Episode 200 - Mark Joyner on Being a Peak Performer In Work and Play

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to DishyMix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton. Hello. I have a really fun guy for you today.

His name is Mark Joyner. You may have heard of him in that he’s famous in the Internet marketing space. He’s made quite a name for himself. He’s a best selling author. He’s someone who got really early into information product marketing. He’s done a lot of deep thinking about people and the Internet and how to connect with them in ways that work for driving revenue and making people happy.

Some of the books that he’s written are Worst Case Scenario Business Survival Guide, a book called Integration Marketing: How Small Business Becomes Big Business and Big Business Becomes Empires, and a book called Simpleology, and Mark also has a company called Simpleology.  He has a collection of companies. He’s a conglomerate man. He’s building an empire. His company is called constructzero.com, and that’s a holding company for many different brands – Simpleology, Auto Response Plus and others, Delavo, which is an ecommerce system. So he owns a lot of companies.

And in addition to the constructzero.com he also has constructzero.org, which is the philanthropic branch of his organization. His goal and his dream is create something that I’m going to talk much more about at the end of the show, this concept of decentralized devices for third world countries, an empowering concept of technology and raw materials putting the hands of indigenous peoples.

I probably didn’t do that justice, but we’re going to go from Internet marketing to global philanthropy and how you can do that in the confines of a corporate environment. I really love Mark Joyner. He’s in a mastermind with me and he’s probably one of my favorite new people. He’s like a shiny new toy for me. I’m totally in love with him. I just think he’s super awesome.

And so I’m glad to have him – oh, don’t laugh. Don’t come on the show yet Mark. He’s waiting for me to like shut the hell up and let him do some talking. It’s…


Mark Joyner: You’re doing great.

Susan Bratton: Well lets welcome Mark Joyner on the show. Mark Joyner.

Mark Joyner: Hey, thanks for having me.

Susan Bratton: Good morning. It’s good to have you. I’m glad you came onto DishyMix. And we saw each other just about a week ago at AdTech. You were one of the speakers for our Inspire Programming, which was above the nuts and bolts of Internet marketing to the more lofty inspirational concepts like design and philanthropy and other things, and corporate culture, we talked about a lot of different things. So I want to make sure that, you know, we talk about your speech at Inspire. We’ll save that sweet stuff for the end. You promised me that there were three things that we were going to talk about today – how to double your productivity with three simple changes and your work habits, how to get the most qualified and eager leads imaginable without spending a dime on advertising, you’ve got us with that, and how to triple your sales by being more honest.

So lets just start with those Mark, the how to double your productivity with three simple changes in your work habits. I’m sure that ties back to Simpleology. So why don’t you start with what that is and how we do it.

Mark Joyner: Yeah, right on. Simpleology is simply put a time management platform, but I really don’t like to call it that because most time management platforms you see out there are really bloated and you’ll notice that you don’t really ever use one for longer than a week, right. You go out and you get that planning tool, you open it up and you’re all gung ho, and then before you know it that thing is covered in a thousand papers and it’s nowhere, right. So what we like to call this is a personal action manager. And what it is it’s a system that allows you to look at all of the things that are on your spectrum of things to do. Now I really want to distinguish this also from to-do lists. A lot of really organized people will say, “Okay, I just want to, you know, create a list of all the stuff I want to do. I’m going to charge forth on these things gallantly.” But the problem with a to-do list is that on the same page you’ve got ‘Take out the trash’ and ‘Save the world,’ right, and then a thousand other things. And when you look at this list it’s overwhelming, so that ends up going in the trash or it ends up totally overloading your brain. This is a really big problem because when the brain is overloaded it doesn’t function well enough. It’s like a PC or a Mac where you’ve got too many windows open, right. The to-do list is the proverbial too many windows in your life, and every other management tool I see out there has that same problem. So what Simpleology does is it allows you to trim all that junk down and focus on only what’s really, really important, and it shows you how to intelligently process that work. So generally what happens to people is they get done in about two hours what normally takes them a day or even a week depending on how dysfunctional they were before.

Susan Bratton: All right, so tell us about Simpleology itself, a little bit about the web cockpit and how the process of that product works. ‘Cause you’re close to a million customers using that thing, so obviously you’re creating value. It’s a dashboard for you life and for your accomplishments, right? And that’s…

Mark Joyner: That’s a good way of putting it. I like that.

Susan Bratton: one of your companies. Tell us about what it is that you teach us to do. You know, what are these three simple changes? I presume it’s if you use Simpleology they’re all in there for you. Is that right?

