Businesses don't succeed by chasing customers. Businesses succeed by getting customers to chase them. There are restaurants that people have to book in months in advance.
There are consulting firms that get to pick and choose the customers that they choose to work with. There are products that you have to pre-order and wait months in order to receive. Those are the types of businesses that are doing so so well in this economy.
But how do you orchestrate that? Well, that's the theme of this book here, Oversubscribed. I'm going to share with you what's in this book that's going to change the game for your business.
With the right moves that we'll cover that are in this book, we can flip the script. We can become way more successful and make 10 times more money by getting customers to line up to do business with you. So, let's get started.
Okay, so let's get into it. Chapter one is only oversubscribed businesses make profit. Now, what do I mean by that?
Imagine if there was something called a prophet god. and the prophet God handed out profit fairly based on who took the most risk, who gave the best customer service, who had the best product that was the most reliable. I think what we'd see is that the airline industry should be wildly profitable.
It's an expensive, risky, high demand business to be in. And yet, strangely, only 3 to 7% margins is the norm in that industry. They're not very profitable even at the best of times.
So, contrast that with Rolex. Rolex watches have done the same thing for about a hundred years. They don't have wildly amazing customer service.
They haven't innovated any brand new massive innovative product and yet every single year they can keep increasing their prices and they have massive profit margins. Now why is that? Well, it's pretty simple.
The airline industry is not oversubscribed. If you want a ticket, you can get one. You could fly today, you could fly tomorrow.
You wouldn't have to join a waiting list. Whereas Rolex maintain demand and supply tension for what they do. Now, this is rule one of every economics class.
And basically, they say when demand is higher than supply, profit is tolerated. When supply is higher than demand, losses are tolerated. And if demand and supply meet in the middle, only wages are tolerated.
Most businesses forget rule one of economics. And therefore, they never make real profit. Consider this little thought experiment.
Imagine there was a business coach who could only take on five clients, but there were 10 people who wanted to be those clients. And they just kept bidding with each other until the price went up and up and up and up. Eventually, five out of the 10 give up.
And the five who end up becoming clients are the ones who paid the most amount of money. When two people want something and there's only one available, the price rises until somebody gives in. If you're not overs subscribed, that just doesn't happen.
The second principle of the book is that the only people that matter are your people. Now, what do we mean by that? Well, there are people out there in the market who have no idea who you are.
And then there are people who have actually figured out that they know you, like you, and trust you. They rate you. They want to work with you exclusively.
Think about the acting industry. There are hundreds of thousands of people who want to be an actor, but only a small group of actors get paid huge amounts of money to be in films. Is it because they're such great actors that they're far superior to every other actor in the marketplace?
Probably not. It's because they have a following of people who are willing to go to the cinema if that person is in the movie. If Tom Cruz is in the movie, people will go and fill up the seats in the cinema.
But if it's nobody I've ever heard of, I probably wouldn't turn up and see the movie. These actors have built a following of people who will go and see them because it's them. We call these people your people.
Now, how do you get a group of these people? Well, they have to notice you. They have to get to know you, and they have to rate you.
And to do that, we've created something called the 7-Eleven methodology, which is in chapter 2. So, what's the 7-Eleven methodology? It basically says that in order for people to get to know you, for them to notice you, and for them to rate you, they need to see you 11 times in order for them to notice you.
They need to spend two to seven hours with you to get to know you and they need to see you on four different platforms to feel like they really rate you. So what we encourage people to do in the book is we encourage them to build their 7-Eleven architecture. That means creating 7 hours worth of long- form content, breaking it up into 11 short pieces of content and posting it on four different platforms.
And that 7-Eleven for strategy has worked now for thousands of businesses who say that it's been transformational. Now, if you can get people who are 7-Eleven Ford, if they've experienced you for 7 hours, if they've seen you 11 times, if they've seen you on four different platforms, those people are now really, really warm to doing work with you. Now, what happens as a net result?
Well, as a net result, they start to ignore everybody else. They're willing to pay your prices. They're willing to respond to your marketing campaigns.
Now, I'll give you a funny example. Me personally, I would not say that I'm a heavy metal fan. I don't listen to a lot of heavy metal music.
However, in 1992, I discovered Metallica and I bought the Metallica Black album. Now, since then, I've listened to a lot of Metallica. I've followed Metallica, and if Metallica comes to town, I'm going to get a ticket and go to the show.
I don't go to anybody else's heavy metal concert, but I will go to a Metallica concert because I have been 7-Eleven forward by Metallica. Now, I've seen this in the world of fitness coaching and fitness consulting. There are certain people who are fitness coaches and they've built up a relationship with a large group of people and some of those people have been fully 7-Eleven Ford and those people are willing to pay premium prices to work with that fitness coach.
