Why Don’t You Just Give Up?

As some of you know, I always go away on vacation for the entire month of July. Right now I’m writing this week’s blog while sitting on a breezy sunlit balcony, overlooking an oil-free (for now) Gulf of Mexico. I have to admit, the prospect of spending another 3 weeks with these same ‘harsh’ working conditions doesn’t suck ☺.

How can I afford the time and money to go on vacation for an entire month – and more importantly, how can you do it too? Easy. I made the decision to just give up! I threw my hands up and said. “NO MORE!”

No more:

• Trying to do everything myself
• Dealing with pain-in-the-ass clients
• Keeping lousy employees
• Wasting time on unprofitable work
• Allowing people to waste my time
• Dealing with other peoples emergencies
• Doing $15/hour work
• Excuses for not succeeding

When I finally gave up all that crap and fixed all those problems, a wonderful thing happened… I found myself with a whole lot more time and money.

I know this almost sounds waaaay too simple. You probably were looking for some super complicated formula, maybe a map to the holy grail, or the recipe for the secret sauce. But no. Just give up!

Just think of all the time you’re wasting dealing with bad employees and the problems they create? How much of your valuable skills are wasted doing work that could easily be handled by a low-wage employee or an outsourced provider with special skills that you don’t possess? How much time and energy is being sucked up dealing with folks that continue to be a pain-in-the ass, or just as bad, always ask you for favors or special pricing? If you spend just an hour a week dealing with each of these problems, you’re wasting over 360 hours per year (There’s your month-long vacation, plus plenty of extra days to play ‘hooky’ throughout the rest of the year!!!)

And please don’t discount what I’ve said here because you think ‘your situation is different’. It’s not. We all have challenges that we must overcome in one way or another. If a shop owner in rural Canada, 20 miles away from the closest town; a shop owner operating in the ‘poorest city in America’; and a shop owner surrounded by 42 other auto repair shops in the same two-mile radius can all figure out ways to create million dollar businesses – plus find the time to get away and travel – so can you.

Let me ask you, on the list above, what are you holding on to that is more important than you finally being able to accomplish all of your goals and dreams? What are you willing to give up in order to make the change?

Got comments? Please leave them below. I’d love to hear them.

Best, Ron Ipach, CinRon Marketing Group

PS: SPECIAL TELESEMINAR TOMORROW NIGHT!!!
Are you on the Pre-Earlybird list to qualify for the biggest discounts and bonuses for attending The EVENT? If not, CLICK HERE to get on the list

And The Survey Says… (The Results Are In!)

I hope all of my friends in the US had a happy and safe 4th of July this past weekend. We had a ‘blast’!

If you’ll recall, a couple weeks ago I sent you a link to watch two new video trailers that I’m considering using to promote my upcoming Auto Repair Event in Las Vegas this October. In case you missed it, you can watch them by CLICKING HERE

Thank you to all 1123 of you that watched the videos so far and special thanks go to the 86 folks that responded on the blog or via email with their opinions regarding which was the right video to use. The results were very interesting and instructive because they were split evenly 3 ways: 1/3 preferred the first video; 1/3 preferred the second; 1/3 liked both but either couldn’t make up their minds or they wanted elements of both to be used in the final video. A few of you even used very strong words to convey the strong opinions you felt about each video; love, hate, awesome, crap, nails-on-a-chalkboard, etc.

So what have I learned from this? First, even though I’m sure most of you had an opinion which video you liked best, only a small percentage were willing to tell me what it was. How many opinions – good or bad – are you NOT hearing from your clients about your services? Whatever you’re hearing, multiply them by 10??

Second, as long as the marketing strategy is solid, there is more than one right way to get it done. In my case, I’ll need to use both trailers, otherwise I’ll risk alienating the 1/3 of my audience that would have preferred the other video. How many ways are you advertising your specials? Are you stuck on the same message and using it over and over? If so, you may be losing 1/3 to 1/2 of your audience because they’d prefer a different message or a different way of being contacted by you.

Third, over 1000 folks watched the videos, so I know that a good portion of my audience is willing and able to watch videos online. If your clients are getting online, how much effort are you putting forth to use this totally free way to market your services to your prospects and to stay in contact with your current clients? (Here’s my shameless plug: If you want to discover how to market your auto repair biz online for a teeny-tiny fraction of what you may be spending to do it offline, you definitely need to be at this year’s EVENT! I’ll be showing you in very simple terms how easy it is to do it, or how to get it done for you.)

