Overview of the 9x12 Marketing System

My name is Jake Lorraine, High Response Marketing Podcast. We're gonna talk 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 gonna help you so much. I'm gonna 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 9x12 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 a shout out to Carolyn Hutchinson in Kenosha. She runs the Kenosha 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. You're just getting businesses together. They pay for the postcard and you keep the profits. You can just start today selling it. And its 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 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 meet. Like, 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 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 feet finders. Mostly because you can deduct this stuff. Pens and pencils and receipt books and you're maybe driving and traveling. Well, that'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 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 dollars worth of free advertising for years and years. I ran my entire window. and signing remodeling business with free advertising for years. So 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 2025. 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 have a benefactor or whatever it's called. 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 to clock in. 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. That's so dumb. Now, I love providing jobs for a lot of people. That's what they like. They want that consistent. They want to know exactly how much they're going to make in the next 10 years. Like they know down to a T and 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've got a couple of screws loose like I do, then entrepreneurship is the way to go and not having a boss, a stupid boss to answer to. That's the worst thing ever. Common question I'm asked is, do I need an 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, 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 S-Corp or LLC treated as S-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 have a conversation with ChatGPT 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. You still record it. You still put it 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 DBA with an EIN so you can get a business account so you can accept checks. So you can deposit in there 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 can 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 of 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, get rid of this, please. This guy spends literally tens of thousands of dollars. I'm like, don't. I'm going to send you the link, and you're going to enter this thing. You can 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 ad 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 would 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, when you're dealing with really small mom and pop brick and mortar 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 saying they're battling someone and they're like, well, I've been mouth word of 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, you're very likely that they will not be a returning customer. Sometimes they will, but a lot, they'll be like. Because they're going to expect a miracle. They're already going to be like, I'll give this a try. 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 or a book. 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 last 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 done, or they're, they really want to advertise, but they don't allow, they don't really have a lot of funds. And this sub $1,000 is something they can afford. This could be late 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 don't deserve to be in business. That'll go back to a corporate life. I love business owners that have money because they don't nag you about the response. Oh my God, I only got four customers. They're like, God, oh my God. You have like some dumb kitchen contract. I'm not saying they're all dumb because they're not. It's just you'll have a dumb one and they'll be like, you know, I only got two kitchens for 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, 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 don't 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. That's who you should be talking to. Sometimes I tell marketers 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've got to convince yourself that it's valuable. So 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 incredibly valuable. You don't think a realtor wants to be the only realtor on a card that's going out 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 it. 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're going to spend 10 grand. I'm telling you, if you're 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. 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 10,000-piece postcard out in the mail, they are going to spend many thousands of dollars. They're going to spend $10,000, $20,000 because that's what it costs. 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 for five, six hundred dollars for. They're literally getting like ten thousand dollars worth of six thousand, ten thousand, 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. You know the real vet. 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. 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? 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. 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. Do you want them to hold this and see the size? feel the gloss, feel the paperweight, and really just visualize what's 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. Then 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 need 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 overcomplicate this, okay? I don't know if you're making them yourself. I have a 50-pack of Canva ads. That link is in the description below. So you can create your own or you can hire a designer. Those Canva templates that you want. Or you can make them on Canva yourself. Totally free. Canva's amazing. Or you can outsource someone. I can always recommend. 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, what kind of deal, maybe help them create a deal. You can use ChatGPT for creating deals, like just for thinking of deals. Really great. You'll look like an expert. Go on ChatGPT 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. ChatGPT 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'll make it work. It's not a big deal. It doesn't have to be a masterpiece. But here's the thing that is going to save you thousands of dollars and your business. 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... text shortcut so on if you're using windows you can use a program called brevi i think it's really cheap it's like five dollars lifetime or something brevi 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 typos you essentially are going to absolve yourself of any errors and either 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, there's no stopping it, right? I can tell you over the last 13 years I've been doing this and I've had it happen myself. But I will see this happen every now and then. Someone will notice a major critical error where they put one of the funniest things one time was funny. It was terrible. A longtime 9x12er accidentally put a stock image of a competing truck. 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 accidentally mailed out that ad. So it was like a f***. Ford dealer with like a Chevy truck, something like that. It was like a crazy competitor item that was not supposed to be in the final ad. And he realized that 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 limited liability companies or S-Corps can provide some value. Because if you were to get sued, you know, someone could sue you. 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, but 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 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 it was your fault. That company could theoretically could sue you, which would be disastrous. So you really want to, number one, consider a limited liability company or S-Corp 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 non-9x12-er, a direct mailer. He had done 9x12s, but he was a direct mailer. Had a printing business and messed up like a $100,000 order. Something that was like a hundred grand. And he messed it up. He put like a wrong thing on it. And this company just sued the heck out of 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 checklist and say, just check for type. Can you look this over for any typos? Can you look at URLs? Pick 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. I'm sure you have a Facebook friend that's probably a retired English teacher. Some people are just really strongly grammar skilled. Have them check things over. Pay them $10 or something. Pay them $20 and just scan it over. Which is actually pretty cool. Retired people that love grammar, making $20 to grammar check something is amazing for them. To just spot errors. 