my name is Jake Lorraine high response marketing podcast we're going to talk about all things 9x12 system I don't care if you're a beginner I don't care if you've been doing them for years this is going to help you so much I'm going to give you a tip that could save you thousands of dollars and potentially your whole business so I am stoked to give this to you there's still a lot of questions that people are asking me all the time repeatedly even if you are a super pro veteran I'm telling you you're going to want to listen to this I'm going to show you something that's going to change everything if you're in the 9x1 12 game it is going to change everything for you if you're not familiar with it it's this postcard it's just a big postcard that you share with other businesses this is shout out to Carolyn Hutchinson and Kenosha this she runs the kosha spotlight she's on her like 10th card or something right now but that's what a 9x12 postcard looks like if you haven't seen one like you're just getting businesses together they pay for the postcard and you keep the profits you can just start today selling it and it Simplicity is really its strongest point if you're complicating this thing if you're talking to business owners you're trying to make this into some complicated thing you are doing it wrong there's nothing complex about this it's you sending out 10,000 or maybe 5,000 or however many thousand postcards to local homes and you're sharing it amongst local businesses that's all it is it's as simp simple as that it can be just a side hustle thing like a thing that helps maybe go on vacation once or twice a year or pays off your bills puts extra money in the bank I don't know makes ends meat like it's you can use it as a side hustle thing for sure you can do that indefinitely times get tough you put out a card or two you want to remodel your kitchen do a couple cards you got a new kitchen got a new bathroom I don't know whatever you do I don't care what you do with your money or you can use it as job replacing income you can get rid of that that nasty boss and that nasty job and work for yourself that's the worst boss there's a lot of advantages of just having a business even if you're still working a job and doing the feat finders mostly because you can deduct this stuff pens and pencils and receipt books and you're maybe TR driving and traveling if it's business related It's deductible sometimes even you go to lunch and you talk about business maybe with a client maybe with your partner you're just or an employee or you're planning out the research marketing research all that stuff is deductible for the most part I'm not a tax person I'm not a lawyer I'm an idiot that has somehow made this stuff all work for me hey look I got 50 plus thousand worth of free advertising for years and years I ran my entire window insiding remodeling business on with free advertising for years so that that's what I am okay I'm good at that so you got to talk to a tax professional if you want actual professional advice but I'm going to give you some insight okay a lot of this stuff is deductible Take Good Records create a business account mileage is 70 cents in 20125 I'm pretty sure it's 70 cents it's like 67 cents right now or something it's going up to 70 cents in 2025 I'm pretty sure all that stuff adds up you can deduct all that on your taxes also like you could lose your job don't you want to have some kind of security where if you lost your job it wouldn't be a complete disaster it wouldn't actually be a bad thing having something like this at your disposal is just good it's also a business that like it's an asset it's a thing that could be sold it has value maybe you could borrow against it or leverage it in certain ways you could benefactor or whatever it's called to give it to your kids have your kids take it over like there's so much good about business having a job is like it's terrifying to me it's been so long since I've had a job it's like the worst thing ever you got a clock in CL you don't know if you're going to get fired the next day and you get the stupid raise every year you get that little bit of a raise and your little time so dumb now I love providing jobs for a lot of people that's what they like they want that consist they want to know exactly how much they're going to make in the next 10 years like they know down to a team they get this vacation and they love going on that cruise once a year it's ridiculous to me but I thank God most people like that because then we can hire those people you know if you got a couple screws loose like I do then entrepreneurship is the way to go and not having a b a stupid boss to answer to that's the worst thing ever common question I'm asked is do I need a LLC the short answer is you got to at least get a DBA okay go to your local municipal government and get registered as a DBA that just means doing business as it means that you can operate under a fictitious name you can call yourself something your business something and you can accept checks or credit cards and stuff under that name that's pretty important because with that you can get an EIN number online you could do that instantly and then you can go get a business checking account business checking is great because you're going to need that to take credit cards but also it's an easy way to itemize your stuff so like to get your deductions it's all in one business account it's going to be easy to keep track of and you keep those things separate you don't mix your personal income with your business income that's super important you may want to do LLC limited liability company because it limits your liability so if something bad happens and it can it's especially as you get