Marketing That Delivers: Direct Response Tactics for Private Equity with John Dwyer

🕒 Episode Timestamps & Show Notes

00:00 – Introduction
Alex welcomes John Dwyer, Founder of The Institute of WOW, to explore how direct response marketing can drive real results for private equity firms and their portfolio companies.

00:53 – What is WOW Factor Marketing?
John explains his flipped model: get prospects to try your product so they fall in love with your brand—not the other way around. 

02:16 – The Power of Incentives
Examples like McDonald’s Happy Meals and Kellogg’s cereal toys demonstrate how incentives remove focus from price. Yet, 97% of businesses still fail to use them effectively.

03:35 – B2B Application of Incentives
John shares how “freemium” strategies—like webinars and educational content—can help service businesses generate leads and build trust.

05:25 – The PE Blind Spot: Marketing
Marketing is often underutilized at the PE firm level. It’s left to portfolio companies and only becomes a priority at scale ($100M+ revenue). 

06:21 – Creating High-Value Content
Instead of always documenting, John recommends delivering structured, high-impact content like digital resources to demonstrate expertise and create authority.

08:36 – Giving Away IP to Build Trust
Sharing ideas freely (within reason) helps firms position themselves as experts. Private equity firms can do the same by publishing their value creation playbooks.

09:33 – Case Study: Dental Facebook Contest
A $30/day contest targeting parents of kids with crooked teeth generated 1,000+ leads in a week—demonstrating the power of a well-crafted incentive-based campaign.

12:43 – PE Deal Origination via Events
John recommends PE firms host webinars or in-person events to share their expertise and attract business owners—selling “once to many” like Tony Robbins.

14:11 – Thinking Beyond Traditional Marketing
John suggests PE firms partner with data providers or influencers to host educational events. Joint ventures and revenue-share models can scale reach efficiently.

17:27 – Turnkey Marketing & Strategic Partnerships
From travel vouchers to million-dollar contest giveaways, John shares how creative incentives combined with strong partnerships can produce scalable campaigns.

19:10 – Using AI for Lead Generation
John discusses how AI-powered voice bots deliver high-volume outreach, sharing relevant data like estimated home values—ideas that can inspire new B2B tactics.

21:57 – Hiring Great Marketers
John stresses the importance of case studies and results over resumes. Look for marketers who can think outside the box and prove success with real-world campaigns.

24:21 – Purple Cow Thinking in Action
A standout example: A building society offered free holidays for mortgage customers and later added Jerry Seinfeld to the campaign—resulting in billions in new loans.

26:42 – Books & Resources
John recommends The Purple Cow by Seth Godin. He prefers audio content and real-world business insights over fiction.

28:04 – How to Contact John
📩 Email: john@theinstituteofwow.com
🌐 Website: theinstituteofwow.com

Raw Selection partners with Private Equity firms and their portfolio companies to secure exceptional executive talent.
We focus on de-risking executive recruitment through meticulous search and selection processes, ensuring top-tier performance and long-term success.

🔗 Connect with Alex Rawlings on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexrawlings/
🌐 Visit Raw Selection: www.raw-selection.com

Transcript

00:00
Welcome back to the Raw Selection Private Equity Podcast. Joining us today is a little something different. It's John Dwyer, founder of Institute of WOW,  a business focused on direct response marketing.  I'm a big believer that marketing can solve a huge amount of problems in private equity firms, portfolio companies, and of course, Raw Selection, the executive search firm that I run here. So  I'm interested to dive into this.

00:28
This is going to be really exciting. He's going to talk to us about how private equity firms particularly can adopt marketing, which I know is not particularly done, how low-middle market, mid-cap, large-cap firms can do something different with regards to their marketing approach,  all to drive increasing value creation, of course, revenue, and of course, EBITDA.  So without further ado, let's dive in. I'm looking forward to this one. John, if you could give us a briefing sign to you,

00:53
Good, thank you Alex. Yeah, look, my name is John DeWire and I am the founder and owner of a business called the Institute of WoW. And as that business name implies, it's all about WoW factor marketing. And so we help businesses with what we call direct response marketing, uh which is pretty much, I guess, you know, very different from brand building. If you go to an advertising agency, they'll tell you that they want you to, they want to help you to get people to fall in love with your brand so that they'll taste your product.