Now consider that it's a lot easier to make money if you've got eight people who are happy to pay $8,000 than trying to find a,000 people willing to pay $80, right? a small group of people who really rate what you do is probably going to be a much more powerful way to grow your business than trying to get a little bit of money off a lot of people who don't really know who you are. So the whole market doesn't really matter.
It doesn't matter what market you're in and it doesn't matter what the market's doing. It matters how many people are your people. Okay, that takes us to chapter three.
And in chapter three we say first make your market and then make your sales. Now what do we mean by that? So market making is about signal collection and sales making is about getting people to pay money.
Before we ask people to pay money, we want to run a signal collection campaign. The example that I love to share is the example of Glastonbury Music Festival. So for 364 days of the year, you cannot buy a ticket to Glastonbury.
You can only register that you're interested in a ticket. That is called a signal collection campaign. You have to pre-register for tickets.
And then one day of the year, they say at 5:00 in the morning, tickets are going to go on sale. Over 750,000 people have registered, but we only have 136,000 tickets available. Now, people lose their minds over this.
They get up at 5:00 in the morning and all of those tickets typically sell out in under 40 minutes. >> Glastonbury Festival has sold out in just 35 minutes. >> Now, most music festivals cannot do that.
And the reason that they don't do that is they try and make sales rather than trying to collect signals first. I want you to do a signal collection campaign before you do a sales campaign. Imagine that you're a consultant and you can only work with five clients per year.
I would like you to get five signals for every one client that you can get. Now, what would that look like? It would look like people filling in an application form, doing an initial questionnaire, something like that, in order to express interest that they want to be one of those five.
Now, if you can get 25 people who have signaled that they're interested, and you only have five consulting spots available, then the price of those consulting spots is going to go high. Now, the thing that really pushes that up is when you add transparency. Transparency is where everybody knows that you've got lots of signals relative to the amount of official capacity that you've got.
So, I want to introduce you to the idea of having an official capacity. And an official capacity means that you've got an official amount of clients that you can take on. And you publicly name that number of clients.
You say, "This is how many people we can work with. I can only work with five clients per year. We can only take 250 bookings.
" Whatever the number is, that's going to be public and that's going to be your official capacity. And then you're going to make public how many signals you've got relative to that. And what we're trying to do is run a signal collection campaign that far exceeds your official capacity.
We want to make sure that it's transparent, that the marketplace can see that you've got limited supply and excess demand. And when the marketplace can really see that that's what's going on, that's when your prices go through the roof. Principle number four is that people buy when the conditions are right.
The conditions have to be just perfect for people to go for it. Now, consider this. Imagine that you've got your business overs subscribed.
You've got lots of signals. you've got limited capacity. People know that your official capacity is 10 and you've got 50 to 100 signals and they can see that there's a difference.
Now, what we need to do is we need to create the moment where people are going to act. And we want to launch a campaign where there is a launch moment or there is a moment to act. And in the leadup to that, we need three things to be in alignment.
We call it logic, emotion, and urgency. Logic is all the reasons why people should buy from you that are logical that could go onto a spreadsheet. So, in the example of a Rolex, the logical reason that people buy Rolexes is they tend to hold their value.
A $5,000 Rolex tends to stay at $5,000 resale value, which means you're not losing money on a Rolex. You might buy a $1,000 watch that halves in value, or you might buy a Rolex that holds its value. So, the logical reason is that it holds its value.
The second thing we need to do is the emotional reason. So, the emotional reason is to have a feeling attached to your business or a feeling attached to the result that you offer. In Rolex's example, it's all about success and status.
So emotions are communicated in movies. Customers have movies in their mind and they think about what is the movie if I buy this product. So if I buy a Rolex, people are going to notice my Rolex.
Or if I buy a Ferrari, people are going to notice me driving the Ferrari. Perhaps that's the movie. Or if I buy your consulting, my business is going to grow and it's going to feel amazing and we're going to have a party with the whole team and everyone's going to celebrate.
So emotions are all about the movies that we play to ourselves in our mind. And the final one is urgency. And urgency is about the fear of missing out.
It's the fear that if I don't buy, I'll miss out on something. It's taking action would actually be less painful than not taking action. So we call that FOMO.
And if we can add a little bit of fear of missing out, if we can explain what do you miss out if you don't get this, what do you lose if you don't take action, then people go, "Ooh, I feel a sense of urgency that I need to take action at this particular moment. " The number one reason that people respond to that is when they see that there are lots more people signaling interest than there's capacity available because that inherently communicates that you will miss out if you don't take action. So when we have logic, emotion, and urgency, the conditions are right and then we tell people this is the time to buy.
Principle five in the book is all about being different and setting your own rules. I really encourage businesses to do things in a quirky, different, unique way. I tell people that if you do the same thing that everybody else does, then you'll get the same result as everybody else.
