I Rocked It When I Stopped Advertising

Have you ever done something that seemed so backwards, it went against everything you know to be right?

That happened to me in my business.

Several years ago, I was running the family business as a brand new, young, inexperienced manager who was recently married.

The manager before me had quit after being there nearly 30 years and I stepped up to take the position because the assistant manager didn’t.

One of the reasons I did was to make more money because me and my wife at the time were scraping by every month and after a while, that just sucks!

I also took the job because there was something going on in my head only one person knew. That person was me. The issue in my head was I wanted the respect of our fellow business owners. If I was running the business, they’d see me differently.

Why did I want that from them? Why did that matter?

It turns out that I was bullied a LOT as kid. It screwed up my ability to have confidence in myself for the longest time. It was hard for me to confidently make good decisions and just be me. I thought being the manager would make a big difference in that. I didn’t consciously think that at the time. I only wanted the town’s big wigs to look at me differently.

So when I took over the position I got busy learning my role. I was also sure I could bring in more customers than the manager before because his advertising never seem to hit home runs most of the time.

It turns out, my advertising was not much better than his. In fact, maybe his was better than mine. That didn’t help my confidence any so I got busy and began going to marketing seminars, buying marketing courses, and reading lots of books.

I got the idea one day to try some campaigns that cost very little to no money because I was using up my ad budget sooner than expected. So I came up with ideas here and there.

Some worked a little. Most didn’t.

One month I was scanning sales reports and something jumped out at me.

I had just seen that we made more money one month by not advertising and using creative ways to increase sales instead. We also increased our transactions. It occurred to me that we should pursue that tack from there on. So I kept working on ways to do this. The problem with it was that I was not an endless supply of ideas. I couldn’t just dream up something and it’d work. In fact, often things didn’t work.

Then one day our town’s largest employer shut their doors after being there nearly 30 years. They were a bus manufacturer called Neoplan. By the time they closed, they had been injecting nearly $2 million into our local economy every month. That was significant because our town was only 8,500 population. When Neoplan closed, so did some other businesses immediately.

Others were clinging to life. Our sales dropped dramatically. I suddenly had little to no money for advertising. So I had to get especially creative but remember…the ideas I had were finite. I had to go looking for ideas.

I decided to look for people who had done or are doing what I was trying to do — bring in more business without spending money on advertising (or very little).

In my search, I found people. It turns out, there’s a secret group of people doing this very thing but it’s not like they were meeting in a dark alley on Saturday nights at an unmarked building so no one knows about it.

Nope.

I had to find them. I had to put out my feelers. I had to research like crazy.

I will tell you that I learned incredible things from this group of little-known profit makers.

In fact, one of the methods I brought to our business increased our average sale by 23% almost instantly. That’s significant for a small business in a depressed local economy…especially when other businesses are either closing or clinging to life.

I actually had fellow business owners coming up to me asking how I pulled it off. One said to me, “how did you do this?”

Honestly, it felt sooo good to hear someone I highly respected ask me how I made our business profitable in a depressed economy.

Yet, I discovered that as good as it felt to have a fellow business owner ask me that, I found something more valuable. I found what I was really after was my self respect. When I was bullied as a kid and it snuffed out my confidence, I didn’t feel like I had my own self respect.

But I did that day. I got it in spades. I thought about what it took to do what I did and I was on top of the world with it. I never looked back!

It all started when I stopped advertising. I had to stop advertising because sales had dropped so much. It scared the hell out of me but it turns out it was the smartest thing I ever did in business.

So that’s my advice to you…

Stop advertising and get busy marketing…or get busy dying!

Want to know more? Go to: www.UndergroundMarketingSystem.com

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