9 Critical Components of Entrepreneurial Success (1 of 2)

Imagine this. You're at a business conference, so you're networking, you're meeting, you're greeting a whole bunch of different people. You've created plans for what you're going to do for lunch when suddenly a seasoned entrepreneurial professional who has decades in the game comes to you and says, I think we need to talk because you need to understand these 9 critical components that are going to help you guarantee your success. What do you do with your lunch plans? Hey everybody, welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In today's very special episode, we get to listen to the man, Bill Glazer. Now, Bill Glazer was the longtime president of the Glazer Kennedy Inner Circle and has a vast wealth of knowledge over a long period of time. And he's going to sit down and share with us these 9 critical components. However, before we actually jump into the 9, he's going to begin with some words of wisdom that you absolutely need. These are the foundation stones in order to be able to jump into all the critical components that are going to be shared. Because of that, this is going to be a two-part episode. So yes, when that opportunity comes, you take that lunch with the man, Bill Glazer. You sit down and get ready for two parts that are going to change how you look at entrepreneurship entirely. Let's jump into the 9 Critical Components of Entrepreneurial Success, Part 1.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by.

Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless.

His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Alright, let's get right into talking about what we're here for, which is marketing and money-making. If I could have sort of my first slide. Okay, what I want to do is I want to talk a bit about some of these signs that we have here. I'm not going to talk about them all, but it's important these signs are all up here because each one of them are important for you to look at, and I want to first talk a little bit about some of them. The first one is my business is different. I will tell you that in traveling around now for 10 years teaching people how— about marketing, the most common response that I get is, "Bill, everything you say is right. Everything Dan Kennedy says is right, but my business is different." Then of course we proceed to say to them, "Gee, that's interesting. How is your business different?" "my business is different because my employees don't listen to me," or "my business is different because of the fact that I have skyrocketing costs," or "my business is different because—" and I said, "Gee, that's the first time I ever heard that. I know your business is different." I can tell you that you've got to get that— if that's in your mind, you've got to get that out of your mind. There is nobody here whose business is different. What you've got to embrace, because what will make the big change is that Gee, what I hear to hear, what I hear in the halls, what I hear talking to other folks will apply to my business. And thinking of that will be the big, big breakthrough in your business is understanding the fact that, hey, my business is not different. I've got to embrace what I hear here. So get that out of your mind and please don't come up to me in the break or one of the breaks and tell me, Bill, I know everything, da da da da da, but my business is different. Which, as far as I'm concerned, you just— you don't have to come up to me in the break, so. But please get that past your mind. It's something that we teach for now for a long time. Those members of ours who understand this and embrace it, they have the quantum leaps. Those members who still say, gee, but my business is different, and I know everybody else's business is not, but mine is, they're the ones that stay in the rut. Number 2 sign, go out and get yourself a herd. This is a Dan Kennedy-ism from Dan Kennedy Rancher. What does this mean? What this means is that what you're looking to do is you're looking to go out and get yourself a herd of customers. And you're looking just like a rancher would do, you're looking to take this herd and put a fence around this herd so that this is your herd. And this is your herd of customers. And this is the thing that will take you eventually to what I call financial freedom. Because by having this herd of customers, you can now go to them repeatedly every time you need to and go to your herd of customers and you can get whatever you want from that herd. And a model to look at is Grazer Kennedy. Inner Circle, because basically what we do is we go out and we get ourselves members, which is our herd of customers. And as you know, every time we look to do our next— every time I need to go out and buy a Porsche, it's just I gotta go out and write a sales letter to sell something so that I can sort of fund my Porsche. So the same thing you've gotta do too. You've gotta look at, gee, what is my area? Where can I get my herd of customers? And there's kind of a secret to this that makes the herd even more valuable, and I'm gonna share that secret with you in just a few moments. But your thinking always has to be, is how do I get my herd? What is my herd? And everything that you do strategically in your businesses has to be all about acquiring the herd, acquiring the herd of customers. 