bigger and more things can happen you don't want your personal assets you don't want your house or your car any of that stuff exposed and have a judgment on your personal record so I would say that yes it probably would be a good idea maybe in the near future to go LLC or scorp or LC treated as es Corp that's something more that you got to do more research on but that limits your liability I wouldn't say just go out and spend $1,000 and get that going right now I would just get a DBA and just start getting some traction but talk to an attorney just ch have a conversation with chat gbt and ask it for payments people always ask how I accept payments you're going to be taking almost always check or credit card sometimes people give you cash that's fine too by the way getting cash doesn't mean it's under the table some people are like oh my God they're giving me cash like you still record it you still put it as an as income it's just cash it's just the way that they paid some businesses just operate in cash for whatever reason it's fine checks credit cards are the most common and you want to have a a DBA with an EIN so you can get a business account so you can accept checks so you can deposit in their it's on your personal accounts and get a credit card reader from like square up which is free and then you can swipe it right on your phone so you can just swipe it right there Square even lets you input them manually so you could take one over the phone which is kind of weird but sometimes people do I've had business owners they text me with a picture their credit card I got a guy that spends tens of thousands of dollars and he always insists on sending me a picture of his credit card I'm like I get rid of this please this guy spends literally tens of thousands of dollars I'm like no I'm going to send you the link and you're going to enter this thing you could do an email invoice with square which is nice you can send them an email with a secure payment link and they can just pay it those are pretty essential things to have for any business I'd also probably buy a mileage log just so you can rake up that 70 plus cents per mile for 2025 let's talk about the easiest deals the easiest people to sell add space to by far are businesses that are already spending money a good habit is just to get the niches that you want on the card so maybe you want an HVAC person you want a roofer you want a furniture store you want a pizzeria you want an Italian restaurant and just think of the first business that comes to mind I'm sure you can think of a realtor you can think of an insurance agent you can think of a chiropractor a furniture store you can think of an auto dealer you can think of all these people because of the amount of marketing that they do so those are great places to start those businesses already spend money they already know the value of marketing believe it or not a lot of when you're dealing with really small mom and pop brick and Warrior businesses they don't always even understand the value of marketing like sometimes it's a struggle to just get them to understand marketing like that marketing is important if you're sitting there battling someone and they're like well I've been M we a mouth in it for 20 years and I'm good those people are nothing but a hassle they're a pain you should never be like having to convince someone that advertising is important if you're doing that very likely that they will not be a returning customer sometimes they will but lot they'll be like cuz they're going to expect a miracle they're already going to be like I'll give this a try but you know and you could bring them all sorts of business in with your card and it still won't matter because these people are so stupid and I'm just going to say that they're stupid yes if you can sell them a space fine don't be battling people you're talking with a business owner and you have to somehow explain that this is valuable either you are but totally butchering your script up or something or they're just stupid they're just so dumb you are sending a postcard to 10,000 people local homes promoting local business their brain power if they can't comprehend that they probably aren't going to F in business they're probably going to go fizzle out they probably run a dumb business anyways so if you're sitting there battling people you are talking to the wrong people talk to business owners who are already advertising I encourage you to talk to everyone like you should introduce yourself and give it a shot and see because some businesses are really cool they've never don't or they're they really want to advertise but they don't know how they don't really have a lot of funds and this sub $1,000 is something they can afford this could be life changing for them so I'm not I'm not saying rule everyone out I'm just saying don't be wasting your time battling with people who are arguing about whether marketing works or not if they don't get this off the bat or at least see that this is interesting something's valuable here you either really messed up that pitch or they're just stupid if they can't get it right away something's not right with them they they don't deserve to be in business that go back to a corporate life I love business owners that have money CU they don't nag you about the response oh my God I like got four customers that they're like God oh my God you have like some dumb kitchen contractor I'm not saying they're all dumb because they're they're not it's just you'll say have a dumb one and they'll be like you know I only got two kitchens from this man this is a joke I'm not doing this anymore like you idiot I'm sorry you made $50,000 off a $500 ad because that's how stupid some of these people are