Stop Being Invisible, Become Unmissable

How can business owners use video to stand out online?

Richard Lowe: All right. This is Richard Lowe with the Leaders and Their Stories podcast, and I’m here with Darrell Stern, who’s going to talk to us about some fascinating things related to business. Hi, Darrell. How are you today?

Darrell Stern: Hey, I’m here, and I’m so happy to be here.

Richard Lowe: Awesome. So why don’t you tell us about yourself?

Darrell Stern: Sure. I grew up in show business. I grew up in New Jersey, took tap dance classes and all those kinds of things, and musical comedy.

Then I got an agent in New York City and started auditioning for television commercials and Broadway musicals. I was the voice of Scooter Computer on Schoolhouse Rock, which is still streaming on Disney+, which is really cool.

I’m one of the last two living people from that era of Schoolhouse Rock.

Darrell Stern: The ironic thing is that I was singing about computers. The little boy comes home and meets his computer, and they talk about what a computer can do and can’t do.

And of course now the whole world is running on computers. As we went on, I continued to do all kinds of TV commercials. Then in the ’90s I did some stand-up comedy, and then I got a floppy disk that said HTML, and I decided to start my own business.

Richard Lowe: Okay. And what was that business?

Darrell Stern: It was called Jersey Visions, back in New Jersey. That was my first name for it. I didn’t know there would one day be what we call personal branding and personal influencers.

We all thought we’d start a company and name it like a company. So it’s really funny, because the website said, we do this, we will build you a website. It really wasn’t a we. It was just me.

Richard Lowe: I understand that.

Darrell Stern: Yeah, exactly. From there, gosh, we’re going so far back. I moved to Las Vegas and got married there, and we used a site called DesignRush where we’d buy chips, and they’d send us someone who wanted a website design.

We’d pay the 10 credits, and five website designers would get the lead at once. So when I got the email saying I had the lead, I was dialing the phone number before I was done reading the email.

I’d usually be the first person who called them, and people were impressed by that. Wow, I just asked for this a minute ago. I was starting to learn sales.

Why do business people need acting skills for video?

Darrell Stern: From there, as the internet got faster and faster and we got more and more features, by 2016 there was video. Everybody could do video and Facebook Lives and all this kind of stuff.

The problem was, you guys are not actors. You didn’t grow up like I did in musical theater and comedy and playwriting. So I started, by accident, to teach business people acting and bring all my theater skills into the business. And that’s when it really took off.

Richard Lowe: What’s the advantage of making business people actors? It sounds like it could work. They learn to communicate and so on, but what other advantages are there?

Darrell Stern: Oh, there’s tons. First off, we’re all actors. You act differently on the radio than you do with your wife, than you do with your boss, than you do with your friends.

We all know we have to adapt and be slightly different in our communication styles. So we’re all actors.

Darrell Stern: When you’re moving to video and conveying your story through videos, there are a lot of things people don’t think about that really put them at a disadvantage.

For instance, they come on and talk a mile a minute. Well, when I pick up my phone and watch you, I don’t want a lecture.

What you’re really supposed to do is be present with a person who isn’t there yet, imagine that you care about them, and want to help them solve their problem.

Darrell Stern: So when you pause and listen and get a little emotional, a little caring, all of a sudden you create the illusion that the person receiving it feels like, wow, how does this guy know that’s my problem?

Richard Lowe: Exactly. Yeah, you’re right. It is all a bit of, I guess you could call it acting.

Darrell Stern: It really is acting. It’s theater, because I’m being present with a character who isn’t there yet. I’ll give you an example from Shakespeare: to be or not to be, that is the question.

Hamlet is considering whether or not he should kill himself, and he’s doing that because he realizes that just by being alive and present, he’s causing a big problem for his family and their reputation.

So when he says it, he separates out the words. To be. Or not to be. And then it has meaning. It really does work.

Richard Lowe: Right. When I’m at home by myself or with a friend, I’m a very different person than when I’m talking to somebody on business. That’s just normal.

How does acting help with sales calls?

