Give Away Your Secrets!

Give away the secrets, sell the implementation. - Alex Hormozi

These words changed the way I thought about marketing my own company and the way that we help other companies with their marketing. Particularly marketing for companies in the service sector, which makes up 70% of US GDP so I think there is a good chance this may resonate with you as well.

First let me confess something. I have been a DIY addict and sometimes even an all-star for the last 9 years, since we bought our house. I've done everything from plumbing work, to tree work, to siding and structural work, and it all culminated in my magnum opus, which was replacing our entire HVAC system this past summer with a central heat pump, which actually saved us about $8000 dollars.

I enjoy learning and I loved the feeling of accomplishment I got when I finished a project and the savings have been life altering but, do you know the one thing that all of my home projects have had in common? Each time I finished a project I would say to myself, "I'd love to hire someone else to do this project the next time".

We live in an age where we can find information on just about anything we want to tackle. This information rich landscape is amazing because it gives us the ability to choose whatever we want to learn and leverage our free time and energy to accomplish things that would have been impossible, or at least would have taken way longer any time before the last 15 years.

I've spent years learning how to perfect the work that Tree City Creative does and my natural tendency has sometimes been to guard the knowledge that I've worked so hard to learn, synthesize, and then package in our own unique way. I'm proud of the system we've developed to do video marketing, branding, and events and I know it works so why would I want to let anyone in on what I do?

However, I learned everything that I know from somewhere or someone. I’ve synthesized everything in my own way and I've built an approach to communicating through video and on stage that I think is special but I'm not guarding the Coke recipe or the Crown Jewels.

I think the best way to market most service companies in today's digital economy is to teach people exactly how to do what you do.

That may seem weird but here are three of the main reasons I believe this to be true:

1. You are providing value before anyone ever pays you a dime. This generates a lot of good will between your potential customers and you.?
2. You are demonstrating mastery of your craft by showing that you know it so well that you can easily communicate it well enough to teach someone else how to do it.
3. You are solving one problem while revealing several more problems.

I can show people how we work on our messaging, how we shoot, and just about anything else that we do. They could go out and do the work themselves and do it better from what they've learned and I hope some will do that and get an amazing value, but a lot of people will quickly realize just how much time, technical skill, and mental energy it takes to produce content in the way we do it.

They might also have a better understanding of how expensive the equipment we use to get the aesthetics we want, and that you have to store it, maintain it, and carry insurance on it.?

Someone who knows my "secrets" may be the best future customer because they understand more about the nuances of what we do.

I know how to do tons of stuff around my house after nine years of big DIY projects and whenever I actually hire someone to do something that I don't have time to do myself I constantly get told how nice of an experience it is to work at our house. I think that is because I've done so much of the type of work that they're doing so I have extreme empathy when someone comes to my house and goes in my hot attic or my freezing, creepy crawl space.

Knowing more about how to do something actually makes you a more educated and empathetic consumer.?

Just because I now know how to replace my HVAC it doesn't make me more likely to do it myself the next time, it needs to be replaced. It might actually do the opposite. The job was so big that I'm more likely to hire it out next time and I'll treat the technicians like absolute life savers because I know exactly what they are saving me from.

Effective teachers who are open handed with their knowledge and skills are winning in today’s information economy.?