[00:00:00] Luigi Prestinenzi: Welcome. This is the Sales IQ Podcast. My name is Luigi Prestinenzi, and I'm on a mission to help salespeople be the best sales professionals they can be. Each week, we'll bring you a different message from thought leaders from around the globe so we can help you master the art of selling.  

Do you ever find yourself asking what makes us different from our company? And how can we stand out from a crowded marketplace this week? We're joined by Mark Wright. Who's going to talk about how he disrupted an industry. And has stood out from the competition to be one of the fastest growing digital agencies in the UK.

This episode is brought to you by vanilla soft.com sales engagement platform. Like no other vanilla sauce is a platform that helps you engage your leads like a CRM, just simply can't do CRM. A great. But to engage with your leads effectively to turn our marketing qualified, lead into a sales qualified lead, and put more opportunities into your pipeline.

You need to get yourself a sales engagement platform. So do yourself a favor head over to vanilla soft.com. Sign up for a free trial and see why so many salespeople are closing more deals as a result of using vanilla soft. So before we get into today's show guys, I just want to say, thanks again for subscribing.

And for listening to this podcast, I do this to help you be the very best you can be. Please continue to like write and share wherever you listen to podcasts. And please don't forget to send me a message on LinkedIn. I absolutely love receiving those messages of gratitude and thanks. So please keep it.

All right. So August is. A few months to go. We're going to be in the Christmas spirit. That's quite scary when you think about it because the year has flown and we've so many things that have gone on, there's been a lot of stuff happening that had just simply out of our control, but we have a few months now to really embrace the opportunity that sits in front of us and have an incredible final, you know, part of, of 2020 and set ourselves up really for 2020.

The reason why I'm bringing that up is because this week's guest it's, it's pretty cool. He won the UK apprentice. And, uh, you know, he, he's a young guy who hails from Australia and he's gone over to the UK and he's done incredible things and he's built an incredible digital marketing agency by backing himself by completely moving his business into a performance based.

And disrupted an industry. He really took on an industry, disrupted it and has created some incredible things and has gone on to achieve a critical thing so far. So it's going to be pretty cool to talk to mark about his journey from a country town in Australia, you know, to such a huge market in the UK and what he's doing to continue to disrupt and challenge and achieve some of the things that he can and are really, really keen to, to share these because with every.

That we do. Do you know, you're so. Sometimes you can be selling a product or service, and it's so much competition and you can often stop and get, well, how do we differentiate ourselves? I'm on LinkedIn and my competitors are posting content and, you know, it's making it harder and harder for me to engage with my prospects, but this is what's great about this opportunity.

It's, it's going to make you stop to really think about, okay, what am I doing? And how can I differentiate myself? What can I do? What's in my control to disrupt. And be remove myself from the sea of sameness because ultimately people buy you, they don't buy the product or service. They buy you and they buy.

The fact that they buy, how you have helped them consider the future state and the picture that you've created for them, the outcome. Okay. So this is going to be an awesome episode to really get you thinking about how you can separate yourself from the sea of sameness and be the best sales professional.

You can be

welcome to the show mark.

[00:04:07] Mark Wright: Hey,

[00:04:08] Luigi Prestinenzi: heck goodies that I'm speaking to someone from the UK that is Australian.

[00:04:13] Mark Wright: Do you know, this is the most looking forward to this in my diary for two weeks, because I do hundreds of podcasts, hundreds of interviews, and it's so good to be doing it with an Aussie in Australia.

Makes me a bit homesick too. So thanks for having me. I really appreciate it and hope we can help out your listeners with so some tips from this side of the world,

[00:04:35] Luigi Prestinenzi: um, I'm very much looking forward to it. And, uh, before we get into the show and talk about sort of, you know, how to grow, um, and how to pivot your sales process and all this stuff that, you know, we love to talk about from our sales and marketing and growth perspective.

Um, we'd love to learn a bit more about you and how you started in the world of selling.

[00:04:52] Mark Wright: Well, I mean, I've always been selling. Uh, the first thing to point out is I'm not from the UK. I'm from Australia, I'm from a small country town in new south Wales called Armadale. And, um, my mum and dad are both business people.

