Joe Polish is sitting inside Tony Jeary's Results Center in Dallas for this episode of I Love Marketing Live, a building built around a single obsession: helping people get results faster.
Joe and Dean pull apart the wow package philosophy, the practice of using small, personal, physical gestures to cut through inboxes and mailboxes that are more crowded than ever, and they back it up with real numbers on why it works.
Here's what you're about to discover in this conversation:
Show Notes
Live From the Results Center in Dallas
- Joe records this episode from inside Tony Jeary's Results Center, a Dallas building Tony built specifically to help Entrepreneurs and teams think better and get results faster.
- Joe got the invitation through his 100k Member Peter Thomas, an 88 year old Entrepreneur who used to run this same annual summit on his own yacht until he sold his boats and switched to chartering one instead.
- Tony has been in business 45 years, starting with his first Client in 1982, the grandson of the Founder of Hallmark Cards.
- Tony currently owns stakes in about 10 companies, including a mortgage company, and regularly brings groups of 12 to 15 employees through the Results Center to work on their thinking.
Tony Jeary's 30 Year Handwritten Card Habit
- His system: keep a stack of pre-addressed, pre-stamped cards sitting in front of him at all times, so the only decision left is who to thank.
- He relies on his assistants to prompt him with who deserves recognition that week, because even someone intentional about appreciation forgets to do it without a system.
- Joe connects it to Dan Sullivan's referability habits: show up on time, do what you say, finish what you start, and say please and thank you.
Why a Handwritten Note Beats a Free Email
- Joe argues relationships work like money: they either appreciate or depreciate depending on whether you keep watering them.
- Dean points out that most inboxes are packed but mailboxes are nearly empty, so a physical note almost always wins the fight for attention.
- Joe challenges anyone to spend an hour on an email campaign and get a better response than an hour spent writing personal cards.
- The plan: write one to ten handwritten cards a day, five days a week, and skip AI entirely so the process stays a meditative, personal one.
The Richard Branson Magazine Email Exchange
- Digging through his archive, Joe finds a stack of old magazine covers featuring Richard Branson, saved from the years he ran Necker Island retreats before handing that business off to Yanik Silver.
- Joe emails Richard a short video of the covers, including one Playboy cover Branson appeared on.
- Richard writes back asking Joe not to go to any trouble, then jokes he isn't sure if it's his own photo or the other pictures that attracted him to the idea.
- The exchange becomes another example of using something already sitting in a drawer to reconnect with someone in your network.
Moonshots and Multipliers: Turning a 2017 Book Into 90 New Videos
- For Genius Network's Alumni August, Joe pulls out Moonshots and Multipliers, a 2017 book built from Member interviews about big decisions, moonshots, and recommended reading.
- He and Eunice tear out each Member's individual page, record 90 personal videos responding to what that Member wrote, and mail the physical page back with Joe's handwritten notes on it.
- Every video asks the Member to update their thinking nine years later, which becomes the seed for a brand new edition of the book.
Robert Cialdini's Influence and the Power of Reciprocity
- Joe records a message to send directly to his friend Robert Cialdini and his wife after bragging about Cialdini's book Influence during a speech to 500 people in Toronto.
- They recount Cialdini's own story about two strangers who exchanged Christmas cards for years without ever meeting, until a favor tied their families together across countries, a live demonstration of reciprocity, commitment, and consistency.
Strategic Gifting and the Five Love Languages
- Tony pays tribute to his late friend John Ruhlin, and recommends Ruhlin's book on thoughtful business gifting.
- Tony shares his own $3.50 strategic gift: a deck of printed quote cards with a holder that recipients keep on their desks for years.
- Dean connects it back to Gary Chapman's Five Love Languages, pointing out that a physical, thoughtful gift is the rare gesture that can touch all five languages, physical touch, words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time, and gifts, in a single action.
The Arithmetic of a $2.43 Stamp
- A listener asks how to decide which relationships justify the cost of an expensive stamp instead of trying to systematize the whole approach.
- Joe reframes the question: every business is really in the arithmetic business, and the right way to judge a mailing cost is against the lifetime value of the relationship, not the price of the stamp.
- He points out that free communication like email and social posts gets treated casually, while something that costs money to send signals real thought and care.
- Dean runs the number: mailing 1,000 people three times a year at $2.43 each comes to about $7,500, a small price against the revenue even a handful of those relationships can produce.
Mike Dimick's Dollar Store Pinata
- Mike Dimick joins the call to explain why he mailed Joe a pinata stuffed with more than 1,000 postage stamps.
- The idea started after Mike received one of Joe's mailings in a bulky yellow envelope covered in 14 stamps, and he wondered whether Genius Network could put a bigger batch of stamps to use.
- Total cost: about $7 for the pinata at Dollar Tree plus $24.80 in priority shipping, and it worked because it got sorted straight into Gary Halbert's A pile instead of getting tossed with the junk mail.
- Joe turned the unboxing into a video that reached his entire audience, a return Mike never would have gotten by simply asking for the attention directly.
The One Shoe Gatekeeper Strategy
- Back in the 1990s, Joe taught carpet cleaning companies a direct mail trick to get past corporate gatekeepers on commercial accounts: send one shoe, signature required, with a letter promising the matching shoe at a scheduled meeting.
- The campaign cost roughly $1,000 to $1,200 to mail to 10 decision makers and typically produced two to five callbacks and one or two appointments, most of which turned into multi-thousand dollar jobs.
- Joe admits that even when he taught the exact strategy to a room full of people at his $6,000 an hour consulting rate, most people still never acted on it, which is the real lesson: ideas only work if you actually use them.
The Dominator Postcard and the Camelback Mountain House
- Dean pulls out an oversized postcard, roughly 18 by 12 inches, that he and Joe built to sell Joe's former house at the top of Camelback Mountain in Paradise Valley, Arizona.
- The headline: "An open letter to anyone who wonders what it would be like to live at the top of Camelback Mountain," mailed to everyone in the valley who could see the house from their own property.
- Dean's team nicknamed this postcard format the Dominator because its size and story completely take over a mailbox and get near universal attention.
- Joe reflects that without that campaign the house, which cost him over a million dollars and two and a half years to remodel, might never have sold at all.
Return on Relationship: The Math of the After Unit
- Dean introduces Return on Relationship, a metric that measures how much revenue comes from people who already know, like, and trust you versus brand new Customers.
- His gold standard for a real estate agent's book of business is a 20 percent annual yield, meaning roughly one in five existing relationships produces a repeat sale or a referral each year.
- Dean's formula: calculate what your relationships would generate at a 20 percent yield, subtract what you are actually getting, and the gap is the revenue you are leaving on the table by not systematically nurturing your after unit.
- Joe closes by pointing to Genius Network's Annual Event in November as one more way to keep building the relationships this episode is all about.
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