when they're not accustomed to spending money on Advertising because they don't believe in marketing the all the results in the world doesn't matter while the Smart Ones will be like yeah just get me I want to be on every single one of these I want my competitor on I understand someone isn't going to buy a $50,000 kitchen maybe the first run I might have to do this for a year until I can then look back and say oh I sold you know I sold 10 kitchens this was amazing let's keep doing it those are the advertisers that you really want on your card that's who you should be talking to some Nel markers they want to go to these really tiny businesses which is fine because you really want to help them but then they end up spending all day battling with whether advertising works or not most of the time you're actually going to be battling yourself you got to convince yourself that it's valuable so you the first thing is to sell yourself and say look I understand the value of this get your head on straight about how nice it is to have 10,000 people holding a postcard with local businesses on it and there's only one per Niche so there's one roofer that is incred incredibly valuable you don't think a realtor wants to be the only realtor on a card that's going up to 10,000 local residences you don't think the furnace guy wants to be the only one like there's in every Niche there's a business that wants to be the only they want to be on that card and they don't want anyone else being on that card there's a ton of them so make sure that you yourself are sold on this that you know how valuable that is and that if a business tried to do this on their own they you're going to spend 10 grand I'm telling you if you a business owner you want to send 10,000 postcards out now I'm not saying you because you know you can go through me you and get the cheapest Printing and get the eddm program and get everything you are an exception to the rule if you take 99% of all business owners getting a a 10,000 piece postcard out in the mail they are going to spend many thousands of dollars they could to spend 10 $20,000 because that's what it cost with lots of moving Parts the design the mailing the printing what kind of coding to use the mailing list how to do the postal there's so many moving parts and you're offering all this handed to them on a silver platter for5 $600 for they're literally getting like $10,000 worth of 6,000 10,000 whatever you want to call it it's a lot for a tenth of that so sell yourself on this first please that makes it way easier to sell others on it because you know the real value of it you're just selling real estate you're not selling results you're selling real estate on this postcard so you're just selling spots on this state it's like a billboard it's like a TV radio you're going to get it in front of so many people do they want to be on it is do they find that valuable if they don't someone else will you don't have a crystal ball you can certainly give them suggestions and try to make their ad look as nice as possible maybe help them craft a strong offer but you can't promise them anything you're providing them real estate that's all the best card that you can use to prospect is your own past card so once you have a card out showing that past card that's the best thing you can show this is the next best thing to show if you want them hold this and see the size feel the gloss feel the paper weight and really just visualize what's that that their ad could be on here this is perfect sometimes people are like I want at least 10 samples of other people's cards so I can show for credibility that's the worst thing you could do number one not everyone wants their cards held back for others to use but besides that it's the worst thing to prospect with other people's cards because they look different they're not yours and you're going to have people all confused and maybe they'll be like oh I like how this looks but you've already gone in a different direction your layout is different and they're seeing another one they're like well this is nice but your card it doesn't have that theme it doesn't have those colors it's like the most confusing thing ever do you mean any cards from someone else to show people it's actually really weird you're halfway through your card and you're showing completely different layouts and color schemes that aren't even yours I sometimes see in our Facebook Elite program I have an elite Facebook group and people are like I'll buy every card that anyone has and they go prospecting and they quickly realize that showing a bunch of other people's random cards does nothing but complicate the whole process for artwork don't over complicate this okay I don't know if you're making them yourself like 50 pack of canva ads that link is in the description below so you can create your own or you could hire a design those canva templates you want or you can make them on canva yourself totally free canva is amazing or you can Outsource someone I can always recommend uh like overseas designers that can do them really cheap you don't want to spend too much time on design just ask the people for their logo contact information and what kind of deal maybe help them create a deal you can use chat GPT for creating deals like just for thinking of deals really great you'll look like an expert go and chat G GPT and say hey what are some good offers for a postcard that a flooring company could use and it'll spit back like 10 things you can look like a genius chat GPT is great for all things like that what kind of color scheme they're looking for just get that basic information down that's it the website URL and if they don't have the logo don't sweat it just give it to the designer