My mum, because it's a hairdresser. My dad owns a, the local car mechanics in Armadale called cliff, right. Motors and. When I was at home growing up when I was a young kid, all I was hearing about was, was work about running a business about sales, and that's where the passion really started flying for me.

And when I was about, I think, 12 or 13, my dad bought a sports store and. Uh, he threw me in there every afternoon after school and every weekend, selling treadmills, selling shoes, selling cricket, bats, whatever, whatever I could push out to the punters I was, I was selling. And I, and no matter how many people we hired in the sports store, we used to have a leaderboard, every shift for who sold the most goods.

I never lost one time. And that's when from like 12, 13, 14 years old, I realized. One I'm competitive too. I like to make money. And three I'm really good at communicating to people how something can change their lives, whether that's a cricket bat, treadmill, whatever it might be. And that's really what got me started.

And, um, I realized quite quickly that if I wanted to make any money. Yeah, it's very hard to do it in a small environment, in a small town. You could have a great life, but if you really want to be successful in selling, if you really want to be successful in business, you have to go into a bigger pond where there's more customers more to sell.

Now, the Internet's obviously changed so much, but I moved to Brisbane. And I started selling gym memberships and that's where I really learned the art of selling. I think people start out where they fall into selling just by selling across a cash register and think they're a good salesperson. If you go into cold selling and what do I mean by cold selling, generating your own leads, producing their own activity, producing your own meetings, closing your own deals.

That's hard, proper selling. And that's where I got modeled on how to open, close, negotiate, overcome objections. Um, and how important activity was and structure to your work to being the best sales person. And, um, in Australia, I was working at a company called Genesis gyms. I don't know if that's still a thing, but they had, like, I think it was about.

300 reps. And I think I won top, top rep 11 months on the bounce. And like, I was the gangster of the gym membership world, but I was selling so much working 15 hour days and making just terrible money. So I got into B2B selling because I learned that B2C selling, unless the margin is really high in the product, you're going to have to sell a lot, to make some money.

Sales has always been in my blood and, and something that I got into. But before I started my career, I don't want to ramble too long in my answer, but you find out I'm very passionate about, about selling and about sales. I came over to the UK as a backpacker, as most Aussies do, and I thought I'll spend a year going around the UK, going around Europe and does a TV show in, in the UK called the apprentice and the whole premise of the show.

It's unfairly regulated towards salespeople. I went to the tryouts and there was 75,000 people. Seventy-five thousand people. Yeah, that's crazy. I mean, I'm from a town in new south Wales with 20,000 people. So there's like four times the town they're in the tryouts and like, you know, you'd get your number and all of that stuff.

And they come along my line, you up in hundreds of people and they came along with a big bin with really crap products. And you had 10 seconds to sell whatever you pulled out blind from the bin. I pulled out a lampshade with. Without a light bulb in it. And he goes, okay, sell me that. And you've just got to start grabbing products and selling them and eliminating people based on sales ability.

This is gold dust. I'm going to absolutely wrong there. So I went from 75,000 to a thousand into the final 20 that went onto the apprentice. And I broke the record on the TV show for selling to the public. I saw 11 hot tubs to one guy and, um, I saw like 23 hot tubs in total. Like I did just went crazy.

You know, selling for me is my whole life. And, um, people say, you know, I've become a really successful business person. It's because I'm a successful salesperson. And I think that if you can hone the art of selling yourself, whether that's on being a better husband, selling more products, Do doing anything in life is selling.

And when you understand that and you get good at it, you can make more money and took them to chief or, yeah. And what an incredible

[00:09:43] Luigi Prestinenzi: journey, right. Going from a, a small, a small place in, in new south Wales to being in front of, you know, 80,000 people and selling, selling like crazy. To get to the point of number one from the, you know, for the show, the apprentice, which is, uh, which is in a pretty, um, and that's what it's called the apprentice.

If I remember correctly,

[00:10:03] Mark Wright: Donald Trump in America over here, it's Lord Alan sugar is one of the richest men in the country on the simple tape, uh, under computer place. And, um, yeah, I think my average episode of viewing was 11 million people watch each episode. It's on BBC one, which is, there's nothing it's like, if, if SPS was good in Australia,

[00:10:28] Luigi Prestinenzi: you, you you've won the apprentice and you've, as a result, you're in partnership or you're working with Lord sugar guys and building, building a business. Yeah. And can you tell us a bit about that business that you're currently.

