Marketing Mastery

Mostafa Hosseini helps coaches and consultants create and implement their one-page marketing plan in three days or less. He is a serial entrepreneur, a business coach, and the Founder of?Persyo, which he’s also the host of the Daily Confidence for Entrepreneurs?podcast, he’s the creator of?Simple Marketing Formula, and much more. He’s been coaching and consulting for many years, helping businesses in various niches and industries grow and scale. Welcome.

Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

I would love to hear your personal story of origin. You can go back as far as childhood or college. How did you get into becoming such an expert in marketing?

I was born in Tehran, Iran and moved to Canada back in 2000. I finished high school and I was eighteen when I got here. I went to school here. When I got first got here, I did not speak English. I went to English school for a couple of years to be able to speak. I went to school for engineering for two and a half years, didn’t liked it, dropped out, got into business school, loved it, which is what I wanted to do since I was a child. I got a diploma in Marketing Management. I got my Bachelor’s in Business Management with a minor in Marketing. I went to school for a long time and I started Persyo Marketing back in 2010.

Let’s stop the story there for a second. How did you come up with the name of your company, and what does it mean?

When I was trying to pick out names, the names that I wanted were all taken, the domains were taken. I had to come up with the name. What happened was one day back in 2010, I was sitting at a food court here in a mall in Calgary and I saw this restaurant. I’m like, “What about Persyo?” Persyo because I’m Persian-Canadian. I made the name, Persyo did not exist. When I searched Google, it didn’t bring up any results. I’m like, “Bingo.” The domain was available. I went for it. I asked a few people, “What do you think?” They’re like, “It sounds good. We like it.” I started Persyo Marketing. We did full-service digital marketing along with coaching and consulting our clients.

Back in 2017 or 2018, it got a little too competitive for me. I’m in a hyper-competitive environment and I decided to drop out and drop the digital marketing services and keep coaching and consulting. That’s my story. I’m married. I got two boys. My top three values are family business and growth and learning. I spend 99% of my time with family, business, growth, and learning. I love nature, mountains, skiing, hiking, barbecue. I love my Persian kebab. If you ever come up here, if I see you anywhere, I’ll do some barbecue and go from there.

Now that you’ve worked with so many different kinds of clients, do you see them having similar challenges or making the same mistakes in their marketing? Are they too complicated typically? Is that why you’ve honed it down a little bit to help people focus?

The number one challenge that I asked people over the years when it comes to their marketing is not knowing what to do. They want to grow their business, get more customers, and the rest of it, but they don’t know how to do it. The other challenge that they have is they start trying too many things. They are poking around twelve different things at any given time and nothing is working. That creates a feeling of frustration, overwhelm, anxiety, and people get depressed because they don’t get results. Back in 2017 or 2018, I read three books that changed the?way I think and?changed my business. The first one was?Zero to One?by Peter Thiel, who is one of the Cofounder of PayPal. In the book, Peter Thiel talked about how competition is for losers. He says, “You got to be in a place where there is no competition or you have very few competitors.”

I had too much competition that I felt like a loser. I’m like, “I got to change this.” I had competition all over the planet. In the digital marketing world, the barriers to entry are not very strong. People wake up one day and they’re like, “I’m a digital marketing advisor.” I decided to drop out of the digital marketing services and stick with coaching and specialization. The next book that I read that made a massive shift in my thinking was?The 80/20?Principle?by Richard Koch. If there’s one thing I wish I knew many years ago was this 80/20 principle. The next one was?Essentialism?by Greg McKeown on what is essential and not. I went through this phase and within 4 or 5 months. I’m like, “I need to simplify and focus.” I came up with a Simple Marketing Formula where we consolidate and simplify everything into one page.

Most business plans, especially coming out of MBA, it goes on and you don’t know where to start even with an executive summary it’s still so overwhelming and the shiny object of, “We should be on TikTok?” I’m like, “It depends on who your audience is. Not necessarily.” I like that. This 80/20 rule, for those people who may not know exactly what it is, I certainly found that useful in my sales career that 20% of your clients give you 80% of your revenue and 20% of the time you spend give you 80% of your results.

Are you spending time with clients that aren’t generating that much revenue? Sometimes, the lowest 20% of your clients are taking 80% of your time. That reframing of all of that is so crucial. Are there some myths that people have like, “If I spend so much money on my marketing, I should get this much percent growth automatically guaranteed?” or anything like that you see people thinking, “You’ve heard that, but that’s a myth.”

You mentioned one of them that, “If I spend so much money, I’m going to be successful.” It could happen, but it may not necessarily be true. One of the bigger problems that I see is if I worked hard, I’m going to see results. You talked about the 80/20, if you work on the 80% that doesn’t produce results, regardless of how hard you work, you’re not going to get there. I heard Tony Robbins said, “If you run East looking for a sunset, regardless of how hard you run and work, you’re not going to see it.”

I also think of the people at Kodak and Blockbuster, I’m sure they were working very hard up until the last minute.

The company doesn’t exist anymore. The strategy was outdated and what they were doing didn’t work and it got wiped up. Those are some of the biggest things.

You hinted at it, but let’s double click on what is this simple marketing formula that you’ve come up with?

The simple marketing formula was I need to apply to 80/20 principle to marketing and break it down to a few simple steps that cover 80% of the stuff that you need to do. I came up with six steps. Number one, you need to set your goals. You need to know exactly what you’re trying to build and achieve. As an example, when you’re trying to build a house, you design it, you do the dimensions. How many bedrooms, many garage doors, and the rest of it.

Come up with a plan, hand out the plan to the builders, bingo, they start building. You barely ever build a house in a city, at least, without a plan. If you do, you won’t get any insurance for it, and/or you would not put your family under that roof. You need to plan and know what you’re trying to build. If you don’t have a plan and a goal, you’re not going to achieve it. It’s pretty hard to achieve a goal that you don’t have.

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