You've got to set your own rules. It's your business. You get to set the rules.
If you want to make people jump through hoops, you can make them jump through hoops. If you want to get people to pre-register for a waiting list or join a discussion group or fill in an application form, you're allowed to do all of those things. Provided it's legal.
You can ask people to do whatever it is you want in order to set your rules for doing business. I used the example of a business coach that I once worked with who told me upfront, "These are my holidays and I'm not going to respond to your emails or your phone calls during these dates. " And he also said, "I don't do late at night.
I don't do early in the morning. This is how we work together. If you don't like those rules, don't work with me.
" And I was so impressed by the fact that he set the ground rules from day one. And it made me feel that he must be a damn good business coach. Oversubscribed businesses are comfortable with the idea of saying, "No, no, we don't let people do this.
No, we don't have this happen. " I want you to think about what would be the rules for you to do business on your terms that would make doing business an absolute joy. Principle six in the book is that value is created in the ecosystem.
One particular thing doesn't create value. It's the overall business that creates value. One product typically doesn't create value, but a product ecosystem creates value.
In the book, I talk about the power of giving away information, giving away insights, giving away education, and then selling the implementation and having both of those options available. Now, here's the cool thing. People might see that you're making lots of profit doing a few different things.
Once you've built your overall ecosystem, it's very hard to copy. People can copy one or two things, but they can't copy the overall thing. And that is what gives you long-term stability.
Principle seven is about meeting people where they are and speaking their language. It's often the case that when you become an expert at what you do, you adopt all the expert jargon. You forget what it's like to be a beginner right at the start of the journey.
You forget what it's like to be frustrated without knowing how to solve the problem. And by forgetting all of those things, you fail to empathize with your customer. See, your customer needs empathy first.
They need you to connect with them where they are. If you want to take someone on a journey, you have to go meet them at their house and then take them on the journey. You can't just expect them to magically figure out how to get to where they want to go.
If they already knew how to get to where you are, they would have already done it on their own. So, on one hand, you have to be an expert at what you do, and you have to understand all the jargon. But on the other hand, you have to be an expert in your customer and speak their language and empathize with their current situation before you get the opportunity to work with them on the transformation.
So, a big part of being oversubscribed is the ability to radically empathize with your customers and what's frustrating them today and what their fears might be today. And the businesses that can empathize in that way and speak their customers language, they're the ones that win. Principle number eight, nothing beats being positively remarkable.
Being remarkable means that your marketing budget drops to zero. When your customers are talking about you, it creates a virtuous loop. Every time you sign up a customer, they're going to go get you another customer and that customer will get you another customer.
So, we talk about the idea of being positively remarkable. Treat your existing customers like celebrities. Make them feel special.
Make them feel valued. Give them more than they thought was possible. And do it with a massive smile on your face.
Because if you can look after your existing customers, they're going to go out and talk to people. Now, in today's world, a typical person doesn't just have a few friends. They've probably got a few thousand people on their social media that they can broadcast you to the world with.
So, we want to approach this from a couple of different angles. Angle number one is the way that you treat your customers and how you make them feel. And angle number two is the way your business visually represents itself so that it's social media friendly.
Now, one big thing that will make you remarkable is to show up as a key person of influence. to make sure that you show up as a thought leader in your industry to share signature ideas to share content that goes viral and essentially that also makes you positively remarkable. If ever you've seen a post on Instagram that has lots of people sharing it that's super remarkable almost viral content you need to become a little bit of a master of showing up as a key person of influence and saying things that get shared as well.
Okay, we've covered the first section of the book which is those principles. Now, we're going to get into the real meat of the book, which is the methodology, the campaign driven enterprise method. So, in the middle of the book, we introduce you to the campaign driven enterprise method.
We say that a business is a series of campaigns and that we've got to run lots of campaigns. We use the example of Nike and we say Nike started out as one campaign to get people jogging and they had jogging shoes and they had a book about jogging and all of that got them started and now they run lots of campaigns. They have a campaign for basketball and for skateboarding and for golf and all the different sports.
They're running lots of campaigns all the time. In the same way that an engine is a revolution and a fast engine is lots of revolutions, a business is running campaigns and a bigger business is running lots of campaigns. So, we talk about three key campaigns that grow a small business into a bigger business.
I've used this approach to build multiple businesses from zero to a million of revenue in their first 12 months. And it really hinges on the idea of what we call a three-part year. So the three-part year is the perfect repeatable week, the spotlight campaign that happens quarterly, and the annual big message.
Let me break it down. So the first type of campaign is the perfect repeatable week. Perfect repeatable week is where you do the same thing over and over and over and over again.