Mark Joyner: Yeah. Well that and a lot more. But the three really easy ones – and this is something that’s totally automated inside Simpleology and it walks you through a little process and there’s, you know, probably dozens of other little tiny tweaks that it sort of automates for you. But the first thing that’s really important is that people need to make sure that when they get down to work that they have a very focused period of time to do that work. What happens with most people is they wake up in the morning and they turn on their email, they turn on their phone, and then what happens from that moment forward is it’s no longer your day. Because all of these emails coming in generally don’t represent your agenda. They generally represent everyone else’s agenda. Yeah, some of these people are responding to requests of yours, but the vast majority of communication that we get is somebody pitching you on something or an advertisement or somebody who wants to eat up your time for something else and sometimes it’s people we love and that’s awesome. But in that moment when you have to a short period of time where you’ve got to get stuff done, you’ve got to tune all that stuff out. So the first thing that we tell people to do is turn off your email, turn of your page – well nobody uses a pager anymore – but your phone and all that other stuff, whatever modern things you’re using to keep yourself connected with the rest of the world, all that really needs to be shut down. And what happens from that little simple twist is that all of the sudden you’re wondering, “Well wait a minute, what am I actually going to do with my time?” Most people don’t know what to do with their time if they don’t have connections from other people, so you’ll find that you’re shifting away from their agenda to your agenda. That’s the first thing. Now the second tip that I generally give people is you’ve got to get super, super clear on what’s actually important to you. You’ve got to get what I call alignment. And I think the concept of alignment is probably the most powerful strategic concept you can ever get really in this life. I know that’s a bold statement, but when you think about it it’s really true. And when I talk about alignment what I’m saying is you need to make sure that your actions, your communication, your team, everything that you’ve got going on in your life is in alignment with what it is that you actually want to accomplish, right. So, you know, most people have these big lofty goals, but what they’re doing during their day has absolutely nothing to do with getting them there. And one of the things we teach in our course, Simpleology 101, is this, you know, free training program that we give out to folks to teach them how to use the software and also how to organize their life, is we call The First Law of Simpleology, and that’s the law of straight lines. You know, you’ve got to walk in a straight line path toward the thing that you want because life is short, you know. Time is something that you’re never ever going to get back so you’ve really got to use that wisely; otherwise it’s going to get out of your control. It’s going to get out of your hands. So if you get all of those things in alignment amazing things start to happen and progress starts to happen much, much more quickly. And it sounds so simple, it sounds so obvious, but nobody does it hardly at all and the few people who do are the ones who are really making a huge difference in this world. Now the third tip would be – and again, we could give dozens of others, but you know, these are the simplest and easiest to learn – is to be ruthless with the things on your list. Again, we’ve got that proverbial to-do list that has everyone else’s agenda and all of these little minor things, things that you shouldn’t be doing, things that you should be delegating out to other people, things that you really should be sitting on your scheduling tools, and all of these things are sitting in one place. You’ve really got to filter that stuff out and dump most of it really and put the rest of it in its right place. And at the end of the day after you go through this process – and again, this is all automated inside Simpleology – you’ll look at this and you’ll go, “Wow, it’s actually only two or three things that were really important to me on this list of 200 things,” and that’s totally doable. So instead of procrastinating and not actually getting to those things that are important, you’re really going to do them because the mind can actually grasp that volume of work.

Susan Bratton: So you’re a person that I think about operating at a very high level of performance. You’re a pique performer. You do a lot. You run multiple companies. You’ve got this philanthropic vision that you’re working on. You have a reasonably new wife, reasonably new marriage.

Mark Joyner: Right.

Susan Bratton: You do training in mixed martial arts, which means you get the shit beat out of you on a weekly basis, like including punches to your head. And, you know, you’re just like out there in a really big way with a lot of things that you’re doing. So I’m sure that you use your own Simpleology product, but I want to go like a level above that. Simpleology is a thing that keeps you organized, prioritized and takes things out of your brain and gives them a place to live so you don’t forget them, but they’re actionable later. What’s your personal philosophy around how much you’ve taken on? You really have a lot on your plate, and you’re doing it in a mindful way because you do everything in a mindful way. That’s just the kind of person you are. You’ve got a lot of eastern philosophy influence and you have conscious approach to your life. What is it that makes you want to do all of this at once and do you sometimes lie in bed at night completely exhausted and wonder why the hell you have an appetite this big for life? I’m not sure what that question was, but just respond in any way you want. That was just like, I think that was more of an opinion than a question, but do what you can with it.

