Marco Torres, founder of MarketingBoost.com, shares his entrepreneurial journey marked by dramatic highs and lows. Initially successful with multiple businesses, Marco's life took a downturn during the 2008 financial crisis, resulting in job loss, business failure, and financial devastation. This crisis, however, became a turning point. Marco underscores the power of a positive mindset in overcoming adversity. Shifting from a victim mentality to an optimistic, proactive approach was key to his recovery and rebuilding.
Marco's rebound strategy involved leveraging partnerships, diversifying income sources, and demonstrating resilience. He and his partners combined their skills and limited capital to establish a successful travel business. This venture exemplifies the importance of collaboration and adaptability in business. Marco also highlights the need for diverse income streams to buffer against economic challenges.
He further discusses MarketingBoost.com, which aids businesses in growth without resorting to discounts. Marco advocates for incentive-based marketing, where added value attracts customers more effectively than price reductions. His journey and business philosophy showcase the resilience, strategic thinking, and adaptability essential in leadership, emphasizing that with the right mindset and approach, overcoming significant challenges is possible.
To learn more about Marco's work, check out their website at https://marketingboost.com/.
Connect with Marco on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/6101960marcotorres/.
Key Points
Transcription
Craig Andrews 00:05
Today, I want to welcome Marco Torres. He is the founder of MarketingBoost.com. Marco has helped thousands of business owners worldwide boost sales and scale their businesses as much as fivefold through the use of incentive based marketing. He teaches entrepreneurs how to source sales and marketing through the use of value add incentives instead of discounts. Oh, I hate discounts. Can't wait to hear more about this. His Facebook group is home to more than 27,000 active business owners who are raking in sales with his advice and amazingly affordable subscription program. But things have not always gone well for Marco and we're going to learn a little bit more about that. I hope you will kind of focus in and kind of tune out what's going on in the background. I think Marco has a powerful story for any business owner that's faced hard times, is facing hard times or wants to know how to face hard times. Marco, welcome.
Marco Torres 01:15
Thank you. Thank you for having. So you're asking me to open up the deep part of some of my history.
Craig Andrews 01:26
Yeah. When we were talking a few minutes ago in the green room, life gave you a reset, is that right?
Marco Torres 01:35
Yeah, absolutely. And I certainly hit bottom if you're on my. Yeah, I'll jump right into it. I've been an entrepreneur. I've had successes throughout my life. By the age of 23 I had opened, had five restaurants and a nightclub. I thought I'd be a billionaire by 35, but didn't never quite make that. I got into the corporate world when I moved to Florida many years ago and moving along fine. I had a nice big home in Windermere, Orlando, Florida, nice area. I had the kids in the right school, seven cars in the driveway. I thought I was living life pretty darn good. Then 2008 hit and boom. I had to lay off 2000 employees that were worked under my team, my organization. Then I got fired and I thought I was pretty diversified actually that I had a business of my own outside of being an employee that I ran with my wife. And of course the mistake was it was in the same industry niche. So before you knew it, that business was failing and I tried to reinvent that business multiple ways. And long story short here, before long, by the time 2009 came around, I jokingly now say that was one of my best sales years ever. I mean, I sold my house, I sold my cars, I sold my boat, I sold my motorcycle, I sold my furniture, jewelry. It got real bad. I kept thinking I'm going to bounce. I'm going to come land on my feet here in another corporate job or what have you. And there was just nothing to be found. And before you knew it, I was literally down to zero, wiped out. I had to leave town. I was so embarrassed of my situation and that I wasn't willing to start at the bottom in my hometown. I felt like I had my hat in my hand if I went to do some lower level position after being a vice president of a big company, that my pride wouldn't let me just take any available position. So I left town. I moved to a new city and moved down to Miami, where nobody knew me from Orlando.
Craig Andrews 04:02
Wow. Let me jump in. I got a couple of questions. One, obviously, I'm so incredibly sorry. I know the story has ended a lot better than that story began, so I'm happy. Obviously. Eight nine. That was the Great Recession. Was the industry you were in especially hard hit by availability of lending and that sort of thing?
Marco Torres 04:32
Exactly. It was all tied to the mortgage industry and the selling of mortgages and what have you, and so that completely disappeared.
Marco Torres 04:46
And I thought I was well set up. But it just lasted all of 2008, 2009 and rolling into 2010. It wasn't until 2010 that I got myself together with some partners and we reinvented ourselves. And together we divided and conquered and started building a business based on what little capital we all had left in the skill sets that we all brought to the table.
Craig Andrews 05:17
Wow.
