5 Ways Adversity Leads To Opportunity

to get customers. The idea that it— that, that the adversity forces you to re-examine everything and look for the Plan B and the Plan C is actually a useful thing instead of an unuseful thing. The second thing that comes along: how does the bad news, the bad thing, the problem the catastrophe, the thing that has happened, the thing we inherited, whatever, that is not good for us somehow become good for us. So this is new foundation, right? What's the new foundation of a business? How many of you read the book, how many of you have read the book What a Way to Make a Living, the Lyman Woods story? Info marketers in the room, probably not many hands. Okay, get the book. You'll be entertained for one thing. The biggest thing he did is he actually started his own mail order religion, but out of adversity. Because the business they were in initially was selling lucky rabbit's feet by ads in the tabloids and newspapers. And even by direct mail. So they were selling a lucky rabbit's foot that, you know, would do all sorts of things for you, cure cancer, make you rich, find you love, etc. And they were giving people like the things to say, the ritualistic things to say with the rabbits while they held or rubbed or whatever you do with a rabbit's foot, I don't know. Obviously it wasn't very lucky for the rabbit. Oh, I know. But, so what the person got for their money was a little rabbit's foot. I assume not a real rabbit's foot given the quantity, but who knows. So they were doing quite well, but the postal inspectors showed up one day, and it turned out they took a dim view of this. Because you were making claims like curing cancer, making people rich, et cetera, for which obviously you had no basis for the claims. And even decades ago, the Postal Service and the Federal Trade Commission had an odd idea about all this, that there should be sort of some substance and validity to your claims. Unless, of course, you're a politician, or like now, a pharmaceutical drug company, or a religion. So there's no truth in advertising laws governing religion. So what they did is they took the rabbit's foot out, they turned the what you say when you hold the rabbit's foot into prayers, and they sold the prayers, for which there is no regulation. Incidentally, no regulation today either. And so this turned into a huge, profitable, prosperous business. Now there's a lot more to the story. The story's a very entertaining story, and there's lessons to be learned from it. You should get the book. But the main thing you should I want you to get from it is the way most people react to things is not, and I use the word with hesitation, creatively or even opportunistically. Most people react to all bad news badly. And the United States Postal Inspector showing up at your door Not a good thing. In the old days, 60 Minutes showing up at your door, not a good thing. And most people would react to that by signing anything they could sign and ending what they were doing, changing their name and hiding in the mountains. That's how most people would react to their thing. They did not react that way. They tried to find a way to preserve what was working, and maybe, and it turned out they made it even better. Now that, that's in an odd example, that's like the defining difference. It's how people react to things. So, story Rick Goings told me, the CEO of Tupperware. So when he came to Tupperware, Tupperware was Nearly dead. It was a dying American icon. You can almost do this by age. How many people in here have been to a Tupperware party? All right. How many people know that their mothers went to Tupperware parties? Yeah, see, you can almost do this by age. So this thing was a dying institution with sort of ugly, product, they hadn't updated the stuff in a while, and so it was hard to get people to come to parties, it was hard, the product wasn't very appealing, the company was really financially weak, so they had no real resources to radically fix any of this. This is called adversity. What this drove them to do is go somewhere to do Tupperware that was at least a decade or two behind the United States culturally, where people would still go to parties and where the ugly product was still cool and new when you snapped the lid and it made the noise, right? So it drove them to go with what they had, to Brazil, Argentina, all through South America, and to Asia where they prospered with the old thing they had and then used that money to create the new thing that would work here. Now today, still less than 30% of their business is domestic, 70% of their business is in other countries, more now. Had this CEO not had this kind of thinking, the company probably would already be dead. It'd be gone, and somebody would have licensed the brand, kind of like what's happened to Kodak. But so in every one of these cases, the situation is really about a very different kind of thinking and a very different kind of response to the situation than anything else. The million-dollar story. So that's another thing that comes out of adversity. Is the million-dollar story. What is a million-dollar story? A million-dollar story is a story that helps you make millions of dollars, right? So how many of you know my friend Mark Victor Hansen? Okay, all right. Chicken Soup for the Soul, for those of you that don't know him. He thinks he's more famous than he is. But kind of everybody knows Chicken Soup for the Soul, right? So the Chicken Soup for the Soul, when Canfield and Hansen first tried to find a publisher, was rejected by 33 publishers. That's probably not a record. Mine's 