Mark Joyner: Hey, I totally get it. It’s a reasonable question, totally reasonable question. And what I would say is, you know, what I endeavored in my life is to make sure that everything that I do is totally in alignment. And all of those things that you mentioned, they are all totally in alignment with the ultimate goal of doing, you know, what we’re doing at the Construct Zero philanthropy. The business is in alignment with that because that’s how we’re funding it, right. We’re not accepting any outside funding for what we’re doing at constructzero.org for various reasons. So all of that business stuff that I’m doing in any every little bit of it has to be in alignment with that, and when I choose things to do in my business I need to make sure that they are going to be supportive of that and they’re going to be most likely to get us the most money in the way that is most congruent with my, you know, personal code that I live by. And in terms of all the other personal things that I do, like there’s other stuff on there that I don’t even talk about, you know, I get, you know, tutoring, you know, in various topics, you know, just to further my own personal education. There are a lot of things that I do, you know, in a very disciplined way. Mixed martial arts, to give you the one example, that is totally in alignment with all of that because I know that what we’re doing is something that is going to meet a lot of resistance from a lot of people. Whenever you come out and you say something like what we’re talking about at Construct Zero, you’ve always got nay Sayers. You’ve got people who are threatened by the agenda because this is a radical disruptive thing that we’re talking about here, right. And there are people who are a little bit scared of that because they might feel like it threatens their power base. And then there are people who just, you know, they’re cynical, you know. And you’ve got to be able to stand up to all that. And, you know, when I decided to take on mixed martial arts I was thinking, “You know, how can I ratchet up my self confidence? I mean I’m a pretty confident guy as it is, but I’ve really got to take myself up to another level so that no matter what I face I’m just going to be able to look at it coolly in the eyes and deal with it calmly.” And getting punched in the face a lot is probably, you know, one of the most difficult things you can do. Mixed martial arts trains you not only to be extremely physically fit, but it trains you how to manage yourself in a lot of different ways. And, you know, I’ve found that my ability to keep my cool in very, very tense situations has been greatly enhanced by that. My personal confidence has been greatly enhanced. Things that used to bother me now the volume is just turned way, way down on those things. So I do sometimes think, “Oh my god, what have I gotten myself into,” but then I have ways of reminding myself what’s important. And when I have those nights where I’m doubting, which do happen, it’s one of two things; either I’ve let something slip in there that’s not in alignment with what I’m wanting to accomplish, or I begin to doubt my objectives. And when I doubt those things I almost always realize that it’s somebody else’s thoughts that are coming in there and invading what I have decided to do in my life. So those moments do happen, but I know how to figure out how to sort of quash that and get back to feeling totally motivated and stoked to be this busy all the time.

Susan Bratton: It really makes sense. I know our mutual friend Carlos Xuma recommends martial arts to any man who feels like he just needs to kick more ass in the world like in his life, and it’s not about physical ass kicking; it’s much more about mental ass kicking. If he wants more masculinity, if he wants to feel stronger, more rooted to the ground, if he wants to be able to weather the storms of changes in his life, that martial arts is really good and it makes total sense. I have a question for you about it. Biologically does doing martial arts increase your testosterone or vasopressin levels? Do you get like a hormonal or, you know, peptide release doing that kind of stuff?

Mark Joyner: I imagine you would, and I’ve seen a lot of science, you know, showing the different biochemical effects of various forms of exercise, and I don’t think we understand these mechanisms well enough to really make definitive statements. But I do believe that there is a sufficient array of evidence out there to support that – testosterone for sure. I can’t quote any studies off the top of my head right now, but I do believe I’ve seen quite a few that show that intense physical exercise, to a point mind you, right, to a point will genuinely increase your testosterone levels naturally without having to take testosterone injections or things like that. Now there are things that you can do in your diet as well. As you know, whenever I’m over at you guys house, you know, I very rarely, you know, eat any of the junk food, right, that’s around. You know, you guys don’t have a lot of junk food at your house, but I mean I eat a pretty strict diet, and also for that same reason there are dietary things that you can do to boost your estrogen and lower your testosterone – sugar for example. So yeah, I think that there’s a tremendous amount of research out there to support that. Again, how the mechanisms actually work, I don’t think we quite have enough information. But I can tell you qualitatively from my own personal experience I feel like, you know, that testosterone is higher. You know, generally we feel calmer. We feel, you know, stronger, more confident, more lucid, more energetic when our testosterone levels are higher, and all of those things are definitely things I’ve experienced since taking up MMA.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, it totally makes sense to me. I’m fascinated by the influence of hormones on our behavior, you know.