[00:10:43] Mark Wright: Yeah. So, um, why I won the apprenticing 2014 and the, basically the premise of the show is you get 250,000 pounds, which is like 400 grades.

Um, and I dunno what the current conversion rate is. And then launch mentors. You, you take the money, you start a business and he takes 50% equity. And that is. But has a partnership where he mentors, you want a one day, a month basis for however long the business goes for. Um, so my company, my idea on the show was a company called climb online, which was a performance-based digital marketing agency, which I still own and operate today.

But the idea behind the business is digital advertising has just gotten so complex where people were talking about click through rates and ads and all of this stuff and confusing the customer. I came into the market with a very simple one. You don't pay until you get results. Yep. And the whole thing about my thing is what you say, what do I do?

Uh, generate more sales and leads for businesses and they don't pay until they get those sales. I just took a whole industry and put it into one sentence. I got absolutely killed by everyone in the sector, but the customers loved it. We were the fastest growing startup business in the UK, the third fastest growing startup business in the UK for two years in a row, we're like six or seven fastest growing business in Europe.

Um, and we, we broke loads and loads of records with Google and Facebook for activating new customers. And it just paying back to the basics of sales. Which was my whole premise was don't overcomplicate things, speak to paperless human bangs, and the better you understand something, the easier and more simply you can explain it.

We just ring up businesses. It's very simple. We go in and say, would you like more sales of late? I don't know anyone. Yeah, absolutely. We provide that, building them a new website, getting them good content, managing their social media sites. And we have a really good structure of payment and climb online is, is been, um, you know, my, my child, as it were in terms of my career, it's taken my career off.

And, uh, we now do the marketing. So companies like Amber. T talk a protein well, which is a cute rooting supply here at women's provider. Um, and like, uh, you know, the list goes on and it's all come back from just starting in my bedroom with an idea, and then just selling like crazy until it got, um, where we could go.

So this is

[00:13:14] Luigi Prestinenzi: pretty cool, right? I think a lot of people, I mean, they look at digital marketing and I saw some statistics only recently that, you know, digital search has really dropped in the last sort of six weeks, obviously with this whole, this whole virus and pandemic has, and crisis has actually created credits and real issues for businesses.

But what I, you know, for go back, you mentioned that you're performance based. So is it, you know, do you, you, they pay based on results. Is that a per acquisition

[00:13:48] Mark Wright: model? Exactly. So here's his is the theory that you'll be aware of. SEO is search engine optimized and the theory of getting keywords up Google historically, before I came into the market, this was the deal.

Man would go into, uh, a business and say, give me a thousand dollars a month. And at the end of 12 months, you might be on Google page. One, for the words for your business, 12 hours would go by $12,000. No words on Google. End of relationship. Move on to next business. I came in and said, right, here's the deal.

You're going to pay me a thousand dollars. But you're not going to pay me until the words are on Google at the front page. Once I get you there, you pay me and you don't mind paying me because you've got the results. If I don't get them, you don't pay. And I don't know anyone. When you hear that what's your risk in signing up?

There is no risk or they get the results.

[00:14:49] Luigi Prestinenzi: That's fantastic. I think you're encouraging me to talk to you after this, about, you know, working,

[00:14:54] Mark Wright: working together. But this happens everywhere. I go everywhere. I do a talk, but the reason a lot of businesses don't put their money where their mouth is, is they don't believe in their own product.

They don't eat their own dog. They're not selling something, they're not doing something which they really believe in. And when you believe in your own product, that's the first step to selling loads. Yep.

[00:15:15] Luigi Prestinenzi: And so, you know, obviously with every, and I've got, you know, the iceberg theory behind me because a lot of people look at, you know, the top of the iceberg and they go look that person's successful and, and look at how great their life is, but they don't see, you know, the real challenges in the late nights, in the 16, 17 hour days that you were.

The thoughts that go through your mind when you're going, mate, is this worth it? Right. You know, obviously in your journey, it's been six years building that business. Has there been moments of, you know, of times when you've really questioned what you do?

