75 Businesses, 2 Days, 1 City Attracting Their Own Customers

When Life Gives You Lemons...

Sometimes international travel does not go as planned. Matter-a-fact, sometimes it goes exactly the opposite way you expected. This is how I ended up stuck in a tourist city slowly losing local businesses in the race to the bottom on hotel booking platforms.

The Problem:

When a business cannot build the strength of their brand or rank at the top locally, they will turn to their only option: outside platforms to bring them new customers.

From food delivery, hotel booking, or service providers - each platform helps your business get new customers via their marketing budgets + simplified systems. All things a business can create on their own, but most owners don't know how.

The only catch? They often charge 35% or more to do so... most businesses margins are too thin to just absorb those costs - so what to do?

What Happened?

Traveling across SE Asia, I found myself locked in an airport holding room, locked in and unable to leave when trying to fly from Siem Reap Cambodia into Thailand. Immigration flatly refused me entry, and there wasn't much to do about it. Basically if a country refuses entry, you have to stay held by the airline until they can return you to your origin country - unless there's not a flight back for a few days, then you have to wait...in what equates to airport jail.

And Then...

Once I finally got back to Siem Reap, I returned to the businesses I had made friends with to tell them my crazy story! I was so fortunate to be able to return to people who knew me in such a crazy time. The hotel owner I had been coaching had a brilliant plan.

He helped me reach out to all the other local business owners he knew to setup what ended up as a 2 day marketing training program I whipped up for them. In no time flat we put on training that brought over 75 different owners, investors, and staff to learn how to create brand strength. My Goal was to stop these businesses from cutting their own costs to below profitable as was the case for so many of them.

The Solution

Providing a proven ranking road map, personal branding training, and ways to secure direct bookings I eventually left Siem Reap confident in the attendees ability to drive direct traffic to their doors and finally take control of their businesses.

What I didn't expect was the amount of success they found. From small local eateries, turning into top ranked restaurants, modest hotels becoming must stay locales, and spas upping their services to 5 star levels. To this day I am so proud of everyone!

This city helped prove that when you can rank at the top, customers will find you and allow you to finally make the money your business needs to be the best it can.

Once you can invest back into your brand, and not have to cut costs to survive - the difference is felt by staff and customers alike and all of this leads to amazing growth that feeds itself into build a true long-lasting brand.

$1,000,000 In a quarter!