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 to someone. I'm like, oh yes, I'm going to 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 sometimes... This is so bad. I can't believe I'm saying this out 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 eddm and only to find out that it's the wrong size or something so i check the size i check the indicia 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 now 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, nope, you're good to go. You know, go for it. I won't tell them 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'll be like that. But you want to absolve yourself. Just throwing that disclaimer in on every time you send them an email. Proof. And don't get in the habit. I understand sometimes these things happen. But don't get in the habit of someone texting you. Because I'm texting business owners a lot. And you'll probably be texting them or calling. You might be talking to them. And they're like, yeah, approved. Totally good. You really want them to just reply because then if something goes wrong, 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, they'd be threatened to go to court. They're saying they saw a different thing. There's not, 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 to, if 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 it clearly wrote here to check this over, that I am human and could potentially have mistyped things. Even you pro 9x12ers, 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 over an email. So I'm telling you, you could save your business. You can 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 9x12. Whether you're starting or a really experienced 9x12-er. 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-opening. This could be a huge game changer for everyone. I'm asked all the time, how do I scale this? What do I do to 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've 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 and making $10,000, what are you doing with the profits? If you are taking the profits as 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 9x12ers 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 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 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 9 by 12ers get caught in that, caught in having so many cards. They're running themselves ragged because they're managing so many cards. They get comfortable at making this $150,000, $250,000 income and they're doing a handful of cards. 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 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 and 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 you 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. You're making a lot of money and you've made it. 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 fast as possible. My opinion right from the beginning, if you really want to make a 9x12 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 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 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. He was doing work too, but I wasn't being paid. I didn't have money. So 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. In that situation, that's a common situation for a lot of people. 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. In business, 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 another job. I want 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 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 terrible. You could be giving someone else that job. Who does it better than you? Who does it more efficiently? You can do the things that you as a business owner need to be doing. 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 at 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 salespeople 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. 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 bookkeeping, highly organized, and also knows how to cold call and also can sell, you're gonna pay through the nose for someone like that. It's gonna be so challenging to find people when you could be just hiring VAs, 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. Filipino VAs are great for things like organization and emailing, communication, and just maybe like project management type stuff. You can have a CRM like Pipedrive. It's a 15 a month. I don't know. It's like 20 bucks a month or something. It's cheap. And that will help you keep organized for everything. You can hire a VA to work the job. CRM. I love Pipedrive. Just get someone else doing that so it takes a burden off of you, please. You shouldn't be juggling all this stuff. 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's 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 game changes. Everything changes when you know this. When you have 10,000 pieces mailed, 16 spaces, and you're charging, let's say, $600 each, if you have 25% recurring, which is really low, and if you've been doing a while, you're probably up in this 50% range, but let's just say 25%. 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 is $1,350 per advertiser. So you've got to start thinking of that, not in terms of the $600 ad, but in their lifetime value. That's $1,350. So every advertiser you have, whether or not they recur, just every... advertisers 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. 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. And 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 numbers? 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 9x12s get 50%, 60%, 70% recurring. I would say most high-performing 9x12ers are in the 60% to 70%, like 7 out of 10 advertisers are staying on. But if you increase that, and I use 25% as a really conservative number, 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 5 million. 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 six months of advertising, three 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 9x12s. A lot of 9x12ers 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 services. 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 $4,920, almost $5,000. If you're at say a 50% profit margin, that's $2,500. So every single person I advertise is. putting $2,500 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 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 something. We got to spend 5, 10, 15% marketing. But when you start breaking customers down into 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 game? 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 make sure they stay on this mailer. Sometimes it's just as simple as like telling people, hey, 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. It's stuff like that, which means you've got to have time to think. If you're juggling 100,000 ads and you've got 15 cards going on and you're trying to just get through the day 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... Five to one ratio of cost acquisition, CAC, cost to acquire a customer, five to one. 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 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've been doing this for two years, or 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 60% that recur. So an advertiser on your card, you can spend $400 in this case to acquire. 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. 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 want to say idiot, marketer that says like, oh, let me put 20 bucks in Facebook ads. 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 give away a 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 9x12 lifetime value just by adding print. So that means like business cards, flyers, brochures, postcards, solo mailings, targeted mailings, new mover mailings. You could add maybe even consulting or web. That's not even digital. You're going to be at this. $1,000 plus 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 going to 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 100,000 cards and ads and trying to figure out who owes. Business owners solve problems. That's what we do. We solve problems. That's 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 to day are these little. pesky problems. You gotta stop that. You should be solving complex problems. Big problems. huge problems the bigger 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 9x12ers and they're just spending their whole day managing art with it's fine in the beginning it's it's fine but you shouldn't be doing this a year into this months at like where you're just you You're spending your day coordinating artwork and sending emails for proofs and stuff. Get someone else to do that. Hire a Filipino VA. Mine, shout out to Jane. I have a whole team. We have five of us that just handle my inbox. So just have assistants 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. 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 9x12. If your whole business is 9x12, you can't sell them other things because your time is taken up on just 9x12. You can't sell them a website. You can't sell them consulting or list services or doing 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. month client and working with them personally and it may be doing some targeted mailings and stuff like that you can't do that when you've taken up all your time just selling ads the ads just you just mean people in they get on the card and they go into your funnel that's really that the game changer is to just get people on the card keeps your brand visible it keeps you out there it just 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're going to tweak these things so watch anything you have of mine let me know how you like this i will see you on the next one

