Website: www.torbaypartners.com
Accepting New Clients: Yes
Client Size Range: $500,000 – $70,000,000 yearly revenue
Leading you gently out of your comfort zone.
Who I Can Help:
Business owners who are truly stumped as to why they are not taking over the world. If you know what’s holding you back then go ahead and fix it; you don’t need me for that. If you don’t know what’s holding you back then you need someone to expose your blind spot. That’s what I do. But in order to make significant progress, we must make significant changes. Be prepared to negotiate some non-negotiables. One of your current non-negotiables may very well be the problem.
Who Is Not a Good Fit:
Car Dealers. There, I said it. I don’t know why, but I’ve never been able to work successfully with a car dealer. I’m not sure if they just never want to try anything different from what other car dealers are doing, or if I’m just incapable of understanding the car dealer’s problems and challenges. If you’re a car dealer, and you like what I have to say, I’ll work with you only on the condition that another Partner is the primary consultant. Remember what I said about blind spots? I clearly have one here. I understand car consumers, but not car dealers.
What I Do For Clients:
Anyone can make a memorable or surprising ad. Very few people can make a memorable or surprising ad to accomplish a specific goal: causing consumers to take a particular action. This is the difference between good writing and strategic writing. So we’ll discuss how the brain absorbs, processes, and retrieves information. Why certain messages are stored for the long-term while others are dismissed quickly and permanently. And we’ll move your message from what it is now (likely some variation on, “Here’s who we are and here’s what we sell”) and turn it into something that resonates deep within the consumer’s brain on a subconscious level.
Success Stories:
I have a retail client in Sudbury Ontario – not a major market, even by modest Canadian standards. He is part of a buying group of 110 very similar stores across the country. Last year he tells me he’s been asked by the group to give a talk on why he’s so successful. He’d never mentioned to me that every year he’s either #1 or #2 in sales out of all 110 stores. And he’s not in Toronto or Vancouver; he’s in Sudbury. So his talk centred on: 1. His method of compensating his sales staff. (genius, by the way) 2. I write his ads. And he never changes a single word of my copy. (A car dealer probably couldn’t do that. Look, see? There I go again!)
Words and Music together:
I actually entered this business as a musician and jingle-writer. That forces me to think of copy not just as sentences of prose, but potentially as a lyric. Lyrical copy is easier to remember, even when just spoken. And prose sounds ridiculous when set to music. So when I’m writing a jingle for a client, I understand the needs of the copywriter, because I am one. Most jingle writers are awesome musicians but have never written a radio or TV script in their lives. And when I’m writing a tagline or brandable chunk, I reject anything that can’t be set to music – even if there’s no jingle as part of the project. Why? Because one day there might be. And that’s not the time to find out it won’t work in that execution.
