Let’s cut the crap—“culture” isn’t a ping-pong table in the breakroom or a laminated mission statement on the wall. Culture is Jerry. And Jerry is why people quit.

In this episode of Advertising in America, the boys throw elbows at the myth that culture is fluff. They unpack how toxic bosses, hollow perks, and lip-service values quietly bleed companies dry—and why the few brands that actually live their culture end up building empires. From Wells Fargo’s spectacular crash to Zappos’ billion-dollar sale, the lesson is simple: culture sells, or it sinks.

Episode Highlights

• People don't quit companies—they quit bosses.
• Wells Fargo proves toxic culture costs billions.
• Zappos proves authentic culture can be priceless.
• Pizza parties, perks, and penguins won’t save you.

This episode’s for the leaders brave enough to stop faking it—and bold enough to let their culture be real, messy, and unforgettable.

🎧 Hit play. Then go build a culture that actually means something.

📱 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

💬 Are you building a brand people believe in, or just wallpapering over Jerry’s bad behavior with pizza parties?

💥 Brought to you by Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services

Does your culture really matter in how your brand shows up, or is it just a bunch of malarkey?

I've never claimed to be a culture expert, so if an actual culture expert disagrees with me, then please ignore me and trust the expert. People don't quit companies. They quit bosses. No one has ever said, “I hate IBM. I'm sick and tired of IBM. I quit.” No. What they say is, “I'm sick of Jerry. Fuck Jerry, fuck him and all his bullshit. I quit.”

Any of these companies where the consumer has a visible interaction with the staff will benefit by creating a culture where the staff are clearly happy and engaged.

I had a job once back when I was a teenager, where the boss was a complete prick, but the guys who worked for him, we loved each other. We had a common enemy, the boss.

If you run a business that depends on other employees performing well for you to succeed, I encourage you to develop a strong company culture. Does company culture matter to consumers? I don't know.

Ryan Chute: In today's episode of Advertising in America, we're going to debate whether your company culture really matters, starting with the guy who puts the HR in harassment. Here's Mick.

Mick Torbay: I've never claimed to be a culture expert. So if an actual culture expert disagrees with me, then please ignore me and trust the expert. But I have seen a few things in my time, and that's led me to some insights. I had a client in Virginia Beach. He was always complaining about attrition. This town has no loyalty. He said, nobody will stay at a company longer than 18 months. Then they're off to see if the grass is greener somewhere else.

And that got me thinking. I've had a lot of jobs. I've had a lot of bosses, some good, some great, some not so good, but getting a new job is hard. I've stayed at jobs way too long because, although I wasn't happy, at least I understood how it all worked, and you never know if the next one will be worse.

So here's the company owner saying in Virginia Beach, no one will stay at a company longer. 18 months, and I just carefully rephrased that last sentence to, no one will stay at his company longer than 18 months. I'll remind you that Virginia Beach is a military town, with Naval Air Station, as well as being the home base for aircraft carriers and other large ships. There's also an army base and a National Guard station. It's hard to find someone in that town who is not ex-military. We're talking about your most loyal, dependable workforce in the country, and he thinks they can't commit to an air conditioning company. Are you insane?

The owner of this company is a brilliant guy, a genius at working the books, and he could easily tell you what's wrong with your business, but he couldn't see in the mirror.

People don't quit companies. They quit bosses. No one has ever said, “I hate IBM. I'm sick and tired of IBM, I quit.” No. What they say is, “I'm sick of Jerry. Fuck Jerry, fuck him and all his bullshit. I quit.” So if you have a staff retention problem, I'd look long and hard at the person who that quitter directly reported to.

There's your failure in company culture. The problem is Jerry.

I've seen a lot of companies give lip service to culture. They have meetings and company picnics, and team-building exercises. In a lot of cases, they're ticking boxes, and I'm not even sure company culture can be controlled by the boss. I had a job once, back when I was a teenager, where the boss was a complete prick, but the guys who worked for him, we loved each other.

We had a common. The boss, Ron. He's dead now, so I can use his real name. We sang songs about him. Best company culture ever. There was no way we were leaving that job. We worked our asses off, got paid shit, treated like shit, but I still had a blast at work. I still miss those days.

I know Wizard of Ads Partners who truly understand company culture. They've built successful businesses where people are dying to work there, and they've done it multiple times. If you can afford to hire one of those guys, you'll do yourself a world of good. If you can't, just make sure you get rid of Jerry before he costs you your entire staff. Speaking of my former client in Virginia Beach, never in my career have I ever fired a client except him. I'm just saying.

Ryan Chute: Fuck Jerry.

Mick Torbay: Fuck him in the neck.

Ryan Chute: Fuck him. No, seriously fuck you, Jerry.

Now, to defend why culture is a total sham perpetuated by big culture to sell more culture, here's Jerry. I mean Chris.

Chris Torbay: Culture's great for employees; if employees like it there, if they feel appreciated and like they're part of a family, maybe they give a shit more and do better and put in extra effort and cover your ass when you have operational shortcomings, and maybe that helps the business succeed.

Maybe it helps you recruit good people when you're known as a great place to work. So if you run a business that depends on other employees performing well for you to succeed, I encourage you to develop a strong company culture. Does company culture matter to consumers? I don't know. The line is nowhere near as direct.

There are clearly examples of where it does; Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Disney World, any of these companies where the consumer has a visible interaction with the staff will benefit by creating a culture where the staff are clearly happy and engaged. But there are plenty of successful companies where the company culture is average or maybe below average, and I have no idea.

Does anyone know of a car company with a culture that is significantly different from the rest? Ford, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Dodge? Does anyone know anything about any of their cultures? Does any of that make a difference to the vehicle you buy, or do you buy based on the reputation of the product, independent of any culture?

Does anyone know the culture at Campbell Soup? I assume it's okay, but I don't know. I know I like the soup, though. What about Levi's, or Kellogg's, or Hertz, or Neiman Marcus? Perfectly successful companies with quality products and a premium price, and no particular culture that anyone is aware of unless you work.

To avoid getting sued. I won't accuse anyone specifically, but we all know major running shoe brands have a history of questionable manufacturing conditions that certainly could never be referred to as a strong company culture. Ask the poor kids stitching sneakers together for 12 hours every night, and the punishing Mumbai heat if he's there for the company culture. I suspect the culture sucks, but the kicks are amazing, and hey, if LeBron likes them, I'm buying some.

Miramar Films had a culture of having to sleep with Harvey Weinstein if he wanted to roll in his movies, and they made a ton of great movies in those days.

Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential told us just how shitty the world's best restaurants treat the staff who literally make the food that makes them successful.

Amazon warehouse workers have to piss in water bottles because they don't get enough breaks, and Amazon is doing just fine, thank you very much. Because rumors of a sketchy culture haven't stopped the average American from wanting to buy cheap consumer goods to fill the existential hole in their heart.

We love it when we see great company culture. If we see that culture reflected in the customer-facing workers we interact with, it's lovely. But can you build a company by grinding your workers down, paying them as little as possible, providing them minimum number of amenities, and basically saying, take it or leave it? Sure can. It means you suck, but you can totally do it.

Ryan Chute: Who wants pineapple Pizza for lunch today? Woo. You've all done such great work. Thank you. We'll be right back after our well-deserved pizza party.

Ryan Chute: Wizard of Ads Partner Ray Seggern, taught us about how the best stories we tell in our advertising are about the employee and buyer experiences that shape why the brand matters. Does a deadbeat culture stunt profitability and growth, or does is it clear out the deadwood?

Mick Torbay: I feel like a bit of a fraud, involving myself in a conversation about company culture. I know just enough about culture to be dangerous. So I feel a little awkward talking about it, but that doesn't change the fact that, we've all been in various situations where we're working and the culture is great and the culture is not. Sadly, I have to agree with Chris to some degree that the company culture and the consumer experience very often have no connection. Which doesn't mean that I don't believe in my heart that a company with a good company culture where everybody loves going to work and sings hi-hoe every morning would not be more successful. I just wish there were an easier way to quantify that.

Chris Torbay: Yeah. I gotta believe, I mentioned, I just picked some names outta the air, Levi's Campbell Soup, all these companies where we don't, the average person doesn't know anything about their culture.

I would assume that they probably do spend some time because the last thing you would want is to find out, “Hey, that soup company that everybody likes, and it's so wholesome and so family-oriented. It turns out they're a bunch of bastards.” So nobody wants that to come out. And so I assume you know that there's a minimum average that keep most people stick to.

Ryan Chute: The minimum viable product strategy of disappointing people just to a certain point. There's always a culture, right? No matter what company you're in, there is a culture because while leadership can set the tone for the culture based off of what they tolerate, the reality of it is it's gonna be good, it's gonna be not good, or it's going to be super toxic, and you have to decide what that means to your business. Now, I talk about this in friction all the time, and it really boils down to communication. People are the wild card, and they represent 80% of our business effort at any given time. So if all we're doing is working hard to put out fires and deal with employees, deal with customers, because we don't have a culture that serves a culture that removes friction. A culture that makes it easy for sellers to sell and easy for buyers to buy, that by its very nature is going to put drag on the flywheel of business, and that reduces profitability. It certainly reduces your highest potential for growth. And that's really what I see.

So a big question is what's the quantifiable examples of that?

I have two quantifiable examples. One is Wells Fargo, and the other is Zappos.

So Wells Fargo, 2016, got busted. Big time, multi-billion dollar scam for what happened during the financial crisis. They had basically set up a culture, a toxic culture of sales effort that took advantage of people at the highest levels. And then they bundled all of this bad business up into otherwise good stock, and that's one of the biggest culprits of the entire financial crisis having led it down the road that we ended up going down in 2009.