'Cause that's the area where you get the financial freedom. That's where you don't have to worry about the one-hit wonder. That's where you don't have to worry about the constant acquisition of new customers. It's now I've got my herd of customers that I've got my cage around, and this is, as I said, brings me to this financial freedom. Number 3. This is one of my sayings. The successful entrepreneur is the loneliest person on the planet. Well, I'm gonna tell you a little secret. That if we did not bring up any speaker up here at all for the next 2.5 days, and all we did was bring you all together and allow you for the next 2.5 days to just mingle with each other and communicate with each other and hang out with each other and have meals together with each other, if that's all we did, then you got more than your money's worth because if we don't bring you all together, who are you going to talk to? Think about it. Let's say your business is doing really, really well. Are you going to tell that to your employees? Hell no. They're going to ask for a raise. Let's say your business is doing really, really, really bad. Are you going to tell that to your employees? Hell no, they're gonna quit. So you can't tell them how your business is doing, good or bad. Are you gonna go to your vendors and tell them how great your business is? They're gonna raise their prices. Are you gonna tell them how bad your business is? They're gonna stop shipping you. Are you gonna go to your friends and tell them about your business? They don't want to hear it. They don't want to hear about your business. Are you gonna go home and tell your spouse about your business? They're busy. They've got their own issues. They don't want to hear it. So there's like nobody to talk to. The successful entrepreneur is the loneliest person in the world. So putting together entrepreneurs in the same place is really therapeutic because you got somebody to communicate with that understands what it is we do. You go up to your buddy that you play golf with, you say to him, Listen, I sent out this really ugly direct mail piece. This thing was really ugly, and I got a great response. And they're looking at you and saying, man, you've got no class. How could you send out that ugly thing? You got to send out something real pretty and shiny and all that other stuff, and therefore that's where you got to build your image. Well, I've sort of learned a long time ago you can't go to the bank and deposit image, but you can sure deposit the cash that comes from the kind of outrageous advertising that we teach. So you can't talk to those folks about it because they think you're weird and nuts. Believe me, I tried, okay? People come, I mean, the question that I like the best is, "What do you do?" They ask me, "What do I do?" I have no idea. When I was buying my Porsche, I was sitting there buying the Porsche and I wrote out a check for the Porsche. And the gal who was my sales associate said to me, "What do you do?" Now, I can't tell— go try to explain to her what I do. So I gave her an answer that she would understand. I told her I dealt in drugs. She got that. Check, cash, no problem. Go figure I'm going to tell her what I do. So you just can't tell people if you're successful at this what you do. So what I— you, you, you— we got to bring you together. So what we do is we will encourage you to spend as much time in the next 2.5 days with being together with each other, telling each other your stories. Believe me, that is very, very— really is very entrepreneurial therapeutic. Now, with saying that, I want to add something to this. In the next 2.5 days, there is everything that you need. We have assembled everything you need to become totally financially independent if you embrace what we put together for the next 2.5 days. With saying that, a big component of that is not the people that are up here on the stage, but a big component of that are the people that are out here in the audience. There are really, really, really some very smart people out here in the audience. When I'm sitting in my InfoMastermind meeting for my Mastermind members, I'm sitting in my VIP meeting for my Mastermind meeting members, when I'm attending the Platinum meeting of Dan's Mastermind members, I'm learning as much from those folks as they're learning from me. There's some real, real smart folks here. Okay, my next sign. This is the famous Jim Rohn quote. Jim Rohn was here last year at the Super Conference. Like Nido Qubein, one of Dan's real heroes is Jim Rohn, and his saying is, "Rich people have big libraries and poor people have big TVs." And how true that is. The rich people are the ones that are constantly working on their education, and the poor people are the ones that are sitting back and eating the Fritos and drinking the Budweiser and just watching the big television. By you being here today, I'm going to put you into the rich people category because you're here working on your library, working on your education. You've got to be thinking about that. I will tell you that there isn't a year that goes by for the last 10 years that I haven't invested at least $50,000 on getting resources to work on my education, and I mean oftentimes I talked to my good friend Yannick Silver, who most of you know, who's writing a— writes an article every month in the OBS Marketing Letter on the internet. And Yannick and I, we talk, we get— not as much as we used to, but I guess we talk about every 2 weeks now. We used to be able to talk more frequently. As our businesses have grown, we have less time to do this, more