You're trying to generate lots of leads, lots of appointments, lots of presentations, lots of sales, and it happens every single week. Now, you might figure out that your business, in order for it to succeed, you need 30 leads per week, and your perfect repeatable week is just going to generate those 30 leads. Maybe you've got a scorecard with scoreapp.
com. Maybe you're doing some online social media marketing. Maybe you've got some paid ads going.
Maybe you run an introduction workshop and you always get 30 people on the workshop. But you've got to figure out what is the thing that works every single week. And the goal here is to crank the handle and do it over and over and over again.
Believe it or not, I have been running the same introduction workshop for the last 15 years for Dent. And this introduction workshop has grown Dent into a global business. It's a 90-minute workshop where we just simply cover all the basics of becoming a key person of influence.
If you haven't booked in before, you can find a link to it below. I run this every single month and it goes over and over and over again. It's the same thing that we've been delivering for 15 years and it just keeps working.
A big mistake I see a lot of businesses make is they think they have to do something different or random every single week. But the best businesses, they know how to show up powerfully in the same way week after week after week. So that's called the perfect repeatable week.
And it's the underpinning campaign for all the others. The second campaign is called the quarterly spotlight campaign. Now the quarterly spotlight campaign is every 90 days we want to do something special.
We want to have a special campaign. Maybe it's a product launch. Maybe it's a seasonal offering.
Maybe it's a collaboration. Maybe you're featuring a high-profile person. So, for example, a quarterly spotlight campaign that I recently ran was I had a bigname guest speaker and we had a special live event in London.
We filmed it and we put it online and hundreds of people turned up and it was a really good spotlight campaign. It was great for our brand. We made lots of sales and it really differentiated us.
The good news is is that people who don't buy on your perfect repeatable week, you can reactivate and get them to go into the spotlight campaign. And people who show up for the spotlight campaign who don't buy, you can reactivate them and send them to the perfect repeatable week campaign. So these two campaigns work really nicely.
If someone discovers you in January, they might come to your quarterly spotlight in March. If they discover you in March, they might come to your perfect repeatable week in April or May. So people bounce between the perfect repeatable week and the quarterly spotlight campaign.
Now each quarter you want to do a different and exciting thing. If you're a seasonal business, you might have a campaign for Christmas. You might have a campaign for Easter.
You might have a campaign for summer, right? So all of those different campaigns, you're going to figure out which campaigns you're going to do each quarter, and you're going to plan it out at least 12 months into the future. The third campaign is what we call the annual big message, or you might call it the 7-Eleven campaign.
And the 7-Eleven campaign is essentially putting lots of content online. This is where people are going to get 11 short pieces of content, seven hours worth of long- form content, and four different platforms. And because they're experiencing you online, they're discovering and adopting your values.
And it's from this social media cloud cover that people often discover you and go to the perfect repeatable week. It's where they'll discover your quarterly spotlight. And it's also where you'll be able to refine your message so that your advertising campaigns work even better.
The annual big message is actually just a constant stream of online social media content featuring you that makes everything lift. Now, the goal here is to plan out all of these three campaigns a year in advance. So, at the end of 2025, I will plan out all of 2026 with a perfect repeatable week, four spotlight campaigns, and an annual big message that we'll express through the 7-Eleven 4 campaign.
By doing that, we just need to execute, and the business is going to grow and do really, really well and hit all of its targets. Okay, the final part of the book says two things that are really important. Number one, you can't do all of this on your own.
You need to have a team of people. And we talk about campaign teams of four people as the smallest campaign team. And we talk about just getting together with those four people and creating the campaigns.
Someone who's focused on the execution, someone who's more focused on sales, someone who's focused on being the face of the campaign. We talk about all of those roles and we say form a campaign team. It's too much to do on your own.
You need to have a little breakout team that is your campaign team and that's really really important. The smallest unit is four but it can build up to about 8 to 12 people as you run bigger and bigger campaigns working on each campaign. And the final thing the book talks about is the remarkable times that we're in.
If you get this right, the sky is the limit. We are now living in a time where you can campaign to all corners of the planet. You can have customers in Bangalore, in Brazil, in Boston, in Birmingham.
You can have customers everywhere around the world. If you get your message on point, if you're capturing people's attention online, if you build a product that scales, you are going to have a very, very big business. There's never been a better time for you to launch something, to run great campaigns, and to get massively oversubscribed at a global level.
So, at the end of the book, I'm really trying to get you to think big based on the potential of the times that we're living in. Now, there's only so much that I can put into a video like this. I've given you a good overview, but really the power comes from deep diving into this.
So, there's a link below where you can get a copy of the book if you want to get into the deep dive or come and join me for a live event where we can spend 90 minutes together and I'll get to know you, you'll get to know me and we'll be able to go that I'll show you what I do on my perfect repeatable week workshop that I run. I look forward to seeing you soon. I hope you've enjoyed that.
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