Mark Joyner: It’s huge. It’s huge.

Susan Bratton: I’m learning so much about it just doing all the research on the love chemicals for Revive Her Drive, as I’ve been writing that, you know, it’s just amazing how fast new relationship cuddle hormones dissipate, you know. And so learning to take mind over matter, which is in a lot of ways I think what martial arts does, when you’re moving your body and you’re generating testosterone, you’re feeling more confident about yourself. You know, that’s one good thing you can do too, all the rigor of the training, the mental discipline that it takes, you know. It trains your body in a new way and it gets those chemicals going. So it’s all very interesting. So I want to move forward a little bit too. I want to talk about Auto Response Plus and Delavo. Those are two of your other companies in addition to Simpleology. Those are your three big brands. You’ve got more in Construct Zero, but just explain why you chose to buy those two businesses. What was it about the email marketing and the shopping cart, and how are your products either now or what you envision them to be, your services, how are, what’s your strategy for that? You know, what’s the differentiation of what you’re putting together there?

Mark Joyner: Yeah. Well in those two cases with ARP and Delavo, what I was thinking there was several fold, right. One is the people behind those two companies are awesome people, right. I love working with those teams. The founders of those companies are both absolutely wonderful people that I have, you know, really deep personal connections with. I trust both of them implicitly. And they’re visionary, you know. Now that’s the people side of it, and I think that the people side is generally the most important thing that you got to think about when you’re selecting a company to bring into your fold. If the product is fantastic but the people are sub par – or, you know, I don’t like to say they’re sub par people, lets say that they’re people who are performing sub par at that moment in their life, you know. It’s generally not going to work out, right. Because everything in this world is dynamic and you’ve got to have conscious management of those things for them to work. Now in terms of the actual products themselves, you know, ecommerce, which both are really deeply connected with both, you know, ARP, which is, you know, an email management system, and then Delavo, which is an ecommerce platform, ecommerce is the wave of the future. It really is, and I think more and more transactions are going to happen online. It’s obvious now, this is something I’ve been saying for almost 20 years at this point. But now I think that there’s no doubt that the Internet has totally changed the way the world works. Now the reason those two particular companies are better than other is something very subtle that most people don’t realize; these are two platforms that you can run on your own servers yourself. I like the concept of having a platform that’s hosted on someone else’s server in that it’s convenient. But what you give up for that convenience, you’re losing a tremendous amount of security and autonomy when you do that. When you go to a company and you say, “Okay look, I’m going to pay for your service. I’m going to log in. I’m going to put all of my business over here in this platform,” well when that platform goes down you can’t call up your own system administrator and say, “Lets get this fixed.” You can’t call up your web host and say, “Lets get this fixed.” You are 100 percent at their mercy. And I’ve seen this happen with a lot of people. They’ve got a big launch schedule and their ecommerce platform goes down, and, you know, the company doesn’t take responsibility for it. You know, the company that’s launching loses hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there is not a damn thing they can do about it. And that is not an acceptable foundation upon which to build your business. So even though it’s a little harder in the beginning, I would advise all business owners to make sure that they have got control of the platforms that are running their business. So Delavo and ARP are platforms that you pay a monthly fee for but you install them on your own servers and you don’t see your data. We can’t see your data because it’s living on your machine. That’s another big problem. When you’ve got these companies that are controlling all your stuff, you don’t know if they’re really living up to their privacy policy. They’re going to say, “Well hey, you know, we’re not going to look at your stuff.” Okay, that’s all well and good. Do you really know that they’re not, you know? It’s really hard to know that for sure. Now there are some companies that are more trustworthy than others, and to totally transparent about that, Simpleology is a platform that lives on our servers and people have to trust us with that data. Now we go to great, great lengths to make sure that that data is totally encrypted and make it, you know, pretty much impossible for us to look at that data, even if somebody wanted to be sneaky about it, right. But not all companies go to those lengths to make sure that that’s the case. I’ve even seen some companies where you sign up for their services, and I don’t want to bash all these other companies, but lets be honest about what things are, right. You go to these companies, you sign up for this service, and sometimes they don’t even have a privacy policy. And when you’re doing that they’ve got the total legal right to look at your stuff in that case. So I think it’s essential to run your business on something that you control, even if it’s a little more painful in the beginning, because what you’re going to gain in the long run is way more valuable than the little bit of time you’re going to lose in the beginning in setting things up.