Chris Torbay: Which is a culture of just runaway ambition or runaway competitiveness as opposed to we're trying to make a great company here, or we're trying to do great things for people here. It's somehow delineated or descended into make sales at all costs. Sell products at all costs.

Ryan Chute: And that in itself has an inertia, right? Roy says that the masses of people are predictable, but the individual is not. And that falls into that category of you get this herd mentality pushing towards a, if you work here, you're going to be a sales goon. And if you're not a sales goon, then get out. No different than the old movie Boiler Room that we saw with just some fantastic cast, but what a wonderful movie. Anyway, I'll digress.

Mick Torbay: But you look at what affects the success of the company, and it's easy to talk about sales, and I think it's harder to connect those dots of good company culture with sales. I've flown Southwest, had a blast. It seems like everybody there is having a blast. Had a great experience, but I'm not sure I would choose the wrong time to depart or the wrong price to pay to fly Southwest versus something else based solely on having a good time.

Chris Torbay: If there was a tie on all the other things, two flights, two different airlines, but at the same time, same price. I'll take the Southwest one. I know I’ll have a good time, but how much would you shell out extra?

Mick Torbay: But, for example, at the last big agency where you work, I don't think you could describe the company culture there as being particularly good. And yet, I don't know if, I don't think it affected the quality of the work you guys did. I think the work you did was top-notch, even though there might not have been the best company culture there.

What the company culture cost them was their creative director, and that is gonna affect your ability to do business. So I think that's part of it, right? It might be more about that, like more about keeping. Keeping key people in, keeping them in key positions. If somebody who's really good at what they do, who does not enjoy going to work, will find work elsewhere, and will easily find work elsewhere.

And replacing that person is, first of all time consuming. Second of all, expensive. And third of all, it might not work.

Chris Torbay: That’s also where you get things like quiet quitting. Which is, if the culture kind of sucks, then you go in there, you take your paycheck because you know it's a pretty good paycheck.

And as you said before, it's hard to find a new job. But you spend your whole day saying, “Yeah, they're not paying me enough to go and do that, or to cover so-and-so's ass, or to, whatever.” And so they're letting problems go up. “They're gonna let this problem happen. I'm just gonna, yeah. It's not my fault,” whereas if you belong to a company that does have a really strong culture, you go, “Hey, geez, I should go tell somebody that this, we're heading towards this iceberg,” and whatever you feel a bit of ownership and responsibility to save everybody else's asses beause you feel like a family.

Ryan Chute: And I think you just said something that's really important, that they have a sense of ownership. They have a sense of dignity, of contribution to something that's pointing towards the greater good. And when we really distill this down, there are 12 kind of major components that I've identified in the culture that are slowing things down or speeding things up.

But ultimately, it boils down to how much does that matter? And if everything was operating optimally, what is the net result?

For short-term thinkers, like Wells Fargo, who created three and a half million fraudulent accounts between 2002 to 2016, as it grew momentum, ultimately you end up seeing this opportunity unfold, and things fall apart. You flip over to Zappos, and they sold for in excess of a billion dollars because they oriented everything around the customer service that they delivered, that unreasonable hospitality that they delivered every day in and day out. And I think, while we may not see it in some things in the marketing top of funnel, we are seeing it mid funnel as the people start interacting with customer service agents, technicians, and or salespeople, or the speed at which they receive things done well, a whole bunch of this stuff becomes invisible, right?

Things just got done faster, easier, smoother, cleaner, and it was done, and the customer didn't have an impression of wow, but maybe, certainly had an impression of that’s easy enough for me to go back and do that again. And given the two choices between Frontier and Southwest, I'm gonna choose Southwest for the sake of 20 bucks difference in the price because I can rely on the experience.

Mick Torbay: And how important is it as an employee of the company to know that your boss has your back? Breaking in a boss is difficult. Nobody likes to do it. But the boss's job is to serve the subordinates. And I think if the boss has that attitude of it's my job to make your job easier, and you come to me with what will allow you to accomplish more, that's gonna set things up for success. I'm not sure everybody who rises to the rank of boss thinks that way. And a lot of people might even get there, through nepotism or through…

Chris Trobay: They think it's the other way around, which is that your employee's job is to serve the boss and absolutely. And what you’re saying is the opposite of that.

Mick Torbay: And so I think that sort of thing can affect things, but ultimately, I think this is about retention. I worry that my ignorance on this subject is going to, is gonna take me in a bad place because I do not consider myself an expert. But to me, that seems like the most important.

Chris Torbay: But retention is a huge part. But there are also plenty of companies that are fine dealing with turnover. McDonald's knows. And McDonald's has a pretty good culture. Kids who worked at McDonald's all say very positive things.

At the same time, they just churn through people, that's the thing. They hire you at 16, you work because their employees go to college. They go off and do something, and so they learned some valuable lessons, and hopefully, they actually experience a good company culture. But that's a company that is also used to operating with turnover as part of the thing.

Your example of the guy in Virginia Beach, he's a guy who didn't want to have a huge human resources challenge every single day of his life. He would like people to join, and he could forget about that for a while.

Mick Torbay: And it never occurred to him that there was a problem, by the way.

Chris Torbay: But you can run it both ways.

Mick Torbay: He thought the problem was the town.

Chris Torbay: And maybe he solved it by saying, “You know what, we gotta get two solid HR people in here and just gimme new employees” as opposed to solving his problem.

Mick Torbay: That’s exactly what they did.

Chris Torbay: That's what I'm saying, you can do it, it makes you a dick, but you can totally run your business that way if you want.

Mick Torbay: But it's expensive. You gotta pay for those people, and it’s ultimately going to mean that when someone really great comes by, you can't say, “I'm gonna lock this person in 'cause she's freaking awesome.” She's gonna leave because she can go anywhere.

Ryan Chute: I think that leads to the bigger conversation of what we're talking about here is, if the buying experiences are the things that we want talk about in our advertising.

Then equally as much we need to talk about the employee experiences in a lot of ways to attract new candidates, to be able to get more buying experiences underway. So it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy of capacity. That one, you're never gonna keep a unicorn, you're never gonna lock that good one down. Those unicorns down because top candidates don't stick around in toxic environments. Why would they? Why do they need to?

And if you're the, if you're a really strong, sales guy in a toxic environment, there's a pretty good chance that you're a toxic person yourself. Like you're really comfortable in survival mode, fighting it out with the rest of the toxic people. You're in the shark den.

Mick Torbay: So then my question to you would be:

Is company culture something that is luck, that is to say, you happen to be this kind of leader and you naturally lead in a certain way that makes everybody else feel good and want to be part of your team. Or is company culture something that you can purchase? Can I go and say, I would like to buy myself one lot of company culture and then bring someone in, create this?

Because I don’t, I literally don't know the answer to.

Chris Torbay: I think the risk is that people think you, and you even said sometimes it's just lip service, and people say, “Oh yeah, we should get some more company culture in here.”

So let's have a summer picnic, and let's have Santa Claus come at Christmas, and let's have red shirt day and whatever. And it's if the boss is still a dink, and everybody's underpaid and everybody's overworked, and they're all still putting out fires every single day that company culture doesn't work.

The company culture where everybody feels like they need to pull together and, because they believe in this thing,  and then on Monday morning meetings people will say, “No, we gotta go out there. We gotta see if we can beat our, beat our projections.” That rah thing is not gonna come from that sort of thing, it only comes when you feel like you have a stake in it or something. And so I think it can be expensive. I think you do stuff like profit sharing, there's a culture thing where when people feel like it actually can pay me, so if I really care more, but those things are also not cheap.

You can't just go buy some balloons and pizza on Friday and think you have a company culture now.

Mick Torbay: Even if it's a Hawaiian pizza,

Chris Torbay: If it's Hawaiian pizza, you get good shot.

Ryan Chute: I mean, anything with pineapples really.

It really does self-fulfill the prophecy. And the answer to your question earlier of, is it something that you can purchase, or is it something that you can’t?

Mick Torbay: Because you can purchase advertising, I know that we do it. And other people do it. But my question, is it possible to bring someone in and create the sort of culture that we know will lead to company success, separate from the luck of being able to do it yourself?

Chris Torbay: You have to do it the same way that we sell you advertising, which is you have to not go with what you thought was a good idea for an ad. You have to go with what I think is a good idea for an ad, and it's gonna scare you at first, but you're gonna have to change your expectations.

And I bet you if you're a lousy boss and you bring in a culture person to come and help your company, the boss is gonna have to admit that he is part of the problem.

Ryan Chute: There you go. Thank you. There. There we go. Then that's what I was hoping to get to right now, is that you can purchase a person to come in and teach you how to do it. But it only matters if you do the work.

Mick Torbay: You feel like doing it.

Ryan Chute: Well, it not just feel like doing it, but feels like sustaining it.

Chris Torbay: Committing to that. It's like the first step of any 12-step program. I think you have to admit that you have a problem, and that's why you had to bring in this consultant, and so you have to listen to what they say.

Ryan Chute: And thank you. The 12-step program really does start with admitting that you do have a problem. And then from that, making amends with not just that, but the process in which you need to resolve those issues. And then you need to go out and apologize to all the people that you did awful things to. And that could be through your policies, through the things that you need to do to become more, less frictionless in your business or less friction in your business. And then you need to. Teach others to reinforce and support that in and along the way as well. So there is this 12-step process.

The truth of every 12-step process follows these four major key points. These way points. And it always comes back to the person at the very top. If you're just a shitty person, who's going to be a shitty person from now to the end of time, then you're gonna have a terrible culture. And you're going to have to pay the price of turnover, and extra HR people, and lower productivity, and disappointment, and frustration all the time. Putting out fires and covering the cost of customer disappointment and everything that goes along with that.