the website and their logo's on there somewhere they they'll make it work it's it's not a big deal it doesn't have to be a masterpiece but here here's the thing that is going to save you thousands of dollars in your business okay when you make the artwork send an email personally I'll screenshot the artwork and paste it into the email that way it's displayed in the email rather than as an attachment and you write this is a proof of your ad please check for typos check it over thoroughly check for typos make sure your url is spelled correctly check expiration date say the same stuff every time I have this actually in a teex shortcut so on if you're using Windows you can use a program called breey I think it's really cheap it's like $5 lifetime or something breey or in Mac it's under text Replacements and I love that because you can use it on your phone too it syncs across all devices but I just have this disclaimer anytime I send a proof already in there so you for me I hit Dot proof and it just spits it out please check for the typos you essentially are going to absolve yourself of any errors and even right in there we try to spell check everything but we're human can make mistakes I want you to check this and make sure it's good to go you could also put something in fine print that we can't be held responsible if you miss the typo or something you want to absolve yourself because if you send these things out 10,000 of these it's there's no stopping right I can tell you over the last 13 years I've been doing this and I've I've had it happen myself but I will see this happen every now and then someone will notice a major critical ad uh error where they put one of the funniest things one time was funny it was terrible a longtime 9x1 12 accidentally put a stock image of a competing TR it was like a Ford dealer and he put like a Chevy truck on it just as a placeholder he's like I'm just for the ad and he asked accidentally ma mailed out the that ad so it was like a Ford dealer with like a Chevy truck something like that it was like a crazy competitor uh item that was not supposed to be in the final ad and he realized it before it mailed and he had to reprint the whole thing because it would have been absolutely disastrous and what's even worse is when it actually goes out and then someone realizes a major thing happened someone could this is why Li limited liability companies or are ask corpse can provide some value because if you were to get sued you know someone could sue you or this is where the crap can hit the fan even though it's a very low-risk business you are advertising something to 10,000 people so let's say you just like say you just like mix an offer up and you wrote like I don't know you did something crazy and they didn't catch it or maybe that was what they said they got it wrong and you printed it and all of a sudden 10,000 people have something that says they're getting this for free or they're getting this for you know a a hundred off instead of a dollar off or something like that you missed a decimal point and now you got people angry because they have an ad that specifically says this one thing but then your it was your fault that company could could theoretically could sue you which would be disastrous so you really want to one consider a limited liability company or escort just to protect yourself in case these things really did come to fruition you really screwed up you truly screwed up I know a guy who actually who was a not 9 by1 12 a direct mailer he had done 9 by 12s but he was a direct mailer had a printing business and messed up like $100,000 order something it was like hundred grand and he messed it up he put like a wrong thing on it and this company just sued the hack on him absolute put him out of business for like pretty much permanently put him out so absolve Yourself by having a simple disclaimer with a I like pasting in a screenshot and just putting all that responsibility on them it's not a bad idea too to have someone else just check things over just scan the card and maybe make a check list and say just check for T can you look this over for any typos can you look at URLs pay a high school student that's smart you know that's got their grammars at the top of their game or an older person maybe even on Facebook you can I'm sure you have a Facebook friend that's probably like an a retired English teacher some people are just really strongly grammar skilled have them check things over just for pay them 10 bucks or something pay him 20 bucks and just scan it over which is actually pretty cool like retired people that like love grammar like making 20 bucks to like grammar check something is amazing for them to just spot errors you know just to check you look like a hero when you spot one you look like a superhero when you spot typos I spot them all the time I actually have one right now that I have to get back someone I'm like oh yes I'm gonna check this typo you want to know something dirty man this is a dirty thing I do sometimes this is terrible someone's going to call me out on this at some point I don't care I will some times this is so bad I can't believe I'm saying this on here sometimes people will every now and then I'll get like a a jerk in email okay every now and then someone will email me and because I offer to always check artwork I will check your artwork to make sure it's eddm compliant you know even if I'm not printing it it's fine I just don't want someone really blowing their money on EDM and only to find out that it's the wrong size or something so I checked the size I check the IND placement I check all that stuff over and once in a while you'll get someone who's a jerk and they'll be like you know n I'm not printing