Susan Bratton: I completely agree with you, and I’m an Auto Response Plus customer because of the control…

Mark Joyner: Yes.

Susan Bratton: that I have over my own destiny. You know, having been on everything from Mail Chimp to Get Response and seeing the vagaries, the whims of the companies executives making decisions about what they should do with your data is just unbelievable.

Mark Joyner: It’s shocking. It’s shocking.

Susan Bratton: I’m with you. I’m totally with you, and I think that’s really smart. So both, do you say Delavo?

Mark Joyner: Delavo.

Susan Bratton: Delavo, that’s what I say.

Mark Joyner: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Okay. I thought maybe I was saying it wrong. So we don’t use Delavo, we use a different shopping cart, but it’s the same concept. It’s a server side solution for ecommerce, right?

Mark Joyner: Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Mark Joyner: Well on your server that’s the key, right?

Susan Bratton: Yes.

Mark Joyner: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: All right, so tell me about this second point. How do you get the most qualified and eager leads imaginable without spending a dime on advertising?

Mark Joyner: Ah, nice. Okay, so the key is integration marketing. Now integration marketing is sort of a name that I came up with years ago. It’s a phrase that I coined to describe a set of marketing phenomena that I was observing. And I’ll give you a really, really narrow view of what it can do. The concept of integration marketing is a lot bigger than this and I want people to think about it metaphorically because you can apply these concepts to almost any form of marketing and almost any platform. So I’ll give you the formal definition of this, and then it might take a minute for it to sink in because these are sort of new words that I’ve come up with to describe this phenomenon, but I’ve attempted to do this in a way that would give people flexible intellectual tools to be able to discover opportunities in their business. And I think that’s extremely important because the language that you use to think about things defines the scope of your thinking. So the formal definition is that integration marketing is the integration of a unit of marketing value into an integration point that sits on a traffic stream or a transaction stream. Now I’ll give you a couple of really interesting examples of this. If you go in to McDonald’s and you order something you’re generally getting up sells and cross sells and things of that nature. One can look at that as a form of integration marketing. Now there’s two general types of this: we’ve got internal and external, right. So when you go to McDonald’s and they say, “Would you like fries with that,” that’s internal integration marketing because they’re upwelling you or cross selling you in that case, to be more specific, on another one of their own products. Now sometimes they’ll say, “Would you like a coke with that,” and if they say, “Would you like a coke,” that is external integration marketing for Coca Cola. Now this is a really fascinating thing I want to point out. Susan, have you ever seen a Coke store?

Susan Bratton: No.

Mark Joyner: I’ve never seen one either. And maybe one exists in some tourist town somewhere, like I’ve seen these Hershey stores that you go into where they’ve got all the Hershey’s paraphernalia you could ever want, right.

Susan Bratton: Like M&M’s. M&M’s does that as well, like in Vegas there’s an M&M’s store.