The chances of you actually growing beyond the length of your shadow is fairly low. It's fairly low. The flip side of it is, if you really lean into it and change your heart to serve people, like you said, starting with the leader saying, “I'm at the bottom, not the top. I'm here to serve them. I need to give them what they need to succeed.” Now we're changing the complete dynamic and disposition, and people can change. People change all the time.

So one of the things that I talk about is very much about getting out of your own way, but the first thing you need to do is recognize what's in yourself. And a lot of that's gonna stem from daddy issues.

Frankly, it's gonna it's coming from daddy.

Chris Torbay: I can see that.

Ryan Chute: You're trying to prove something. You're you act like an asshole because your dad treated you like an asshole. It's all the time. We know that. We fired someone for that.

You have all of these things where you're thinking, “How do I solve this problem?” You solve the problem by making it simple for people to do their job, to feel like they're a part of something, to retain their dignity along the way. So this really boils down to one big thing. The exact same thing that's true about advertising is the exact same thing that is absolutely true about sales and relationships. You can purchase a relationship for an evening too, right? And that's great.

Mick Torbay: This suddenly got awkward.

Ryan Chute: This and that's great for the short term, if that's your thing. But it's a short-term thing. It takes effort, it takes commitment. It takes clear and open, and robust communication to maintain a relationship, and certainly to get into a relationship where you get married and have two lovely kids.

At the end of the day, this is no different than your business. If you hope to retain those people, you have to do something that they're willing, and it they see worth staying for.

Mick Torbay: And if I'm hearing you what, it starts with is for the people at the top admitting to themselves that maybe they're not doing it right.

Ryan Chute: Even the well-intentioned people are almost always not doing it right somewhere. And if they're doing right for what's right, right now, for the size of their business, as the business grows and more people are added it and more complexity is added, we now have to do it again. And probably in a different way.

This is a perpetual motion machine. It's not something that ever ends. It's always going to be something that continues to be problematic. Because if you think about a ball bearing and, or like a bearing, and it's got a little flywheel in it, and there are 12 bearings in it. What if I make one of those bearings bigger? Now the whole flywheel's janky, right? Or I make one too small, or I make the channels too narrow or too thick, or I add rust, right? But what if I grease the wheels? There are always things that can change it, and we have to just one by one, look at all the things that can change and make it easy for people to do their jobs, to do the thing that they want to do to serve themselves.

And what is it that we're trying to serve? A customer?

In an earlier episode, we talked about a customer's purchases, things to tell the world, including themselves, who they are. An employee tolerates a job or thrives in a job to tell the world who they are, including themselves.

And sometimes they get stuck, and sometimes they're in survival mode, and sometimes they're thriving. But at the end of the day, everything that everyone does, no matter what the context, is about identity and ranking up in this world within ourselves, with the people that we love and the greater tribes that we're associated with. And that comes to work. That comes to our family. That comes to our kids, that comes to our next-door neighbor. That comes to everyone.

Mick Torbay: I think especially when it comes to your career, because people literally will describe themselves by their career. I'm a doctor.

Chris Torbay: The number of people you go to, it all struck me as weird. When you meet somebody at a party, the first thing you say is, What do you do? What's probably more real is what's hobby?

Ryan Chute: What makes you happy?

Mick Torbay: “I’m a father.” Nobody answers the question that way.

Chris Torbay: They say, “What do you do?” And half the people are like I'm a something by default. So that is not their identity. But it's amazing how we have decided that's how we will categorize people.

Mick Torbay: But also to some extent. I think you raised an interesting insight, which is that we very often, for better or for worse, we define ourselves by our job.

But I think we also have to define ourselves by who we work for, right? If you work for someone you really admire, I think you will really take pride in. I do this thing, and I do it for that guy, or for this organization. And if you're working for a person who you know doesn't respect you, does not appreciate what you contribute, then how can you with pride define yourself by your career? Then it becomes more like from nine to five, I do this thing, but yeah. Fuck it.

Chris Torbay: And then you, and it's funny when you ask that question, you get some people who answer that way because the, they want to quickly move off of that. Do not define me by this. Because I actually don't like it. I'm just too chicken to leave.

Ryan Chute: Yes. And look, a lot of those people are just not in that place where they want to leave be or they're financially obligated, or whatever the case might be. And it goes both ways, both positive and negative. You could be a Marauder with Stockholm Syndrome surviving in a toxic wasteland culture, and be the guy like in Mad Max who's absolutely going to dominate in that thing. That's fantastic. But they'd sell their mom for a wooden nickel.

That's what you get with that culture. And if that's what you want, just know that you're living a highly transactional life that is going to be treated with transactional people. That's what you're attracting in, which means that's what you're attracting from your customers, and that's what you should expect.

You should be commoditized and expect the lowest price, and always have to be the low-price guy. And when you're celebrating your big wins because you scammed a customer, because you didn't actually deliver on the value proposition that you promised for your premium price, then all of a sudden, you end up reaching this length of your shadow because no longer is it that customers don't know who you are. It's that they do. And that's scary, when you have to be run outta town and go starting the next town over to do the thing again because you're no longer welcome here.

Chris Torbay: Because everybody knows you're full of it.

Ryan Chute: Or you just hit this level of people who are also accepting you for what you are and willing to let you exist in their universe because it suits them in some way. At the end of the day, this is what we saw with Wells Fargo, but, on the equal and opposite flip side, it's also what we saw with Zappos. Culture absolutely is going to affect your success.

Mick Torbay: Do you think they would be as successful as they are if they did not lean into that craziness?

Ryan Chute: My argument is that I don't believe that they would've sold for the multiples they sold to Amazon if they didn't fervently protect their culture the way that Tony Shea did.

It made a huge difference. Now, when you compound that into the cost of doing business, you know the cost of turnover, the cost of extra HR people, the cost of disappointed customers, the cost of lost customers, there isn't this endless glut of customers that's going to come now to the end of time.

There's going to come a time when you just stop. And it just continues to diminish downwards. But you're also just surrounding yourself in this horrible environment of negativity and survival. Guarding the resources, hoarding the resources, and protecting that last little scrap of food that you have. What kind of life is that?

It's just tough. It's exhausting. So it has to impact you because that's where burnout comes from.

Mick Torbay: It can not, it can't not affect you.

Ryan Chute: At the end of the day, what are we trying to solve? We're trying to solve for what kind of culture you want to have.

It's always gonna come from commander's intent. The commander is going to determine what kind of culture you have, not because of what you say you're going to do, but because of what you tolerate, in what actually happens, the actions, the behaviors of other people. If you tolerate toxicity, you get toxicity. If you tolerate transactional treatment, you're going to get it. If you treat your employee like a transaction, like a number, like a peon to do your work and to perform for you and dance even though you don't supply them with the proper leads, and your price book is embarrassing, and all of the things that you're doing to supposedly sell stuff is an absolute tragedy, including the way your marketing, the way you're selling, the way you're delivering on those promises or not the way that you set up your org chart, who you've got in charge of other people?

How you measure people, “you gotta have a 40% closing or you're outta here.” If you're going to measure me on a statistical sample size, that's one fourth of what it needs to be for me to be actually measured on whether or not I could actually achieve 40% and you send me on opportunities that could get me a 40% conversion, and you gave me a selling system that allowed me to convert easier because the customer's gonna say yes more readily. I'm not saying I can't sell, what I am saying is I can't sell under these terms and conditions.

And no solid-minded person is going to say yes to a crap offer. And if I don't believe in it, my customer's not gonna believe in it.

Mick Torbay: And I think that's the point, which is that we do watch what the leaders do. We call them leaders 'cause they go first. We take our cues from what leadership does. And so when leaders act in a way that is supportive of the subordinate, then that works its way down. If the leader acts like they're saying to the subordinate, it's, what have you done for me lately? Then what's that subordinate gonna do to the people who report to him? And that's when the whole thing falls apart.

Ryan Chute: It is. And so it all comes down to really what I love to call Harold the Motivation Penguin.

Chris Torbay: Naturally, but of course this one does.

Mick Torbay: It always comes down to seabirds.

Ryan Chute: It always comes down to Harold. And there's basically there's external internal motivations. There are positive and negative motivations, and all of those motivations orient and lead towards identity. And if we just recognize those simple things first, we can actually start to inspire our employees instead of having them conspire against us.

The only thing you get with compliance is defiance. So the end of the day I'm rhyming.

Mick Torbay: It's a lot of rhyming. That's a lot of rhyme.

Ryan Chute: That's how you remember stuff.

Mick Torbay: And nothing rhymes with Penguin by the way.

Ryan Chute: That's right. The problem. The Harold, motivation Penguin. So the reality of it is that when we know the basic ingredients of motivation, we can motivate, and we can recognize when we're weaponizing things like fear, shame, and guilt in our infrastructure.

So, from an actionable step is take a look at your business. Take a look and figure out, “Hey, am I doing a thing that is causing friction?”

Is my friction creating a culture where I'm getting less productivity, I'm getting less buy-in, I'm lowering my conversion rate, I'm doing the things that are causing problems that have the customers say no? Am I even staying tuned to my marketplace to recognize how the market has shifted and where their head's at right now? Are they afraid? Are they unsettled? Are they feeling unstable? Are they tapped out?

All of these things need to be married into the relationship message that you have together. If you're working on this as a couple, you can't avoid the financial conversations. Those things are gonna come up, and sometimes people want something fixed, not replaced. Maybe build a model that makes it easier for them to do that. Which is gonna make it easier for your salespeople to sell, and you're easier for your CSRs to book appointments, and easier for customers to come into your marketing because we've done marketing that speaks to the real needs of customers in the moment.