[00:15:48] Mark Wright: All the time. Yeah, still, still today. You know, I'm living on the other side of the world.

I'm an Australian living in England. I was meant to be here one year. It's been 10. Uh, and, um, my mom kicked off. We went, I'm coming home. I've got a fantastic all my friends, all my family. Everyone I know is in Australia. Um, so I've given up, I've sacrificed my whole life, my whole career to be here for an opportunity.

And, and that's what it takes to be really successful. It's really hard. And the reason most people don't make it is because it's so there's so many opportunities to walk away. Uh, you've gotta be doing something that you really love because otherwise it is just, you you'll just leave. And, um, you need to surround yourself with good people that constantly encourage you and pick you up when in during those times.

Um, but also, you know, you've got to stay on. You've got to have a vision. There's no good. Just getting into something and hoping you're going to be successful. It will get tough. And when it does get tough, if you don't know why you're in it, you will leave. Yeah. I have solid goals. I have an amazing network around me.

I have a great, um, couple of mentors that are, and when I say mentors, I'm not talking about, oh, one guy that wants to a million pounds turnover. They're billionaires, you know, Lord sugar, uh, build the multi-billionaire. These are serious guys, and I'd be crazy to give up the opportunity that they provided me.

Uh, however, we are looking at opening a, an office in Sydney next year, so that will get me one foot back in the door.

[00:17:26] Luigi Prestinenzi: And, you know, and obviously during those moments of you, you talk about, you know, finding that intrinsic motivator to ensure that. You know, you can get out of bed, you know exactly why you're doing what you're doing over the last couple of months.

I think, you know, there's not many people that have been at that point of. Really faced with some quite interesting challenges, whether it's, you know, working from home, the kids are at school, like, you know, homeschooling and, um, people are losing their jobs. People are finding it tough in the market. Um, you know, there's, there's a whole range of issues from your perspective in your business.

Um, what did you do to sort of ensure that you didn't have that massive dip and you continue

[00:18:08] Mark Wright: to grow. That's it it's, it's really interesting. I think the first thing I did was made really tough decisions quickly. Uh, I spotted this, I was watching the news and what was happening in China. And I was thinking, this does not look good.

You know, this looks like it's. I was watching what was happening in Wu Han. I was watching what was happening with businesses in China. And I thought, okay, if this gets into Europe, this is a big problem because it's shutting down all of China. So I watched the first thing I did was monitor what was happening.

And then I made a plan. So we put together a plan for, if we have to go into a lockdown, if the situation evolves, what does that plan look like? The most important thing in every business, which people get really confused about. Sometimes it get really like, oh, we're doing this. And this most important thing in any business is to make sure.

Never get deviated away from that. You can do great things. You can be sustainable, you can do all of this stuff, but in order to do anything in business, you have to stay alive and to do that, you must make profit. So the first thing we do is we, we, we, we draw up a line and say, based on these profit levels of this turnover, like.

This is how the business looks. This is how many staff it's got, how many offices it has, et cetera, et cetera. The first thing I did is I just wiped out 25% of the staff straight away and hadn't lost one client. There was no lockdown. I think there was like 12 cases of coronavirus in the UK. But I had a feeling that this was going to be something serious.

So I went into my boardroom and I said, right tomorrow 25% of the staff are leaving. And the sh faces were like ghosts from the rest of the management team. You're overreacting. Let's wait and see what happens, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now indecision and holding on to too long kills businesses, it's better.

There's never a good time to make a tough decision, just make it and get off, got rid of the stuff. But I said, my one condition is we're not lowering the marketing budget. I'm going to take that up. And then people like this guy has lost his mind. You know, I thought there's going to be a vote to have me out as CEO or MD.

My theory was this. Every person is going to go and vote in their boardroom to keep as many personnel as possible, but drop all the rest of the overhead marketing sales tape, shutdown, marketing budget stops, uh, and they just start conserving like the body where the blood goes to all the vital organs.

Most businesses are going to stop sales and marketing first. That's always the first thing to go to my theory was if I cut administration and I do all the other areas, keep my sales team. Increase my marketing budget. I'm going to be operating in a market with like no competitors. That was my theory. And I look, I know what this, it probably sounds really ruthless.