Marco Torres 05:18
One of those. Yeah, go ahead.
Craig Andrews 05:20
Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm just really curious about something because I have a lot of people that applied to be on this show that are in some form of real estate investment. They help other people become rich through real estate. ActualLy, I was in a monthly peer advisory group yesterday with somebody who is heavy into rental property and apparently things are getting rough. Do you think other people today may be poised for the same wake up call that you got back in eight nine?
Marco Torres 05:58
Well, I don't think it's as bad as that at all. Coming anytime soon? I hope not anyway. But it's similar, right, because the interest rates at 7% are hard to come by and it certainly makes things much less affordable for the real estate industry and the mortgage industry. But they're still available. One of the differences was in 2008 was there was no getting any mortgage of any kind for any kind of business whatsoever for quite some time. Essentially, that came to almost a completely dead halt
Marco Torres 06:39
for the industry niche that I was in and for many others, nobody was buying or providing lending for quite some time. And so in that scenario, and it totally wrecked that industry that I was in. What I was, I was in the timeshare industry. I was the marketer for one of the biggest timeshare marketers in the world, and I ran the Internet marketing machine that made the phones ring for selling vacation packages and so forth. That had to do with eventually the sale of a timeshare. And that market completely had no funding, no financing whatsoever. And so boom, it was over. And of course it was over for many others, especially in the real estate industry today, it's similar in that a lot of homes, people are not selling their own properties, because if they've got an interest rate that was at two or 3%, why would they can't afford to sell it now and move into something else when they're to replace it, they're going to be at a 7% interest. The same, very similar scenario. There's very little resale of properties moving, and new construction is probably the only thing that's still selling pretty well. A lot of it has come to a dead halt and it's kind of slowed down the industry dramatically.
Craig Andrews 08:06
Wow. So in 2010, you started reinventing yourself, you reconnected with your partners. And what happened then?
Marco Torres 08:17
Well, we launched our own travel space, our own travel business, and we got into it in a different market, completely down in Mexico and away from the US market. And we started there, and from there we went globally. But we pulled up and took our skill sets that we'd learned and everything and the little capital we had left. And I like to always in my lifetime, I've leveraged the opportunity to work, to have good relationships and build partnerships. It's kind of like being married. There's lessons in that that I've learned as well, that I would do differently if I have new partnership arrangements now. But I have always found that partnerships can be good if the expectations are set right with everybody. And it allows you the opportunity, because you may not be able to hire somebody as skilled as yourself to be able to afford that person. But as a partnership, then you're both looking at the upside. And if you can make sure that you're both going to put in the time and the effort, and you both have the skill sets you're bringing to the table, there's a lot of value, in my opinion, in partnering with the right people, where you're conquering and dividing. In our case, we had four partners, and one of us was focusing on financing, the other was focused on sales, the other on marketing, and the other on the hotel resort relationships worldwide. And we ended up building one of the fastest growing travel sites in North America at the time. And that led us into a company that I have today, which is a similar product line but totally different deal, which was what became marketing boost anyway.
Craig Andrews 10:00
So what would you say are some of the lessons that made it possible for you to rebuild? What would you pass on to others?
Marco Torres 10:09
Well, the first thing, when I hit bottom there, and I took a long time to, I thought I was going to bounce and end up in another corporate position in no time. And before I knew it, like I said, I already told the story. I lost everything. Little by little, as funds were running out, my business was failing, my job was gone, and nobody was hiring. So before you knew it, I fell into a depression and a victim mentality, which is common in today's world where everybody's a victim. I kind of felt my father had always put on me that because he was Hispanic, he was a victim of discrimination throughout his career and life. And then I started to blame it on that. Well, maybe that's what's going on. Not everybody at the company I was with got fired, but I did. Maybe it's because I was Hispanic and I started to take on the poor me victim mentality, which that was certainly keeping me down on the bottom of the barrel until I got rid of that and realized, hey, I'm in the United States of America. This is one of the best countries in the world with the most opportunities for anyone to reinvent themselves and rebuild themselves. But you got to have the right mindset. So I got back into the books and the motivational videos and training and back into my roots, Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy, and got back into setting the mindset right. And that changed everything. And then it's, you know, I can make it happen again and again. Am I willing to do what it takes? Am I willing to start all over? Hold the hat in my hand as I said earlier, am I willing to burn the candle at both ends and stop being the victim? And trust me, in your late forty s and you're finding yourself at the bottom of the barrel starting all over. You might ask yourself, why me? Why at my age, did I lose everything? Why am I starting all over? Why can I not afford to keep my kid in college? It was rough, but I knew how to make money. I just needed to reapply and managed to put that together. And years later, where I am much more successful than I was back then when I thought I was doing pretty well and set up now with multiple streams of income so that hopefully, if anything, were to get as crazy as it did in 2008, I would survive it by much, a lot of better standards.
