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What is up guys? Oh, there we go. What is up guys? Gene Petty back at you with another episode of the All Access Podcast from Dent Repair. Now guys, it's birthday weekend. I turned 50 on Friday. It's Sunday night, and, uh, it wasn't just a day, uh, because my amazing wife Melissa, turned it into a whole weekend long celebration, uh, which was just absolutely fantastic.
But I am absolutely wiped out because it turns out I'm not 21 anymore. Uh, anyways, uh, so to give you a little rundown, uh, Friday. Uh, she made me take the day off, which was good, right? Sometimes, sometimes you need a little bit of [00:01:00] guidance to, uh,
listen to your smarter other half. Uh, so anyways, took the day off. Uh, we went to the spa, got pampered for a little bit, had a great lunch, um, relaxed all afternoon, and then went out to dinner with our best man from our wedding and his wife, and hung out. Um. With them. Came back, had some cigars, hung out with, uh, our daughter and her boyfriend.
Great time. Didn't have, uh, I didn't have any plans for Saturday. Uh, so I was like, well, I'm gonna sleep in, you know, ease into this being 50 thing. And, uh, Melissa came in and woke me up and she's like, Hey, uh, you know, your cigar hangout night in May, uh, you're not having that. And I'm like, you know, I'm not gonna sleep off.
And I'm like, what? What she goes. Yeah. Uh, I called all the guys and they're all gonna be here tonight, so we gotta get everything set up. Let's get to it. [00:02:00] Uh, so yesterday, right two days ago for you, uh, got everything set up and had an amazing hangout, uh, cigar party here at the house with a bunch of my guy friends.
Uh, that was super cool. And then today family dinner was my birthday dinner. Uh, she made all of my favorite foods. We had creme brulee for dessert, but it has been quite the weekend and I'm a very, very blessed man, uh, to have had such an amazing weekend. And, and it's really not a bad way to kick off being 50.
So here I am in all my tired gloriousness and uh, I don't even wanna know. Yep. Lemme look at the screen. There's some bags under these eyes. I'm going to bed early tonight. Or at least that's the plan. So what are we gonna talk about this week? Well, first, uh, the advanced pool training at Anson, which is like in 12 days, I think when this comes [00:03:00] out.
Uh, I still have a couple of spots left. Uh, I'll put the link in the description, but it is dent repair now.com/advanced glue pull. I believe anyways, got a couple spots left. Uh, that's one day we're doing a mix of hands-on and, uh, forgot to silence my phone. Anyways, we're doing a mix of hands-on, uh, and classroom.
Uh, but we're gonna dive deep into some glue pull. We're gonna talk about unfolding with lateral tension, uh, reshaping, uh, some nasty sharp dents, uh, edges with lateral tension. Um, glue pulling body lines to get those going. Tension on body lines, working with stretched metal and tension. It's gonna be a great class and we're gonna dive into a lot of my cold glue tricks.
Uh, cold glue has become this amazing, fast forward on so many [00:04:00] repairs. Uh, anyways, it's gonna be a full class, lunches included, and Christina and the Anson crew are giving you a hundred dollars. Gift card just for attending the class. So, you know, it's like getting it for 6 99. It's a deal. We're gonna have a great time.
Um, and then their 30th anniversary, open house is the next day. So that is always a good time. If you've not attended an Anson Open house, you are missing out. Uh, and I can only imagine how awesome, how big they're gonna go for the 30th. So pretty, pretty cool stuff. So tonight's episode to this week's episode, I suppose, um, kind of hearkens back to one of my truck talks, so not in the podcast feed.
Sorry, James. Need to add those to the podcast feed. But anyways, I've got a short series. I think maybe at this point maybe four or five [00:05:00] truck talks where I just sort of riff driving the truck, uh, about life advice. Tonight's episode is brought to you by one of those episodes, uh, where, you know, sort of talk about like, if you don't want to do it today, but you want to do more stuff later down the road, you gotta do put that work in and do that work even when you don't feel like doing it.