time to be lonely. But we talk and we compare notes about, hey, did you buy this? Did you hear about this? Did you go to this event? Because we're constantly looking to stay on top of the game. The good thing about what we do as being good marketers is the fact that there's always new strategies, new breakthroughs, new things to discover. So rich people have big libraries, poor people have big TVs. My other sign that I want to talk to you about is the biggest difference between an average income and financial freedom is implementation. And it, once again, I will tell you that this is like the biggie for me. When I work with entrepreneurs, and now I'm kind of like intimately working, I would say, with about 150 of them where I sort of know more about their business, and I know, invariably I start learning more about their own personal lives than I would like to even know about. But when I work with them, what I see this as being the big difference, um, the— when I had asked the Platinum members to stand up, InfoMastermind VIP members to stand up, that is really what sort of sets them apart, is the fact that there's implementation. They don't leave the meeting with 10 pages of notes and then show up 3 months later with having had nothing done on the 10 pages of notes. What they do is they leave the meetings and they go and they prioritize the things that are gonna be the greatest opportunities to them and they immediately implement, immediately implement. Some of them start implementing while they're in the meetings. Ron LeGrand is a great example of that. He brings with him, you know, usually a little staff of people. He's delegating to them to get this done, this done, this done. If he doesn't have the right folks with him, he goes down the hallway, gets on the phone, get this done, this done, this done. Lloyd Irvin, I saw Lloyd over here somewhere. Where's Lloyd? There he is. Lloyd Irvin, tremendous growth in his businesses, launched a whole brand new business with his wife, what, and, and had immediately 7-figure success. Got it all done like in within 6 weeks. 7-figure business. How'd he get it done? Implementation. That's all, that's really what it came down to is you're going to learn, you're going to see here a whole lot of information that's going to be great for you, but if you just see it and you don't implement it, it's just good information for you. The whole trick is, is implementation, and as we talked yesterday during the Renegade Millionaire Day, that part of this implementation process is speed. Getting it done fast. If you don't get it done fast, you're probably not going to get it done. If you try to get it done perfectly, you're probably not going to get it done. Dan has a saying which, believe me, as soon as I heard the saying, it was like a tremendous relief off of my shoulders. As soon as I learned it, which is good is good enough. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's better to get something good out there implemented than to get something— having something perfect that never gets implemented. So the biggest difference, as I said, between an average income and this whole idea of financial freedom is implementation. Okay, enough about some science. Let's talk about the 9 critical components of entrepreneurial success. You're going to hear some stuff here this morning that you've never heard before at a Glazer Kennedy event at all. And you're going to hear some stuff this morning that you have heard before at a Glazer Kennedy event. But you're going to hear some things that is sort of coming from the eyes of Bill Glazer that you've never heard on this list. And I have 9 of them that I want to share with you this morning. Number 1. Riches and niches. This one you've heard before. If you haven't heard it before, you need to understand this one. This goes back to the sign which is go out and get yourself a herd. Because the herd, and this is the secret that I alluded to before, the herd that you want to get, which is the most valuable herd, which is the absolutely the prize cattle, is the niche. So if you go out and get yourself a herd of a big general broad group of folks, not nearly as valuable as getting— having the herd of really the ideal herd. So what you want to be thinking of is this, couple of important questions. One question is If I had to paint the picture of my ideal customer, what does that customer look like? You gotta be thinking about that because again, you don't want your customers to be everybody. You want your customers to be this type of a person. Second question you want to be thinking of is, how can I get to the ideal customer? So not enough people— first of all, not enough people think in terms of what's my ideal customer. They just think in terms of I want to sell everybody that's going to raise their hand and give me a credit card. Well, that's fine, but not necessarily your ideal customer. And then the second thing they don't think about is now that I know who my ideal customer is, how do I get to that person? Is there a way for me to get to the person easily and quickly? Is there a way— maybe there isn't a way to get to me easily and quickly to that person, but, which is now my third question, is what is that customer worth to me? Because if the customer is worth enough to you, then easily and quickly may not be as important as it is if the person's worth a whole lot. One of the biggest— I was in, where was I? I was in Ohio. I was speaking at