Craig Andrews 12:37
You said something there that I think is so powerful. It's having the right mindseT.
Craig Andrews 12:46
A little slice from my story. A couple of years ago when I was in the hospital, I woke up one morning and it was another day where I couldn't move. I couldn't do anything for myself. I was in constant pain. And I started going in a dark, dark place. And fortunately, that only lasted a few hours before I realized what was going on. But the reason I bring that up is kind of tied to your story. Before you can pull yourself out, if I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying you have to change your mindset.
Marco Torres 13:18
Absolutely. It won't happen with that, with just taking steps and taking, even if you're taking all the right steps and the right actions, it's kind of like the seven secrets or what have you. You still have to manifest to the universe that you deserve to have things go right for you, that things are going to come your way and that doesn't happen with a victim mentality. That doesn't happen when you think everybody's out to get you. That doesn't happen when you think that the government's out to get you, whatever, everything and everybody out there. So you've got to change it and look for one, you get your mindset right, that you're not a victim, that the opportunities are there for you to be had, and then you got to learn the skill sets again and freshen up on. Do you have the ability to persuade? Do you have the power to influence people? From the old book of how to Win Friends and influence people by Napoleon Hill. And that happens in a combination of having the right power of communication when you're saying words that when you're out there looking for opportunities, when you're closing deals, when you're setting up business opportunity meetings and the resort relationships, for example, that we were working on, et cetera, that people are going to, even though we were starting from zero, people would give us that, yeah, these guys know what they're doing. We'll work with them. And so it took that setting up that mindset and then having the belief system that it's going to come. It will come eventually if you keep knocking on enough doors and have the right mindset.
Craig Andrews 15:11
You know, Ross Pro, of course, the billionaire who founded EDS Systems. Do you know how many consecutive times he was told no before somebody said yes?
Marco Torres 15:23
No.
Craig Andrews 15:24
76 times. He got rejected 76 times straight. And number 77, somebody said, yes, we'll do it.
Marco Torres 15:38
Exactly what I'm talking about.
Marco Torres 15:44
It's there to be had. But you've got to be willing to put that hat in hand if need be, if you have to do what I did. Like I said, I started in a whole new town. I wasn't willing to let people see me knocking on doors from scratch. But I mean, I went from a corporate vice president position to commission only PR sales in Miami as one of my sources of income while I started building a business again for myself.
Marco Torres 16:16
Even when you have to reinvent yourself, it can be done at whatever age you're at, as long as you. I mean, I wouldn't want to start over again at 63, but I guess if I had to, I would.
Craig Andrews 16:30
Well, there's a lot of people that are a little bit nervous about the economy. I mean, I'm nervous I'd be lying if I said anything else. What advice would you give for me and for others that are looking at this economy and they're just like, this scares me.
Marco Torres 16:48
Well, yeah, definitely the advice I would be giving anybody out there, and obviously you need to plan this for years, right? It doesn't happen overnight, but you do have to try to have multiple sources of income, ideally passive income. In my case, I have variety. But one of my favorites that I thought I was better protected with back when I owned real estate. Back when. But now I like to make investments with either 100% cash or nearly all cash. Rental properties that are basic rentals, not high end stuff. Something, no matter what the economy. I personally believe no matter what happens to the economy, there's always going to be people needing to rent something somewhere. And those are incomes that right now I barely need them. But if the world went upside down on the economy again, the rental properties that I have, plus the other passive incomes that I have, would keep me afloat without hitting rock bottom again. And so that's taken me some years to develop that cash flow that I can invest in. Properties, I think maybe they're too safe. I should maybe have some in other sources of investments as well. But the point being is that if you can work on ways to have a variety of incomes, not all in one industry niche, and that's another thing I do, is I don't have them all in real estate again, but have them outside of multiple sources of revenue and multiple industry niches can kind of protect you from something going on out of your control.
Craig Andrews 18:39
Excellent. And from a leadership perspective, what would say has been your biggest lesson in your journey?