Darrell Stern: Exactly. Actors are also very good at listening, at sensing the other person’s mood. This is sales, right? The best sales call is not you blabbering on and on.

It’s listening to the other person, pulling from them what their needs are, and repeating their needs back to them, which shows that you actually listened and makes them feel significant.

Then you propose a solution, of course. So acting and theater are everywhere, in all forms of life.

Richard Lowe: Sounds like an improv class might be good for anybody, to learn how to respond to situations.

Should business owners take an improv comedy class?

Darrell Stern: Yeah, I tell everybody, take a comedy class. Take an improv comedy class. Write a play. Write a script. Get involved with your local theater. It will make you a better person.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, the open mic thing seems like a good way to go.

Darrell Stern: Well, yeah, unless they’re at two o’clock in the morning and you had to bring 20 friends, in New York City and all that. But I used to do it.

I used to be out in the middle of the night going all through New York City. We didn’t see it as any kind of fright or problem.

We were very city-wise, if you want to call it that, and it was a blast.

Richard Lowe: Interesting. I’ve never done one myself. I’ve been told to stand up and talk on the spur of the moment because I was the only one there who could talk, but I’ve never taken a class on it. Sounds like it’d be fun.

Darrell Stern: Well, people ask me, do you still do stand-up comedy? And I say, well, I’m 55 now, so I just sit down and do it.

Richard Lowe: So sit-down comedy, yes.

Darrell Stern: Yeah, exactly. I’m a pretty funny guy, I guess, sometimes. Well, you look pretty funny tonight. You’re dressed like you’re on the beach in Palm Beach, or like it’s still 1968, and I’m sorry to tell you, but we’re past Halloween.

Richard Lowe: Well, thank you very much for that. There you go.

Richard Lowe: What are the interesting things you’ve learned about business as life has gone on?

Darrell Stern: Sure. When I lived in Denver, I met a lady named Angel Tussey. I wrote them a 35-page proposal on how to market their radio show, and she thought, wow, this guy’s a genius.

I impressed one person, and it changed my whole life. She put me on stage in front of their networking group. Part of their culture was a thing called fan bragging, where you could call in to the radio show and brag about another person or another business. That really shot my business to the moon.

How does a local business rank number one on Google?

Darrell Stern: Then I was lucky enough to meet a young man named Saul Reisman, who was running a small auto mechanic shop in Englewood, Colorado, in a little crappy part of town, in a little industrial park.

He told me, look, I want to be the number one auto mechanic in the state of Colorado. And I said, okay, let’s do it. I’d been studying and practicing the art of search engine optimization for 16 years by then, since 2000.

Darrell Stern: He had a three-page website. I built him a huge website with not one or two or three, but 60 landing pages, one for each and every type of car you can drive.

The easiest way I explain business is this. You’re driving in your car, on a big road trip, and you look down and it’s got three miles left in the gas tank. Where do you need to go right away?

Richard Lowe: Gas station, of course.

What is a situational avatar in marketing?

Darrell Stern: Exactly. And not only is that the way to keep your car going, it’s also the only business that gets you out of the situation of not having enough gas.

So what situation is someone in where they need your business? That’s a situational avatar. It’s not demographics necessarily. It’s an actual situation.

Darrell Stern: Like, I have chronic knee pain and I’m on workers’ comp, but the workers’ comp is running out, and I have three grandkids I need to take care of, and I need to figure out a way to get back to work or fix my knee.

That’s a real dramatic situation. With all these different landing pages, we could do videos about particular things.

Darrell Stern: Cars are simple to do, because you have the make, the model and the year, so you’ve got three things that make it very, very specific.

I’m looking at a 1969 classic Rolls-Royce that was actually made in England, before, of course, Mercedes-Benz owned them, and they’re not really European cars anymore. So we would go on and on and make these videos.

How does Google index video content?

Darrell Stern: Now I’m going to take you on a little trip back in time to 1985. We’re going to do a little Back to the Future. In 1985 I take your book out of the library on how to run a great radio show and how to ask great questions.