Mark Joyner: That’s right, yeah. And it’s fantastic, but that’s not the norm, right. The norm is you buy M&M’s at shops, at supermarkets, you know, anywhere where it’s appropriate to include that in there. Now Coca Cola is really brilliant with this because there is no Coke store and almost everywhere you go Coca Cola has done external integration marketing of their product. Now so how do we apply this concept to online marketing? Well in online marketing years and years ago we never had any upwelling or cross selling. One of my old companies was the first to do upwelling and cross selling on the Internet, and one of these tactics that I came up with is something that transformed one of my earlier businesses pretty much overnight, and it’s now a staple tool that we use to grow any business that we begin. So it’s a very simple idea. When we were selling e-books, I started the first company to sell e-books online many, many years ago. When we first started doing it we would say, “Okay, you’ve completed the transaction. Here’s a thank you page. We’ve just sent you an email. Here’s a nice little pat on the bottom. Now off you go,” right. Totally wasted opportunity. So we started doing this up sell of another product that we had. We also started the first ad tracking company online years ago. And we tweaked this and we played with it until we got to a point where 50% of the people who bought the e-book were taking up this up sell of this ad tracking service. And then one night I was walking home and I said, “Well wait a minute. You know, if we’re doing this on our thank you pages” – at this point other companies had started selling e-books and this whole, you know, sort of Internet marketing boom had really started blossoming. I thought, “Why don’t I go to these other companies that are selling e-books on similar topics and get them to integrate this offer on their thank you pages?” And I thought, “Well that’s a good idea,” but when I thought about it some more I couldn’t sleep that night because I began to see just infinite possibilities with this. So the very next day we started calling up these companies and striking up these relationships, and before you know it we were getting, you know, 50, 100 sales a day from just one of our partners with whom we were doing this. Now think about this. You cannot find a better lead than this because first of all, we don’t pay anything for that unless it generates a customer. We’re not risking anything at all. They put that ad on their thank you page, and that customer has raised his hand, he’s said, “Not only am I interested in this topic, I have a credit card, the credit card functions, and I’m hot to buy this thing right now in this moment.” Someone tell me how to find a better lead than that. That is the ultimate in qualification. If anybody could find a better lead than that I want to know because you’ll be a millionaire many times over just by finding a better qualified lead than that. So anybody in the world can do this and not only can you do it with your offers, you can do it with your email list, right. You can go to people who have email lists on similar topics and you can say, “Hey, why don’t you put a little tick box on your opt-in form?” It says, “Would you also like a free subscription to this” or if that’s too technical for you and that’s not going to work out, put a little ad on the thank you page that says, “Hey, would you also like to opt-in to this other newsletter,” right. Or on that thank you page of their email opt-in put in an offer for one of the products you’re selling, or on the thank you page of something they’re selling put in an offer for a product you’re selling or an email opt-in or anything that is a unit of marketing value, any unit of marketing value. And again, this will work on any integration point on any traffic stream and any transaction stream. Now in the book Integration Marketing I created a little point scoring system to show you the quantitative value of different integration points. So when people get excited about this, they go, “Oh my god, this is awesome. I can now build my business without spending any money on advertising.” That is a revolutionary idea for most businesses, but they go out and they start out willy-nilly. So I strongly recommend that people go in and they learn how to quantify those different things so that the time that they’re putting into finding those deals are spent on the ones that are going to provide the biggest impact on their business.

Susan Bratton: I really like this little book Integration Marketing. It’s physically a little book; it’s not mentally a little book or informationally a little book. But I appreciate a small book. It’s nice.

Mark Joyner: I do too.

Susan Bratton: And it’s very timely. I mean I think that this concept of integration marketing, the, you know, having your ad on a buyers, you know, page, confirmation page, those kinds of things, is super smart. I like the way you quantify the value of them. So this is a very timely book. It’s not anything that’s, I mean I don’t think that this concept will ever go away. You can only just keep doing it better and better and better and dialing it in.

Mark Joyner: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: What do you think about, if you have time to spend marketing your brand right now is integration marketing the first thing you do after you build a website or are there other things that you do to promote your products, which are really services?

Mark Joyner: Yeah, yeah, most are all services. You know, it’s really the primary marketing weapon that we have; that along with really focusing energy on word of mouth marketing. Word of mouth marketing when done properly – and I think that, I like to classify it in two ways, I call it incentivized and inspired word of mouth, inspired word of mouth being way more powerful than incetivized word of mouth. It really is the most powerful force for marketing. And the way to make that work, it’s a totally organic process, you know. You’ve got to make your product better. You’ve got to make your service absolutely awesome. You’ve got to constantly improve your presentation. You’ve got to be willing to listen to the voice of the customer. Like Susan, one thing I really love about you is you will send me emails with feedback that holds no punches, you know. I mean you’re just like, “Look, this sucks. This sucks. This is awesome. But all of this sucks,” you know, and I’m like, you know what, I could sit here and feel sorry for myself and go “Oh my god, she’s such a big bad meanie,” but that’s stupid, right. It’s totally stupid. You’ve given me a way to make more money, you know. So I listen to that. I listen to that. And that is something that we have made part of our culture in our businesses. We listen to our customers and we’re constantly improving every single thing that we do. And I think that those two things together, when you focus your energy on inherent organic word of mouth marketing and on integration marketing tactics and you do that in a systematic and strategic way, you’ve got to really healthy foundation for your business because you’re not putting yourself at risk with all of this, all these advertising spends – not that that’s inappropriate, there’s a time and a place for that. But sometimes advertising stops working, you know. If it didn’t businesses wouldn’t be failing so often, right. When you build your business on this kind of foundation you’ve got a very, very low overhead for your marketing budget and you’ve got a fan base that is intensely loyal that will go out there and will stick with you when you have tough times in your business. So outside of those two things, that’s really what we think about and that’s how our conversations go in our company.