01:21
We flip that model, we get people to taste your products so they'll fall in love with your brand. Like it. So what mistakes do you see either private equity firms or companies  making and what would you suggest to correct them? Look, not just private equity firms. mean, at the end of the day,  I think the conversation we've had before you press the play button, um private equity firms are not big on marketing themselves. They tend to work on referrals.

01:47
But just in terms of just general businesses, it doesn't matter what business it is, whether it's in the services industry or the product industry, they tend to market their products or their services on price. And of course, know, there's a race to the bottom because if you're selling a washing machine and it's a commodity and you're selling it for 500 pounds, let's say, or $500, then the guy down the road can beat you within about five minutes. And so what we teach people is to actually not focus on price, but rather market your products or services based on value add.

02:16
And  the best example of that would be McDonald's Happy Meals. They've been running for 44 years, a Happy Meal  with a toy inside. And if I asked any parent or grandparent, what was the cost of a Happy Meal?  They couldn't tell you. Most couldn't tell you at least because that free toy takes your eyes off the price.  That was very interesting. I could not tell you what the price of a Happy Meal is either to be fair. So,  uh, uh, my kids are a bit young to be jumping in that, but I do remember having them as a kid and,

02:45
I couldn't tell you how much, how much they are. interesting. So the crazy part about it, Alex, is that Kellogg's have been doing the same thing with toys in their cereal boxes for about 50 years. I grew up on the Flintstones toys. that shows you I was born in 1800s. And,  know, they still do it. Amazon Prime have a special bonus if you, you know, join their Prime membership club.  The local cafe down the road probably gets you to have a little reward card and they give you a stamp every time you get a coffee. And when you get nine coffees, you get the 10th one for free.

03:14
The irony is though, is that 97 % of businesses worldwide have never ever ever used an incentive. It's absolutely crazy. They just market their products or services on price and they wonder why they lose that last drop. that's interesting. So a lot of focus there is on kind of B2C. Do you see the B2B focus with regards to the incentive as well?

03:35
Yeah, exactly.  I mean, you know, I'm in the advisory business and my business is the Institute of WoW.com. So therefore we're, you know, as you would imagine with a name like that, you're either into marketing or advertising or entertainment.  And,  you know, my mantra is, that, you know, if you are going to help people, then show them you can help them by taste testing.  And so, you know, what we tend to do is a lot of, you know, podcasts like this, or a lot of webinars and  seminars to a lesser degree than what

04:02
used to be the case before COVID, but courtesy of COVID, of course, we're all on webinars these days. And so we get out lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of free information  as bait, if you like,  for people to say, okay, well, I like the sound of this form of marketing. It's very different from what we thought before. We used to  think we should put our face on the side of a bus, so that was it.  And what we find is that, by,  I guess, you know, demonstrating to people what is between your ears and why your system is better than most, then yeah, you're going to...

04:31
pick up a lot of good leads. unfortunately, a lot of people don't do that. They don't have freemium programs. I mean, you probably have seen the melecs where a lot of the digital products these days have a seven day or 14 day free trial. And the whole idea of that is to get you to taste the calamari outside the fish and chip shop before you come in and buy the more expensive fish. Makes sense. Makes sense. So when we think about, big advocate.

04:56
Obviously for this, hence the reason, you know, run an executive search firm and focus on the private equity industry and build a podcast in order to help promote the brand and awareness, et cetera. you know, selling to the converted already.  One of the things I speak to,  when I speak to like private equity firms in particular, but especially, especially like chief executive CFOs, they, you know, they'll build a sales team to try and drive that kind of response rate. And when it comes down to the marketing is certainly left at the portfolio level in the most part until they get kind of

05:25
probably seriously thought about 100 million plus,  but  at the private equity level, it's just predominantly non-existent. We're not seeing chief marketing officers, head of marketing,  really at private equity firms anywhere in its truest form. Some of them are doing that, but again, I would suggest that's the bigger ones.  What's your  take around how a firm begins to think about that kind of freemium, as you've put it?