Finally, test! For the cost of a few hours of my time and a free email, I found out that I’m on the right track. I received a lot of constructive comments, got a lot of folks excited about attending the Event, and heard from a lot of old clients that have been out of the loop for a while. If you’re going to try an unproven marketing strategy with your clients, test it small first. If the results are good, quickly roll it out to the rest of your list. If it fails, you’ve learned what NOT to do, plus you’ve saved a lot of time and money too!

Best, Ron Ipach, CinRon Marketing Group     –    www.cinron.com

PS: Are you on the Early-Bird list to qualify for the biggest discounts and bonuses for attending The EVENT? If not, get on the list by CLICKING HERE.

Why Do Some Shop Owners Succeed And Others Fail?

How is is possible for two auto repair shop owners to be exposed to the exact same marketing and management information, at the exact same time, and even be located right across the street from each other – and one shop becomes wildly successful and the other one fails?

It took me years to figure this out, but I have the answer for you. Watch this 13-minute video that was recorded at The ‘EVENT’ for auto repair shop owners in Las Vegas last year.

CLICK TO WATCH THE VIDEO

I wish you all the best of success,

Ron Ipach, CinRon Marketing Group        http://www.CinRon.com

An Apology…

This economy should have easily been a boon to your business. Poor new car sales have given way to more money being spent on repairs and maintenance, but far too many of you have not been able to capitalize on this potential opportunity of a lifetime.

My mistake. I got soft. I worried about what my critics were thinking and saying about me. I listened to everyone that took offense to my very blunt and straightforward approach to teaching the proven principles of personal and business success – a style that had worked very well for thousands of my clients for 12 years – and made the very bad decision to go the ‘warm and fuzzy’ dark side.

It suddenly became ‘okay’ to be mediocre. I stopped flaunting the successes of the ‘haves’ because there were so many ‘have nots’ that were still struggling. I listened to every excuse under the sun, and instead of methodically squashing every one of them, I took the Bill Clinton, “I feel your pain” route. Every word in my weekly messages was scrutinized to make sure I wouldn’t offend anyone.

The result? Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! (Well not quite that bad!) What did happen is many of you didn’t get the constant swift kick in the pants that you needed to get your $h!t in gear and do something, anything(!), every day to propel your business forward. Way too many shop owners have taken the ‘ostrich approach’ and have stuck their heads in the sand and are waiting for business to get better on it’s own. The lifeblood of your business – marketing – has become just an afterthought. Even when handed a proven marketing program on a silver platter, most chose to sit on their hands and do nothing at all!

Oh, and the whiners that I listened to and changed my approach in order to get all warm and fuzzy with… they’ve been responsible for a paltry 1.3% of my total income over the past year! (This may be the biggest lesson for you this week – Listen only to your customers that are actually giving you money!)

Sooo… lesson learned. If you’re looking for info on how to be successful in the should-be world, where the skies are sunny every day, cute little cuddly teddy bears frolic with butterflies in flowery meadows, and lies like; “The check is in the mail”, “It’s only a cold sore”, and “It’s supposed to make that noise” are actually true – this ain’t gonna be the place for you any more.

But if you’re looking for info on how to be successful in the REAL WORLD, using the same success principles and proven strategies that are, still to this day, making a crap-load of money for shop owners in this so-called lousy economy – bend over and get ready for a weekly swift kick in the pants.

Comments? I’d love to hear them. Post them below.

Best, Ron Ipach, CinRon Marketing Group

PS: If you didn’t watch the free marketing video that I emailed to you last week, CLICK HERE.

Want To Use Quick, Dirt Cheap Or Even Free Marketing? …if so, a little prep work is in order

It’s Monday morning and you’re staring at your appointment book and you find way too many gaps in it to feel real confident that this is going to be a record-setting week. It’s been a decent month so far. Your newsletter hit your clients’ mailboxes in the beginning of the month and gave you a good surge of biz, but here we are a few weeks later, and it’s slowing down. What can you do right now to fill your schedule?