And, and you know, I'm saying things are probably not conventional. Um, the reality is this Google and Facebook have released their statistics of the agencies in, in the European network, in the Amir region. My agency is number while for sales in the last month. Wow. So the theory works now, was it nice to let 25% of my people go?

Absolutely. But we now will have an opportunity where we can bring people back in. The business has survived, it's remained profitable. And now we're starting to expand again and bring anyone who was let go further back into the business. And, um, it's not nice. It was a terrible situation, but we had a plan.

We stopped to the plan. We did it quickly and it worked and maintaining that Salesforce, maintaining that activity, not creating excuses to sit back and have a holiday and enjoy lockdown and get fired. But increase our marketing, get some leads, sell those leads has worked an absolute dream. And, um, you know, it's been a tough time, but I've learned a lot through it.

So,

[00:22:01] Luigi Prestinenzi: you know, what I'm hearing is you were quite decisive about making change. It wasn't something that you sat on for a long time. You made that change. You made the decision you executed and then you put in place. Uh, a new plan to drive results, to try to, you know, maintain, but what's actually happened is you've grown through that.

[00:22:23] Mark Wright: A hundred percent and, and always think about, uh, you know, work from the result backwards. What do you need? What I don't understand about business owners. And that really drives me crazy when I meet with clients or I, I mentor a coach. Is when something happens, they sales go down. There's a turn in the market as a coronavirus, whatever happens.

Their first reaction is cut the sales team and the marketing and no one ever analyzes. Okay. How much does that salesperson? Yes, he costs me 2,500 pounds. $4,000 a month, but how much does he bring it? Everyone's always looking on the cost rather than the result. And you should be analyzing everything in your business on a results based model.

How much does Fred bring in if he's costing you $4,000 and bringing in you $4,000, Fred probably needs to go, but if he's paying 4,000 and bringing in 50 a month, Fred is we need more friends. How many friends can we get into the business and, and people, uh, Just indecision and a lack of having that, having that plan

[00:23:33] Luigi Prestinenzi: and your acquisition model, like to acquire a new client.

You use it, you know, you use, uh, a combination of inbound and outbound, right? So your sales team are aggressively talking day to day, conducting outreach, as well as building inbound channels for you to, to find customers. So, um, which is quite interesting. Right. And, uh, is that something that you encourage most of your clients is to have an omni-channel

[00:23:57] Mark Wright: Methodist?

It's essential. It having an all new channel being everywhere. You never know if your next biggest client is you, you don't, you, he could be anywhere. And I'll tell you a story in a second. Uh, that totally changed my changed my life. So I broke it up into two, two ways. I have a tape, which is an outbound tape, and I haven't seen, which is focused on.

So we don't, we don't confuse, we don't muddy the waters and my job is to be everywhere. Speaking on stage writing books, producing podcasts, um, uh, speaking on the biggest stages in the UK, doing whatever I can to get the agency. Well, no, to create. Okay. So that's, my job is to create content, become the most well known expert in marketing that brings that energy.

And whilst at the same time, we have a team call calling, email marketing, creating lead magnets, and dropping those out. Some companies, what, whatever we have to do to create more leads or create a more, whilst we getting the brand going out to the other side. And I think too many times. Have I you've got to have one or the other, you tend to have both the keys to be everywhere.

Okay. So they

[00:25:14] Luigi Prestinenzi: are really good. I'm really glad to hear that because you know, there were a lot of, um, self-proclaimed social gurus who talk about only inbound, you know, and inbounds a new way and the old style of, of cold calling and. Cold emailing is, is outdated. I get really furious when I, when I hear that sort of stuff, because I see, you know, I see, uh, uh, work with, uh, a number of different clients.

I see a lot of data and what's awesome about seeing the data is to show, you know, what inbound is just, or outbound is just an effective at inbound. I'm actually having an omni-channel approach is usually the smartest way for a business because just in case one channel is a little bit like one month.

You're not so. You know, completely at the mercy of that particular channel. Um, you've got multilingual

[00:25:59] Mark Wright: a hundred percent. I say, you know, you'll be like me with Google entrepreneurial stuff. Watch motivational videos. Every time I start YouTube, you get one of these, uh, so-called uh, new Amelia. And then something you all know cold, calling's dead, emailings dead.