with you I'm going somewhere else or something and if I get a little attitude which I can't believe people will do that people will like hit you up for free you know check this over for free and then they'll have a little attitude and sometimes they'll have a they'll have a typo sometimes these are major typos I'll spot a typo it's not my responsibility to be the grammar police if they're not printing with me and they're being a jerk I'll just Noe you're good to go you know go for it I won't tell him the typo you know I get my little bit of payback it should have been nicer should have been nicer to me but you look like a hero when you spot typos though so if they're nice spot a typo they really like that but you want to absolve yourself just throwing that disclaimer in on every time you send him an email proof and don't don't get in the habit I understand sometimes these things happen but don't get in the habit of someone texting you cuz I'm texting some business owners a lot and you'll probably be texting them or calling they might you might be talking to them they like yeah approved totally good you really want them to just reply and because then if something goes wrong they they can say I never told you that or that wasn't the thing I saw no I saw something else I didn't see that so you really want that approval on the email next best thing would be to have a text with that artwork and they say yes this is good to go right in the thing and you screenshot it but you don't want to have like an email sent and then the person calls you and they're like yep good to go or they text you and say yep got your email it's good to go because now you have these two different things if you were to go to court it be threatened to go tot and they're saying they saw a different thing there's no you don't want that this is your baby this is your business things happen this protects you it absolves you pretty much if you were someone butchered their ad and they sent something out and there was a piece of information that was wrong you got the URL spelled wrong you didn't type it in right happens all the time you don't want them then saying I can't believe you did this you just sent this 10,000 you know you better send me you can just say this is what I sent you and clearly wrote here to check this over that I am human and could potentially have mistyped things even You pro9 by 12ers many of you are not doing this or aren't doing it to the degree that I just said you might be accepting ads over phone or something if it came down to it you should have had that that over an email so I'm telling you you could save your business you could save thousands of dollars and save your business by just having that disclaimer in there I want to talk about scaling I want to talk about scaling this is actually relevant to all stages of 9x 12 whether you're starting or a really experienced 9 by 12 because I have some insight that I know is going to help you no matter what stage you're in for this and this could be pretty eye openening this could be huge game Cher for everyone I'm asked all the time how do I scale this what do I do scale this how many cards should I do you should be doing as many cards as you can comfortably do okay that's the short answer everyone does a card for different reasons some people do a card just for side money just for an influx of cash some people do it for free advertising for their business some people do it as a job replacing thing these are all different unique situations there's one big question you got to ask yourself what are you doing with the profits of your card when you do a card and you make however many thousands 2,000 3,000 5,000 maybe you're doing two cards making $10,000 what are you doing with the profits if you're taking the profits with personal money you're putting a bottleneck to your business growth you're not going to be able to scale that is not how you scale your business but many 9 by 12ers think that they think I'm just going to make more cards they think that they're going to make $5,000 for every card and they're going to do 10 cards a month and they're going to make $50,000 a month in simple terms yes but the the complexities of that will become very quickly evident that is not actually the way you scale a business if you are taking all the profits and just all of a sudden you have $50,000 a month it won't work you can't just take the profits for a grow growing business that's like more of a hobby side hustle type thing you are going to need to reinvest those profits to take that money and reinvest it into the business and that's how you scale that is how your business is going to actually scale is by taking that money and not spending it but putting it back into the business that's going to grow it at an exponentially larger rate your job is not really to do as many cards as possible because that will create a lot of logistics problems that become really challenging some night Myers get caught in that caught in having so so many cards they're running themselves ragged because they're managing so many cards they get comfortable at making this like $150 $250,000 income and they're doing a handful of cards and it's going well and they have a ton of advertisers it gets very comfortable and they can't figure out what to do from there because they're just spending all day managing these ads two cards gets pretty complicated you start like spending a ton of time on just collecting payments just communicating with advertisers and staying on top of who needs what and artwork needs to be done and this is overdue this person wanted this and that person wanted this and you spend all your time doing that you're not even selling ad spaces maybe you have