It’s a big thick book with all this terminology in it, bandwidth and questions and interview policies. Then I realize, wow, this guy has a big index in his book.

He knows what he’s talking about. I’m going to learn this from this book.

Darrell Stern: Well, Google uses the same word, indexing. It also owns YouTube, which is indexing. So if you reverse-engineer that, you say, in order for this kid to be indexed one, two, three, four, five on Google for fixing a particular type of car, I’ve got to extract the content from him and get him to demonstrate fixing the car.

So that’s what we did.

Darrell Stern: Every week I’d go down there, we’d look at the shop, and he’d say, okay, this is a story, let’s talk about this car. He’d jump right in, close his eyes, say go, and we’d shoot the video.

No stopping, no pausing, no flubbing it up. He was the perfect client for this grand experiment.

Darrell Stern: First we did classic cars, old cars, luxury cars, all these specific rare things. One thing I always ask is, what’s the most expensive, rarest thing you do?

Because if we’re going to rank you one, two, three, four, five on Google, we’ll do the most expensive, rarest thing you can do.

So if you searched for Rolls-Royce repair in Greenwood Village, Colorado, because we did videos, created articles based on the videos, linked all the words and indexed it together, he ranked number one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, nine and ten on Google.

Darrell Stern: He was stapled there for 10 years for Rolls-Royce repair in Greenwood Village, Colorado. That doesn’t happen every day. Not that many people own a Rolls-Royce, but the 35 who did, and who realized he was the best, made his income go up by $40,000 a year for 10 years.

Got it? Then we started doing more common cars. And next I’ll tell you about the video that actually made him $7.9 million, and how we went viral with it.

Richard Lowe: Why don’t you do that? I’d like to hear that.

What does it mean to market the problem you solve?

Darrell Stern: Okay, great. You’re marketing the problem you solve. You’re not marketing you. You’re not marketing how old you are, how experienced you are, how much you love your job.

You’re not marketing knowledge, simple facts and figures that you know. You’re marketing the problem you solve. I wake up in the morning and ask, now that we have ChatGPT, or ask the internet, I need an answer to this problem.

Darrell Stern: If you align yourself with the answer to that problem, demonstrating that you’ve had the problem, maybe teaching how to do it, doing the solution in front of me, I’m going to say, here’s my money, fix my problem.

That’s 99% of it. There are other kinds of businesses, but most of the time I’m paying you because I want to get out of this crappy situation and into a better one.

How do you find a viral topic for a business video?

Darrell Stern: So I drove around Denver. A lot of people there drive Jeeps, with the doors ripped off and all the fancy, big, high-up Jeeps. I was at a pizzeria in Colorado, across from an arcade bar, and I walked up to these Jeep guys and asked, is there a common problem you’re all frustrated with on your Jeeps?

I got lucky, because they said yes, the Jeep death wobble. I was like, what the heck is this?

Darrell Stern: It turns out there’s an engineering flaw in the Jeep that Chrysler Fiat, who makes Jeeps, won’t acknowledge, and it means the wheels can wobble right off the road.

So I went into something called research. Oh my Lord, you can do your research. Here’s the problem with most people in business and marketing. You wake up and go, well, what should I do?

I’ll tell this story today. There’s no research, no planning, no asking the world whether this is a story anybody would care about or something that would go viral.

Darrell Stern: So you look up Jeep death wobble, and there’s a video at 7.2 million views, one at 600,000, one at 800,000. Okay, so the problem is viral.

First I ask you, what’s the rarest, most expensive thing you do? Then I ask, what’s the most popular problem you solve? With those two answers, you have something amazing called a strategy.

Wait a minute, you can have a marketing strategy? Well, yes, you can. That’s why I made the 60 landing pages and everything else.

Darrell Stern: I’d never done this type of project before, but I knew from being on the internet long enough, and from my father being a philosophy professor, that this would work.

We put out the video in July 2016. Nothing happens at first. By February of the next year I’m in Vegas speaking at an event, and my Facebook lights up.

It’s him, and he says, wow, that video has made me $20,000 so far. Oh, I might have been right.