My name is Jake Lorraine, High Response Marketing Podcast. We're gonna talk 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 gonna help you so much. I'm gonna 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 9x12 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 a shout out to Carolyn Hutchinson in Kenosha. She runs the Kenosha 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. You're just getting businesses together. They pay for the postcard and you keep the profits. You can just start today selling it.

And its 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 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 meet. Like, 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 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 feet finders. Mostly because you can deduct this stuff.

Pens and pencils and receipt books and you're maybe driving and traveling. Well, that'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 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 dollars worth of free advertising for years and years. I ran my entire window. and signing remodeling business with free advertising for years.

So 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 2025. 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 have a benefactor or whatever it's called. 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 to clock in. 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.

That's so dumb. Now, I love providing jobs for a lot of people. That's what they like.

They want that consistent. They want to know exactly how much they're going to make in the next 10 years. Like they know down to a T and 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've got a couple of screws loose like I do, then entrepreneurship is the way to go and not having a boss, a stupid boss to answer to. That's the worst thing ever.

Common question I'm asked is, do I need an 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, 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 S-Corp or LLC treated as S-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 have a conversation with ChatGPT 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. You still record it.

You still put it 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 DBA with an EIN so you can get a business account so you can accept checks. So you can deposit in there 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 can 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 of 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, get rid of this, please. This guy spends literally tens of thousands of dollars. I'm like, don't. I'm going to send you the link, and you're going to enter this thing.

You can 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 ad 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 would 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, when you're dealing with really small mom and pop brick and mortar 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 saying they're battling someone and they're like, well, I've been mouth word of 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, you're very likely that they will not be a returning customer. Sometimes they will, but a lot, they'll be like.

Because they're going to expect a miracle. They're already going to be like, I'll give this a try. 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 or a book. 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 last 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 done, or they're, they really want to advertise, but they don't allow, they don't really have a lot of funds. And this sub $1,000 is something they can afford. This could be late 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 don't deserve to be in business. That'll go back to a corporate life. I love business owners that have money because they don't nag you about the response.

Oh my God, I only got four customers. They're like, God, oh my God. You have like some dumb kitchen contract.

I'm not saying they're all dumb because they're not. It's just you'll have a dumb one and they'll be like, you know, I only got two kitchens for 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, 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 don't 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. That's who you should be talking to.