22. But, but so they were rejected by 33 publishers and I think 17 or 19 agents who all told them to take a hike.. And the best rejection letter is, who wants to buy a book of soppy emotional stories and you guys aren't even going to write them? I mean, that was the best rejection letter. All right. Now, the persistence story and they went ahead and all that's interesting. And if you know Mark, you've heard him tell that story because for him it's a million-dollar story. The adversity of the 33 rejections and the 17 agent rejections and the persevering through all of that to turn it into a success is at least as valuable as is the success, because he has leveraged that story in a variety of different directions. It is, for example, very compelling to other authors and would-be authors, most of whom have more rejection slips than they have anything else, and so a part of his business that is directed at authors is all driven by this story. And so the story itself is worth $1 million. Charles Atlas, sand kicked in his face, not only birthed a multimillion-dollar business, but birthed an entire industry. How many of you in here— this is the new one. Somebody show me really the old one. But how many of you have read the book? All right, been influenced by one version of the book or another? Okay. All right, those of you who raised your hands, what you know, I think, is that the book really is all based on one story, the angry and disappointed patient, all right, who then sparked the idea that there's an inner image like an outer image, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. Now, I never met Max. He died before I got involved. I did meet the widow, Anne, and at one point, I did ask Anne how true is the original disappointed, angry patient story, and she gave me a brilliant answer. What difference does it make? I said, okay, I got it. Alright, so in all probability there's a little bit of truth in it, and then it was poetically exaggerated for effect, as most such stories are. Most people don't understand how beneficial and important and useful their pain stories can be as sales and marketing tools, because the one thing everybody has in common is adversity. And so if you want to connect with people, and I don't care what you sell, it really is about human connection, the adversity story can be the million-dollar story, and it can have long, long, long, long life. So So Joe Kosman illustrates this principle perfectly and gives us a very powerful strategy to apply to our own businesses or to be predatory and find opportunity elsewhere. And so Joe's modus operandi— now I'm not suggesting the modus operandi necessarily, but I am suggesting it even as a way to look at your own business. So Joe's— and it's a way to find Plan Bs. So Joe's modus operandi was to find a product that was being made and being sold one way, two ways, three ways, and not five, six, seven, eight, nine, or not one he could think of for it that its owner hadn't thought of for it, and he would go negotiate exclusive rights, in most cases giving them little or nothing, to get the exclusive rights, sometimes a performance guarantee. You know, I get them for 3 years, and if I don't create X amount of dollars, then I lose my rights. And then he would do something dramatically different with that product than they had been doing with the product. His most famous one that he made the most amount of money with was a product called the Ant Farm. It's a plastic box with dirt and tunnels in it. Full of ants, so you can actually see the ants run around. How many in here had an ant farm when they were a child? Do you learn more looking around? Okay, a bunch of you. Well, you understand then, see, kids are thrilled with this, right? Same reason they want to have rats and snakes, right? A, it's cool, and B, I might knock it over and all the ants will get loose in the house and my mother will be upset, and that's really cool. So, but what the ant farm was, it already existed. He didn't invent anything. The ant farm was a teaching aid. It was sold through school supply catalogs to schools to be used in biology class. So each school would only buy one of these products. He's the one who figured out, boy, kids would love to have this at home, and watch the little ants run around and build tunnels and stuff, and their parents won't like it, so they really will like it. This will be really cool, but we can con the parents by telling them that it has educational value, so that'll make it okay. And so he made millions of dollars with the ant farm which was already laying there. Now again, I'm not necessarily suggesting you run out and start looking for unexploited products and do that as an entrepreneurial adventure, although I have heard worse ideas for people who have no ideas. Okay? However, what I am suggesting is you can look at your own business through Joe Kosman's eyes in order to find unexploited opportunities and unused channels of distribution. Gets to the fourth thing everybody does is taking ownership of the adversity, okay? So the worse it is, the more you need to own it and not be delegating it because the people you delegate it to will not have a life or death interest in it. You know, this is the dichotomy in the automobile industry that we have no answer to. So in the past 2 weeks, Mercedes has recalled 183,000 automobiles. Toyota's recalled 360,000 automobiles, on and on and on and on and on, right? The guys that make them have no punishment, penalty, consequence to any of that. Who has the consequence? Actually, the stockholders who have no control over it whatsoever, and whose neck