Darrell Stern: I go look it up and it has 8,000 views. That was just the beginning. Today the video has 200,000 views and 211 comments from all over the world, a lot of them from Colorado, and in total he’s made $7.9 million in Jeep repairs.

How many marketing videos can you shoot in one day?

Darrell Stern: I went back to visit him in 2019, 2020, then came down here to Arizona, and we took a break. He had to find a new shop, because they were going to blow up the building he was in.

Then in November he writes to me and says, I’m going to do more videos. So I’m like, okay, let’s do it. We shot 200 videos in two days. That’s one of the things I do in Stern Storming.

Darrell Stern: We started at four in the morning. You don’t have to start at four in the morning with me, but he has a mechanic shop that’s going to open, with customers and noise from the other mechanics, so we had to get there early.

The first thing I asked when I walked into the shop was, where are all the Jeeps? Where are all the Jeep death wobbles? And he said, there are no more.

I fixed them all. Isn’t that the best marketing in the world?

Richard Lowe: It is.

Darrell Stern: Everybody with that particular problem within a 500-mile radius came to him to fix it, the end, and he got all the money. Now he’s built his own shop.

He got architects, designed the ideal mechanic shop with all the high-tech stuff he wanted, and he makes $5 million a year. And he’s 35 years old.

Richard Lowe: Interesting. Interesting.

Darrell Stern: Give people hope, and prove that you can do it. That’s what all marketing is. That’s my philosophy. First I give you hope. Are you frustrated with this?

Are you fed up with it? Do you wish it would go away? Well, what if I, Darrell Stern, could come to you, extract and film 200 videos of you in two days, and all those stories would already be done?

You wouldn’t have to make another video for years. That’s the format of an inbound landing page.

Darrell Stern: A lot of people skip that. They’re getting all these likes and follows and comments and they’re not selling anything, because they’re not directly asking the person, are you frustrated with this problem?

I might have the answer. Can we talk about it? Simple. Marketing is the art of starting meaningful conversations, and the conversation is between you and someone who has the problem you can fix.

Richard Lowe: Right. I saw that.

Darrell Stern: Okay, now we can go on.

Richard Lowe: All right. So this guy made several million dollars off your idea. Sounds like a great idea. What else is there to it?

Darrell Stern: Getting stable at the top of Google, and going viral with not just that video but a bunch of others, took him from his idea, running the best, biggest, most popular auto mechanic shop in Denver, and made it a reality.

Today he does TV ads and all kinds of other things, but I got him so stapled to the top of Google that every day someone comes into the shop and says, I saw that on YouTube.

Richard Lowe: Interesting. All right. Well, I don’t really have anything else. Is there anything you want to say to our audience before we close out?

Will AI video replace actors and film crews?

Darrell Stern: Well, sure. I went on to make 116 online courses. I did two in one day for Mark Victor Hansen. We did one that saved people from cancer, and we enrolled 6,558 people.

That was during COVID. And now, of course, I’m in this world of AI and generating video, where I can make a scene, develop the script, see who the actors are and where the set is, and make a full Hollywood movie without calling any actors, writers or screenwriters.

We’ve crossed over into this new age where anything we can imagine, we can create, and this is just the beginning.

Why does storytelling work in marketing?

Darrell Stern: Storytelling wins. Creating story, creating drama. As Americans we’re used to this. We watch television, we watch movies, we’re always talking and telling stories. There’s the story of Jesus Christ.

There’s the story of Luke Skywalker. Our culture moves on stories, from the Greek tragedies through Shakespeare, through the Bible. There’s always a story in it.

It’s an allegory, to teach you a lesson. That’s how our culture exists.

Darrell Stern: So tell your best story in the most dramatic way you can tell it, and you’ll become an influencer, demonstrating your expertise, which is what an influencer is in your industry. And of course, I’d love to work with you on that.

Richard Lowe: Well, all right. Thank you very much for coming on the show.

Darrell Stern: You’re welcome, buddy.

Richard Lowe: This has been the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. I’m Richard Lowe, and I do two or three of these a week, so stay tuned. Thank you.

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