All of this stuff on my, you have no idea what you're you're talking about. And second of all, if your outbound strategy is working so well, your inbound strategy is working so well. Sorry, you're missing 50% of the pie. You could have an additional 50%, a hundred percent growth from where you are based on.

If you just agreed that the other. The reason why people say cold calling cold emailing stuff. Cause I don't want to do it well, they don't know how to do it. And they're too scared to pick the phone apples, get on the email and get rejected. So I just say that's dead. That's all they're actually saying is I'm too scared or eye socket.

That strategy. Yeah.

[00:26:58] Luigi Prestinenzi: For anyone that's sitting there right now, that's thinking to themselves. Right now that I'm sort of, you know, we're coming to the tail or hopefully the tail end of this crisis. And there's a bit of the normal that's coming back to reality. I know that we're we're we leave. People are going out again.

Gyms are starting to open, which is so exciting, um, for me to get to get back out there and to more local left 45. Right. But, um, you know, for anyone that's sitting there, that's going, okay. I've had a bit of a tough time. What's some advice that you could give them. That's going to help them sort of be the best they can.

[00:27:31] Mark Wright: The first thing is, is, is to really right now such a bright time. This whole thing is given every single person it's hitting the reset button. And right now is such a great time to have a think about, am I doing something I really love and I really passionate about, and that I've got a future. You'll never going to have a better time as an adult right now when you've just had the reset button hit.

First thing is, do I really love what I'm doing? And do I want to be the best at it? People want to buy from experts. And if you've really got a passionate for what you do, you can go all the way. If you don't, I suggest and try and find something else. That's the first thing. And people sometimes need that permission.

You say the white fish all about, if you're not doing something you enjoy. Change it up, do something else. If you are doing something that you do now. So Todd, there's going to be more opportunity the next three months at the end of this crisis, people are going to make more money and more opportunities than ever.

If you look at all the millionaires and billionaires of the. It all created their wealth off the, off the back of recessions and depressions. We're just about to have the biggest worldwide recession in the history and the last three or 400 years, there's going to be opportunity to start new businesses, build big businesses, buy properties cheaper than ever.

There's going to be opportunity everywhere. So right now, if you want to be successful, your idea is what do I want from the next 12? Who do I want to be as an entrepreneur? What do I want my business to be? And how am I going to get that? The answer is once you know what the insect or you're going to be in, you need to be everywhere.

That comes through being a key person of influence being on podcasts, meeting people like to sell, writing a book, speaking on stage, and at the same time, sell, sell, sell, sell, get being known, getting your product out there. Get referrals, work your power base, whatever you need to do. Never changed. Just your activity is going to determine the success of your career in the next six months based on the opportunities that are going to be available.

Yeah.

[00:29:27] Luigi Prestinenzi: Nah, I love them. I love it because you know, so many people get in, you know, there's, you know, sell, sell, sell it's that whole concept. And I love the fact that, you know, selling's an awesome thing, you know? Something that you said, um, before we started recording was, was quite interesting. You said, although actually might've been at the store is selling is about helping somebody, you know, you can change your life.

You can help them achieve a better state. And when we can do that, right, we're compelled to get our message to as many people that could potentially buy our product. And we're not doing people a disservice, you know, we're not, we're not bloody, um, you know, coercing them to buy something. That's not going to benefit them.

I mean, that's, that's not. Right. So that's what I love about what you're saying. It's, it's about, you know, get out there, the activity levels need to be high. And again, you mentioned you wanted to be in a bigger pond and the sort of, you've got that at abundant mindset and knowing, okay. I can look at the what's about, you know, what's happening in the economy right now.

With a real fixed mindset that, and be a victim, or you can actually look at it and go, well, there's an, there's a, there's a world of abundance out there. How can I prosper, um, from the opportunities available and look for those opportunities. So I really love the way that you've explained that to me, man.

It's, it's absolutely awesome.

[00:30:44] Mark Wright: Bye mate. I appreciate it. When I was a young man, I thought about it really black and white. I thought if I'm going to sell digital marketing to plumbers, if I call all the plumbers in Armadale and new south Wales, I'll call them all by lunchtime. There's only two plumbers in London.