Susan Bratton: I’m sensitive to the time that we have, and I want to ask you three more things. I’m going to tell you what the three things are that I want to talk about so that you can decide how to parse your time and answer them.

Mark Joyner: Okay.

Susan Bratton: The first one is that I want to understand more – it’s a pretty tactical question I think. How do you systematize the ability for your customers to have an inspired word of mouth relationship with you? How do you give your customers the ability to spread the word on your company’s products and services? That’s number one. Number two, you promised to tell me how to triple my sales by being more honest. And number three, I really want to talk about constructzero.com and the DC3D strategy that you have, and that’s a big one. So you might want to go bing, bing, bing, right.

Mark Joyner: Okay, you got it.

Susan Bratton: So number one is how do you systematize the word of mouth. Number two is the honesty question. And number three is your dot org.

Mark Joyner: Awesome! Okay, on the first question, we generally try to not systematize that because when you start systematizing things you’re getting more into incentivized word of mouth rather than inspired. But with that said, there are lots of really interesting things you can do, like these days there’s all kinds of Facebook integration you can do that is, I’ll tell you what, it is nasty viral this stuff, because when somebody comments on something that you’re doing or they like it it shows up in someone’s stream and then that shows up in all their friends stream. There’s so many instant ways that that can now connect with potentially millions and millions of people. So that’s what I would ask people to do. But first and foremost – and this leads in very nicely to the next question – make sure that what you’re doing is awesome. Make sure that it’s buzz worthy in itself. And if you do that people don’t need extra ways to spread the word. They’re just going to do it because they are inspired to do so. Like you and I, we’ll share things with each other. Like I remember at dinner the other night I was like, “Oh my god, you’ve got to go see this Symphony of Science thing.” I don’t need a Like button for that. I don’t need a comment box for that. I don’t need a telephone for that. I just thought it was one of the most amazing friggen things I’ve seen in my life. So much that I want to share with people that I love. So that’s it. Be awesome. Now how does this tie in with being honest? Well if you are honest with your customers your customers are going to trust you a lot more and when you screw things up – and you will, right – you can come right out and tell them, “Look, we really jacked this up,” and they’re going to remember that you were honest because most companies, they sweep everything under the rug, they’re constantly lying and once that happens people don’t trust you anymore. People, now more than ever, understand that humans are imperfect. No longer can we have these perfect sterling images of companies because the conversation that has been stimulated by the Internet makes that moot. We all know that it’s not possible. It’s not realistic. It’s not honest. So be out there with your flaws, but when you get that kind of feedback respond to it. You’ve got to not only show people that you’re honest but that you’re also proactive and that you’re going to not only listen to what they say, but you’re going to take action on things, and you’ve got to show them consistent constant feedback on what you’re doing to make things better. And when you do that you’ve got a conversation going on with you fan base, and if you can keep that conversation going they are going to love you and they’re going to spread the word about what you’re doing far and wide. They’re going to do more for you than advertising ever would. But you’ve got to be honest and you’ve got to be absolutely amazing. Most people are not willing to do those two things. If you’re willing to do those two things there is nothing in this world that you won’t be able to have. Now your third question, DC3D stands for Dirt Cheap Decentralized Distribution Devices. And what we’re talking about here, simply put, that’s a very sort of, you know, high [inaudible] way of explaining the concept. A simpler way to look at it would be what if you had a small device that could cost less than $5 U.S. dollars to make that could provide clean water for a village or for a home or a small device that could provide free electricity for a home or a small device that could provide, you know, a nutrient rich food supply, or later on down the road we even hope to provide devices that provide unlimited un-censorable access to the Internet. What would happen to the world if these devices existed? Well several things. First of all, it would be a lot harder for war to happen because I believe that most conflict in the world, even though we use ideological justifications to explain why these wars are happening, I believe that those are just carrier waves for pain and frustration, and that pain and frustration is caused by people not having access to things that they need. When we don’t have things that we need, we suffer. And if we had devices…