05:54
And that kind of insight, if it's a service-based business to be able to put out content. Because the first thing we think about is,  I don't know what to share. So how do you kind of internally, or how do you encourage your clients to begin to think, right, well, these are the things where they use the kind of, is it the Gary V model of document,  don't create model, but what's your kind of take on that? Yeah, look, the Gary V model is incredible.  But of course it comes with its,

06:21
The downside is you normally lose your marriage because you've got a camera following your 24-7,  and  that's happened to him and many others that do the 24-7  camera.  Yeah, look, there's no  doubt that content is king.  In my instance, uh I've had six kids, they're all grown up and left home now, but it was very hard for me to have a camera following me around the house because there's six kids. And I think you've said you've got a couple. Have you got a couple?  Yeah.

06:49
So you imagine your wife would be really wrapped if you had a camera in your lounge every day. um Yeah, look, content is king. There's no question that in the world we live in now,  and with AI,  you don't have to worry too much about content. I uh know that nobody can see this if they're listening to this, but I  have to write books. If you're doing the seminar or conference service,  you basically got to write a book. And this one's a bit different for those who are listening and not watching. It's the size of a tabloid newspaper, and it's called the...

07:18
Wow, the Well Manifesto. It's leather bound, it's got 300 pages in it, and it has the most successful direct response campaigns that I've ever run. I didn't put the ones that didn't work in here, obviously, but I put the ones that did work. And it's $420 to print that book, okay? So she's pretty special, that one. And I give that to people free. And people say to me, what? Now I give the digital version. Obviously I'm not going to print $420 for every person that knocks on my door. But the reason I give that...

07:45
to everyone is because the moment that they get a quarter of the way through that, there's hundreds and hundreds of direct response marketing campaigns in here that have got ridiculous results, my phone rings before they get a quarter through the book. And the reason is because I've overwhelmed them with such creativity, if you like, in terms of direct response marketing, they think, hang on, this guy's David Copperfield, I want to talk to him. If I only had that in a chapter, then I wouldn't get anywhere near as many.

08:11
inquiries. And so therefore my view is, that hand out as much of your  IP  within reason. If you've got the Coca-Cola formula, don't hand that out. right. But you know, hand out as much as you possibly can because that will make them hungrier for your David Copperfield magic. Yeah. I think it's interesting. I  that message for me is something that really sat and I was like, oh, we can't do this. But then you realize that

08:36
Most people don't do anything with the information that you give them anyway, because they don't know how to deploy it. And then the question goes, well, okay, you've given me all these direct mail campaigns, but how do we run them? What do we actually infrastructure needs to be built around them? And it's the same for private equity firms and their portfolio companies. We're starting to see lots of private equity firms now, well, I say lots, actually I'm starting to see a very small handful of private equity firms, but an increasing number now starting to put their playbooks out there and starting to promote what they do with their portfolio companies, because that's then going to attract.

09:05
more of the similar type people to play in it. And it's the same model as what you've done there is here's what we've done here's how it works. Here's all the free stuff, you know, go away and do it. And then it's kind of like, well, I'm not sure if we do this. It's kind of tailored to our industry, how to word the emails, how to read the, what do we use the, you know, the old shoe kind of mentality of sending your prospects a shoe and then say, you know, we'll, I'll give you the other woman foot in the door type mentality. think I stole off Patrick bed David, all these different elements, you know, you're not sure. that's when they'll come back to you, but you

09:33
of put yourself as the authority.  And I think that's basically what you've done there with your book for your business. Well, we had a classic. mean, I was on a podcast about a month ago. It was an American guy out of Texas. And it's funny though, because he said to me, oh, look, your name's John DeWire, but you get John or JD because he read my bio and I get JD most of the time for John DeWire. And  I said to him,

09:57
Yeah, I get JD, either that or Dickhead. the funny part about it, he must have taken me seriously. He emails me now and says, Dickhead. anyway, I'm going to have to be careful when I'm talking to the Americans. I don't get the Aussie airman. But yeah, I was telling him, you know, I said, look, you know, we have a lot of clients who've wasted a lot of money with Zuckerberg on Facebook. And we've got a system that can beat that. And he said, oh, what is it? I said, basically, we call it the Facebook contest formula.