There is thousands. So I moved to where I had a market where I could sell over. I could be bigger where I could do more. Now that's an extreme example. You could be in Sydney, Melbourne. Now with the zoom, look what we're doing any across, across the world. For me, a lot of people are not doing things that they're really passionate about that they really want to do.

And it comes back to get in an environment that really inspires you. Even if you make less than. From maybe a changing in industry or an environment. As long as you are happier, you will eventually be more successful. Get around the right people, change the people you surround yourself with change the things you follow on Instagram, the books you read in the audio books, you listen to.

Once you change that environment and get into something that you really love the next 12 months, there is going to be so much opportunity and success come from this. And we need to start thinking like that rather than making an excuse to sit home and watch Netflix and become a. That's someone else's idea.

We can type this as a pretty successful. Absolutely.

[00:32:06] Luigi Prestinenzi: And so may I, uh, obviously in, in what you've been doing and, you know, you're putting together, you've, you've got that incredible event. Um, that unfortunately I was meant to be there next month. Um, but missing out, but you've had a number of people you mentioned before mentors, I mean, in your career so far, who's been the biggest influence on.

[00:32:25] Mark Wright: Oh, gosh. So comes back to two people. Really I'd say two or three people. My granddad, um, who really taught me everything. His name was Quinn fried. He's passed away since I've been living over here. Uh, and he really taught me the fundamentals of business, the fundamental lentils of selling and, and I think Lord, sugar's been, you know, a huge inspiration.

Iowa signed that when I won the apprentice, I got 250,000. I was on the 23 year old men. If you gave me an option at 23 times, the 250 grand or the mentoring, I would've taken the 250 grand. Now as a 30 year old, that's had mentoring and five businesses. That's done the things I've done in business. He offered me 250 grand events.

I got lost at the 250,000. What a good mentor or coach can teach you. You, you can make so much more than. It was success is a recipe. It's just like writing down a recipe for a cake. If you follow it, you get the cake, you get the results, business successes, no different find someone who's successful in your sector, or really successful in business.

Follow what they say, use their guidance and you'll get the same results. Yeah, that's

[00:33:36] Luigi Prestinenzi: awesome, man. And what's one strategy that you've used to build your mark, your digital marketing agency. That you would do again, if you were starting a business today.

[00:33:50] Mark Wright: Wow. Okay. I've always pushed myself to spend the most on marketing.

Okay. Now, when I started hitting my bedroom, I was living in a place called Canada water in London, which is complete shit. I was living in a house with 11 people and I had my laptop, my laptop next to my bed and any spare money I would empty into marketing. I understood from a young man that to basic accessible in anything.

You need to be known. People need to know you. If people don't know who you are or you're not putting your product, your people, you can't sell to them. So, you know, McDonald's is still one of the biggest advertisers in the world. Everyone knows who McDonald's does. They still advertise? I haven't stopped their budget when they stop advertising, I'll stop advertising.

But for me, it's about, I understood that bang and then hiring good people was really essential to having a good business, not skimping on those areas. It's it's made me, um, it's led me well. Yeah,

[00:34:52] Luigi Prestinenzi: no, that's a great, that's great advice. And I think, you know, I think for anyone, um, you know, positioning brand and, and marketing and sales is absolutely paramount.

So thanks for sharing that with me and my, unfortunately, like coming to the conclusion, we could talk about this for hours, but, um, where can our listeners find more about you and learn and engage with.

[00:35:14] Mark Wright: Listen, I would love to talk to anyone particularly Aussies. I've got a soft spot for anyone. If you just search climb online, climb online two words on Google Mark Wright. Now, there's another very famous Mark Wright, um, in the UK. So I'm always the second on Google or any social media. I'm number two. Uh, if you go to climb, climb online, they're my two biggest events and businesses. I'd love to hear from anyone, but listen, put it this way. If you're a business and you want to get more leads or sales, I'd love to hear from you.

[00:35:46] Luigi Prestinenzi: Fantastic. Well, mate, I really appreciate your time and for sharing some strategies that you've used to build your business and yeah, I'll look forward to seeing you in person when we can get to.

[00:35:59] Mark Wright: Thanks again for having me on and, and all the great work that you're doing.

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This episode was transcribed digitally, some errors may be present.