Sometimes I tell marketers 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've got to convince yourself that it's valuable. So 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 incredibly valuable. You don't think a realtor wants to be the only realtor on a card that's going out 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 it. 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're going to spend 10 grand.

I'm telling you, if you're 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. 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 10,000-piece postcard out in the mail, they are going to spend many thousands of dollars.

They're going to spend $10,000, $20,000 because that's what it costs. 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 for five, six hundred dollars for.

They're literally getting like ten thousand dollars worth of six thousand, ten thousand, 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. You know the real vet. 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. 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? 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. 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. Do you want them to hold this and see the size?

feel the gloss, feel the paperweight, and really just visualize what's 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. Then 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 need 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 overcomplicate this, okay? I don't know if you're making them yourself. I have a 50-pack of Canva ads. That link is in the description below.

So you can create your own or you can hire a designer. Those Canva templates that you want. Or you can make them on Canva yourself.

Totally free. Canva's amazing. Or you can outsource someone. I can always recommend.

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, what kind of deal, maybe help them create a deal.

You can use ChatGPT for creating deals, like just for thinking of deals. Really great. You'll look like an expert. Go on ChatGPT 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. ChatGPT 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'll make it work. It's not a big deal. It doesn't have to be a masterpiece.

But here's the thing that is going to save you thousands of dollars and your business. 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... text shortcut so on if you're using windows you can use a program called brevi i think it's really cheap it's like five dollars lifetime or something brevi 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 typos you essentially are going to absolve yourself of any errors and either 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, there's no stopping it, right? I can tell you over the last 13 years I've been doing this and I've had it happen myself.

But I will see this happen every now and then. Someone will notice a major critical error where they put one of the funniest things one time was funny. It was terrible.

A longtime 9x12er accidentally put a stock image of a competing truck. 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 accidentally mailed out that ad. So it was like a f***. Ford dealer with like a Chevy truck, something like that. It was like a crazy competitor item that was not supposed to be in the final ad.

And he realized that 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 limited liability companies or S-Corps can provide some value. Because if you were to get sued, you know, someone could sue you.

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, but 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 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 it was your fault.

That company could theoretically could sue you, which would be disastrous. So you really want to, number one, consider a limited liability company or S-Corp 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 non-9x12-er, a direct mailer. He had done 9x12s, but he was a direct mailer. Had a printing business and messed up like a $100,000 order. Something that was like a hundred grand. And he messed it up.

He put like a wrong thing on it. And this company just sued the heck out of 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 checklist and say, just check for type.

Can you look this over for any typos? Can you look at URLs? Pick 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.

I'm sure you have a Facebook friend that's probably a retired English teacher. Some people are just really strongly grammar skilled. Have them check things over.

Pay them $10 or something. Pay them $20 and just scan it over. Which is actually pretty cool. Retired people that love grammar, making $20 to grammar check something is amazing for them. To just spot errors.

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 to someone. I'm like, oh yes, I'm going to 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 sometimes... This is so bad. I can't believe I'm saying this out 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 eddm and only to find out that it's the wrong size or something so i check the size i check the indicia 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 now 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, nope, you're good to go. You know, go for it. I won't tell them 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'll be like that. But you want to absolve yourself.

Just throwing that disclaimer in on every time you send them an email. Proof. And don't get in the habit. I understand sometimes these things happen.

But don't get in the habit of someone texting you. Because I'm texting business owners a lot. And you'll probably be texting them or calling.

You might be talking to them. And they're like, yeah, approved. Totally good. You really want them to just reply because then if something goes wrong, 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, they'd be threatened to go to court. They're saying they saw a different thing. There's not, 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 to, if 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 it clearly wrote here to check this over, that I am human and could potentially have mistyped things. Even you pro 9x12ers, 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 over an email.

So I'm telling you, you could save your business. You can 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 9x12. Whether you're starting or a really experienced 9x12-er. 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-opening. This could be a huge game changer for everyone. I'm asked all the time, how do I scale this?

What do I do to 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've 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 and making $10,000, what are you doing with the profits?

If you are taking the profits as 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 9x12ers 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 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 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 9 by 12ers get caught in that, caught in having so many cards. They're running themselves ragged because they're managing so many cards. They get comfortable at making this $150,000, $250,000 income and they're doing a handful of cards. 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 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 and 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 you 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.