Mick Torbay: So if I understand you correctly, if you do it well, you're like a really happy penguin. And if not, it's more like having an albatross around your neck?

Ryan Chute: And you don't want, who wants an owl?

Mick Torbay: Wow. Two, seabirds two, right?

Ryan Chute: This has gotten nautical, up in here. I love it.

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Ryan Chute: To land this bad boy, a strong culture, I believe, makes a big difference. It makes a big difference. And not only the employee experience, because it's the employees who deliver the buying experience. And if employees are 90% of the equation when we're trying to grow our business, then it's our job as leaders to orient towards a culture that serves them so that they can service our clients better. And that means making it easier, and those end up being the things that we can advertise about in our advertising.

In our marketing, we have a client, Barker and Son that does a wonderful job speaking about their business inside their business on every single ad. And it's grown them all kinds of accolades because they're recognized as a great place to work. They don't have a hiring problem in a very challenging state, where hiring is incredibly hard.

Mick Torbay: And nothing in the ad ever says this is a great place to work. We simply project a great place to work.

Ryan Chute: That's right. And look, we're going up against a company that was known for how big they were, like a giant five times the size of our client. And now they're literally 50% less than our client in total revenue. They've gone from five times more to 50% less than our client. And they've done that because they had such a toxic culture.

So these are the ROI. Steps for ROI only matters in relation to time. If we don't land that right, and we don't understand that in the short term, did Wells Fargo look like they were a bunch of geniuses? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Up until they got caught.

Mick Torbay: For a while.

Chris Torbay: Until it imploded.

Ryan Chute: And it's eventually going to implode because too many people doing too many completely illegal things, compounded it out, and then somebody gets fired, and then there's the whistleblowing.

So no different. You have to run a business, if you're looking to run it sustainably in long term, it's all gonna orient around the count the culture. We equally see that in private equity companies that purchase companies, and there's plenty of great private equity companies that do a bang-up job. There's way more that have no clue what they're doing.

Mick Torbay: And don't bother.

Ryan Chute: And fold the companies like dramatically quickly. We see it two, maybe four years at the most, and these companies are completely gone because the culture's not there anymore. Everything's been gutted out, and they're not, and they don't have anything but a name left over.

So does it matter? Yes.

In my estimation, based on what I'm seeing, the math points towards be the leader that people want to follow. And you can't be that leader unless you have a North Star, because the North Star is the only way you can navigate. And if you can't navigate, all you're doing is surfing or drifting, or worse yet, drowning.

Till next time, this is Advertising in America.

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Thank you for joining us on Advertising in America. We hope you enjoyed the show and captured a nugget of marketing magic. Wanna hear more? Subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your friends. Do you have questions or topics you want us to cover?

Join us on our socials @advertisinginamerica. Wanna spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today. Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.

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1. Open your ads with a big, emotional idea.
2. Save the details for your web page.
3. Use parallel structure if you can.

Parallel structure is a writing technique that uses similar grammatical constructions to express related ideas. Patterns of words, phrases, or clauses that are repeated show that your selected ideas are of equal importance. Parallel structure uses clarity and rhythm in writing to create a balanced and harmonious flow.

It is how you can sing to the heart without music.

Parallel structure is a poem that doesn’t rhyme.
Parallel structure is a song without music.

This is parallel structure…

Natural diamonds are rare and wonderful.
Especially when they are perfectly proportioned.

If you are going to ask a rare and wonderful woman
to marry you, be sure that her engagement ring celebrates
a rare and wonderful, perfectly proportioned,
Earthborn natural diamond.

This diamond was born when the earth was formed.
It has been waiting millions of years to be the
undying symbol of your love.

An unspeakably rare and wonderful diamond;
for an unspeakably rare and wonderful love:
Earthborn natural diamonds. Available in only the finest stores.

Visit earthborndiamonds.com to find
the earthborn diamond jeweler near you.

Born, celebrates, waiting, undying…

“Natural diamonds are rare and wonderful. Especially when they are perfectly proportioned.”

1. I suggest Earthborn Diamonds as a name to consider because:

(A) the name clearly indicates that these are natural diamonds.
(B) anything that is “born” is alive.
(C) Your engagement ring likewise comes alive when it “celebrates” the Earthborn Diamond it holds.
(D) I own the domain name.

2. Let’s examine the central stanza of this 5-part, 4-stanza* song of love:

“This diamond was born when the earth was formed. It has been waiting millions of years to be the undying symbol of your love.”

(A) “Earthborn” is explained in that opening sentence.
(B) “waiting” is the third activity that only a living thing can do, and fourth,
(C) to be “undying,” a thing must be alive, like this diamond, and your love.

3. “Rare and wonderful” is repeated 5 times in just 30 seconds.

(A) It describes the Earthborn diamond.
(B) It describes the woman you love.
(C) It describes the love that the two of you share.

4. This love song employs a writing technique known as parallel structure.

(A) The diamond, the woman, and your love all share specific attributes, and
(B) twice the ad tells us that these diamonds are “perfectly proportioned.”
(C) Due to the recurrent, parallel structure of the ad, “perfectly proportioned” will trigger the mind of a man to think of the perfect proportions of the women he loves. But he will do this on his own, in the private chambers of his mind.

5. When you want to attract a man to your diamond brand,

(A) speak about the properties of the diamond
(B) as an echo of the properties of the woman.
(C) He will choose your diamond because he associates it with her.

* We open with a half-stanza followed by three stanzas, then close with a half stanza. Our 30-second ad is a poem without rhyme, a song without music.

Every so often, a corporate giant lobs a memo into the world that makes the rest of us stop, tilt our heads, and think: Huh… so that’s where they’re headed.

AT&T just did it.

Their CEO, John Stankey, sent a 2,500-word response to his company’s employee engagement survey—a survey 99,000 people took the time to fill out. Instead of treating it like a gift, he treated it like a complaint box.

The short version? “We’re changing. You don’t like it? There’s the door.”

It’s not that Stankey was wrong to clarify expectations. Every healthy workplace needs a clear understanding of what employees can and should expect in return for their effort. That unspoken understanding even has a name in organizational psychology: the “psychological contract.” The trouble is, his version read less like a contract and more like a set of terms and conditions you agree to without scrolling to the bottom.

And this is where privately-held, owner-operated companies should lean in—not to copy, but to contrast.

Because here’s the thing: What makes sense (or at least is survivable) for a 100,000-employee telecom is rarely what will make your 100- or 400-person business thrive.

The Problem Isn’t the Survey — It’s the Silence After

If you’ve been in business long enough, you’ve heard the grumbling about employee engagement surveys. Not the questions themselves — the graveyard of nothing that happens afterward.

I know a regional company with about 450 employees who took their survey results seriously… or at least wanted to look like they did. They didn’t like what they saw. So they hired a different survey company and did it again.

That was the entire action plan.

And now they wonder why their people roll their eyes every time the word “engagement” comes up.

The point of a survey isn’t to produce a colorful bar graph for the next leadership meeting. It’s to uncover the gap between what you think is happening and what your people are actually experiencing—then do something meaningful to close that gap.

Why the Big-Company Playbook Doesn’t Fit Smaller Teams

When a CEO of a century-old behemoth talks about “market-based culture” and “realigning professional expectations,” they’re playing a game with rules the rest of us don’t have — or want.

Big corporations can afford to burn some goodwill. They have layers upon layers of departments, recruiters, and brand recognition to keep the machine moving, even if morale takes a hit.

Privately-held and family-run businesses? You can’t afford that luxury. Every person matters more. The culture is smaller, tighter, more personal. A bad departure isn’t a blip on a quarterly report — it’s an empty desk your whole team walks past every day.

When you lead a business where everyone knows everyone’s kids’ names, you don’t get to treat loyalty like a quaint, outdated idea. You don’t have a “talent pipeline” in HR jargon — you have Mary, who’s been with you 14 years and runs the department like her own. You have Daniel, who started in shipping and now heads up product development. You have people whose value isn’t just in “capability, contribution, and commitment” but in the fact that they are the culture.

Look Outside Business for Better Answers

One of the quickest ways to get stuck is to assume the only place you can learn about leadership and engagement is from other companies. If you only study your own industry — or worse, only Fortune 500 giants — you’re basically photocopying someone else’s answers to a test they keep failing.

The non-traditional business school Wizard Academy teaches this approach. Called Business Problem Topology, it’s a technique used for the discovery of innovation models that have been proven, tested and refined in a business category other than your own.

Sports teams. Military units. Theatre companies. Classrooms. Community nonprofits. Each of these has its own playbook for building loyalty, performance, and pride. And here’s the secret: they work better for most small and midsize businesses than the “market-based” models the big players are selling.

Why? Because those worlds understand something corporate America keeps forgetting: people will walk through fire for you if they believe you’d do the same for them.

Fear Works Fast—and Fails Faster

The tone of Stankey’s memo fits a growing trend in C-suites: management by fear. The idea is simple — scare people into staying in line because they have fewer places to go.

Sure, fear can get people to move faster. But you don’t get their best ideas. You don’t get their creativity. You don’t get their desire to go above and beyond. You get the minimum they can do to avoid being noticed—and eventually, you get their resignation letter the minute the job market loosens up.

In smaller companies, fear isn’t just bad strategy — it’s toxic. It doesn’t just erode performance; it eats away at the relationships your whole business depends on.