Marco Torres 18:47
Well, in my journey, one of the things that we did in leadership role, I guess you might say is if you don't set the culture in your own business, if you're not focused on setting the culture, someone else is going to set it for you. So think about how are you going to set up a team that is inspired by high performance and how are you going to accomplish that and doesn't happen by accident. So there's a lot of books and stuff on that and training you can reach out for. I think in today's world it's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. There's so much available technology. I mean, I've been an Internet marketer since 1996. I've seen the entire evolution of online marketing and there's never been an easier time to be an Internet marketer of one kind or another based on the technology available, the affordable pricing of all types of technology, from CRM systems to funnel builders to you name it. But there's also more competition maybe than ever. So you do need to find ways to stand out from the crowd and deliver whatever it solve, provide solutions. The more people you actually help get what they want, like Ziggler always says, then the more you're going to get what you need as well.
Craig Andrews 20:15
Well, in terms of providing solutions, something that we talked about in the intro is you help people grow their business without giving discounts. You have incentives that are not based on discounts. And as a marketer, I hate discounts. I think there's so many reasons they're bad and that hurts your business. We have something called a first time offer, which is not technically what I'm talking about, but that comes across as a discount. But I love your mission that you're trying to eliminate discounts as incentives. What are the incentives you're using?
Marco Torres 20:59
Well, first, let me kind of define incentives. A lot of people don't quite get what I mean by incentive based marketing. And so one example I like to talk about is Jeff Bezos with Amazon 2005. He offered and brought out Amazon Prime. And back then none of us were video streamers, really. We weren't interested in the video content that Amazon prime offered, if they even offered video at that time. But it was more of what do we want? The incentive was free shipping, paid $79 what it was back then, $79 for Amazon prime annual membership and you got free shipping. Well that was genius, right? We all bought into that. We all got it. We wanted the free shipping. So what is it you can do to take your clients eye off of the price and focus on the prize. And another example of that is McDonald's with a Happy meal. They have thousands of families choosing the McDonald's Happy Meal over other fast food outlets with the bundle of food and the little toy in the Happy Meal gift. So what is your adult Happy meal for your business marketing boost provides we provide a subscription model to business owners. It's very affordable and it gives business owners the ability to offer our travel incentives. Complimentary hotel stays at 130 destinations around the world, hotel savings cards good at over a million hotels worldwide, and restaurant savings vouchers. And so there's what I call micro incentives for micro calls to action. And for example, those complimentary hotel stays with a bigger call to action. So you might say when you purchase our Black Friday promo, instead of giving it 50% off, say you get five nights in Cancun on us. When you make take the following annual purchase and pay us for a year in advance of our services so you can get a big call to action taken care of with dangling a big carrot of a high perceived value complimentary hotel stay now, they don't include airfare. A couple of quick disclaimers. They don't include airfare, they don't include food and beverage. They don't include government taxes and fees. And there's no timeshare hoops or nothing like that. Nothing to jump through to earn or to use these vacations just to give a quick plug on what marketing boost is. Thanks for letting me cover that.
Craig Andrews 23:22
Yeah, and what type of businesses benefit from that?
Marco Torres 23:26
You would think that they only work in travel. We certainly have hundreds of travel agents that use our incentives, but we have found that these things work for nearly anything from business coaches to shoot. I've got real estate agents, insurance agents, financial services, nonprofits. I've got multilevel marketers using incentives for everything from anybody who does webinars. You might say, hey, join us for our live event in person, every door. As you come through the door. We have numerous door prizes from complimentary hotel stays to this, that and the other webinars. We're giving away a webinar at the end of the webinar to the person who is the most engaged during the live call virally using them to grow Facebook groups. I've seen people say, hey, for every ten people you invite to join our Facebook group about any industry that you're building a Facebook group about. When you tell ten people, for every ten people you invite to the group, you hit a chance to earn complimentary hotel stay. Our grand prize we're giving away for three nights in Las Vegas and so on. And that's what we do in our Facebook group is we teach people to give ideas. We do brainstorming calls with our members and come up and give them ideas on how they can use these incentives to enhance whatever their call to action is in whatever industry niche I've seen them work, whether they B to B or B to C or you name it.
Craig Andrews 24:59
Excellent. And how do people reach you?
Marco Torres 25:01
Well, just go to marketingboostsolutions.com. You'll see a variety of the different products we offer as MarketingSolutions and or marketingboost.com. We make it real easy to try these out and give one to yourself and test them out.
Craig Andrews 25:18
Well, Marco, thanks for coming here and sharing your story. I love know so daunting to go to zero and have to rebuild late in life. And I would guess there are people listening that are either facing that or about to face that. And I hope your story encourages them so they can handle it more boldly as they move forward. Thank you for sharing that on leaders and legacies.