to sell a few spaces here and there because youve repeat advertisers but you're spending all this time managing and organizing juggling all these cards it's a terrible place to be in it really is it's a lot you're making a lot of money and you've made it you know you're you're a real business owner you've replaced your job income you're doing this full-time but you still just have a job you're just your own boss now you got to start being a business owner your main priority should be to replace yourself as as fast as possible my opinion right from the beginning if you really want to make a 9 by12 Business a business personally I would see it no other way you have to replace yourself ASAP you cannot be doing the day-to-day things for this business for very long at all maybe you want to put a card together yourself just to get familiar with the process I I I get that I wasn't broke when I very first started but I didn't have any money to work with I couldn't really take money out of our personal account to to do this business I was already not making money at our window business because my partner was making all the money despite me doing the work I he was doing work too but uh I wasn't being paid uh I didn't have money so I I only had the money at my day job okay for my family so I couldn't spend the money although my wife was supportive of me I couldn't just spend our money so in that situation that's a common situation for a lot of people like you might have a day job income but you can't necessarily just spend it on your business or that much of it so anyways I knew from the beginning that I just needed to replace myself that was number in business you have to you I cannot be the one doing it all that's not the point of being in business that's a job I don't want to another job or in a business so you have to do what you have to do to make the money to hire someone and sometimes it's just being creative like a with salesperson working on commission you have to be resourceful and Scrappy but you have to replace yourself ASAP you can't be doing the selling the organizing the designing the admin work the bookkeeping all that stuff is that is terrible you could be giving someone else that job who does it better than you who does it more efficient you can do the things that you as a business owner need to be doing okay your goal has to be to not be selling ads to not be doing artwork to not be doing admin tasks to not be organizing who needs to be talked to and who needs to get ad their ad signed off on and send the proofs like that is all time wasting that you shouldn't be doing you should be familiar with it hire someone else to do that so you can focus on the big things you can do this much more efficiently when you have systems okay so for the salesperson I will tell you where to go and who to talk to I will get you these lists of all the businesses in these industries I just need you to talk to five per day that's an example of a simple system instead of trying to hire salese and just saying go sell get a system together where you have a process that they follow and they just talk to five business owners a day or they talk to 10 business owners a day that's an example of a simple system you want a lead generator or someone you want to hire someone to organize okay I need 20 local businesses and all their contact information across these niches and you don't have to pay so much for people if you start hiring people and you're like yeah I need someone who's great at at bookkeeping highly organized and also knows how to cold call and also can sell you're going to pay through the nose for someone like that it's going to be so challenging to find people when you could be just hiring vas you know hire Filipino vas hire a domestic VA hire a person just to do spreadsheets a person that just does graphic design not one person that can do five different things so build these simple systems with simple metrics expectations and hire people to do them Philippino vas are great for things like organization and emailing communication and just maybe like project management type stuff you have a CRM like pipe drive it's is it 15 a month I don't know it's like 20 20 bucks a month or something it's cheap cheap and it will help you keep organized over everything you can hire a VA to work the CRM I love pipe drive just get someone else doing that so takes a burden off of you please you shouldn't be juggling all this stuff that that is a waste of your time it's so bad of a waste of time if you're the type of person that's like I could do this myself well yeah you could but you're not being a business person okay you're not going to make things move you're going to be trying to just save money all the time by not hiring someone and it kills your time you're not valuing your time here's probably the most powerful thing that I can share with you when you know this one thing the the game Changes Everything Changes when you know this when you have 10,000 pieces mailed 16 spaces you're charging let's say $600 each if you have 25% recurring which is a really low and if you've been doing a while you're probably up in this 50% range but let's just say 25 5% and let's say they stay on for an average of five mailing how much is that worth in lifetime value if 25% of them recur that lifetime IS350 $1,350 per Advertiser so you got to start thinking of that not in terms of the $600 ad but in their lifetime value that's 1350 so every Advertiser you have whether or not they recur just every Advertiser you have is worth $1,350 because a quarter of them will recur and stay on an average of five times five mailings now you start thinking of things in numbers okay and the quicker you start thinking in business