a chapter meeting for Dan Crix and Thad Winston. We did a combined chapter meeting there in Ohio. And like I usually do when I go at these chapter meetings, we usually do a couple marketing makeovers for people's businesses. And somebody got up in front of the room and they were talking about the fact that they were in, this is a brand new business, many of you probably never heard of this before, it's really like kind of like very rare and unique, it's called real estate investing. So one of these guys was in the real estate investing business and he got up and he said, every time, I'm doing very well, but the biggest thing that I need is I need more people to buy the real estate from so that I can make money with real estate, and I'm struggling with getting— buying more real estate. And I said to the guy, what is an average transaction worth to you? The response was $30,000. And I said to him, what are you doing to get the customer? Well, I'm sending out a postcard. And I said to him, well, like, let's spend more money, you know. I mean, let's— we want more customers. It's worth $30,000 to us. How much— I said to the guy, how much would you be willing to spend to get another $30,000 transaction? Of course, his mindset was like 2 postcards, you know. But, but, but the real— I mean, the answer really is, is how much can you spend to get the ideal customer? Because what you want is you want to be able to— there's riches in niches. If you can find the ideal prospect, the people that are looking to sell their homes to this real estate investor— now, who's the ideal prospect? People most likely to, to do that. Let's spend the amount of money that we need to spend in order to get that customer, because there's riches in niches, and every business has got them. I just wrote an article this past last week, now that I'm out of the retail business after 34 years, I could have like murdered somebody 34 years and been out of prison, I mean, but I was there for 34 years, but now that I'm out of the retail business, I just wrote an article in my retail newsletter about what would I have done differently, what would I do differently today, and one of the things that I feel as though that I made the mistake of was not going heavily enough after the affluent customer. I should have gone more after the affluent customer. There was be more riches in that niche of folks looking to buy menswear. So therefore, you needed to figure out what is that niche, what does that perfect customer look like, how do I get to that customer, and how much is that customer worth to me so I can figure out how much can I spend to get that customer. Number 2, you probably will never have heard this before at a Glazer Kennedy event, and that's because I don't have Dan up here on the stage with me, but this is nobody ever gets rich by themselves. And there's kind of like a theme that I hear by certain people like in our herd, which is, you know, I run an office with no staff and I just do everything, I'm a one-person situation and all this other stuff. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with having no office. There's nothing wrong with working out of your home. There's nothing wrong with having virtual assistants. There's nothing wrong with that at all, but you're not going to get rich by yourself. You gotta have people. You gotta look for people that you can have relationships with, that you can count on, that can help you to get rich. At our vendor area, our I forget what we were calling it, but our vendor area that we have Saturday night and Sunday morning. In there, our printer's in there, City Blue. Our mailing house is in there, Handy Mailing. Our CD duplicator, McManus Duplications, in there. Black and White Communications, they are people that we use for our conference calls. And a lot of other vendors that we use in there. We could not have grown the way we've grown without those folks. I could not have grown Glazer Kennedy Inner Circle without the folks that are back there and wearing all the red stuff that are back there, because nobody ever gets rich by themselves. You need to look in terms of the fact of I need to have a team of people that either I outsource or I have working with me, and not for me, but with me in order to get wealthy. So I'm not gonna be up here and telling you that this is a solo business that you're in. I'm up here telling you that you've gotta be looking for this team that you can get rich with. Number 3, continual education. We talked about it a bit about with when we talked about Jim Rohn's quote, rich people have big libraries, poor people have big TVs, but I believe that that's one of the 9 critical components of entrepreneurial success. And I think it's worth mentioning again. You have to continually look to educate yourself, and I don't, what normally happens is as you start hitting success, you start saying to yourself, you know what, I'm too smart for the room. I'm too smart for everybody that I get, I come in contact with, and that's not true. One of the, I mean, maybe the brightest guy that I know, who does not have, by the way, a college education, but maybe the brightest guy I know is Dan Kennedy. He is, I'm always amazed at just how smart he is and how intuitive he is in his responses. One of the few people in the world that I really go and seek out advice with on a continual basis because I trust his judgment so well. If you go over to his house, which is his office, there's piles and