Novel way of explaining binary counting to absolute beginners

Binary is explained very well on thousands of excellent web pages out there, so this is just a snippet of an idea that I think is novel.  I just thought of a cool way to teach someone to count in binary, by just swapping the digit "1" for "9" and back, as follows:

A) Replace all the "1"s with "9"s;
B) Add 1 as you would in familiar decimal counting
C) Then change all "9"s back to "1"s.

For example, starting with say 1011
After step A) we have 9099
After step B) we have 9100
After step C) we have 1100

The goal is to very quickly just skip the step of actually writing any "9"s at all, and just know to treat the "1" as the "9", i.e. in binary, the "1" is the last digit.  Works for any base.