10:24
And I gave him an example and basically it was a dentist and the dentist said to me, look JD, what we want to do is sell invisible braces, which is called Invisalign, to  rich parents of children with crooked teeth. And I said, oh, okay, righto. And they said, but you know, we're not getting anywhere on Facebook. putting, you've got an advertising agency doing it. And of course, you know, it's the bearded hipster with the ponytail putting the ad together. So basically it shows a child with invisible braces on.

10:51
I said, okay, well, how about we give this a shot? So we ran a contest  for, and we targeted rich suburbs and we said, would you like to win Invisalign braces for your children  if they've got crooked teeth? Who do you think is going to enter that contest? If you've got children with beautiful teeth, there's no way you're going to enter that contest. But if you've got children with crooked teeth, he spent $30 a day. That's all he spent, $30 a day. This is in Australia. He got a thousand leads in the first week. We're talking insane numbers of entry forms, right?

11:19
Now, it was 991, but let's just say 1,000 for our figure sake. He had 991 people who he could contact the following week to say, good news is some bad news. Bad news is you didn't win the contest, but the good news is we have a special deal at the moment for your child to get braces. It used to be this, but now it's that. And if you actually decide to get braces for your child by Friday, we'll give you a voucher, which will give you three nights accommodation for free. Shut the gate.

11:44
And that's what direct response marketing is all about. It's not sponsoring the local football team. It's not putting your face on the back of a taxi or the side of the bus. It's actually doing shit that actually gets your results the next day. Interesting, interesting. And then you've got the advert, then you get the old adage of, doesn't work in our market, it's different, we're different. I wouldn't have thought about that. That's really interesting kind of lever. Sorry to interrupt. Just a quick mention of a longstanding partnership with Grata. As you all probably know, the private equity scene is constantly evolving. And...

12:14
Deal Flow is moving now to proprietary and data-driven processes. Grata provides you with the data and information of over 7 million private companies. So if you're looking to improve your proprietary Deal Flow and improve the data access, then reach out to Grata today. Now back to the podcast. So when we think, um let's dive into this with regards to a few kind of examples. Have you got other examples of, obviously, we're familiar with the

12:43
private equity world and the part they have to play. It's a financial services industry. As you said earlier, there's, uh and before we jumped online, my take on their deal origination strategy is that they are predominantly  network.  So advisory, advisors, investment banks, brokers to some degree, all influencing them and introducing them deals. We're starting to see that kind of head of business development, a deal origination type role starting to come into private equity, but predominantly that is

13:12
just managing those networks rather than actually thinking it from a marketing lens.  What ideas would you have or campaigns that you think would be interesting that  private equity firms could run  in that lens? know I'm kind of  shooting off the hip for you or making you shoot the hip a bit here,  but that they could run that would engage and entice owners of companies to engage with them with the potential of selling their business now or in the future.

13:42
So once to many. Okay, it's a lesson I learned about 10 years ago. I was in the corporate world.  I was doing marketing here in Australia for McDonald's and 7-Eleven and  BP gas stations and a whole bunch of bigger businesses.  And as it turned out, I said to my wife, look, how about we swap  and we provide this intellectual property to smaller businesses because we're not getting any younger and so therefore what we can do is milk the stuff that's between my ears and sell it to smaller businesses. Mind you,

14:11
Yeah, my wife said to me, just forget it, shut up and just keep what you're doing because the corporate standard to pay on time every time. But anyway, I didn't listen to her and I got into this more business sector. And the interesting learning curve was that the Anthony Robbins model is alive and well, no matter who your audience is. And that model is sell once to many. And that is either holding an event, it could be a dinner party at the Versace upmarket hotel. It could be at the local bowling club. It just depends on who your audience is.

14:41
and you invite people to come along and you demonstrate your wizardry and there'll be a percentage of those people that just line up to talk to you at the end of that presentation. Whether that presentation's a day or half a day or three hours, it's entirely up to you. ah I could not believe it. I ah wasn't that flash at it, to be honest with you, in the first six months because I had come from the corporate world so I didn't know how to speak down to people. Well,  I knew how to speak down to people but I didn't know how to speak to small business owners. They thought KPI was a new chicken chain.

15:09
So therefore, it was an interesting learning curve when I was the only one on stage in the room with teeth. ah we went through that whole learning process. And once I understood what  the small  to medium sized businesses were after, it's an incredible money tree because you might be in front of 100 small businesses and you demonstrate again your David Copperfield wizardry. And then you can bet your life if you've uh got a product or service to sell.