And it's not that I don't feel like doing the podcast because I love doing the podcast, however, my butt is kicked from going a little too hard all weekend and staying up too late and having a great time. Um. But neither here nor there. If you're gonna do big boy stuff, you gotta come back in and do big boy work.
So that's what we were doing. That's what I'm doing, uh, is getting here. I wanna talk about, uh, and, and I was just riffing with this, with Jack Bucknell. What's up Jack? Uh, earlier this week I wanna talk about some copy [00:06:00] words, the words we use in. Our ads in our videos, in, in anything promotional, uh, copy is the, the proper term for your words in video.
Right? Sort of what the AI does. Uh, when we put the podcast feed up and it pulls the clips out, uh, the first is gonna be, now the, the cool word is hook. Right. Your, what kind of, what's your hook for your video? Uh, think of that, like your headline. Um, when you start thinking about ad copy. Uh, I don't know if it, I haven't seen any recent statistics, but back in the day when I studied a lot of copy, it was something like, 80% of the success of your ad depends solely on the headline.
Did you catch that? 80% of how successful your ad is [00:07:00] depends on your headline. Kind of crazy. That would also say 80% of your success of your video that you're putting out depends on your hook. The headline, the first thing you read, eat
when you start thinking about copy. And headlines and hooks and everything like that. Um, there are a couple of resources out there. David Garfinkel is the art or the author. Author, the author's name. Um, he's a copywriter, right? This dude that just writes copy. He writes advertisements and writes sales letters and goes through there.
He did a, uh, whole book of. Advertising headlines that work. It's like a workbook. So it's all these headlines that work, that are proven, that are tested. And [00:08:00] then he gives you like a workbook. So he gives you the original headline, which could be like, they didn't believe me until they saw me play piano.
Right. So the, the headline is, is something, something along the lines of that I don't have it in front of me. And again, we're just riffing because I drug my ass down here to do this podcast to get it done 'cause that's what you gotta do. But anyways, the headline is something like, they didn't believe me or they all thought I was crazy, and so they saw me sit down and play at the piano.
It's, it's something along those lines. So that's the proven headline. And, and I'm sure I have that one a little bit off, but then as you go through the workbook it is, they thought I was, and then blank until they saw me. Blank, blank, whatever it is. So then he'll give examples and it'll be [00:09:00] like, uh, for a cosmetic dentist, they thought I was crazy until they saw the before and afters of my patients smile.
Uh, you know, something like that. It's something to pull you in. It's something to hook you, uh, and get you in. Uh, I will definitely link that book in the show notes. Uh, highly recommend if you're doing any advertising. Any, uh, well not so much print, but like Google AdWords or anything like that. This book can help you write good ads.
So those words matter, right? This even plays, I suppose, back into like we've talked the last. A couple of weeks or a couple of weeks ago where we talked about some sales, uh, and we talked about, um, talk about marketing maybe. Anyways, we like psychological warfare was the, um, topic that's come up a few times.
Your words matter for the same reason, right? When [00:10:00] you talk about how the word matters, like cheap. Versus inexpensive versus only, right? So I was at the gas station today filling up gas and they're advertising their food inside on the, uh, on the screen at the pump. And it was like, oh, delicious, this, this, this.
And then it said only 4 99. Now it literally like the sandwich that they, that they were showing or the Ritz looking lady, the sandwich. It's like a wrap. Right little gas station, uh, chain. But it's like a fajita roll. Fajita roll. Yeah. With one chicken finger in it, and it's four and it's only 4 99.
Because they're using that word only. You're like, oh man, that's only 4 99. Oh my [00:11:00] gosh. That's crazy. That's such a good deal.
When we talk about pricing, right? Think about it's only this, or you don't say it costs this much. You say your investment is right. So, so these plays on words. Words. When you start talking about your headlines and your ad copy and everything like that, every single word matters. And I think the, the. The way to think about that is, or the way to check that, is to get in and do some testing.
So like, if we go back to 80% of your, uh, video success, or 80% of your ad success is your hook or your headline, you can test two different headlines. Uh, you know, hailstorm, ravages, Pittsburgh, read more here. Right? [00:12:00] Or we had a hailstorm yesterday. Hmm. Not quite as exciting. Uh, hail damage repair now. Right?