A Better Way Forward

So, what’s the alternative? It’s not pretending change is easy or that hard conversations aren’t needed. It’s leading with transparency, yes—but pairing it with reciprocity.

If you’re going to ask your team for adaptability, show them yours.

If you’re going to ask for commitment, make commitments you actually keep.

If you’re going to measure engagement, be ready to respond with action—not another survey.

And most importantly, remember that in a privately-held or family-run business, you’re not just protecting a brand—you’re protecting trust. Once you lose that, it doesn’t come back with a new policy memo.

The Takeaway

AT&T can choose the road it wants to take. The rest of us don’t have to follow it.

If you lead a smaller, tighter-knit company, your advantage isn’t in mimicking corporate giants — it’s in staying human. In listening and responding. In valuing loyalty, not as a relic of the past, but as a competitive edge.

And if you’re going to ask for your people’s voice—whether in a survey, a meeting, or a hallway conversation — treat it like the gift it is. Not with defensiveness. Not with dismissal. But with the simple, radical act of saying: I hear you. Let’s fix this together.

Because for businesses like yours, loyalty isn’t dead. It’s alive and well. It just has to be earned.

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What happens when you think your TV commerical style says "premium brand," but everyone watching hears "discount furniture warehouse"?

In this no-BS episode, Ryan Chute teams up with Ad Wizards Mick Torbay and Chris Torbay to tackle one of advertising’s most expensive delusions: believing you can look like Budweiser on a budget better suited for Honest Al’s Used Cars.

From Apple’s minimalist “I’m a Mac” spots to Restoration Hardware’s six-figure polish, the crew pulls apart why cheap production isn’t just a bad look—it’s a bad signal. They reveal how “average” ads waste your money, when a low-budget look can actually work in your favor, and why your nephew with an iPhone isn’t the next Spielberg.

The boys trade war stories on blown budgets, laugh at the charm of terrible cable ads, and argue over whether you should spend until it hurts—or until your brand finally stops looking like a garage sale.

Episode Highlights

• Why most $10K ads are tragically average —and how to rise above them.
• When "cheap" is on-brand (and when it tanks your credibility).
• How to make budget restrictions fuel creativity instead of killing it.
• The hidden costs of cutting corners in casting, gear, and post-production.
• Real-world case studies: from plumbing ads to premium retail giants.

Whether you’re running a scrappy small business or managing a big-budget brand, this episode will sharpen your instincts, save you from wasting money, and help you invest in production that makes your ads look as good as you say you are.

📱 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

💬 When was the last time you saw a “budget-friendly” commercial that didn’t look like your cousin shot it on a weekend—and did you trust that brand more or less afterward?

💥 Brought to you by Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services

In today's episode of Advertising in America, we're going to debate the high cost of TV production.

I love now. Now is the best. Everything is so much better now, and production is better too.

You need to spend enough to deliver a final product that looks professional, that delivers on your concept. If cutting corners compromises that, you can't cut those corners. Your goal is to look like an advertiser that people take seriously. If your production values look half-assed. You undermine that.

You can't just take any idea and try and pull it off on a shoestring. If it looks like you cut corners on production, people will think you cut corners everywhere else. Here's a commercial made on a low budget. But don't confuse Big Head Store with a high-end furniture store. Restoration Hardware spends six figures to make their commercials look good, and that's how they convince people they're a premium store. If cheap is not your brand, consider spending a bit more on TV production.

Ryan Chute: Is it worth paying the piper for premium work, or will the minimum viable product suffice to fight for all the bootstraps? Here's Mick.

Mick Torbay: There's a thing I like to say, and I've even said it a few times on this program I love now. Now is the best. Everything is so much better now, and production is better too.

I actually produce some of the radio commercials I write, and in my home studio, I have the equivalent of about half a million bucks worth of equipment, if I had bought it in the eighties. I have a multi-track recorder of a quality that didn't exist 30 years ago, even if Steely Dan wanted it. I have plugins that emulate the most expensive studio equipment in the world. I record on a Neumann U 87 microphone going into a manly Voxbox preamp. That's about 30 grand right there. Only, none of it is real. It's software and technology indistinguishable from the original. On the television side, I work with studios that have editing capabilities better than George Lucas had when he made Star Wars.

And I'm shooting 30-second TV commercials for a plumber in Milwaukee. Just amazing. So there's no question, production costs are at an all-time low. Enjoy it. But do remember lower production costs doesn't mean you can spend next to nothing and get something that looks as good as a Budweiser commercial. It doesn't level the playing field. It just means Bud spends half a million bucks on a 30 instead of a million, but you can't compete with that when you're spending 5K. The best way to pay less for production is to have a writer who understands the situation and looks at a low budget as a creative restriction.

Remember the Apple Ads from a few years ago. “Hi, I'm a Mac and I'm a PC.” They made 66 of those commercials over four years, so yeah, they couldn't afford to spend a quarter of a million bucks for each one like Apple normally did. It was all done on a white psych with little or no props. The dialogue did most of the heavy lifting, easy to light, easy to shoot. Looked like nothing else on TV. But if you noticed how many small businesses now do TV commercials with two people talking on a white seamless, it's no longer a distinctive thing. It's still cheap, but it's not interesting anymore. Low production value means you'll need above-average writing and above-average talent. The MAC versus PC ads had two top actors, like feature film actors, so be careful.

Keeping your budget low is not easy, but it's doable as long as everyone on the team is aware of the challenge. You can't just take any idea and try and pull it off on a shoestring. If it looks like you cut corners on production, people will think you cut corners everywhere else. Here's a commercial made with a low budget.

But don't confuse Big Head Store with a high-end furniture store. Restoration Hardware spends six figures to make their commercials look good, and that's how they convince people they're a premium store. If cheap is not your brand, consider spending a bit more on TV production.

And if you really want to trigger me, mention a production guy who quotes you a price on a TV commercial before they even see the script. Seriously, that happens. “How much for a TV commercial?” “Oh, we can do one for five grand.” Really? Imagine a construction company quoting to build your new house without even looking at the drawings.

That's what he sounds like to me. Anyone who tells you how much a commercial will cost before seeing the script is either full of shit or completely out of his depth. Avoid that guy like your life depends on it. Find a talented ad writer who looks at a small production budget as a creative challenge, and you could strike gold. It's happened before. It can happen to you.

Ryan Chute: I just love pitting you against the things you're so clearly for.

Mick Torbay: It's kind of mean, actually.

Ryan Chute: It's actually awesome to watch you dance. It's a beautiful thing. Maybe I'm the evil twin. Chris, you spent the national GDP of The Bahamas on a single ad before. What do you have to say?

Chris Torbay: How much should you pay for production? As much as you can afford. There are various rules of thumb. A classic is that you never spend more than 10 or 15% on production because you should spend most of your marketing budget on media, getting your message heard, not on making it.

That's fine, but it also breaks down when the numbers get low or high, for that matter. Just because a 30-second Super Bowl ad costs $8 million doesn't mean you should spend $1.2 million to make it. Some, apparently, try filling it full of celebrities and special effects when they haven't got a particularly good idea or a differentiating message. But how do you calculate that if you use non-traditional media, if you run YouTube or social media or play it at your trade show booth, your media cost might be zero. So what's 15% of that? You need to spend enough to deliver a final product that looks professional and delivers on your concept. If cutting corners compromises, that you can't cut those corners.

Your goal is to look like an advertiser that people take seriously. If your production values look half-assed, you undermine that. The truth is, we are spoiled. Now, the bar has been raised; even the simplest Kickstarter video has production values that look professional, and they have negative money. They actually go further into debt to make it look legitimate. They hire professionals. YouTubers and influencers have sophisticated lighting rigs and audio gear and edit their videos professionally, even when they're trying to look like normal people posting from their bedrooms. There's a reason we don't shoot this podcast on an iPhone in Ryan Chute's rec room.

Production values demonstrate professionalism. It shows we believe strongly enough in the things we say to present them in a way that looks credible and professional. Is there a cheaper way to do it? Yes, there is. Should we do it that way? No, we should not. The key is making sure all the money you spend goes onto the screen. Good gear, good cameraman, good audio production, actors, writers.

Hire somebody smart to give you a great idea. Can you get some kids straight out of community college with a communications diploma to write your ads? Sure. Don't spend the money. I'm expensive, but the money you spend will be on the screen. Where you stop spending is where it gets more expensive, but not visibly better. Extra money for celebrities for no good reason other than, “Hey, that's cool.” Fancy dinners and tons of people at the chute, staying in hotels and eating big meals that we bill to the job.

Corporations get themselves into this trap because the committee has to be there, and it costs money to send the marketing manager, the marketing director, and the VP marketing all to Hollywood for a week and eat at the Ivy every night.

In my big agency days, I was on tons of those jobs. That's how the big breweries end up spending $350,000 on a 30-second spot. Skip those expenses, but do pay for quality. We say this all the time in business: there's a difference between the lowest price and the best value. The Volvo might be the best value, even though it ain't cheap. You don't have to buy the Ferrari, but please don't buy the Trabant.

Ryan Chute: The Trabant 601 was a very reliable automobile. 499 ccs of fury that was. After the commercial break, we'll thoroughly investigate how to whole-ass your production work.

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Ryan Chute: I love how you both danced around the numbers. What does it look like in cold, hard cash?

Mick Torbay: I think where a lot of the problem comes from is that nobody wants to look the client in the eye and say no. Nobody ever wants to say, “Actually, maybe you can't afford this, and when it comes to television, sometimes you just can't afford it, no matter what your nephew says.”

If you're gonna make a commercial, we can't just pretend that there aren't people doing that really well on television today. And your commercial, you can't compare the amount you're gonna invest in production with the other guy who also sells grapple grommets. It's, it's no, you're right next to a Toyota commercial.