15:34
At the end of it, you're probably, if you do a reasonable job, you're going to have a 20 % to 35 % close rate. And that's what I think doesn't happen in this instance. I mean, I've got a client in Adelaide. I happen to be on the Gold Coast in Australia, but I've got a client in Adelaide, which is about two hours flight away. He's raising $50 million at the moment in private equity to buy a couple of businesses. And we're doing the opposite. We're actually having on the 19th of September, as I look at my calendar, I think it's Friday, the 19th of September.

16:02
I'm flying down to Adelaide  with him and we're presenting the opportunity to  probably about 20 to 30 private equity guys in the room. it's basically, yeah, mean, so once it's what Anthony Robbins has been doing for the last 30 or 40 years, he packs out a stadium with five or 6,000 people and he sells once to many instead of the individual  ones he does his. And you can do that online. Of course, I'm talking about live events. They are going to be much more powerful because of the nature of the event, but you can do this online as well, of course.

16:33
Perfect. You're doing it right now, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's just about, you know, you've to build the audience  and get the attraction and then run it through.  yeah, brilliant. I'm thinking about this with the guys from my business and  Graeme that uh additionally from there. I'll give you  an idea. And again, you know, it's about JJVs. I mean,  I got sick of paying Zuckerberg money.

17:01
to advertise our stuff and a lot of our stuff is uh packaged because we realize the small to medium businesses, and I know that's not necessarily your audience, but small to medium businesses really don't have the time or the skills to execute stuff.  So I found myself feeding strawberries to pigs. So therefore I was giving all of this corporate advice to a business that was doing maybe less than a million and they just couldn't implement it. So therefore I realized that for that particular audience, what I'd have to do is create a package promotion.

17:27
So we have package promotions like, you know, you win a million dollars if you buy this product or service and we get the million dollars from Lloyds of London for about $20,000. All those shows on TV, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? That's all run by Lloyds of London.  And, you know, we'll have petrol discounts,  we'll have holiday vouchers that these thousand dollar value holiday vouchers for three nights in hotels all around Europe and America and Australia.

17:51
ah They're worth $1,000 but we sell them to businesses for $50 and so therefore they give these vouchers to people when they buy their products or services. It's worth $1,000 but it's only $50. So we do all of this packaged stuff  and you know what we find is the best way to market this is to actually join venture with people with lists. So therefore I will say to someone, look you've got a list of business owners, why don't we do a live webinar on Tuesday the  14th or whatever.

18:15
I'll get on and do my song and dance and explain what this is all about. And at the end of it, whatever that we sell, then I'll give you a percentage. So you do a revenue share.  And you're dealing with a much bigger league because of, you know, private equity people. But by the same token, there's no reason why they couldn't do this sort of webinar. And maybe some of them are. But I suggest that because most of these people are left brain, not right brain creative. And I wish I was left brain, by the way. My wife wishes I was left brain a long time ago, by the way.  We wouldn't have had to make a comeback so often.

18:43
But anyway, the thing is, that because they tend to be more operationally minded, they might not think that way. But I'm telling you, know, online webinars are a money machine if you get it right. Okay. And it's so kind of promoting that what your guy's secret source is. How does somebody grow a business? I think of it from my line, there's a private equity firm put on, hey, how do you grow X, Y and Z? How do you do this, this and this? was, you know, if it's the big boys, people are going to jump on. there's no reason if it's a big private equity firm versus a small one.

19:10
and you're marketing into the right people, simply email marketing it out,  I would guess. Is that predominantly how you  kind of promote these  events and whether it be a webinar, whether it be in person, is it predominantly via email marketing? Well, pretty much. mean, I did a webinar recently with uh a lady who was a real estate coach. So she coaches real estate agents how to get appraisals because as you know, with every 10 appraisals or valuations they get, they normally turn that into two or three or four listings, right?  And that's where they get their big commission.

19:38
And so therefore I said, okay, well, let's do one together and I'll give you 30 % of our revenue.  And what we saw, we have robots now, the AI world being what it is, is that I cannot understand the real estate world. It's an incredibly weird world whereby they actually put a little flyer in your letterbox with their ugly face on it. And then they say, would you like to get a valuation of your home? Because we've got to keep up with valuations because we are buyers in the area, the usual violent. And they wonder why they get no result from that.

