I write about how Local Service Business owners can build an engaging Utopian World for their customers to inhabit using Endless-Value-Journeys, a strategy that emphasizes delighting dream customers, fostering deep connections and cultivating lifelong relationships. This paradigm shift moves us from reacting to one-off transactional customers to proactively inviting them into our world. Welcome to the art of building a Purpose Driven Expert business.
HOME MANIFESTO RED CARPET ABOUT
Hello.
This page is for anyone who wants the full back story, rather than the paraphrased About me page.
I’m Mark Earle, a local business owner like you and I’d love to share a bit about my journey with you.
I say that upfront because it’s important for you to understand ‘Who Mark Earle Isn’t’!
I’m not a fan of these fake guru’s, or ‘I used to do this for 5 minutes and now I just teach about it’ type of people.
You’ve probably guessed I tell it like it is…
I’m not a person who talks theories that are in books, or someone who has just taken a ‘how to coach’ course or book like some of these 22 year old ‘Life coaches’… really…
What could you possibly know about life at age 22?
Now don’t get me wrong, I read books, I learn things and I apply them… but obviously not everything works, at least not for me anyway…
No, my teachings come from down in the trenches, sleeves rolled up and in the proverbial s@*t most of the time of my early business life.
It’s what I’ve learned, what has worked, and the ‘don’t do that ‘cos it doesn’t work’ kind of stuff.
So on this page I want to give you a bit of my work life back story and how I’ve got here, and more importantly what it means for you.
It’s been a rollercoaster ride, filled with highs and lows, but every step has shaped me into the person I am today and how I can help people.
With the many ups and downs, falling for the fake guru’s evil schemes and plans, not once but several times, investing tens of thousands on pipe dreams, only to find myself back at square one.
Before the Internet: My career began in the engineering field, as a time-served sheet metal worker, where I worked on places like the Piper Bravo oil rig. This was the replacement platform after the tragic Piper Alpha disaster (there’s a 10 minute mini-documentary about the disaster on YouTube here). It was a challenging environment, but it taught me resilience and the importance of safety in all aspects of work.In a twist of fate, I also found myself as an aircraft engineer during the 9/11 disaster. The industry was devastated, all of a sudden a vehicle (aeroplane) that could miraculously take you thousands of miles in a few hours to dream locations, was now seen as a weapon, and our company was hit hard.
Nothing can compare to the loss of lives during this time, we only faced weekly redundancies, the first being on Christmas Eve 2001, and our team dwindled from 1300 employees to a mere 250. It was a heart-breaking period, but it also opened the door to new opportunities.
I took voluntary redundancy in the June of 2002, and supplemented my redundancy pay with a loan to buy a Wheelie Bin Cleaning franchise, it was an existing franchise 30 miles from where I lived but had existing customers and cashflow.
This would be one of my first lessons in business, projected cashflow and real cashflow can be miles apart. Some weeks were great and others were us left eating beans on toast.
This got me looking outside of my business for more money (another major mistake that took 10 years to fully understand).
My Internet Life: After joining a UK based network marketing company in 2003, to earn an extra income to allow my wife Sharon to leave the job she despised, one of my upline built me my first site on WordPress as a way of recruiting new team members into our downline, he taught me the platform, how it worked and how to build my own sites.
He’d teach me about how people search for stuff using the internet and how I could get my website to show up in the results.
If you have any understanding of the search engines, you’ll know that this is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
And it was a real eye opener for me, this became the foundation of my Smart Search Compounding Method that now helps my clients succeed with their websites.
This was when the internet was in it’s infancy, I’m sad to announce that I go back to when you had to use a dial up modem to access the internet, yes that’s right, the days of unplugging your phone line to plug the modem in and hearing the dialling tone as you accessed the internet, god that makes me feel ancient.
Needless to say, I was a like a sponge for this new information, there wasn’t a ton of competition like there is now for keywords (the phrase you type into the search engine) and it was quite easy with a bit of work to get ranked on the first page of the popular search engines.
Google hadn’t yet monopolised the landscape. Search engines like Yahoo, MSN, Overture and even one called Ask Jeeves were popular.
I was amazed and hungry to learn, and I learned a lot, not all of it good, it was the wild west for anyone who was looking to make a fast buck at anyone’s expense, and I was generally the sucker!
Too many times I’d get duped into spending $17, $47, $97 or $497 for courses (yes they all ended with a 7) that promised me the earth and left me going around in circles.
