‘Help! My Business Sucks!’ is a free, weekly web TV show that helps entrepreneurs to “get more done and have more fun.” Hosted by maverick marketer Andrew Lock, the show provides plenty of practical marketing tips, big lessons from well known brands, and lots of little known resources that small business owners can use to increase their profits.
With an irreverent, entertaining, and humorous style, the show has become more popular than a supermodel at a Catholic boarding school.
“…the show has become more popular than
a supermodel at a Catholic boarding school.”
In 2008 the show became the #1 most popular marketing WebTV show in the Apple iTunes store, beating well known ‘traditional business training’ competitors like Harvard Business Review, Advertising Age, and Business Week.
As a result of the lessons he’s learned, he is on a mission to expose traditional marketing techniques as outdated and ineffective. You’ll discover much better ways of promoting your business, to make it stand out from the crowd. You’ll also discover that ‘marketing is everything and everything is marketing’ - a phrase that you’ll hear a lot from Andrew.
Andrew’s Story
It all started with potatoes…
As a kid, Andrew challenged every ‘normal’ way of making money that was accepted by all the other kids. While most school age youths were doing a paper round to earn some pocket money, Andrew hated getting up early in the morning so that didn’t seem like a good idea. Besides, he was never one to blindly ‘follow the crowd’ and he knew he could do better, regardless of his young age and inexperience.
One day while traveling on a bus, he overheard some old people complain to each other about not being able to carry bags of potatoes home from the store, and that sparked an idea to create a potato round.
Andrew found a farm that was willing to supply sacks of potatoes and had his parents drive him over to collect them. He then divided the potatoes into small ‘retail’ bags and went from door to door, quickly establishing a little business that earnt him 18-20 times more than his school friends were making with their paper rounds, AND he was able to do it after school, not at 5am in the freezing cold of the British winters.
Andrew comments, “I had no interest in potatoes, but the money was hard to pass by. Actually, I got a lot of satisfaction from helping so many people who couldn’t get out of the house. They really appreciated the service and would frequently pay me more than the asking price. I realized at that point that within reason, price sometimes isn’t an issue. If demand is high and there’s no competition, price is often taken out of the equation. That was one of my earliest marketing lessons at a time when I didn’t even know what marketing was!”
School and Beyond
Understandably at school, Andrew was known by everyone as ‘the entrepreneur’, and quickly won all the top awards for business studies.
Andrew’s first info-product was created at age 14, a guidebook about planning a vacation to Florida theme parks. “This was before desk-top publishing so I used a typewriter to create the guide, and photocopied it to make copies to sell. By today’s standards they looked horrible, but again it taught me that if the information was good, people would overlook presentation (or lack of it).”
Deciding to forgo college and instead focus on real-world business, Andrew’s hobby in entertainment magic led him to hook up with famous entertainer Paul Daniels (the Johnny Carson of the UK and someone who’s performed more magic on TV than anyone in history) to create the definitive course about how to profit from performing magic tricks for others. Entitled, ‘How to Make Money by Magic’ the course was sold via mail-order and the largest info-publisher in the UK eventually picked up the rights to distribute it.
Andrew went on to become Paul Daniels personal manager, which led to an unexpected and fascinating marketing education. Andrew explains, “little did I know that Paul was such a genius. He has one of the highest IQ’s of anyone I’ve ever met and I learned more about real-world marketing from him than from any books or courses I’d read up to that point. Together, we devised some amazingly powerful, sometimes wild and crazy marketing campaigns for his business that I’m very proud of.”
Discovering eBay
In the early 2000’s Andrew discovered eBay and went on to devise a unique way to profit from eBay, using unconventional marketing techniques. His ‘H3 eBay system’ has been used by many people to attract a steady stream of new buyers for their business, and also spawned the monthly printed newsletter, ‘The Renegade Auction Seller.’
Andrew is the author of the following books:
“Magical Marketing’
“How to Shoot, Edit & Distribute HDV”
“eBay Exposed!”
“7 Unconventional Ways to Profit from eBay”
For more information about Andrew’s unique and often unconventional strategies for growing a business fast, he offers a monthly training program shipped direct to your door (U.S. and International) called ‘Microwave Marketing’ - Instant, ready-to-use marketing ‘recipes’ for fast results. Microwave Marketing is all about combing speed with systems to get results fast and then set the entire process on autopilot. Visit: www.mwavemarketing.com for more information.