20:06
kept on saying to real estate agents that came onto my program, out of every 10 appraisals, how many listings do you get? They get probably three or four. I said, well, why don't you just hand in a million appraisals? Stop asking them, just give it to them. And it explodes their brain because they don't think that way. Of course, they were driving a school bus last week. And so therefore, I just say to them, OK, well, we'll put our AI robots onto it. So basically, these days, we have a system called AI Genie, and we ring 10,000 homes in a day. 10,000 homes in a day.

20:35
with these robots and they basically say, oh, hello Alex, you are 24 Smith Street, Smithville. Just thought I'd let you know that we're  phoning to do some research on how many people understand how much they're sitting on at home. Do you know your home is worth $1.2 million? Your head explodes.  then uh you say to me, well,  I didn't realize that. Now this robot sounds exactly like a human. 78 % of people think it's a human. And even if they don't, who cares, right?

21:01
And then so therefore they basically say,  well, if you'd like a local trusted agent to come in and provide you with a written appraisal, then would you like that to happen?  And we are selling those leads then to real estate agents because instead of asking, do they want an appraisal, we just give out a million appraisals. But they don't think this way because they're not thinking scaling. And you know, the game that we're in is not just direct response, but  you  know,  I used to do all the Murdoch.

21:27
scratch games, okay, for all of his newspapers in Australia. And you'd be familiar with Rupert Murdoch, of course. And that's all about scaling. So therefore we'd make sure that we had a million scratch bingo cards out there because then that would probably stimulate about a 15 % lift in your circulation. It's all about scaling. Interesting. Very interesting. So just looking at this from a slightly different lens, we've got a problem in private equity at the firm level and I think a portfolio level where we don't utilize marketing enough.

21:57
Um,  what, but then someone's going to, okay, well, you  you're not going to get a partner, a management partner of a private equity firm starting to go down the marketing route and studying and Jay Abraham and Gary Vaynerchuk and all the guys that put all the information out. So they're going to start to think, well, we need to bring somebody in to help drive and develop this. And then that comes to the question of, well, if you don't know what you're hiring for, how do you go out there and hire good people? You'll just end up with somebody who tells you, know, that's was, as you referenced earlier.

22:25
driving a bus last week and now they're an expert marketer  and can do all of the direct lead stuff. So when firms are considering hiring a great marketer for a fast growing either private equity firm, private equity backed business, what are some of the questions that you ask of the candidate and what are the best answers that we should be looking for that they will give to those questions? ah Two things. uh Number one, I normally judge people on their history, not what they say they're going to do in the future.

22:54
And so therefore I don't employ too many 23 year olds. And I know that sounds very convenient for a baby Bermut like me to say that because when you become an old fart, then of course it becomes a sport that you bag out millennials. I've got six of them by the way. And so therefore, yeah, look for someone with a couple of wrinkles because at the end of the day wrinkles tend to deliver wisdom. But more than that, look at their case history.

23:23
I mean, you on my website, theinstituteofwild.com, if anyone wants to go on there, they will go to the case histories tab up the top of it. They could be on there for two hours looking at all the case histories. And the reason I do that is because I want to overwhelm them with proof that we have half a clue what we're doing. And the other thing too that people might like to consider is that aside from looking at the history of someone, because at the end of the day, that tends to predict their future, is have a look at whether they think outside the box.

23:52
You know, one of my clients some years ago was a building society in Australia and building societies and credit unions that would be the same in the UK and in America, they tend to attract a working class audience. Banks, the big banks, the banks of America tend to attract people with suits and ties. The credit unions and building societies are after working class. And so I said to this bank, listen, stop trying to beat the big banks like the Wells Fargo banks or the banks of America with interest rate prices because you never got to win. They will always beat you. It'd be like a

24:21
you know, small shop opposite Costco trying to beat Costco, it's not going to happen, right? And they said, well, what do we do? I said, well, listen, why don't you actually give away the honeymoon rate that you normally had for home loans, give that to a travel company that I was producing some TV commercials for, and they'll give you a discount holiday. So, kind of long story short, we came on TV and social media and we said, swap your home loan from the big banks, they don't care about you, bring it across to the Greater Building Society and we'll give you a free holiday. Cost neutral, because they gave up their honeymoon rate, which is the 1%, right? It went nuts.