Years ago, you could simply send an offer via fax to all the local businesses in your market area. You could also hire phone solicitors to dial home to home and invite them to your shop. More recently, you could even record a telephone message and with the help of this new-fangled thingy called the internet, blast your ‘personal’ message out to all of your clients home phones. When employed properly, any one of these strategies would easily fill up your schedule for the week. But no more.

So now what? What can you do right now and get your phones ringing right away? Two ways.

First, by email. Gather up all of your clients’ emails that you have in your database and send them a good offer that they can take advantage of if they respond right away. Currently email is free and since you already know how to use it, this should be a no-brainer.

Second, by text. In case you haven’t noticed it yet, text message marketing is gaining lots of steam in popularity and those that have been using it claim to be getting some really awesome results. It’s fairly simple to use once you get the hang of it. Just create your offer using 160 characters or less, load your client’s cell phone numbers into the system and press send. I found a reliable and dirt cheap company for you to try out. Click on the image below and sign up for a free trial. In the US, each text will cost only 5¢ and in Canada, it’ll cost you 7¢. There are no signup fees and NO monthly fees! Now that’s what I call dirt cheap!

In both cases, your message will be delivered within minutes and your offer will be seen and (hopefully) responded to. But here’s the big problem… how many correct email addresses and cell phone numbers do you have in your database? Without up-to-date email addresses and cell phone numbers, these ideas are worthless to you and you’ll be stuck with no way to fill up your appointment book (other than by picking up the phone and personally making calls one by one).

If you want to take advantage of these free or dirt cheap marketing ideas in the very near future, take the time right now to start gathering the data. You’ll be glad you did.

As always, I love to hear your comments. Please post them below.

Best, Ron Ipach, CinRon Marketing Group

How To Build Your Future Bank Account Right Now

I got up especially early this morning to write this weeks message because I’m on what just might be the final vacation with my entire family (at least for a while), so the only time I can write this is while everyone else is still sleeping. Ronny will be graduating in a couple months and heading off to college, and Samantha will be right behind him next year and I’m sure their idea of having a good time on Spring Break doesn’t include mom and dad. We’re gonna have to pack a lot of memories in the next 6 days!

You may not realize it, but there are two ‘bank accounts’ that you need to be paying attention to filling every day. Most everyone focuses only on their ‘current bank’ account. This is the account that gets filled with the sales that you are making every day. But every bit as important is your ‘future bank’ account. Think of this account as a giant bag of seeds that you are planting every day that will sprout into little money trees in the future. Lemme ‘splain…

You run an ad on Facebook for a free oil change. Sixty prospects click on your ad and then enter their email addresses in order to get their free oil change certificate (This was all explained on the series of videos on Facebook advertising that I produced a couple months back.)

Let’s say eight of those prospects come in to redeem their coupon and purchase an average of $80 in additional services. You can deposit $640 into your ‘current bank’ account, and you can now also make a sizable deposit into your ‘future bank’ account from the 52 remaining prospects that haven’t come in to your shop yet.

How much money is put into that ‘future bank’ account? For most shops, nothing, because they’re off chasing after the next ‘current bank’ customer. But for you, because you’ll be following up with a few emails to the remaining 52 prospects and inviting them to come to your shop to redeem their certificates (remember, they gave you their email addresses in order to get the certificate), the skies the limit.

Let’s assume that your follow up emails bring in twenty more of those prospects, each spending the same $80. That’s another $1600. And if you want to project out into the future even further and figure out what this could be worth to you over their entire lifetime of doing business with you, the number is closer to $630,000.00 (If you’ve been to one of my seminars or have any one of my marketing systems, you know that the lifetime value of each your customers if you treat them right and do the proper follow up as I have laid out in the system is about $22,500).

When times get tough or sales start to slip, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of only paying attention to the current bank because you need money and you need it now. That’s what’s so dangerous about the economy right now. The temporary cash crunch has shop owners forgetting to invest in their futures. It’s all about how much you can extract from your customers wallets right now – not about creating a ‘wow’ experience for your clients, being a trusted adviser, and developing a long-lasting relationship with him.

Equally, if not more dangerous, is a failure to focus on the education that you’ll need in order to help you get more customers, keep them coming back, be a better salesperson, and run a better shop. The shops that have already invested in their education and are properly applying these strategies in their shops every day are doing well these days. Many of the shops that haven’t, are struggling right now.