of numbers and you become obsessed with these numbers you're going to see your results really explode you stop thinking about the money that's just the result of things you start looking at these numbers and how you can discover and tweak these numbers the money just comes as a natural result so if you're in business and all you're thinking about is this money like you're actually not going to make it in business if you're thinking of business as in how much money you're going to make from this your business isn't going to work out the way business really works is you become obsessed with tweaking these numbers and the money comes as a result of that so let's take this Advertiser worth $1,350 because that's really what they're worth every single Advertiser whether they recur or not is worth $1,350 how else can you increase those summ by tweaking these numbers you can charge more right if you charge more then that value goes up but charging more isn't always the answer you can get that recurring rate higher a lot of 9 by chars get 50% 60% 70% recurring I would say most high performing 9 by1 12ers are in the 60 to 70% like seven out of 10 advertisers are staying on but if you increase that and I use 20 25% is a really conservative number that is that lifetime value is going to explode you can also get them to stay on longer so you can get people to stay longer than five mailings you can get them to stay on for 12 mailings imagine someone who stays on average 12 mailings maybe some of them stay on for 24 for 36 some stay on for two mailings but they average 12 that lifetime value is going to go through the roof so putting out cards consistently makes a big difference you can explore getting commitments on contracts and getting people to commit to 6 months of advertising 3 months of advertising 12 months of advertising and lastly you can add more services to each customer you don't have to just be selling them 9 by12 a lot of 9 by 12ers who are juggling so many cards per month they haven't replaced themselves so they're busy all day juggling that because they haven't replaced themselves and they can't ever get to selling them more surf let's say you don't increase any extra Services you just increase the recurring rate to 60% instead of 25 60 and you do 12 mailings a year your average your lifetime value is now at $ 4,920 your lifetime value of every Advertiser whether or not they recur or not every Advertiser you get has a lifetime value of $4,910 almost five ,000 if you're at say a 50% profit margin that's $2,500 so every single person advertis is putting $2500 in profit to you that is how the game changes when you start thinking oh crap every Advertiser is worth $5,000 because then determine what's your cost to acquire one how much can you spend to just buy a customer that's really where the magic happen happens in marketing and in business how can you buy customers that's the Holy Grail small businesses never even think that's possible they think of marketing as just this expense that just gets built into their budget it's just some we got to spend 5 10 15% marketing but when you start breaking customers down into a a figure you start playing with these numbers you can do anything you can scale this thing to anything but you can't do this unless you replace yourself and then you can look at the big picture and say okay how are we going to increase this recurring rate how are we going to increase the number of mailings we do do we add commitments do we up our customer service gain do we stop promising results do we go after different customers how do we keep this recurring rate very high keep these people happy and and make sure they stay on this mailer sometimes it's just as simple as like telling people hey if okay if you don't want to go on there we really want to have a plumber on here so I can't promise you you're going to have a chance to be on it again I'm going to put someone else on there that can keep someone on that's stuff like that which means you got to have time to think if you're juggling 100,000 ads and you got 15 cards going on and you're trying to just get through the day of of what artwork needs to go where because you don't want to hire someone else to replace stuff you can't think of these big picture things so if 60% of them stay on for 12 months is worth $5,000 if your profit margin is 40% not even 50 just 40% profit margin and you want a 5: One ratio of cost acquisition CAC cost to acquire a customer 5 to1 that means you can spend $393 to acquire a customer that's factoring in a 40% profit margin that's factoring in that you're still making a profit so you can spend 400 bucks pretty much just to acquire one Advertiser on a 9x12 space if you've got 40% profit margin 60% recurring and they stay on an average of 12 months so sometimes these figures change as you go maybe you look back and you say okay I'm I've been doing this for two years I've been doing this for one year this is how long people are staying I need to increase it to this amount I need to increase the recurring amount but what I'm getting at is that you can spend in this situation you can spend $393 almost $400 just to acquire an Advertiser on your card and they don't even have to be recurring because that factors in the the 60% that recur so an Advertiser on your card you can spend $400 in this case to a chire this is why replacing yourself is so important because you can do this you can look at this stuff and then you can figure out what you can spend it on how do you spend $400 like what are the things you can do to acquire customers this is the fun part this is what I love in business is figuring out the creative stuff of what you can do okay I can spend $400 to acquire every