Dent repair now, or just plain old dent repair, hail repair or hail repair and some urgency or immediate openings for hail repair. Right. And I've got hail on my mind because just a couple hours north of us. Not really for us. But man, like Cleveland, well into Pennsylvania just got smoked. Uh, so I've been talking to everybody again, getting all these calls from guys I know, uh, about hail up there.
Um,
even Louie today messaged me and he is like, because he is from Ohio, not quite up that far north, but he is like, man, I keep getting tagged in all these posts. And then these people aren't even doing, uh, these body shops aren't even doing estimates. Like how do we reach out? What do we do? And I'm not sure what the answer is 'cause we're like two [00:13:00] hours away, but immediate hail openings makes sense.
Um, when we had a big storm here, I think it would've been like end, end of 23. November of 23, it doesn't matter what it is, hit a little bit away from us, like a little bit south and a little bit east. Uh, I've got a big net here, but my net just happens to miss that river valley over there. And these cars got smoked, like this storm parked over the cars and just beat the hell outta everything.
But there were a couple of pockets of nice cars, but it got to the point where all these body shops that were over there. We're like, we're not writing estimates, we're not taking in any more cars. We're booked out solid for a year. Well, guess what? Immediate hail opening, immediate hail repair openings here.
Um, we spoke to, right? We tried to enter the conversation [00:14:00] that is in the customer's head. Right. Just like when Louis texted me this morning and he's like, Hey, these people up there can't get, can't even get their car looked at. Um, we saw the same thing in. St. Louis, that would've been in 24 when I was ever working with a buddy Dan.
Right. The shops were like booked for a year, not even looking at cars. We're not taking anything else in, but these hail cars we're just booked. You can't even, but I got rear ended. No, don't care. Doesn't matter. We're booked. And you know, you can't blame 'em, but it does provide that opportunity for shops around you and Right.
Playing with that headline, like these people are like. We would be chasing hail, not rear-end jobs, but you know, man, I can't even get my car in for an estimate. What am I gonna do? Where am I gonna go get this repaired? If you wanna start picking, if you're close enough, and again, we're too far away, you start picking with that ad with immediate openings back to that 23 storm, whatever it was for [00:15:00] us.
Um, I think our ad was something like, uh, we know, we know that all the shops in the valley have stopped taking new cars. We are a paintless, dent, repair only company. We know there are certain cities and we named off the cities that, that were the towns that I knew had good damage in them. And I'm like, and we have 10 spots available right now for the next 10 people that call or book this spot is yours.
Right? And we ended up filling all of those spots and it turned out to be a great storm. But I used those dollars or those names, those words. Man, my brain is not firing on all cylinders tonight. Um, we use those words to help pull those people in, right? Does that make sense? We also talked about, we, me and Jack, uh, were talking about, um, this email text, short [00:16:00] form advertising strategy, um, from a guy named Dean Jackson, uh, that I like, that is like these short conversational.
Um, messages where you're expecting a response. So another tactic for copy is to don't speak to everyone. Speak to one person, right? Instead of, Hey, Pittsburgh, there was a gigantic hailstorm, blah, blah, blah, blah. We can help you, right? And we're saying we can help Pittsburgh. You would be better off to say.
Were you caught in the hailstorm that came through Ross Township on April 2nd, 2025? If so, I've got the solution for you. I know all the body shops over there are tied up. We are just a short ride away. We handle everything. We've got, you know, contracts with, uh, rental companies. You come down, bring us your [00:17:00] claim, forget about it, we'll handle the rest.
Right. But we're talking to you. That person not to. We're not talking to Ross Township, we're talking to you from Ross Township. So think about in all of your advertising, in all of your videos, start talking to one. Try to talk to one person. Try to talk to, listen. I'm talking to you watching this video, or you listening to this show.
I'm not telling everybody to do it, but I'm telling you that you need to pay attention to the words that you're using. For your advertising. Right? That is what it is all about, is getting that ad copy out there.