I’ve been here for the past 52 weeks helping you for free each week with this weekly message, but if you want to move faster than at a snail’s pace and are willing to invest more time and money in your future bank, give my office a call at 1-800-797-0537 and we’ll be glad to put you on the fast-track.

Best, Ron Ipach     CinRon Marketing Group

They’ve Raised Their Hands. Now Go Get ‘em!

Thank you to everyone that participated in my survey last week. I gained some real insight on what I need to do to help you in the future. If you haven’t yet had the chance to take the quick 60-second survey, go to www.surveymonkey.com .

A few weeks ago I talked about my experience at the local Home & Garden Show and how Cindy and I requested over a dozen of the exhibitors to come to our home to give us estimates for a few projects that we plan on completing this spring at our house. What I didn’t tell you is that as we filled out their contact forms at the show, we told them that we were very serious prospects and would definitely be hiring someone right away to perform these services at our house.

Well, turns out, Dan Kennedy was right. People haven’t stopped buying, people have just stopped selling. Here I am trying to buy, and only five of the thirteen even bothered to call to set up an appointment. Only four of them showed up, and each spent about an hour measuring, explaining their products and leaving an estimate (None of them made a decent effort to close me on the spot!). And then, only one of the four bothered to to give me a follow up call to ask for the job. Of course, I awarded it to him.

You need to remember, every time the phone rings or a prospect walks into your shop, he or she is trying to buy something from you. Last time I checked, calling, visiting, or just shooting the bull at an auto repair shop isn’t on very many folks “1000 things to do before I die” list. If they’ve stepped forward and raised their hand to you in some manner – sell ‘em! And if your first attempt isn’t successful, try again. And again. And again. Don’t give up – you can’t afford to.

For instance, if you’ve watched my videos on Facebook advertising and placed your own ads, you’re probably collecting lots of email addresses right now. One of our ELITE members just collected 60 emails from local folks that stepped forward and gave their email addresses to him as a result of seeing his Facebook ad!. Did all 60 visit his shop already? Nope, but I’m sure a handful will take advantage of his offer in the coming weeks. Then, by continually staying in touch and sending followup emails to these folks and inviting them to take advantage of his offer, quite a few more will also.

On average, each one of these prospects cost him only $1.50 each! So he’s spent a whopping $90 bucks to cause 60 prospects to raise their hands. Now, through the magic of this newfangled technology thingy called email☺, he can send an email to them once a week until the coupon expires – for FREE! And if they don’t come in, or they get upset about getting the emails and ask him to stop sending them, no problem. They weren’t going to be his customers anyway.

Be smart. Get aggressive. Everyone else has stopped selling – and that’s left the door wide open for you!

As usual, I really want to hear your comments. You can leave them below.

Best, Ron Ipach, CinRon Marketing Group

PS: If you haven’t watched my videos on how to advertise on Facebook, CLICK HERE to watch them now. This will be the last week that they will be available.

Why Do Great Offers Fall Short?

Maybe this has happened to you… you put together an offer to send to your prospects and clients. Not just any old offer, I mean a really really killer, can’t-miss offer like $50 off any service that you perform. Now you know that there will be skeptics out there looking for the hidden strings, so you announce that there is no minimum purchase required and no restrictions on what they can buy. And to prove that you won’t jack up the price first and then take the $50 off the total later, you tell them not to produce the coupon until after they’ve been presented with the bill. Oh, and for the icing on the cake, you offer a 100% refund if they aren’t totally thrilled with their experience with you.

The timing is right. Folks are looking for a good deal. They need what you are offering. You send your no-fail offer to the right list of folks, and then you get ready for the crush of people beating a path to your door… but it never comes. What the heck happened? Did you miss something? Was the offer too good to be true? Wouldn’t you just love to ask every one of them why they didn’t take you up on your offer?

Even the most experienced of marketers aren’t immune to this phenomenon to a certain degree. Last week I offered to give away copies of my brand-new marketing course to the first 200 shop owners that wanted them. The offer was (I thought?) brain-dead simple. Invest $197 to get the course. Take 60 days to go through the course then call my office and get all of your money back. (WOW!) I also added a 30-day, no-excuses needed, 100% money back guarantee too. And to cover what I thought was the final hurdle, I assured everyone that there were no more payments and nothing else to buy.