piles and piles and piles of crap all over the place. But these piles are things that he's constantly reading, constantly learning, CDs that he's watching. You know, it's amazing for me is how he's continually working on his education. He and I routinely, and he sort of got me in this habit, We read a book a week. Every week we churn out a book. Now, I'm not going to tell you that I'm sitting there and reading every word of that book. I'm sort of going through it at rapid-fire pace and I'm sort of looking for the key stuff because unfortunately I just can't do that. But I read an entrepreneurial book on marketing or advertising or entrepreneurship every week because I believe that you have to continually work on your education. Again, by you being here, that clearly is a sign that you understand that and embrace that. Number 4. Number 4 is the power of direct marketing. Once again, this was the big quantum leap for me in my business. And to tell you my story, in 1990, there was 33,000 independently owned menswear stores in the United States. In 2000, 10 years later, when they took the next survey, it went from 33,000 to just a shade under 5,000. 7 out of 8 menswear retailers in the United States went out of business. Why? Well, maybe a lot of reasons, but what I observed was what do menswear retailers, what were they, spending their time on. They were spending their time on, "I gotta buy the best possible products that I could for my customers, and I had to provide the best bend-over-backwards service that I could for my customers." And those two things are very important, but what they didn't understand was the power of direct marketing, how to communicate with the customer in order to continually bring that customer back over and over and over again. When I heard Dan Kennedy speak in 1995 in Philadelphia at a success seminar, that was the first time that I sort of really understood just how powerful direct marketing was. By the way, I'll just mention to you also that up until that time, I was always a student of marketing. But my— the way I was a student of marketing was by looking at the marketing of other menswear retailers. Now look at what I'm studying. I'm studying an industry that went from 33,000 to 5,000 and I'm studying what they're doing. What I should have been studying was I shouldn't be doing what they're doing. And I finally figured that out after I heard Dan speak and my big breakthrough was figuring out what was going on over here in industry A, which was not my industry, and how do I move it over here to industry B, which was my industry? And when I understood then direct marketing and how powerful that was, that was the big, big leap. That's when I experienced the phenomenon. That's when my business had a huge, huge growth. The very first year, over 30% growth we had in our business. Never had a growth like that before in my business. I didn't change my merchandise mix. I didn't change the customer service level. We always felt we always provided that well. But what we did for the first time was we really let our customers know that. We were sending out a direct mail piece to our customers every week. We were call— I'm sorry, every month, 12 times a year. We built it up eventually to 18 times a year. We built it up to an email every week, 52 contacts a year on email. We were outbound to our customers and calling our customers anywhere from 4 to 12 times a year. A lot of touches, a lot of marketing. That was the big change. I— over the next 2.5 days, you're going to be seeing this super conference more than any other super conference we've ever assembled. We have more show-and-tell than we've ever put together before. You're going to have 6 people competing for the title of Glazer Kennedy Inner Circle Marketer of the Year. They're going to be up here and showing you unbelievable show-and-tell stuff. We had close to, I think it was about 75 entries for that, most we've ever had. We, our committee carefully studied all 75 of them to figure out the best 6. Our committee was me. And you know what, it's painful to look at all 75 of them because there was like 6 really good ones. And there was another 6 good ones, and there was a lot of awful stuff. So, so, so we have, you're going to see a lot of that. I'm going to be sharing with you 14 outrageous advertising examples that are outrageously successful. Many of you will remember I ran a contest which we're paying out a prize for, and there are a lot, the contest winners are part of this. It's really great, some really great stuff there. Some of this stuff is really going to make your jaw drop. And also I asked for just to get started right away, there's a guy that's doing really, really great stuff that I've known him for a long time and he's become an unbelievable student of this what I call outrageously effective advertising and he's doing in two particular areas. One is in birthday mailings and the last time I looked, if anybody disagrees with me let me know, Last time I looked, everybody has a birthday every year. So he's doing birthday mailings. He's even come up with a very clever way to make it so you can have a birthday— ready for this— twice a year. And not only that, but also he's doing new mover mailings. And I asked him to come up here with me right now and show you some great stuff. So my good friend, Mr. Dean Killingbeck.

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 $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.