were looking for and interested in getting interest information about those. About those services. And we set up relationships with the other businesses where they would give us a referral fee. And so we ended up turning our lead generation into a very nice profit center. And that has stuck with me as being something that it's valuable to be the person that identifies people who are going to do something. And being able to direct that business to someone else is what is the essence of being a market maker.

So fast forward. And we were able. I was able to do that same thing when I created the guide to Halton Hills, which was the first sort of real scale direct response thing that I did in my real estate business, I modeled that and I created a directory, a guide called Toronto and beyond 40 great places to Live within an hour of Toronto.

And I licensed my system to 40 different realtors in the 40 communities and would run ads for the big guide of the 40 great places to live and then refer to the leads out to the people who were the licensees in each of those 40 communities. And we've used that same model, that same thinking of being in the position to identify people ahead of time. And this is where the UNIX contracts comes in, that this, I was working with a company that did it recruiting and what that meant was that they would find people who were contract programmers and the big companies like Nortel at the time would lease these employees or contract these, contract these programmers through the company for a two or three year contract.

And it was a very lucrative thing for the programmers because they could make substantially more money than they were making in a, in a salaried position. But they were worried that there was no like lifetime job security. They felt like they were going to be out of job in three years and so they were reluctant. So we put together an ad that we would run in the tech journals saying unix contractors commanding $55 per hour, which was almost double what they were getting in salaried positions at the time. So it was information, objective information available where they could leave their email address to get information about the, about these contract positions.

And now we had a pool of people who were Unix contractors interested idea of doing contracting and that put us in a really nice market maker position to go to companies like Nortel or others who were hiring them. Instead of waiting for the mandate to then start the advertising to find people, we were able to, you know, you've heard maybe the phrase dig your well before you're thirsty. We were able to stock our pond with people who were already looking for these, looking for and interested in contract positions so that we were able to match them with these things. Did the same thing with a party rental company by being a market maker in the outdoor wedding area.

So you know, being a party rental company, it's not the sexiest thing that a bride is anxious to decide on who they're going to use in that. So it's difficult when you're thinking about advertising a party rental company. But the most valuable thing, the lynchpin in that whole market is having access to someone who is intending on having an outdoor wedding. So we put together the directory, the 101 great places have an outdoor wedding in Toronto. And when people would ask for it, what they're doing is they're basically indicating, I'm gonna have an outdoor wedding. And then we were able to continue communicating with them.

We had an edge in that we knew that they were going to have a, an outdoor wedding. And we could present information about all the things going to need in preparing for that outdoor wedding under the context of here's all the locations, you can do it. And we've got all of the things that you need. A tent and tables and generators and all the stuff to make these venues work. Plus the other businesses that were also interested in finding in speaking to these brides were also very interested in being in this directory. So you think about florists and limo companies and bridal gowns and caterers and DJs and bands.

All of that stuff was a. We were able to be in the market maker position for the outdoor wedding category and turn our advertising into profit center. So the pattern is there. The pattern is about thinking ahead of what's the genesis thought of somebody going into this process. If your business is one component of this that is sort of a middling part of the journey. If you can go all the way up to the front and identify people who are entering the process to where it's inevitable that they're going to need your good or service in that journey, you've got an advantage that you can now introduce them to all the other people that they're going to need along the way.

I think the old saying is, you know, how do you catch an elephant? Well, you see where they're going and you run up ahead and you dig a big hole. That's the thing how you, you know, catch a parade of elephants. And so in every market there is a journey that people are going to go on. And if you can just stick your head up a little bit and see what the context of the whole journey is, nobody is thinking like that. Everybody else along that line is myopically focused on their own thing. They're only looking for people who want catering, or they're only looking for people who offer, who are looking for one piece of the puzzle.

And if you can get up and do something that doesn't seemingly on the surface have an immediate benefit for you, then you can have an amazing advantage in that market because you have ident identified them first. You have the opportunity to build a relationship with them, to be a trusted advisor and be an advocate for them. In a lot of ways, we refer to this as being the mayor of a category. If you appoint yourself to the mayor position, it's a, that's a wonderful place to come from. And you know my friend Taki Moore talked yesterday on one of his videos about the idea of the being the mayor and he said something that was very insightful is that one of the keys to being the mayor is to realize that it's not a position of prestige, it's a position of service.

And the person who gets to be the mayor of a category is the person who is the most useful to that category. So focus on what would somebody who's entering the category that you're in the market, what would be the most useful thing that you could organize put together for them and then appoint yourself to the position. There's no votes, there's nothing stopping you. You get to self appoint to the position of mayor of whatever category you want and then the byproduct is you end up being a market maker.

Every idea that I've had, every dollar that I've made over the last 30 years has gone through my brain, through my pen, onto a piece of paper in my journal before it went out into the real world. And if I can turn people onto that activity as a driver for what to do, what to think about, what to ask yourself to draw out, what the next most valuable action is for you and how to find the most profitable things that you can install in your business, I'm all for it.

So this Friday at 1pm, I'm going to do for the first time a 50 minute profit finder workshop. And you're going to join me live on Zoom. And we're going to go through a 50 minute exercise. Bring your pen, bring a notebook or piece of paper and I'm going to guide you through a thinking process that will help you identify where the lowest hanging fruit is in your business and maybe some fruit that you didn't even know was there.

But I'm going to show you where to look for it. So it's free. It's for you. It's Friday. At 1pm this Friday. Just watch.

Just go to 50minuteprofitfinder.com and I'll get you all the details and hopefully you can join us then. Friday 1:00pm.