So if you look ridiculously cheap and shitty, and then the Toyota commercial comes next, you're fighting against them too. And so nobody wants to say, “This is TV. You really have to do this well. And so if you can't afford good production, no problem. Let's do radio where it's a lot cheaper to sound really freaking good.”

Chris Torbay: But even in radio, in all media, the problem is that when you say nobody wants to say no in all media, there is always somebody who can do it for less than that. Let's mention a number. As soon as you mention a number, if I ask you, is there a way of doing it cheaper than that? There's always a guy who could do it. And then when that guy gives you a number and you say, “Is there any way of doing it cheaper than that?” The answer is always “Yes, there is always a way cheaper.” And they're all making, I'm doing it cheaper commercials right now, and they're all making, but it's a straw that broke the camel's back argument at one point, do you say, “Okay, now it looks crap.”

It maybe only look incrementally crappier than the previous one, which only looked incrementally crappier than the one before that. But at some point it looks. Amateurish and embarrassing, and what are you gonna do with the money you saved, because now you just look bad.

Ryan Chute: These are absolutely astoundingly important things to talk about. Let's look at some of the fun facts here that will absolutely knock your socks off in a lot of ways. And one service business, this is US Small Business Administration, in 2024, small businesses are spending 5% to 12% of revenue on marketing production.

That's not the media spend, that's not the channel spend. That's not the management fees. When we're thinking about service businesses getting their message out, their revenue, based on percentage of revenue, it's not unheard of in the world of business, in services specifically, this is measured through census data, right? That you would spend 20% of your marketing budget.

Now we're talking home services, plumbers, everything else. As a rule, we're running somewhere between 3% and 12% for most of our clients. Some of the people who've ended up overspending a bit more because Google has spent more of their money this year, have dusted up to the edges of 13 to 15% to aggressively grow. But we're talking about fairly astounding levels of expenditure here.

I've seen production come in as low as $200-$250 for a video, and it is clearly not TV quality. There is just no way in the world that this is going to look good on TV. We have production houses that we've used that will do it for $1,000 to $1,500 a video if you do a bunch of videos together. And again, if you remember the old days of cable TV ads where the slick used car salesman is coming, asking, telling you to come on down to Honest Als, super amateur, and there's to some degree, the potential of charm is there. Not unlike Red House.

Mick Torbay: And might be on brand, right? If Honest Al is saying, I've got the cheapest Chevys in town and he's got a cheap ass commercial. That works, that's cool.

Chris Torbay: But if you're trying to sell a premium product, which any of our consumers, that's where our clients are.

Mick Torbay: It falls apart, because most of the clients that we work with are not pretending to be the cheapest solution in town. And if you're gonna expect your customer to pay more to hire you. You can't look like the cheap guy.

Ryan Chute: Absolutely. And we've seen generic ads in a box where the technician walks up to the front door, the clip of the truck parked in the perfect spot, and the handshake and the smile, and then the talk at the thermostat. And then the conversation over the kitchen counter, all of the generic nonsense, and they're paying $10,000 for that one time and use it as much as you want. And that includes everything. Is that a good deal? Absolutely.

That is the worst money you have ever spent on the guy, and we've actually had this happen, who immediately threw out that he could do something that we were doing for a client for, somewhere in the realm of half. And that they would come to him and they would do all of this stuff without even seeing the script. They had no idea how much we had to pay the actual guy who was the actor.

Chris Torbay: Exactly. And that's why I say that money is money that goes on the screen. You can read the ad yourself, or you can get your brother-in-law, who always wanted to be an actor. He can be the star. Or you can cast somebody who is a professional actor. Who's got that right gravitas, if it's supposed to be gravitas or has got that comedic ability, if it's supposed to be a funny spot, and that's money well spent, you've created a character. Think of campaigns that are out there where you go, I love that guy, when you know, you mentioned I'm a Mack, I'm a PC. Justin Long's got some charm to him, and I forget the name of the guy who played the PC, but he was a well-known comedic actor, and he played the Schmo really well. That was good money. Could you and I have read those? Sure. But they wouldn't have been as good. It was worth the money to pay for those two actors for it to land.

Ryan Chute: Content Marketing Institute did a research study and found that small businesses are wasting 26% of their advertising budget on ineffective production. And that really does hurt when you're a small business. Like, we're never going to recommend doing TV if it's out of production. We're also never going to recommend that if you're going to do it, have a standard so that you stand up against the Budweiser commercial on one side and the Apple commercial on the other side. Otherwise, you are wasting your money if you can't land that joke, if you can't get the thing done, and I don't care if it's in front of a white screen. If the copy is there, I'm all for it.

If there's nothing that the copy is going to do, that's going to stand it out past the white screen setup. Don't do the white screen right? Looking at the production cost for what it is, is astoundingly more beneficial.

So what are we seeing typically for people who are really just asking us what they want to know?

The Wyzowl Video Marketing Research Council in 2024 said $1,500 to $5,000 per minute is a fairly common video advertising production cost, not TV.

When it comes to TV, the average advertising production cost ranges from $1,500 to $10,000 per asset, which is usually 30 seconds, and that's done by the American Marketing Association.

Mick Torbay: Remember, that's the average. That means there's a lot that's way higher than that. There's clearly stuff that's being done that's lower than that, but understand, if you spend $10,000, you are average. You are not standing out. You are not. “Oh my God. What a great piece of video.” $10,000 gets you average. That is something to bear in mind when someone says, “Yeah, I can do that.”

Chris Torbay:  Because it’s based on Crazy Charlie's discount, car dealer. Like all those guys. Those are guys in that average as well.

Mick Torbay: And they're doing it for $400.

Chris Torbay: So do an average of all the ads that you remember, and like, and you find charming or interesting or that stay with you,

Mick Torbay: Like what you talk about at the water cooler. All of those were made for six figures.

Ryan Chute: And the super cringey Red House one absolutely fits for a discount furniture mart.

Mick Torbay: They're not pretending to be anything.

Chris Torbay:  But the other thing you may find out too, is like you may find out that it costs more than you think, right?

In Canada, we have the Loblaw's grocery store chain has a line of products called Noname, and they're all this yellow label with plain black print on them, whatever.

Mick Torbay: It's ugly on purpose.

Chris Torbay: They advertise on TV, they make them look cheap. They look like they're in a studio. You can actually see the lights. So but they probably spend a lot of money to make it look like it's a low-budget spot. And I can guarantee you that they hired top graphic designers to design that ugly ass logo. No logo, but that ugly ass layout design that goes on all those things. So those guys from Red House, they may be doing it for 10 bucks. They may also not be doing it for 10 bucks and trying really hard to make it look like it was, because it's on brand actually.

Ryan Chute: Absolutely. And there's other factors in production cost as well. The type of camera that's used. One of the studios that we often frequent uses some of the most state-of-the-art equipment, and they rent that equipment because it's so expensive to buy that camera, just that one camera. Not just the camera, but the lens for the camera and how it actually does the thing specifically.

Technology has absolutely advanced us so astoundingly forward and reduced cost dramatically, because we're not taking up a warehouse worth of space to have all of this studio space. We've often had meetings at Metalworks in Toronto, where they have just massive pieces of equipment that are incredibly costly, astoundingly accurate and high fidelity.

But we're really trying to recognize that, like you said, in your studio at home, you can knock out a radio commercial. It reminds me of Johnny Molson's creative that we had with a client where he talks about a helicopter coming in from Luxembourg and using the dynamite to blow at the back wall. And all of those things on the TV budget would've been somewhere in the realm of half a million to a million dollars. The helicopter from Luxembourg alone. But on radio, it costs the cost of the radio because we just created.

Mick Torbay: You can quote a radio commercial production before seeing the script.Because I challenge you to spend more than $5,000 on a radio commercial. And that’s when you get Harrison Ford to do it.

Ryan Chute: That's it. That's exactly it. So other costs include royalties and licenses. Real music or boxed music, right? If you have royalty-free music that everyone can use and that you're gonna recognize on 58 other things, you don't stand out anymore. And did you spend your money wisely?

Or do I spend the extra $600 to get proper production done? $2,000 for actual actors who have to land in time and enunciate and inflect all correctly to have that, that perfect southern drawl or Minnesota mom or whatever the case might be, that really hits it hard. All of these things cost money, flying them to locations, costs money, buying the royalties out so that there's no licensing where you're having to repurchase the copyrights or use them in different areas, all costs money. These people have rights that are doing this production as well. Heck, even with Dewey Jenkins, when they released Bobby to go to Hollywood, Dewey Jenkins paid him a hundred thousand dollars as a parting gift. And they announced it on an ad that he was actually letting them go, and then it hit the news. And of course they said, "Is it real?" And it was real. That's what he got. So these things add up, and they matter. But will it further your brand? That's the question of the day.

Chris Torbay: And that's where it comes down to. It is case by case, and the problem you get in is when somebody quotes a number. You just said a bunch of numbers, which may be appropriate for some things and may be completely inappropriate for others. I hate for somebody to hear $600 or $2,000 and then say that's how much the thing that you had just attributed to those actually costs, it depends, right? If you write a jingle and it has a choir in it, you gotta pay all the choristers. If you write a radio ad that has two people in it versus one that's got four. There are extra actors in there, and if they need to be comedic actors, and so you have to get good ones rather than just any old radio DJ reading the copy; it's gonna cost a little bit more. And this is the problem, we all have apocryphal stories. Everybody's got a friend who did a spot for $5,000.

Was that spot... I used to shoot corporate videos, and people would say, “I got a guy who did a corporate video, and we heard they were $5,000.”