Within a couple of years, I had built a £5 million property portfolio ($7m real estate portfolio to my american friends). It was a thrilling time, but it wasn’t without its challenges.
So much so that in 2010, We almost went bankrupt when 21 of our apartments were shut down by the fire department with just 3 hours notice.
It’s a long story but the top and bottom of it was that some selfish tenants cut the wires to the smoke detection system to allow them to smoke in the apartments without setting off the fire alarms.
The fire department wouldn’t give me time to resolve the issue and get everything fixed saying “if there’s a fire tonight, you could be responsible for hundreds of deaths and face manslaughter charges”.
This unfortunate event left 21 families homeless, many of them innocent parties, and I started receiving death threats from angry parents who had to take their family to a hostel for shelter. It also led to a number of disgruntled tenants causing as much damage to the property as they could in the 3 hours they had available.
It was a mess, sinks were blocked up, taps left running to flood their apartment any others underneath, walls, doors and windows were damaged. There was hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage done in a few short hours.
It was a dark time, but I learned valuable lessons about risk and responsibility. I had no problem getting the leads and closing the deals, but I didn’t have the infrastructure in place to support our growth.
We now had a monthly mortgage liability of £8,000 on those apartments, with no income coming in, the automated calls from the lenders were incessant, we were getting tens of arrears letters daily, this compounded to seeing me in the repossession courts 12 times over a 2 month period.
It was bleak.
Parallel to my internet presence and property ventures, I still had the cleaning business from 2002, following the 9/11 aircraft redundancy.Do you find that every time you think you are growing, the rug seems to be pulled from under you?
Have you tried to implement systems into your business but they never quite seem to get you the results you’re looking for?
I did too…
Like most people when they get into business, you have a look around to see what your competitors are doing to get new business, and you pretty much do the same.
For us, it was door to door canvassing, I ran local radio ads, I even got stung with the ad that goes in all the local dentists and doctors surgeries (cringe).
I wanted to grow rapidly, so I hired canvassers who would knock on 300 – 400 houses a night, with a conversion rate of about 3%.
Still about 10 new customers a day were getting added, not bad I thought…
What you find though, by canvassing door to door, the only people left who aren’t using a service are the people who have ripped every other company off before, and now you’re next in line. They must be thinking to themselves “Here’s the next sucker”.
The customer attrition rate was horrendous, some had one clean and cancelled (you actually lose money on the first clean, but think long term and that you’ll have a customer for life), and don’t even get me started on staff members stealing the takings.
It was constantly one step forward, two steps back, does that sound familiar?
I was forever looking online for ways to grow, online marketing, tips and strategies.
Like I said, I built my own first website in 2004, which is several centuries ago in internet years, in the property niche.I was gleaning some insights though, and with this new knowledge, I jumped straight into a long held ambition to be a property investor. So, in 2004, I embarked on a new journey in the world of building lead generation websites to grow a property portfolio.
I bought course after course, from the guru’s with images of them with Lamborghini’s, promising fortunes with their system, but only lining their pockets, none of these courses were really designed for my type of business, but I learned little bits from each that I could apply here and there to keep me moving forward.
Over the next 10 years from my first site, I would continue honing my skills, applying all the knowledge into our cleaning business website, and eventually would have everything dialled in.
And once I did, we’ve not had to knock on a single door for new business or to collect payment since 2014.
We now wake up to new customers every morning who’ve booked and paid for our service.
They’ve searched online, found us, gone through our sales system and deposited money in our bank account before I get to know about it.
Quite cool really.
This is what I now teach, without the 10 years of banging my head against the wall, lol.
As my skill set was growing, I’d have friends and relatives who had different businesses who would approach me asking could I show them how they could implement it into their business what I did for mine.
So for years, I’d sit them down, show them how it worked and give them the step by step instructions of what I did.
Months would go by and I’d ask them how it was working, only to hear that they’d found it too difficult and they’d given up.
It was so frustrating for me because I knew this stuff worked, I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working for them, I guess they just didn’t have the 10 years experience that I had prior to my breakthrough.
I thought back to the times I’d spent thousands on courses and would feel overwhelmed with the amount of information that was in there, they’d obviously felt the same way and didn’t want to contact me due to some sort of feeling of failure.
So that’s when I came up with the idea of just giving people the next step from my systems that actually work. Something they could do today, that would take 10-30 minutes to implement and they’d get a result or outcome today.