is, whose head's actually on the chopping block? It's the, CEO, right? And in reality, in most businesses, the same thing is true. See, in reality, if while you're away and you're here, your staff decides not to answer the phone you wanted them to answer the phone the way they're supposed, or decides to really aggravate a major account, or decides to, I don't know, fuck with everybody at your restaurant, or, you know, whatever it is that they decide to do, and whatever adversity or crisis occurs that they might need to handle, in reality they have no ownership stake in the consequence. What's the worst thing that happens to them? Unemployment. That's it. That's the worst thing that happens to them is unemployment. And for the most part, staff consider jobs replaceable, interchangeable, and they got 99 weeks now to go figure that out. And fifth, all we've been talking about the whole time, innovation, invention, Opportunism. Let's talk very quickly about some of the main ways to uncover hidden and overlooked opportunities. Bigger opportunity hidden in the small part of the business. So many, many moons ago, I had a client who was barely making a living in a little business and The year before he came to me, he made 60, I don't know, 63, 64, 65,000 bucks, something like that. The next year he made $2 million, and the year after that he made $4 million. Now, I'm telling you this story in part because there was no genius required on my part to make this happen other than asking some probative questions. So the guy owned an inventory control company, an inventory auditing company in Texas. They serviced retail stores, supermarkets and convenience stores all throughout Texas and Louisiana. And they were the guys who went in and they closed the store overnight, or they closed the store for 2 days, and they do an independent inventory that they don't let the employees do it. So that they get a real number. And what it exposes, of course, in those businesses is what's called shrinkage, what has disappeared that hasn't been paid for, which most of those businesses think is all shoplifting, but it's actually all employee and deliveryman theft is what it is. It's a 5 times multiple. And so Jack's got this nice little company, and he's marketing it, he's getting accounts by doing talks, and sometimes entire seminars about employee and delivery man theft. And his schmooze, his magic to his talk is he was a delivery man thief for 10 years. He drove a bread truck and stole, he drove a beer truck and stole, he drove a soft drink truck and stole from the place he delivered to. So he knows every way that they steal, or at least a lot of ways. And the employees and the delivery guys collude, so he knows how they do it. So he would give this talk and then these store owners would hire his company to do the inventory work, right? So as he is telling me this, I'm— and then he gets out testimonial letters, which he's got a mound of testimonial letters from clients, but they're not testimony to the inventory work. They're testimony to having heard the talk and now gone and put controls in to stop to stop the theft, and oh man, we found last quarter alone, we found over $150,000 that we stopped. And these are the kind of— and he's got mounds of them. And I'm going, Jack, the money's in the speech. The opportunity here is in the speech. It's not in the stupid inventory control business with a bunch of employees you got to manage, who by the way are stealing stuff while they're in there doing the inventory. Well, once you've done the count, it's another calendar quarter before there's another count, and the employees of the place are going to get blamed for it, so out goes the staff. I said, you know, I said the money here is in the information. Switch to a seminar business, bigger opportunity. A lot of people don't know Victoria's Secret stores, their own, you know, they actually were started and crafted and engineered to directly compete with Frederick's of Hollywood. Therefore, they were crafted to be stores where men went to buy that stuff, which of course, despite abundant empirical evidence to every man in the room that it's a useless and futile activity, men still go and buy this stuff. Never to be seen again, but buy it. But so they created these stores to compete with Frederick's, and they were not doing very well. Wexler bought this thing one step away from bankruptcy, the guy that created all the Limited, and what did he do with it? He changed the market. He made it all about a place for women to go buy this stuff, okay? Not another place for men to go buy this stuff. Wrong market altogether. Underpriced and nothing offered to the top 20% premium buyers. Price strategy is a huge area of unexploited opportunity. And like I told you, in every industry. Ignore distribution channels, we talked about that. Unexploited assets, we talked about that. Here's sort of the big thing to know about all this. This is not in your, so this is me saying this. The extent and strength of your ability to do all these things, thus to identify and exploit opportunities to their fullest, Success totally depends on quantity and quality of exposure to all the different ways that people exploit opportunity.

Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow, and the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever, designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. This free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free, just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month. One from Dan Kennedy, and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.