About

Hello! My name is Craig Marty, I decided to put this website together and share everything going on in my world to help business owners get more customers, more easily so they can spend time with their kids, partners, family and friends. 

I’m a husband and father, they are the two most important parts of my life and that is why I have built the style of business I have. 

It’s my business that supports my family orientated lifestyle, it’s not not me who works 65+ hours a week to keep my business afloat, although I have been there and done that – I know what that’s like.

Friends and family that know me would agree that I don’t follow the norm and I don’t care what other people think.

When I think of the “average guy” now, I picture a clean cut 35+ year old guy wearing trendy clothes that match his perfect beard and hairstyle. Someone who is politically correct and overly concerned with how people view him.

And that just doesn’t describe me… 

I’m a 36 year old (as of June 2020) Australian male, but I feel no pressure to follow trends and never really have.

I was the guy with long hair in high school, who played the guitar. And I was only 1 of 3 guys who could meet the description in my high school, and the other 2 guys were in my band! 

Now I own and run our Australian based marketing company called Customore. We focus on getting our clients more customers for THEIR businesses! That’s the main thing we focus on each week. 

Customore has other brands under it like ‘Customer Mountain’, my personal brand ‘Craig Marty’ and other smaller online side businesses tick over in the background. 

I worked every casual job I could after leaving High School and starting my very entry level degree at university. I’ve never been afraid of hard work. My early jobs included:

  • Lots of construction work (labouring, etc), 
  • Waiter
  • A short stint in fast food.
  • Fruit and vegetable shop
  • Door to door sales
  • and several more.

My first career was in call centres. I started on the phones as casual thinking that is where it would end too (it didn’t). Every day was spent giving technical support to senior citizens who had just got their first DVD player, but still wanted their old VHS player to be connected to their TV too! They were some long phone calls. 

After 3-4 months I was doing 40 hours a week as a casual and I got a taste for full time money. 

When university started back the following year, I wasn’t there. 

I was focused and determined to work my way up the corporate ladder, and I did over this seven-eight year, short career. 

Along this climb I heard about this ‘making money while you slept’ thing, I was young and very interested in that. 

I started learning more and trying out countless different ways to do exactly that – all after business hours and on weekends when my corporate duties had finished. The year was 2004. 

Anyway, I climbed the corporate ladder, concentrated on making my bosses happy by meeting my targets, which really means meeting THEIR targets. I learned that very early and it was a good lesson, because it helps a young eager employee climb up the ladder. 

When the company I worked for was opening a new hub in the Philippines to meet the demand of lower labour costs, the big boss asked me if I wanted to move to Manila, Philippines from Sydney and run the operation, I said yes.

Hundreds, if not thousands of Australian businesses have off-shored to the Philippines since, and whilst I wasn’t the first of course it was mostly American companies and expats who had done it, so explaining to taxi drivers (pre-UBER and pre-GRAB) where I was from had to include mentions of ‘Kangaroo’s’ because “Australia” wasn’t a common response they heard.

One Door Closes and Another Opens 

Guess what happens when you offshore operations to the Philippines? After two and a half years of being the most expensive employee in the Philippines office, the question about your future arises back home in the head office. 

The answer for me unfortunately (or so I thought at the time) was Redundancy (laid off!). 

There was no job back home, because I moved it to the Philippines and I was too expensive to employ in the Philippines.

When I landed back in Sydney, I slid back down the corporate ladder a few rungs making my way into another call centre. That company I started working for, bought out one of their competitors and the two call centres merged. 

So, guess what happens when two call centres merge and there’s now two call centre managers… One just joined the company, and the other one who had been employed there for a few years: the new one which was me, gets laid off.

Yes, that’s two redundancies within 12 months. It wasn’t a sunny, fun time of my life.

I had a home loan, my wife and I had recently married, and then the second redundancy hit.

It was definitely a moment to reflect and to think about what I wanted and what my next move was going to be. I am sugar coating it of course, and saving you from the stress and worry I felt.

But here’s the thing…

Remember I said I’d heard about the ‘make money while you sleep, online business and marketing’ thing?

Well, I never stopped learning over the years. Even whilst in the Philippines.  

Even in the last couple of years of my corporate career, even before my first redundancy.. I had already made my first dollar online. And I literally mean 1 dollar, it was nothing to write home about (yet!).

I had got some websites up and running, I had other ideas and online strategies that I was working on. 

After my second redundancy, it was time to choose: do I go back to my old career or was it a sign to roll the dice and have a gamble?

When I thought about going out on my own, I needed a plan. I needed a more solid business idea to launch, so I could have a somewhat better chance of earning some money. (I put it like that now, but back then I thought it was going to be A LOT easier!) 

A part of the online and business industry I did know all about, was getting websites up and live. 

I‘d also heard stories from friends and people I met who had been cheated and overcharged tens of thousands of dollars for websites, and I had also got quotes ranging from $800 to $15,000 for the same job when I got quotes to get a website built!

So I knew this was an area of the market that other business owners would have been struggling to navigate. Turns out they were. 

So that was it, my first business for myself was building websites for other businesses! 

But I didn’t build the websites (because I couldn’t build you a website to save my life!), I just advertised the service, spoke to the business owners, heard what they wanted and then I had a web developer who I hired on a per project basis, build the website for me. 

And that was it.

Soon came my first $1,000 working for myself. And then $10k and so on.

I hate bragging and I hate braggers. But if you’re still reading this then I know you’re serious. So I only want to share this with you, very quietly here that my company has broken the million dollar mark several years in a row (although, I don’t build websites for clients anymore – I help them get customers of their own). 

I only tell you this to help you see that it is possible to have these kinds of returns with online marketing and the online side of your business. 98%+ of what we do is online!

That’s the story of how I go to be here, writing this book for you to read and learn from.

From two back-to-back redundancies to going out on my own and making it work.