And it's okay, you're a mining company and you want us to go 7,000 feet underground and shoot for a day. Was your friend's apocryphal corporate video that was done for $5,000, did it have those challenges? Did we have to go all the way to Sudbury? Did we have to get a crew underground?

Ryan Chute: You gotta pay extra just to go to Sudbury?

Chris Torbay: But no one ever asked that. They just get a price in their mind. And I guess that's going back to the very beginning, that's why we hesitate to say “what’s a number,” because until you know anything, the number is only misleading. We have to talk about the exact apples and oranges that we are dealing with here before. That's right. We can talk about the number.

Mick Torbay: And I think sometimes we get bogged down in the individual technology. Like, I know Apple released a TV commercial, which they proudly said was shot on an iPhone. And I believe they shot that thing on an iPhone. But what they didn't do is have another guy on an iPhone 20 feet back showing you the lighting rig because you can shoot things on an iPhone if you light the living hell out of it, and have a brilliant, super attractive model to be shot. And the whole thing's probably on a steadicam rig.

Chris Torbay: And post-production is color correcting. There was all of that stuff. There was all kinds of stuff done in post.

Ryan Chute: So there’s editing, right? And look, what we need to recognize is that this is all proportionate to your budget, that you decide on based on your business. We're not saying you have to spend this money when we're recommending something, and you don't have to feel compelled if you're doing it on your own to overspend or outspend. Some things are an investment, and you're paying for them like Kickstarter before you're even making money, and other times you're producing these things in line with what it costs to put out your brand in the best way.

Remember, the biggest thing that matters most is the words. The second biggest thing is the visuals and other aesthetics. The other languages of the mind that associate with those words. The thing is that we've proven that for decades on the radio, and we've proven that with Theatre of the Mind and how that leverages up. So, is it that we only wanna do radio or only TV or only social? Is there a different aesthetic for social than there is for TV? Absolutely, there is. All of these things are true, and they're all relevant to where you're at in your business today. It's your production should be a reflection of your current budget to play the game that can be played, within the confines of what we have to work with.

Mick Torbay: And it should be a reflection of how you see yourself in the marketplace. Like in the echelon of how you see yourself.

Ryan Chute: That's it. It's gotta match or wait until it does match or do a different thing to get to the next thing. There are lots of ways to approach this. There's more than one way to solve a problem. At the end of the day. We have to figure out what the problem is and what resources we have at our fingertips are from that. We can figure out what to do to make it all make sense.

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Ryan Chute: Where do we land on production costs? The truth is, there's no one-size-fits-all answer. Mick made great points about today's technology, and a tight budget doesn't mean that you can't create something absolutely amazing. And sometimes a clever idea and a little creativity can do more than a big budget ever could.

And Chris brought up an important reminder, too. Investing in quality can make a big difference. Especially when you want to build trust and look professional in proximity to the ads that are in either side of you.

If you're a small business operator. I get it. Every dollar counts.

The good news is you don't have to spend a fortune to make a great ad, but if you do have the budget, invest a bit more so you can add a polish that tells your audience that you mean business in relation to what you're trying to represent in the marketplace. A premium product, a premium solution, versus a low-cost, low-budget solution. The sweet spot is where your budget, your brand, and your goals all align. And whether you're spending $500 or $5,000, focus on making every dollar work every bit for you. We're here to help you figure it out. So don't be shy.

Reach out, and we'll help you make the most of what you've got to spend. Whether you work with us or not, we always want to give you help.

Until next time, keep it real and keep it clear. This is Advertising in America.

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Thank you for joining us on Advertising in America. We hope you enjoyed the show and captured a nugget of marketing magic. Wanna hear more? Subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your friends. Do you have questions or topics you want us to cover?

Join us on our socials @advertisinginamerica. Wanna spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today. Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.

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The strongest brands are the ones with the most distinctive personalities. But even a weak and faded personality is better than none at all.

A brand with a personality is an imaginary character in the minds of the customers of that brand. It is similar to the characters in syndicated television shows, bestselling novels, and big movie franchises.

Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, and Robin Williams are actors, but they are also characters in your mind.

Willie Nelson, Michael Jackson, and Taylor Swift are musicians. but they are also characters in your mind.

Brands are like that.

Two people are now going to tell us about books.

Dear Person Reading This,

A writer can fit a whole world inside a book. Really. You can go there. You can learn things while you are away. You can bring them back to the world you normally live in.

You can look out of another person’s eyes, think their thoughts, care about what they care about.

You can fly. You can travel to the stars. You can be a monster or a wizard or a god. You can be a girl. You can be a boy. Books give you worlds of infinite possibility. All you have to do is be interested enough to read that first page…

Somewhere, there is a book written just for you. It will fit in your mind like a glove fits your hand. And it’s waiting.

Go look for it.

Neil Gaiman
A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, p. 22

Brands are like novels and movies and TV shows. Brands are like hit songs. Brands are like actors and musicians. Brands are like good books.

Here is the second person.

Dear Reader,

When I was 12, I was given a scholarship to a private girl’s school in the town where I lived. All the other girls came from another – wealthier – town. They were driven to school in Jaguars and Mercedes Benzes. They ate artichokes. No way would I ever fit in.

In the midst of my funk, the English teacher assigned A Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. As it happens, Frankie, the book’s heroine, is also 12 and also wants to belong. Her yearning is such that she wants to know everyone in the world and for everyone to know her – exactly what I wanted!

That’s what stunned me, not just the intensity of the longing, but the specificity. It meant – it had to mean – there were other people in the world like me. Not just Frankie, a fictional character, but the author who had to have felt that way herself in order to give Frankie that longing. I felt such an intimate connection with her, as if she’d looked deep inside me and knew me in the way I wanted the world to know me. Reading didn’t just offer escape; it offered connection!

All these years later, I just have to look at my copy of A Member of the Wedding on my bookshelf to experience again how I felt when I first read it and to feel the full force of that connection: to Frankie, to Carson McCullers, to the 12-year-old girl I was, and to 12-year-olds everywhere.

Emily Levine
A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, p. 52

A brand with a personality is like A Member of the Wedding, written by Carson McCullers.

Who was the first ad writer to give a brand a distinctive personality?

That’s like asking, “Who built the first car?” To answer that question, we would first have to agree upon the defining characteristics of a car.

For us to agree upon “Who was the first ad writer to give a brand a distinctive personality,” we would first have to agree upon a definition for the word “distinctive,” and then we would have to agree upon what constitutes a “personality.”

We could do that, or you can just trust me when I say that Carl Benz built the first car in July of 1886 and Bill Bernbach created the first brand with a distinctive personality in 1958. The ad is not logical. It does not speak of features and benefits. It does not feel like an ad.

Ads with personality are captivating and engaging because they give you a look at something through the eyes of someone else.

In this case, we are listening to a catty cat, an obvious metaphor for a snobbish society matron.

You might be thinking, “That ad isn’t special. I see ads like that all the time.”

These are my responses:
(1.) No, you see ads like that occasionally, perhaps 1 in every 1,000 ads you encounter. You only think that you see them “all the time” because when you do see one, it has an impact on you. Your mind has been ignoring the 999 others because they are uninteresting and predictable.
(2.) Keep in mind that we are talking about 1958. In those days, this ad was revolutionary.

A year after Bill Bernbach wrote that first Ohrbach’s ad, a group of Germans came to America and asked, “Where can we find the man who writes those ads for Ohrbach’s?” And thus the legendary “Think Small” campaign for Volkswagen was born.

Volkswagen, a small car with an air-cooled engine from Germany, quickly became a powerful brand with a cult-like following. And this happened in America just 14 years after the end of WWII. Don’t tell me that ad writers don’t make a difference.

I began this journey by accident.

For many years, I have quoted Bill Bernbach’s famous statement, “I’ve got a great gimmick. Let’s tell the truth.”

The truth is that he never said it, and he never claimed to have said it.

Bill was searching for a new gimmick for Ohrbach’s Department Stores when his client Nathan Ohrbach looked at him and said, “I’ve got a great gimmick. Let’s tell the truth.”

It is foolish to create a personality for a company that doesn’t already have one. Great ad writers perceive the personality that is already alive within the company. And then they amplify it.

If you try to give a personality to a company that doesn’t already have one, the customers who respond to your ads will feel they have been deeply misled and betrayed. You can put lipstick on a pig, but everyone who encounters that pig will still recognize it as a pig.

Bill Bernbach never did that. He found the truth, amplified the truth, and then proclaimed the truth. When I recently learned what Bill Bernbach really did say, it freaked me out a little. Things that I have discovered, developed, practiced, and written about for more than 40 years had been discovered by Bill Bernbach before I was born.

This is Bill Bernbach:

“A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.”

“There is no such thing as a good or bad ad in isolation. What is good at one moment is bad at another. Research can trap you into the past.”

“We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics, we forget we can create them.”

“Our job is to bring the dead facts to life.”

“An idea can turn to dust or magic depending on the talent that rubs against it.”

“The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.”

“If you stand for something, you will always find some people for you, and some against you. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you, and nobody for you.”

Richard Kessler owned an invisible little jewelry store in a sad little strip center in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. Everyone in Menomonee Falls was willing to drive 21 miles to Milwaukee, but no one in Milwaukee was willing to drive 21 miles to Menomonee Falls.

But that’s exactly what we needed them to do.

Richard had vision and courage, but so do a lot of other business owners. The reason I agreed to work with the Kess-Man is that he was willing to be vulnerable. The man had genuine humility.

If a client doesn’t have humility, they won’t let you write ads that reveal their heart.