Advertiser I what can I do there's so much you can do it's fun I have a blast with stuff like this what can you do you could run Facebook ads you could set aside x amount you could spend maybe $100 to $200 per targeting business owners and run Facebook ads to them instead of the idiot that I don't say idiot marketer that says like oh let me put 20 bucks in Facebook it if you're able to acquire an Advertiser by spending $200 one Advertiser it's totally worth it you can do giveaways you can put social postings of giveaways you'll giveaway space I think the smartest thing that you can actually do is give away a space that's the smartest thing you can do is give away a space give as many spaces away as you want give them all away if you can strategically give them all away you know you're winning because you can spend $400 to acquire a new customer in the very beginning you may not know exactly what you can spend to acquire a customer and you may have to build systems that can increase that because the whole point of it is what can I do to increase my lifetime value now if you start adding print just add print to the mix just start selling customers print you're going to add a good 700 to $1,000 of value right off the bat per lifetime value you're going to double your 9 by12 lifetime value just by adding print so that means like business cards Flyers brochures postcards solo mailings Target mailings new mover mailings maybe uh you could add maybe even consulting or Webster that's not even digital you're going to be at this 1,000 plus dollar that you're going to be able to spend to acquire a customer and you can do some crazy stuff with that when you have $1,000 that you can spend to acquire a customer and every customer you get you're going to make a boatload of money I mean you can do ads you can just give stuff away you can do so much you can give away the house you can be going up to business owners and giving them free ads and free spots on this and they get this and they get that and what's crazy is that you can build these packages that they can't say no to right that they get so much free stuff they're GNA say you know what I need business cards I need this this is amazing like yeah can you do this can you do that oh my God you can do that and you won't even have to spend it that's the crazy part about it you won't even you'll be giving stuff away and they'll just say I need to buy that I need this I need that I need this and yeah I want on this and your cost to acquire them becomes lower and lower because you're spending your time using your Creative Energy rather than juggling a 100,000 cards and ads and trying to figure out who owes business owners solve problems that's what we do we solve problem this really what we do we're just problem solvers we're professional problem solvers but it's what kind of problems are we solving if your problems that you're solving day today are these little pesky problems you got to stop that you should be solving complex problems big problems huge problems the bigger Pro the problem that you can solve the more money you're going to make if the problems that you're solving all day are these little pesky little problems someone else could be solving those problems you know you look like I look at some of these by 12 years and they're just spending their whole day managing artw that's fine in the beginning it's it's fine but you shouldn't be doing this a year into this months like where you're just you're spending your day like coordinating artwork and sending emails for proofs and stuff like gu someone else to do that hire a Filipino VA you know mine shout out to Jane yeah I have a whole team we have five of us that just handle my inbox so just have assistance that solve these pesky little day-to-day problems you should be working on the big problems because that's where the money is so when you talk about scaling it's not about how many cards you can do and how much money times that card okay I can put out 10 cards and make $50,000 no because you can make $50,000 a month on two cards you can make $50,000 a month on one card the actually the purpose of a 9x12 if you've gone to my course you know this the purpose of a 9x12 card ultimately is just to get new people in it's to get people in where the lifetime value is so high you have them into all your other products you can't start adding other services and products if you're so engulfed in 9 by2 like your if your whole business is 9 by 12 you can't sell them other things because your time is taken up on just 9 by2 you can't sell them a website you can't sell them consulting or List services or doing a a targeted mailing or marketing help or rebranding like all this stuff that you can easily Outsource and just work on from a higher level or a more personal taking a $5,000 a month client and working with them personally and maybe doing some targeted mailings and stuff like that you can't do that when you've taking up all your time just selling ads the ads just you just me people in they get on the card and they go in to your funnel that's really the the game changers to just get people on the card keeps your brand visible it keeps you out there it just it it generates fresh blood you know and you can just replicate it if you need to in other areas if you want to expand you just put another card out in another area or you have so many advertisers you want them on multiple cards which increases your amount of mailings increases the recurring rate all that stuff which just explodes the business so you really have to be looking at these numbers become obsessed with how you going to twe these things so watch anything you have of mine let me know how you like this I will see you on the next one