Restaurant consultant Howard Tinker writes about me in his book More Bums On Seats

Howard Tinker is a high-profile marketing consultant in Australia who specialises in helping restaurant owners grow their sales by tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

He has written a book called More Bums on Seats and he very kindly thanks me in the Acknowledgements:

“My great friend Chris Payne who believed in me enough to push me into business in the first place.”

Here is an extract from his book in which he talks about our work together:

“In 1997 I opened my first business. It was called LifeTools Australia and it was based on a direct mail company called LifeTools in the UK owned by my good friend Chris Payne. On leaving the UK I had jokingly said to Chris, ‘if I can’t get a job in Australia I will set up the Australian arm of LifeTools’. Many a true word spoken in jest!

“Less than a year later Chris sent me boxes of stock from the UK and I was the proud but somewhat bewildered owner of a booth at the Mind, Body Spirit Festival at Darling Harbour, Sydney. I say bewildered because I really had no idea what I was doing.

“Just as in school I chose someone smart to copy – no point copying from another dumb kid in the class. My friend in the UK, Chris Payne was doing well in business and he supplied me with products to sell in my first business, Lifetools Australia. So I simply copied the sales pieces he used in the UK. I merely Australianised them and they worked. I mailed them out and they brought in sales, it was like magic, I was exchanging pieces of A4 paper for cheques and cash!”

Howard did terrific business promoting PhotoReading, Paraliminal CDs, The Sedona Method, and more using my sales copy and brochure designs. He and his wife Bev also handled all the admin when I ran a 3-day seminar in Sydney several years ago.