You're making a lot of money and you've made it. 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 fast as possible.

My opinion right from the beginning, if you really want to make a 9x12 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 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 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. He was doing work too, but I wasn't being paid. I didn't have money.

So 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. In that situation, that's a common situation for a lot of people.

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. In business, 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 another job. I want 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 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 terrible.

You could be giving someone else that job. Who does it better than you? Who does it more efficiently?

You can do the things that you as a business owner need to be doing. 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 at 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 salespeople 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.

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 bookkeeping, highly organized, and also knows how to cold call and also can sell, you're gonna pay through the nose for someone like that. It's gonna be so challenging to find people when you could be just hiring VAs, 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. Filipino VAs are great for things like organization and emailing, communication, and just maybe like project management type stuff.

You can have a CRM like Pipedrive. It's a 15 a month. I don't know.

It's like 20 bucks a month or something. It's cheap. And that will help you keep organized for everything.

You can hire a VA to work the job. CRM. I love Pipedrive. Just get someone else doing that so it takes a burden off of you, please. You shouldn't be juggling all this stuff.

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's 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 game changes. Everything changes when you know this. When you have 10,000 pieces mailed, 16 spaces, and you're charging, let's say, $600 each, if you have 25% recurring, which is really low, and if you've been doing a while, you're probably up in this 50% range, but let's just say 25%.

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 is $1,350 per advertiser. So you've got to start thinking of that, not in terms of the $600 ad, but in their lifetime value.

That's $1,350. So every advertiser you have, whether or not they recur, just every... advertisers 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. 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. And 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 numbers? 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 9x12s get 50%, 60%, 70% recurring. I would say most high-performing 9x12ers are in the 60% to 70%, like 7 out of 10 advertisers are staying on. But if you increase that, and I use 25% as a really conservative number, 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 5 million. 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 six months of advertising, three 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 9x12s.

A lot of 9x12ers 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 services. 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 $4,920, almost $5,000. If you're at say a 50% profit margin, that's $2,500. So every single person I advertise is. putting $2,500 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 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 something. We got to spend 5, 10, 15% marketing.

But when you start breaking customers down into 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 game? 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 make sure they stay on this mailer. Sometimes it's just as simple as like telling people, hey, 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. It's stuff like that, which means you've got to have time to think. If you're juggling 100,000 ads and you've got 15 cards going on and you're trying to just get through the day 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... Five to one ratio of cost acquisition, CAC, cost to acquire a customer, five to one. 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 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've been doing this for two years, or 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 60% that recur. So an advertiser on your card, you can spend $400 in this case to acquire. 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. 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 want to say idiot, marketer that says like, oh, let me put 20 bucks in Facebook ads. 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 give away a 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 9x12 lifetime value just by adding print.

So that means like business cards, flyers, brochures, postcards, solo mailings, targeted mailings, new mover mailings. You could add maybe even consulting or web. That's not even digital.

You're going to be at this. $1,000 plus 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 going to 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 100,000 cards and ads and trying to figure out who owes. Business owners solve problems. That's what we do. We solve problems. That's 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 to day are these little.

pesky problems. You gotta stop that. You should be solving complex problems. Big problems. huge problems the bigger 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 9x12ers and they're just spending their whole day managing art with it's fine in the beginning it's it's fine but you shouldn't be doing this a year into this months at like where you're just you You're spending your day coordinating artwork and sending emails for proofs and stuff.

Get someone else to do that. Hire a Filipino VA. Mine, shout out to Jane. I have a whole team.

We have five of us that just handle my inbox. So just have assistants 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.

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 9x12. If your whole business is 9x12, you can't sell them other things because your time is taken up on just 9x12. You can't sell them a website. You can't sell them consulting or list services or doing 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. month client and working with them personally and it may be doing some targeted mailings and stuff like that you can't do that when you've taken up all your time just selling ads the ads just you just mean people in they get on the card and they go into your funnel that's really that the game changer is to just get people on the card keeps your brand visible it keeps you out there it just 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're going to tweak these things so watch anything you have of mine let me know how you like this i will see you on the next one

Transcript for:Overview of the 9x12 Marketing System

Transcript for:
Overview of the 9x12 Marketing System