While I still did very well with this campaign, I’m a bit short of my goal of 200. As I write this today I still have a couple dozen of my courses left for the taking. What went wrong? Was the offer too good to be true? Was it too complicated? Did I miss something? I dunno.

The point of today’s message isn’t to commiserate about the lack of response to our advertising efforts. Nope, it’s to tell you about a free online site called SurveyMonkey.com that we can use to help us find out where we went wrong with our offers. With SurveyMonkey.com we can set up a quick 2-minute survey and ask our prospects why they didn’t respond. And then, based on their answers, hopefully we’ll be able to craft offers that will get a much better response the next time.

To see SurveyMonkey.com in action (and to help me out by taking the survey so I can do a better job for you in the future), go to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CMGRTKQ and answer my quick 5-question multiple-choice survey. Everyone that takes the survey will receive a nice thank you gift from me.

Hopefully if we all start surveying our clients and prospects more often, we’ll have a better handle on what they want and what offers will get them more excited.

Best, Ron Ipach, CinRon Marketing Group

PS: If you didn’t take me up on my offer to grab my new system, go to www.4CarCount.com. Today will be the last day that I’ll be offering this system with the totally free offer.

Here’s Video #3 – The Answers to Your Questions

Well, it took me a while, but I finished off the final video (#3) on how to advertise your auto repair business on Facebook.

You can watch it by CLICKING HERE

Oh, and when you watch it, you’ll see that I have a brand new auto repair marketing course that I want you to have for free! More details will be coming tomorrow.

Enjoy, Ron Ipach, CinRon Marketing Group

“People Haven’t Stopped Buying In This Recession. Auto Repair Shop Owners Have Just Stopped Selling!”

I believe I first heard the above quote from Dan Kennedy and I can’t think of a truer statement. This past Saturday afternoon, my wife and I went to the big Home & Garden show in Cincinnati to see if we could find lots of ideas for our huge bathroom remodel project that I finally agreed to do. Or I should say, Cindy wanted to get lots of design ideas. All I wanted was to find a contractor to do all the work for me. 😉

The first thing that struck me was how small the show had gotten. Normally two entire floors of the convention center were packed with landscapers, roofing contractors, remodelers, home entertainment companies, garden supply companies, decorators, etc; now they easily fit onto less than one. This is stupid crazy! If you have a product or service to offer, why wouldn’t you want to stand in front of hundreds or thousands of people who are interested in what you have to offer???

“But, but… in this economy, no one wants to spend any money on that stuff!” WRONG! The buyers were out in force. Every single vendor that I polled told me that they already collected dozens of qualified names from folks interested in getting quotes from them.

People are still buying. Are you still selling? (I wonder how many of the 13 vendors that I gave my contact info to will actually follow up with me?)

After the show, we decided we’d head down to one of Cincinnati’s landmark restaurants for some world-class ribs. Sheesh, what recession?? Six cars waiting in line for valet parking. A two-hour wait for a table in a restaurant that can probably serve a thousand guests per night. A place where a dinner for two will easily cost $100. We called six other nice restaurants around town and got the same 90-120 minute wait times. Are you kidding me?! “C’mon, NOBODY is spending any money! Why can’t I get a table at decent restaurant??”

While it is very true that folks are watching how they spend their money much more closely, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped spending it on what THEY WANT to spend money on. You just need to make sure that they want to spend their money on what you have to offer. (By the way; it should be obvious that if it is 100% true that your customers don’t have any money to spend on anything other than food, clothing and shelter, you’re going to have to get busy marketing to find new customers, right?)

The door has been left wide open for you and anyone else willing to set aside today’s ‘conventional thinking’ and cutting back on their marketing and selling. When everyone else seems to have stopped trying to be successful, it’s easy to step forward and take advantage of that.

Is it tougher today than it was in the past. YES. Can you succeed by relying on just the same old stuff you did in the past to market and sell your services? NO! It’s time to get real serious and pay attention to the new ways of doing business in this ‘New Economy’. Stay tuned. I’ve got lots of great stuff coming your way.

As always, I am here to help. Let me know what you need from me to help you succeed. Please enter your comments and questions below.

BTW, Did you watch my video and get started on my killer cheap new way to attract new customers that I sent to you a couple weeks ago? If not, CLICK HERE to watch it right now before I delete the video.

Best, Ron Ipach, CinRon Marketing Group