Jon Schallert + Rich Carraro
In October of 2014, Livingston County Development held its fourth Destination Downtown Conference with the goal of bringing local entrepreneurs and stakeholders the tools that they need to create destination businesses and communities. Over 180 people from business owners to community stakeholders attended. This conference featured presentations from Jon Schallert, an internationally recognized speaker and small business expert, and Rich Carraro, an expert in bringing creativity to the world of local advertising.
During the conference, Jon Schallert wowed the crowd with his proprietary 14-step “Destination Business” process which he developed over the course of nearly 30 years of studying and interviewing independent business owners who had made themselves the preferred choice in their competitively crowded marketplaces. Jon Schallert is an internationally-recognized business consultant and speaker specializing in teaching businesses how to turn themselves into Consumer Destinations.
““When a business becomes a destination, it can change an entire community with its customer traffic!””
His Destination Business strategy has been used extensively by businesses large and small to help them capture more market share, even when larger, better-capitalized competitors seemingly have the advantage. This strategy breaks down the process of how a business tries to market itself, and elevates the unique qualities that a targeted customer finds most important in the decision-making process. Using this strategy often means ignoring the tried-and-true marketing methods that industry-leaders traditionally use, and instead, focuses on increasing the “marketing scope” of a business, which in turn pulls targeted customers and the media from outside the traditional geographic marketplace of the business.
With the launch of the Jon Schallert’s online training program, business owners can access both live and on-demand business training webinars in the company’s online learning social network, Destination University. With over 50 world-class authors and business experts contributing content and daily interaction and advice, Destination University is a leading-edge tool that gives independent business owners the same training advantages that are used by Fortune 100 companies and major universities.
“You will walk away with tools that will change your business and your community forever. Killer speakers, brilliant, but easily implementable ideas that help you think outside the box!”
As the conference continued, speaker Rich Carraro inspired attendees with before and after images of ads that he has redesigned for clients. Richard Carraro is the President of ClownBike Advertising, a one-man ad agency in Sea Cliff, New York, opened in 2001. The ClownBike motto is "Affordable, Local Advertising That Doesn’t Suck." That's because he believes that 99% of local advertising does suck and is a complete waste of money. Since ClownBike is a one-man agency, Richard does everything: concepts, photography, PhotoShop. After working on Madison Avenue, he was tired of ‘creative-by-committee.’ He wanted to treat advertising like an art form, not as disposable ads.
In fact, that’s Richard's definition of "breakthrough advertising," when someone actually retains your ad, instead of tossing it. His aim is to create advertising that people will want to stick on their refrigerators, just because they like looking at it. They don't even care what you're selling. Richard also gives speeches, workshops and seminars around the country where he teaches small business owners how to create their own brand of breakthrough advertising. His specialty is gorilla marketing on a shoestring budget.
Both speakers met with select attendees for one-on-one marketing consultations with local business owners after their presentations. Feedback on the event was overwhelmingly positive and attendees were excited about the strategies and skill-sets that can be put into practice immediately.
“Jon is an interesting and entertaining speaker with a lot of good ideas. You can take parts or all of his ideas and start implementing them immediately. It shows you how you can do things you are doing already and make better use of them. ”