We had a tiny little ad budget, so we ran weird radio ads late at night that ended with Richard saying, “Kesslers Diamonds, inconveniently located on Appleton Avenue in Menomonee Falls.”

Humorless people assumed that Richard had misspoken. They called the radio stations and said, “He’s not saying ‘conveniently located.’ He’s saying ‘inconveniently located.’ That man is saying ‘inconveniently located!’ You need to correct that.”

My goal was for you to feel that you knew Richard Kessler. I liked Richard and I wanted you to like him, too. To like him, you just needed to get to know him.

We accomplished this in 60-second increments.

If you win the heart, the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.

Kessler taught every employee to think and feel like they owned the store. He gave each of them his full authority. No employee at Kesslers ever had to “check with the boss” to make a decision. They were able to make gigantic decisions without having to check with him or with anyone else. That’s real vulnerability.

When Richard Kessler had grown the company 70 times bigger than it was when we got started, he gave his employees the company.

Kesslers Diamonds is the largest employee-owned jewelry store in America. They have 9 big stores across Wisconsin and Michigan with plans to open a lot more.

I shared that story with you to make you understand a transformative truth: Passion, pride, and confidence are overrated. The world is full of idiots who are passionate, proud and confident.

Untempered passion, pride, and confidence create a strutting peacock, a coarse cliché, a cardboard cut-out wearing an Armani suit. If you write ads for such a person, you must target people who want to be that person. Count me out.

If you want to write successful ads that win the hearts and minds of millions, look for business owners who have humility, vulnerability, and generosity.

America loves Warren Buffett – not because he has billions of dollars – but because he has humility, vulnerability, and generosity.

Be like Warren Buffett.

Nobody answers their phone anymore. 

Cold callers are sus. 

Cold calling is illegal. 

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Cold Calling in 2025? Are you Mad?! Maybe…

I don’t really care what opinions people have about cold calling in 2025. When you need to feed your business, you go hunting. If there’s no food in the pantry, you go get food. And that’s cold calling. 

As more people use caller ID to gatekeep their calls, the stats have changed. Cold texting is illegal until you get explicit permission from your prospect, and robodiallers will get you into a lot of hot water. 

But when you need calls on the board, you’ll do whatever it takes to get appointments. Let’s go over what you need to know to make it work legally. 

What is Cold Calling?

Cold calling is the unsolicited initiation of contact, usually by phone, with someone who has not previously expressed interest in your product, service, or business, with the goal of starting a sales conversation, gathering information, or setting a meeting.

Key points that make it cold:

• No prior relationship: The prospect hasn’t opted in, requested info, or engaged with you before.
• Intrusive by nature: You’re entering their world uninvited, which means you’re starting at -1 trust.
• Intentional prospecting: The primary aim is to move the prospect closer to a buying decision or next step.

What it’s not:

• Calling a current or past customer (that’s warm calling).
• Returning an inbound inquiry (that’s follow-up).
• Outreach to a referral (that’s referral-based prospecting).

Done poorly, cold calling is telemarketing’s loud, obnoxious cousin. Done well, it’s a high-effort, high-focus form of direct outreach that wins precisely because most competitors won’t do it well (or at all).

Is Cold Calling Legal in the US in 2025?

Yes, cold calling is legal in the US, but it’s wrapped in enough regulation to get the careless into hot water.

If you’re calling cold prospects in 2025, you need to navigate federal, state, and sometimes industry-specific rules.

Federal Rules That Matter for Cold Calling

1. Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA)

• What it does: Restricts telemarketing calls, auto-dialers, prerecorded messages, and texts.
• Key takeaways for cold calling:
  
  • No robodialing or prerecorded voice messages without prior consent, especially to cell phones.
  • Must display a valid caller ID.
  • Must maintain an internal Do Not Call (DNC) list and honor opt-outs immediately.
  • Calling hours: 8 am to 9 pm local time in the prospect’s time zone.

2. National Do Not Call Registry (DNC)

• What it does: Let consumers opt out of unsolicited sales calls.
• Key takeaways:
  
  • You must scrub your list against the DNC before calling.
  • Fines can hit $51,744 per violation.
    Exemptions:
    
    • Business-to-business calls.
    • Existing business relationship, within the last 18 months.
    • Calls to people who gave prior written consent.

3. FTC & FCC Enforcement

• Both agencies can enforce TCPA and DNC rules.
• Lawsuits are common, especially from “professional plaintiffs” who know the system.

State-Level Rules for Cold Calling

• Some states go further with stricter call time limits, licensing, or mandatory disclosures. For example:
  
  • Florida (FTSA) has expanded restrictions on autodialing and even certain text messages.
  • Oklahoma & Washington have similar “mini-TCPA” state laws with higher penalties.

The bottom line is, cold calling is still legal, but you must have a compliance process like DNC scrubbing, opt-out tracking, and time-zone checks.

Train your team to open calls with the right disclosures and document everything in case you get audited or sued.

What Does a Cold Call Sound Like in 2025?

Here is the modern cold call formula that blends old-school grit with new-school personality. This strategy is the difference between being hung up on in 5 seconds and booking an appointment in less than 60 seconds.

1. First Contact

Job one: kill the “sales call” vibe instantly. While all the typical call centers are chasing the yes to get the customer in a “positive mood,” it’s actually a fool's errand. No cold call in history has earned that right. So take FBI Negotiator, Chris Voss’s advice and go for the “no.” 

“Hi [first name], I know you weren’t expecting me. Would it be crazy to think I'm calling for a good reason? 

The key to an effective cold call is maintaining pace. Once you’ve received a quick no, move right along with a sense of urgency for respecting their time. 

2. The Hype Hook

There is literally only one reason a person would give you their money, effort, or time. You have something of value that they need, and you’re ready to give it to them in exchange for something logical.  

The four ingredients of hype include the following: 

1. An intrusive method of communication (like a cold call)
2. An offer too good to be true. 
3. A distinctly logical anchor.
4. A profound sense of urgency. 

You’ve got about 4 seconds to pull this off with confidence and class. For example:

“We’re a new Veteran-owned AC repair company in [specific neighborhood], and we are out looking to make a good first impression. We’re offering our fellow neighbors a $29 tune-up and donating 100% of proceeds to Veterans in need. Would it be too much to ask to count on you for an appointment today?” 

Now, don’t be a liar. That’ll come back to haunt you. Find your authentic offer that is too good to be true, and then anchor it with something that just makes sense. 

3. The Closing ARC

Almost everyone is going to find a reason to resist you. So spend less time on the offer and more time on the benefits of the offer. No one cares about your tune-up, but an awful lot more people care about Veterans, as in the earlier example. 

“[First name], I totally agree with you that you don’t know us, and maybe you even have a guy that you use already, but every 29 dollars goes a long way in helping a veteran in need get essential food and medicine. We want to do our part by doing what we’re good at, AC maintenance and repairs. Let us give you a great experience. It wouldn’t hurt to give your AC a little extra TLC, would it?”

Anytime you’re faced with resistance, recognize that you need to do three things instantly: 

1. Agree with the person no matter what they say. 
2. Rebuttal it with something that speaks to their most likely objection. In this case, it’s the lack of urgency. 
3. Close the sale by asking them to buy again. 

Repeat this Closing ARC process until they book a call or get off the call you’re on. Always make it super friendly, but be tenacious. You have one goal. Close the appointment. 

4. The Next Step

You don’t have an appointment until you have a specific day and time. Not a window. Not a general commitment. Not a day….or a time. All you have is a fake commitment that will fail to get the technician in the door. Here’s how you get a next step solidified.  

• Confirm a specific day and time for the appointment. 
• Get permission to text them before the appointment. 
• Text them a summary of the appointment after your call. 
• Text them the evening prior to the appointment.
• Text them the day of the appointment. 
• Text them 45 minutes before the appointment. 

If they are open, also collect their email and ask permission to send them a little info about your company. Everything you do from here on in is relationship building. We want them to feel really good about their decision and about you coming. 

5. The Referral 

Now that you’ve landed the appointment, here’s a litmus test for the truly brave. It’ll teach you how solid your actual appointment is, and how much value the prospect sees in your offer. Ask: 

“[First name], just before I let you go, would I be crazy to ask you to do me a tiny favor? [wait on no response] 

Would you know one other person who would love to get a $29 tune-up to support a Veteran today?”

The people who feel good about you enough to book a sincere appointment would feel even better paying it forward. 

A ballsy move, but one that will truly pay off once you’ve mastered the cold call. 

For those that want to get permission to share their loved one's info, have a text message standing by ready to send to your first appointment to share with your second opportunity. 

Some Phone Psychology for Cold-Calling in 2025

Be their friendly neighborhood repair guy. People like knowing you’re local. There’s a safety in that. Be ready to mention nearby streets, landmarks, or recent weather events to spike familiarity and engagement.

Use your late-night FM DJ voice. A warm, steady, and confident tone will make you sound more like a neighbor than a telemarketer.

The less cold you can make it, the better. Boost your answer rates by up to 30% by first hitting the call list with a direct mail piece if at all possible. 

Relentlessness is essential today. You’re not going to get away with 3 attempts at calling anymore. The average outbounder has to make 12 attempts at reaching a cold lead. 

Get a verbal commitment on the next step. People are more likely to protect their self-image by doing what they say they will do out loud. 

Use authentic scarcity. No one will believe you if you say we’re doing this as a limited-time offer. Base your limited offers on authentic reasons, such as limited appointment slots. 

Leverage unity as a means of connection. People want to do business with people who share the same values and elevate their own identity. 

Want more deals? Get dialling. 

Need help? This is what I do. Pick up the phone and call me. 

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