Susan Bratton: Yeah, we’re fighting over resources. That’s the [inaudible]…

Mark Joyner: That’s it, exactly. That’s I mean, you know, and a lot of people think “Ah, that’s not really the way the world works,” but if you look at almost every conflict in the world and you really look at as much historical documentation on those things as you can, I believe that it explains those things perfectly. So that’s the first really wonderful side effect of having these devices all out throughout the world. The next side effect would be that there’s a lot of ways to brain power out there and that brain power would now be freed up to do amazing things. Like to me I wake up in the morning and I am absolutely astounded that we don’t see on the front page what’s going on in the world of science, right. You know, “Oh wow, we just discovered what could be an inhabitable planet, you know, in a solar system, you know, a light-year or so a way from us.” Well it’s going to be further than a light-year or so. But that to me is the amazing stuff that we should be thinking about, and we’re not thinking about the fact that, hey, at any point here an asteroid could slam into this planet and end all of this, right. But instead we’re talking about all this nonsense, all of these imaginary borders. We’ve got everybody all wrapped up in all of these unimportant senseless things when they could really be contributing in a more profoundly valuable way. And when people wake up in the morning and they have access to everything that they need as their birthright, rather than say, “Hey, you know what, I’ve got this job that I hate that I’ve got to go spend more time doing this crap that I don’t like,” they would be like, “Hey, what can I explore? What can in invent? How can I use my mind?” I think that if we do that we will experience a tremendously huge renaissance in this world, and that’s what we would like to stimulate happening.

Susan Bratton: I love your idea, and I look forward to you having a lot of conceptual proof points of decentralized devices that can empower people with natural materials or local resources that people can create themselves to get better food, water, access to information and opportunity. I really like that a lot, and I don’t know why, but it reminded me of an organization – and I can’t remember the name of it – but they’re down in San Jose. It was started by a woman who is an ex school teacher. And what she does is gets donations from corporations in the Silicon Valley of excess materials, anything, you know, just stuff they were going to throw out like things that they bough that they can’t use for product or service or the building or whatever. Anything that’s going to go to waste, they call her, and if there’s enough of the material she’ll send her truck out and she’ll bring it back to the warehouse facility, and then she has a group of teachers that are on her board and are associated with the organization, and those teachers create science projects and math projects, learning projects for schools…

Mark Joyner: I love it.

Susan Bratton: And they kit them up so teachers can go to this place and get these, you know, kits of 30 or 28 or whatever items and take them back and do a project with their class with recycled materials. They also take all kinds of computer equipment and they completely bring it up to date and they give it to teachers. It’s not the same thing, but it’s a really cool thing ‘cause that’s kind of the integration of available materials and science to empower learning and to lift people up. So it feels similar in that way, you know, that model.

Mark Joyner: Yeah. I absolutely love that, and I think, you know, there is so much room for this kind of stuff going on and I think that more than ever we’re seeing people come up with ideas like this because people are starting to realize that we are so intensely connected, all of us around the world, and I don’t mean that in some un-measurable metaphysical way. I mean a very, very empirically verifiable scientific way, we are totally connected and the industrialized world has stopped growing, right. We’re expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, right. We’re just about to break 7 billion now. Three billion more people by the time we reach 2050, and all of that’s happening in developing…

Susan Bratton: Third world.

Mark Joyner: Yeah, third world.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Mark Joyner: And I’ll tell you what, that is a security issue and people are starting to think about that more, and it’s a really fantastic thing to see.

Susan Bratton: We have to get the right materials into the hands of people so they have the opportunity to create their destiny.

Mark Joyner: I love it. Yeah, exactly.

Susan Bratton: I love it too. Well Mark, I really, really appreciate everything you’re doing. I think the businesses that you run are smart. I think the books you write are valuable. I think the work, the vision that you hold in the world is amazing, and I love how you’re just like a walking talking peak performer. I really appreciate a lot about you, and thank you for not only speaking at AdTech, ‘cause I kind of had to talk you into that. I know you didn’t want to do any speak ops this year. You’re kind of going to, you’re gopher goes to ground when he’s got a lot of businesses to manage, and I totally understand that. So thanks for popping out of your gopher hole for AdTech and for DishyMix. I appreciate that very much. I’m glad that I had the opportunity to create two places that you could share who you are in the world because who you are in the world is a super great awesome thing.

Mark Joyner: Thank you. Right back at you. And for everybody listening, listen, I’ll tell you what, Susan Bratton is a, she is a juggernaut. This is an awesome, awesome person. Keep listening to her show.

Susan Bratton: Thank you so much sweetie. All right, I’m your host, Susan Bratton. You’ve gotten to know Mark Joyner. You can find out more about him at constructzero.com. I really appreciate you listening, and I hope that I’ve provided some inspiration for you. I have a copy of Simpleology and I have a copy of Integration Marketing. If you’d like a copy of the book post your desire on my DishyMix Facebook page. Just go to Facebook, search for DishyMix, tell me why you think you should get this book and I’ll give it to you. Have a great day and thanks again for checking in on DishyMix. Take care.