Beside a fortuneteller, in a strip mall in Las Vegas, we found the best donuts in town. Well technically, Yelp found them. We simply bought 10 dozen and bribed our way to a 9 am, standing room only, live UnPodcast audience.
Create great content and the audience will come.
Create great content and feed everyone Ronald’s Donuts, and a packed-room of hung over marketers will come.
We got back from Vegas and into the studio, raving about Ronald’s Donuts. We shared our Yelp story. How the donut shop with over 500 reviews and 4.5 stars caught our attention and our hearts. Just what we needed, another thing to miss about Vegas.
Fast forward a few months later, to another studio day. We were just getting ready to leave when Alison noticed a box sitting on our doorstep. A box of Ronald’s Donuts, with a note attached from someone we’d never met – Petrus Engelbrecht, a real estate agent from Sotheby’s.
Petrus had attended a talk Scott gave to real estate agents and decided he wanted to be our realtor. The talk gave him all the tools he needed to get noticed, so he decided to do a little research. He listened to the podcast, heard about our love of Ronald’s Donuts and decided to have a dozen flown in by a partner in their Las Vegas office. And then, he just left them on our doorstep.
Now, one of us would never eat random doorstep donuts (Alison) and one of us had eaten six before we got to the studio…
We weren’t in the market for a house. We hadn’t even mentioned looking for one online. Too often in business we focus only on those ready to buy. If someone isn’t ready, with money in hand, we ignore them. It’s buy or good-bye. But great marketing is about more than that. It’s about staying in front of your target market, so when they’re ready for your product or service they choose you.
And no one has demonstrated this better than Petrus.
Scott has lived in Oakville his entire life, surrounded by ads for realtors. Their faces on benches, the backs of buses, flyers in newspapers and lawn signs. Now we’re just spit balling here, but we’d say there are about 10,001 realtors in our town who’s faces we’ve seen (and sat on from time to time), but when it came time to look at houses, there was only one we wanted to talk to. Not only had we never seen Petrus on a sign or business card, but he was new to the area, to the continent to be exact. And he was new to real estate.
Not only was Petrus’ approach creative, he gave without asking. He didn’t check in the day after dropping by our house to see if we wanted to buy a house now. He had an idea and took a chance, and it worked. A few months later, we bought our dream home and Petrus got his Return on Donuts.
Since then, Petrus and his family have become friends and we’ve referred him to many others. He is a great agent, which is actually the real point here. No amount of donuts in the world will help your business if you’re not great. The donuts opened the door (literally) but it was his passion, intelligence and skills that kept it open.
He took the whole thing up another notch when he brought over a gift for Scott during the holidays. Knowing Scott’s passion for comic books and specifically Wolverine, and his hatred of QR codes, Petrus had a one of a kind piece commissioned by a local artist Mike Rooth as you can see in the image below.