I tried it with a few people and it worked, and not only that…
I also noticed that they’d have a sense of accomplishment, a feeling of making progress, and more importantly wanting to take the next small step.
That’s how this website was born, a resource for local business owners to start automating their business so that their business ‘Worked For Them’ rather than them ‘Working For It’.
One step at a time, getting more and more of their life back with each step.
That’s how I developed the 6 steps of The Purpose Driven Expert Method.
Simple really…
You get to see the overall picture, like the lid of a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, and then you just focus on one part, like starting a jigsaw puzzle with the corners.
They say a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step, and then one more and one more…
You see, as local business owners we know what we’re good at, we know the value that we provide to our customers, and we tend to look to others to build the systems for us.
We hire so-called experts, a website designer, a graphic designer, marketing and advertising agencies, and they aren’t cheap.
But here’s the real problem, they don’t know our customers, they don’t know their pains, their frustrations, their needs, and we give away our power.
Which is why we become susceptible to the £2,000 – £10,000 website designs that are just a glorified digital brochure from graphic designers who know nothing about marketing and conversions, only that it looks good.
I once heard of a local business owner who was charged £35,000 for an ecommerce website that when I checked it out he could have bought for £30 a month subscription and a £199 theme.
I was stunned… but this is what can happen when you don’t know any better.
So I am going to give you the Real Talk…
For all the changes in tactics, techniques, fads, social this, network that, FB, IG, YT, Twitter (X), TikTok and all the others that have come and gone like MySpace, SnapChat, Friendster, Vine and Periscope.
And Google isn’t immune either with it’s Google+ and Google Buzz platforms that lit up and fizzled out like a November sparkler.
The bottom line is this…
REAL Business hasn’t changed. Find a customer who has a problem, is in need of a service / product you offer, and serve them really well. That’s it!
When you serve them really well and are able to communicate with them on a consistent basis, offering help and advice for free, they will be receptive to your other offers and services in the future.
Is there some work involved to get you to that place, YES, let’s not be naïve here, but everything can be achieved in a step by step format.
Just like learning to drive a manual car. You didn’t think you’d be able to handle 3 peddles with just 2 feet, a steering wheel, changing gears, indicators and windscreen wipers with just 2 hands, listen to the tone of the engine so you know when to change gear and coordinate all of that while keeping your eyes on the road and avoiding oncoming traffic.
But now you can, and now you have the radio blaring and are able to have a conversation with passengers at the same time as eating an apple.
So don’t get overwhelmed, you can do this, one step at a time, if you can keep your eye on the goal…
A true lifestyle business that ‘works for you’.
If you can copy and paste, follow simple instructions, and are prepared to do a little work each day to keep moving forward without the ‘microwave mentality’ of expecting fortunes and results overnight, I can promise you that you can start building a lifestyle business for yourself that you will not only enjoy…
But you will be building an asset that will be growing in value and people will be queueing around the street to buy, should you ever feel like selling it.
And you can get started and set up for less than £30… (that’s not a typo!)
You’ll have customers regularly coming to you, you’ll get to concentrate on what you’re good at, you’ll have multiple income streams, providing the quality service to your customers, and have them coming back for more.
And you can get rid of those over inflated directory sites like Home Advisor, Angi’s List and Yelp that have you paying high lead costs, only to send the leads out to several business owners and you have to get into a bidding war, where the lowest cut priced offer usually wins and your quality ranks lower in the scheme of a bidding war.
Business is not a ‘race to the bottom’, it’s about ROI (Return on Investment) and LTV (Life Time Value).
I have a simple philosophy on business, and I wish it was mine, it actually comes from the late sales and business trainer and speaker Zig Ziglar, it goes like this…
“Help enough people get what they want, and you can have Everything You Want!”
I really want to help you get what you want and I invite you to think about and start living this philosophy in your business and life and see how far it can take you.
What you’ll find is, when you really care about how you can serve your dream customers, helping them achieve their goals and dreams, there is no limit to what you can achieve.
You really can have a true lifestyle and business of your dreams.
That’s what I want for you, are you up for the challenge?
My goal is to get you into action, taking the right steps to achieve the lifestyle freedom and the business you thought you were building when you started out.
If you feel like you’ve been off track for too long, but didn’t know how to get back on track, then let’s start getting the clarity and focus on taking each small step along the way.
Let’s do this…
Helping you succeed,Mark Earle