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Holidays and pandemics.

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

I have this stupid fascination with puppets ever since I was a kid. And so I had to bring out because I’m recording this Halloween night, and had to bring out two of my favorites here.

The skull that I’ve had sitting up here, nearly all month for the celebration of Halloween. And I like holidays, because there are lots of fun.

But really, how do you handle both holidays and pandemics?

How do you handle these situations?

I’m going to talk about some scenarios that I came through today that can be helpful to your business.

Welcome to Brian J. Pombo Live, we do this on a daily basis where we get together and discuss business concepts, sometimes life concepts that have a little bit to do with business. Because business is nothing more than than idea of how to handle life better, or how to handle life better for yourself and for others. But today, I want to talk about how Halloween and pandemics affect you.

Halloween in just specifically because that’s what we’re going through. But if even regardless of the holiday, you got to think about holidays.

First and foremost, when it comes to business.

What is the benefit of holidays?

The benefit of holidays, is that a majority of everyone out there is thinking about the same thing at the same time. This is not always the case.

Okay, it’s also the case with pandemics.

But we’ll get to that in a second.

With holidays, everyone is thinking the same thing. For the most part, they’re thinking in different ways. But they’re all thinking, Oh, it’s Halloween today. You know, it’s October 31.

Everyone’s thinking, Oh yeah, that’s right, it’s Halloween. And when they see anyone dressed up, they’re like, Oh, that’s because it’s Halloween.

And it’s instant because the toughest thing is getting some exposure and getting the conversation going. You’ve got to start with the conversation that’s always going on, already going on in your customers head, something that Robert Collier spoke about, over 100 years ago, or nearly 100 years ago.

And that’s what the name of the game is, the better you can get to what the conversation that’s already going on, you can play along with it. Then you have an end you have, you have a way to be able to start talking with that person, just like if you were in a party of some sort, or some type of mixer, and you went up and start talking to someone, if you knew what they were already thinking about.

You’d have an automatic in with them. And all of a sudden, they’re gonna start noticing you start talking with you Just because you’re talking about something that’s already going on up here. Regardless of what that is.

So holidays are a great way to be able to do that just as a way to be able to start the conversation.

Hey, it’s Halloween, just like I just did. It’s Halloween, this is what’s going on. And you take it from there.

How do you get that to fit into where you want to take it, that’s a whole nother thing. That’s a great thing about holidays really, really helpful for business, especially when having a conversation.

And that doesn’t matter if it’s a potential customer. Or if it’s a current customer that you need to let them know about something. Or if it’s someone that used to be a customer that you need to get their attention back again.

It’s the same thing, no matter what you have to get in to their head on where they’re at, you have to meet them where they’re at, instead of trying to automatically pull them out of wherever they are, and get them to start thinking about what you want them to think about.

You got to start where they are, that’s the quickest way to be able to start a conversation with somebody. Now, let’s talk about pandemics because I got to see something here in town that I’ve never seen before, because we’ve never been through something like we’ve been through in the year of 2020. So even if you’re watching this years in the future, and you’ll remember or you’ll have heard about when in 2020, we had the COVID-19 crisis, and everything kind of turned upside down for a bit and everything got closed down.

No one really knew how to do the things that they’ve been doing for years and years and years in a new way. Or in a way that would be politically correct or in a way that would be sensitive to people’s desires and so forth.

And so you saw a very different type of thing. People did not know how to trick or treat, because the governor of Oregon, that’s where we’re at. We’re here in Grants Pass Oregon, the governor of Oregon basically came out and said there is going to be no trick or treating.

Now, does she have any legal authority to actually do that?

It doesn’t matter, because she did it. And so then people have to decide, okay, well, how do we deal with this because it’s being considered that kids aren’t going to go door to door and get treats like they normally do.

Now I think people still did. And the funny thing that was that was really interesting to me. It was all a clever ideas that people came up with to make up for the lack of trick or treating because kids still want to dress up and they still want to go out and get candy.

So how do we go about switching that to something else?

How do we make it something else?

One of the things that I saw straight off the bat that I thought was a great idea was having a drive thru. And so that there’s a, there’s a shopping center here locally that my, that actually our property management company runs it.

And my wife is the main one in charge there.

She had been she’s been in charge for years and years of this property management group.

And so she came up with the idea of what if we had cars come through?

Well, normally every year, they invite the whole town out in the middle of the day, usually the Saturday leading up to Halloween, but this Saturday was Halloween.

So had everyone come out on Halloween. And normally what they’ll do is they’ll have all the shopkeepers, all the vendors and this is an outdoor mall, it’s an outdoor shopping center, they have all the vendors come out and sit there with a bag of candy and hand out candy.

And so people are dressed up in costumes themselves and so forth. So it’s a huge event every year, I mean, a huge amount of the town comes out and walks the entire because it’s a good sized shopping center, they walk the entire shopping center, getting candy and you get you get by with doing a lot of candy.

There’s been a few years that our kids have only gone to the shopping center and gotten their candy there. So this year instead, they said, Well, why don’t we have a drive thru, where people just line up and drive through the shopping center, we’ll have one spot where we give them one bag of candy per kid in the car, and just do it that way.

Which is fine.

The kids don’t get to show off their costumes, nothing else. But at least they get their candy. And they get to feel like they did something. And it allows these businesses to have exposure, like they like they normally get every year at least to some extent not great.

But huge turnout, because people were hungry for it. They wanted some type of normalcy or something close to it. So they amazing turnout.

They had another one where a not sure what organization put it together. But somebody rented the fairgrounds, which is also here in town, the County Fairgrounds, and they rented the arena that’s normally not used for showing animals and so forth. And they set up a trunk or treat, which if you’ve ever seen that they have

the backs of pickups and cars opened up with the treats right there and someone dressed up handing things out. So he had a couple couple organizations, businesses in their hand out candy, all you did was you came through and walked around. Now it was amazing.

I mean, around this area, not a whole lot of people wearing masks, maybe a quarter of the people wearing masks, and definitely not a whole lot of social distancing going on.

So it’s something you got to keep in mind when doing something like this. But amazing turnout, just outrageous turnout, tons.

I mean, my kids got more candy there than from anywhere else, they didn’t have to make too many stops.

So there’s a lot of ways to be able to adapt to fit a situation, you got to get creative.

You got to think outside the box, you got to think of what people want and what can you realistically give them in a situation where your hands are tied.

There’s not a whole lot that you can do the same. So how do you get around that you got to think around the box. But don’t ignore the holidays.

If you want to get out there and put out a commercial or you want to put out a message and get people talking at least acknowledge the fact that there’s a holiday and that’s that’s what they’re thinking about.

And you could acknowledge it and set it aside. You say hey, Happy Halloween, I know I’m not wearing anything. but I know you’re going to be out trick or treating.

Hey, before you do that, let me remind you one thing and you go into what you’re what you’re wanting to tell them. Just a quick, that’s just a quick tip.

There’s a lot of other things that you can do to really stand out against the competition, whether they’re directly industrial competition, people in your industry competing against you, or everybody else that’s competing for everyone’s attention nowadays.

Go check out my book, 9 Ways To Amazon-Proof Your Business that’s a way to stand out in ways that no one else is doing. And in some cases like Amazon.com they can’t they can’t stand out in these nine ways. Go check it out at AmazonProofBook.com.

That’s AmazonProofBook.com.

You get a free copy there and you get a discount copy if you want a hard copy of it too.

So you have a great night. We’ll be back here tomorrow. Get out there and let the magic happen.