I spent a couple of years like really studying sales letters and writing and writing styles for, um, advertising, right? For copy. [00:18:00] Also, I'm a big fan of not. Formal writing. I like to be more conversational when I'm writing copy, if I'm writing a sales letter or anything like that. In fact, pre ai, uh, when I would write sales copy or letters or webpages or anything like that, I would, you know, have Melissa, who's way more intelligent than I am, um, read my stuff and she's like.
Well, this isn't proper, this isn't here. But you know, I, I see how you were talking to that person and it's like, instead of a former dear sir, to whom it may concern, I'm like, Hey, what's up man? It's Gene, the Dent guy. How you doing? I tried to write more conversationally. I try to sit down, like one of my goals this year and, and I feel like it's coming out in the podcast, is to be just more me, be less polished, be less.
Sales person, like promo person, like [00:19:00] when I was working for Kiko and, and I had to be polished because that's what we needed to do when we're selling a product and I needed to be on point and follow the brand. Now, doing my own stuff like this, I'm the brand, like I want my personality to come through, so I want to speak in my ad copy and in my videos I wanna speak more conversationally, less formal and polished.
And two, I really wanna let me come out. I want my personality to come out and find these people that I connect with. Right. I talked about, I definitely talked about this, uh, in the, uh, it was like the social media content episode. Get your face on camera where we had this lady came in, came in this lady, this lady came in.
Or we had a lady come in. Hmm. Telling you the brain's not firing all the way anyways. And she was like, man, I saw your [00:20:00] video. And she was watching one of the truck talks and she was like, you weren't even talking about dents or business or repair. She's like, you were just talking about life and I really liked what you had to say and connected because it was just me being me.
And I would sit down and have that conversation with. Anybody over a, you know, a cup of coffee in the morning, a, a beer at night sitting down to have a cigar at the cigar bar. It was the same kind of conversation that I would have anywhere, right? Because I put that out and was real and conversational.
Right? To give her a way to connect. Not so much copy there, but good. Let yourself come out, uh, and be there, right? That's just like I see fad from dent proof, uh, putting his videos out. And he's just being him and his connection that he's making with the camera, with the camera is awesome. I see the same thing with, uh, Lou Fanning.
I think it's Fanning, not fanning. Anyways, Lou from Sioux Falls. Uh, [00:21:00] Lou, you're putting yourself out there, man. Like you're bringing your family into the, into the mix. I love it. You're being you, that's gonna help you connect with people when you start doing advertising or even when you start to write.
Content for your website? Or, or, or ads like let yourself come through another tip, right? With your Google AdWords, right? With your short text ads online. I think it was. The advertising guy who was in charge of Adobe, like Photoshop, Lightroom, like that, Adobe, and they were talking about testing headlines and testing ads and testing landing pages and conversions and how all that worked.
The best converting landing page you can get is when you have your like, so let's call it like. Doting repair today in Pittsburgh, or Doting Repair [00:22:00] Pittsburgh, or doting repair Cannonsburg as my headline. If we can create a landing page on the website that when they click that ad and they go to the website, the headline at the top of that page and the content on that page says, Doring repair and cannonsburg, pa, right?
Or as, as close to. The headline in your ad is possible. Nothing, they found nothing that converted better than that kind of ad, right? Or that kind of landing page for that kind of ad. You have to choose the words that help your customer find what they want. Um, another good rule, I'm just sort of dumping rules on advertising and everything like that, uh, was from.
I can't remember the AU author's name, but StoryBrand, if you search StoryBrand, you'll find him. Uh, and he talked about your [00:23:00] caveman brain, right? So our brains are wired for ease. And if something is complicated or difficult, our brain wants to check out, and it's like, Nope, we're burning too much energy thinking about this.
We're gonna bounce, we're out. He talked about your website, check. And I know I need to redo my website. I need to go look and see where we're at with this now. But anyways, he talked about your caveman brain. Caveman brain should be able to look at your headline, at your copy, at your opening right or above the fold on your website.