24:51
For two or three years, they took billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of extra money. And this idiot who you're talking to at the moment didn't charge a percentage of the increase in  loans. He just charged a consultancy fee. So I'm a complete moron, by the  way. then about three years into it, I got Jerry Seinfeld to do the ads. And so therefore, I fly backwards and forwards for three years. I'm name dropping. I apologize for that.  I think this story is relevant  to the question you asked. And so we got Jerry Seinfeld on.

25:20
For three years, he came on Australian TV and social media, courtesy of the ads that I would do backwards and forwards to New York. And he would say, get a home loan from the Greater Building Society and get a free holiday. It went through the stratosphere. Seinfeld knew how much money he made for the bank, he would have put his hand out more. But you know what Seinfeld cost us? Seinfeld cost us a lousy $1.1 million a year, multiplied by three years. So that's 3.3.

25:44
I couldn't begin to tell you the billions and billions and billions of dollars that the building society took as a result of putting that guy on. So it could be very,  I always, we call it the chocolate chip cookie. If you've got a chocolate chip cookie in a basket of just normal cookies, then  guess which one's going to get the most attention, the chocolate chip one. And for private equity firms, it may well be that they have to think outside the square and that if they want to attract people to their environment, I'm not saying Seinfeld, but you know.

26:14
You know, give Ricky Gervais some money and get him to front your next conference. And I know that sounds ridiculous and it's outside the square, but that's the thought sort of thinking that  these guys need to, I think at least,  dip their toe in the water. Okay, that could not change, could not differentiate. um What do you watch, read, listen to, you recommend that others check out? I don't read any  books. My kids, my six millennials make fun of me because...

26:42
Here I am at Baby Boomerang and still working and I convinced them that, well, the reason I'm still working is because you kids went through private schools and you ate up all my super.  But aside from that, said to them, look, I don't like jigsaws and I can't play golf. What the hell am going to do otherwise?  And  so therefore I don't read fiction books because  basically I've got the attention span of a goldfish. So therefore I would get into the first chapter and just go to the back page to find out what happened.

27:08
And  when it comes to fiction, I'd say to the kids, look, why would you read a book? I might as well just wait for the movie. Jurassic Park was so much easier to watch than read.  So I read  audio-broadcasts. Yeah. So I go through the Richard Branson's and the Walt Disney's and the Last Evening Spellbooks. That's the sort of stuff I like. And I guess the book though that probably resonates most with me is The Purple Cow by Seth Godwin. So  basically that's the same philosophy that I have. He was driving through the country with his wife.

27:36
and he stopped  to see all these cows in the paddock and they all look the same. And he said to his wife, imagine if one of those cows was purple, it would stand out. And so hence the book came around, The Purple Cow. I call mine the wow factor, but I say to people, look, unless you've got a wow factor ah in your business and that is something that distinguishes you from everyone else, and normally that's a happy wheel toy, ah then, you know, go and get a job because, you know, you're not going to stand out from the crowd if you're the same as the crowd.

28:04
If anybody wishes to reach out to you post this podcast, John, how best do they get in touch? They can't do that, Alice, because I live on a private island. I'm so wealthy and so it doesn't have phone access. I wish. I wish that was the truth. Yeah, buddy, they're not a problem at all. Just John at theinstituteofwow.com. So that's J-O-H-N, John at theinstituteofwow.com. And my business is theinstituteofwow.com.

28:33
Perfect. Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much for coming on. John, I appreciate the insight into  what seems a bit of an art.  I'm sure there's a, well, as you've described today, there's a lot more science behind it than that, but creative thinking, et cetera, within marketing, giving private equity firms and portfolio companies that kind of direction as to what should be doing to  do your uh wow factor, purple cow, and all the references, the chocolate chip cookie in the normal cookie jar. So  thank you very much for coming onto the podcast and sharing everything you have.

29:02
My pleasure, mate. Thank you for the invitation. And for everybody listening, tuning in yet again to the Privacy Podcast, thank you very much  for coming onto the podcast yet again. Till the next time, keep smashing it, and thank you very much for listening.