And go, Ugg me need dent fixed. Ugg, they fixed dents. Ugg me call. Right? And no offense to like the Geico cave man, if you're watching my show, thanks for the watch. Um, but. It. Super simple, super easy to communicate, not right. A, we don't wanna land on a page or look at an ad that it's just text heavy. Text heavy, text heavy, right?
Go [00:24:00] back to that headline or the first couple of lines and make it so easy that a caveman could understand what you're talking about, right? And you will see higher conversions. Um. For your landing pages, right? You don't need to write novels on your landing page. Uh, another tactic from my copy reading days or copy studying days is instead of, you know, like headline and then paragraph and paragraph and paragraph, you can just do bullet points, right?
Like doting repair, canonsburg, pa, and then. You know, dings generally take less than an hour to fix. That's the whole line. And then all makes and models today work or can, can have dings repaired. You know, just every little thought can be its own little bullet pint going down the line. You just need a [00:25:00] handful of them and then give them a phone number.
Give 'em a form to fill out something to text, something to attack. Keep it caveman, simple. Just like when I'm teaching, right. I try to, and I picked this up from a guy named Scott, uh, who works for Caliber and did a training for them. And, uh, he came up and he was like, man, excuse me. He's like, you did a great job.
You really explained everything well. And he's like, that's something we strive for here, is we wanna make it just crayon simple. And I'm like, what's crayon simple. Because if you hand a kid who's never seen a crayon before a crayon, they're gonna grab it and they're gonna be like, oh, this makes marks right.
They're not gonna say it makes words. They're gonna be like, we can draw with this. And they're gonna scribble and they understand the whole concept of a crayon and half a second with no explanation. So just like caveman brain on your, on your ad, right. [00:26:00] When I'm trying to teach and work through, I try to make my complex ideas.
Crayon. Simple, right? And, and bring it in so that your brain doesn't get in, get stuck in that engaged, like, oh, I can't wait. It's too much to process. I can't think about it. And we check out, right? And we grab our phone and we're on TikTok. Like, that is not what we want to do. We want to keep that copy nice and easy and simple to work through, and don't be afraid to test it.
Um. What are you guys doing for your copy? I know I've got a good handful of people on here that are listeners that do great videos, that do have great hooks. What are your secrets to the hooks where like, let's talk hooks and let's maybe share some hook, uh, ideas. [00:27:00] In the comments or shoot me a message.
I'm curious what your best headline or copy or psychological word trick is. What, what do you got for me? So guys, that's it. Uh, I feel like I was a little rambly. Uh, but I'm certain that I dropped a couple pieces of knowledge in there for you. Uh, so I hope this can help you a little bit. And I'm gonna go publish this bad boy and go to bed because this old man is tired.
Anyways, uh, tons of people reached out for my birthday. Thank you all so much for all the wishes you made. You made this dude feel really loved. Uh, not that Melissa will ever watch this episode. But babe, if you did had an amazing birthday weekend, you knocked it out of the freaking park. Thank you so much.
I love you. Um, and guys, don't forget about that advanced training coming up at Anson Dent Repair now.com/advanced with a D glue pull. We'll get you [00:28:00] there. I've got just a few seats left for that. Uh, and that's in a couple of weeks. And even if you don't make the training, I hope to see you at the Anson Open House.
Uh, I will likely do a live episode, not a live epi. I'm not gonna broadcast live, but I'm probably gonna record an episode, uh, similar to the DB Expo episode at Anson because it's gonna be fun. I always love going there. Uh, maybe we'll do a little bit from the class. We've got a, a little mastermind meetup beforehand and we've got the event there.
It's gonna be an awesome weekend. Can't wait to see you there, as always. Go follow us on social media at Dent Repair now, and we just crossed, I can't remember if I told you last week we did cross the 4,000 mark. In fact, we're almost up to 4,200 followers on Facebook already, so we are ticking away to that 10,000 number that I'm striving for.
That likely Facebook will be like, you need 20,000 to get that same [00:29:00] thing now, because like the carrot that keeps moving. Anyways, guys, thank you so much. For listening, watching all of that good stuff. Until next time, I'll see ya. 1, 2, 3, 4.
