Building Blocks of Renegade Millionaire Marketing (1 of 2)

What does it mean to be a renegade millionaire marketer? Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In this episode, we get to listen to Dan Kennedy, Bill Glazer, and Lee Miltier as they break apart the structure of renegade millionaire marketing and how you can install it into your business, including 3 specific premises that you must follow in order to be able to follow the renegade millionaire marketer path and the building blocks that you need to install piece by piece in order to build not just the foundation of your business, but a structure that lasts. Lee Miltier will be asking the questions and we get to listen in. Let's get started.

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.

Hello, this is Lee Miltier, and welcome to the Renegade Millionaire Marketing, an exploration of the most unusual unorthodox, creative, advanced, and of course, exceptionally profitable marketing strategies used by renegade millionaire entrepreneurs and pretty much ignored or misunderstood by the majority of business people. So, Dan, Bill, let's just get right to it. I have one general question before we work through the list of building blocks, and that is, how do you define renegade millionaire marketing?

Well, the— if you just break it up in language, right? So, so the renegade part of it, I think, gets to being a contrarian, being willing to do everything differently, violate all of your industry norms, annoy your peers and often industry regulatory bodies while you do it.

Yes.

Sort of be viewed as odd, weird, unpleasant, and be all about results. The millionaire part sort of speaks for itself as well in that, although, you know, being a millionaire isn't what it used to be. Yeah, but, but it still represents— it still is sort of symbolic to people more now than it is about the amount of money. It is about having an exceptionally profitable business. And in one industry that might mean a different number than another. In one part of the country where you live, it might be a different number than in another. But it really means that you are, you are out-earning your norms and you are out-net-worthing which is not a verb, of course, but you know, you are, you are out-net-worthing your, your norms.

We're gonna make that a verb.

Well, I can make anything a verb I want. That's, I keep feeling that's my policy.

Well, you know, listen, just so to echo what Dan just said to me, just like if you go back to the original Renegade Millionaire system, which anybody listening to this, if they don't already have it, they should probably pick up a copy of it. But just like in the Renegade Millionaire system, if you're not annoying your peers, you're probably not doing it, doing your marketing as well as you should. And first of all, that's a mindset that holds a lot of people back because they're, they're resistant to, to, to annoy their peers. And, and you got to get past that first of all. And the good news about getting past that is That once you adopt this and you accept this, you'll find that actually not only will the marketing of your business be the most profitable thing that you can do for your business, but it becomes the most fun thing you can do for your business. I mean, consistently when I talk to members of ours, whether people that I coach more one-on-one or just people that I meet at one of our national events, and they, they embrace this whole concept of marketing that is all results-driven and get a great return on their time and investment. They tell me that by far and away, it's the one thing that they do in their business that they enjoy doing more than anything else that they can do in their business. And that's, that's, that's very comforting. Once you get— you can pass this mind shift of Hey, I'm, I'm kind of like, my competitors are looking at me and they're looking at me like, you know, I shouldn't be doing this kind of thing. And many cases, even my family members are looking at me like, you know, you shouldn't be doing this, this kind of thing. You know what I mean? This, this marketing looks like not high class enough, you know? And once you get past that thinking where it's all about getting results, you'll find it to be the most fun thing that you can do in the entire business.

Well, I'll bet. I'll bet you that when you really started to change the advertising and marketing in your own stores, right, in your former life, you, you may have to wonder what you did in your former, former life to be, to have to be a retailer in the life when you got sent back. But every time you say former life, I think, well, that's, I know, I know you do. And that's why I just said what I said. That was for your benefit. He had a, he had a puzzled look on his face and you got it instantly, you know. For your benefit, theoretically, you get your current lot in life if you're a reincarnationist by how good you were or how bad you were or what you did in your former life. Hence, it's, you know, when a frog is here for some previous reason. Not to suggest that you're a devout believer in reincarnation either, but you know, Lee's a little more flexible in her beliefs than some. But, but anyway, I would bet that, that when you start changing all the advertising marketing in your stores, your father undoubtedly thought it was weird and your employees probably gave you grief, your salespeople, the newspaper you advertise in. I mean, I'll bet you heard it from everybody, didn't you?

There's, listen, there's no question. But you know what's interesting is, is that, well, my father, you know, the first time I came back and told my father who, when I heard, first heard you speak, Dan, at, at the Success Seminar. And I came back and told my father who I, for those who people listening to the CD, you know, I worked with my father for 20 years every day in our family business. And, and I heard Dan talk about, you know, you send out a letter to somebody And then whoever doesn't respond, you send them a second letter 2 weeks later. Doesn't respond, send them a second, a third letter 2 weeks later after that. I mean, he looked at me like I was nuts, you know, like if they didn't respond, they're not responding. And then when I, when I just, and very much to my father's credit, because, you know, many people who work with their family businesses, all this dysfunction and very much to my father's credit, he never held me back from me doing what I wanted to do, which unfortunately many parents do hold their children back. And so he allowed me to succeed and fail. And, and so I went ahead and did this thing and it was a huge success. And then, you know, as I embraced it more and more and more and more and got better and better and better at it and weirder and weirder and weirder. And oh yeah, which, which was getting back to the fun part because the, the, You know, Dan, I showed you a mailing piece that I created recently, which was the sending out a piece of a cardboard box. And, and I said to you, I handed you a sample of it. I said to you, gee, I wish I was doing more of this stuff like I used to do, you know. And so, so it became the most fun thing that I did in my entire business. But I also will tell you, to your point there, that yes, the, my employees and initially including, you know, so let's get past my father. My employees initially looked at it and they said, you know, what's up with Bill? I mean, you know, and then, and then you're right, the media, especially the newspapers, but the media looked at it and they, and they, you know, you know, this, this guy is like lost it. But as they started seeing the results, my employees saw the results, then they rallied behind it. And the media, as they didn't really, could never see results, but they would just see that my business just kept getting more and more and more successful. And I was spending a lot more money on marketing. Which made them very happy, by the way. They first started, then it was the shift from, you know, hey, this Glazer guy who's an idiot is now a genius, you know. But, you know, it took a little bit of a while to convince them of that. But, and which also proves that you can fool the media twice. I can fool them in the fact that they thought I was an idiot and I can also fool them in the fact they thought I was a genius. So, So they were easily fooled. But yeah, but you know, as, as results start happening, you turn in from, from somebody who's a, who's an imbecile into somebody who must really get it and know it. So you're right.

All right.

Before we go on and get into details, I think, Dan, I think right now what we should do is refresh everybody's memory. Everybody who already has the original Renegade Millionaire system, about the background. So tell us about what your overall premise is and what your approach is.

Well, the first premise is that, that the majority is always wrong. So which explains a great deal about how we get the elected people that we do. Although just imagine if we actually had a majority of the population voting who we get. You know, Whitney Spears would be president and, you know, and from American Idol would be the Secretary of Defense if we actually had, if we actually had the true majority voting. So, you know, things could be worse, I'm afraid. But so my first premise is, is that the majority is always wrong. And, and, and so financially it has some measure of keeping score, right? There's 1% of the United States population that gets rich and 4% that achieves financial security and independence and 95% don't. And so that tells you that 95% of the people around you have wrong thinking about money specifically and about success in, in a broader sense, about business, about advertising and about marketing. Otherwise, if they were right, those percentages would be flipped around. And so, you know, the statistics tell us this. It's still very hard to like look at all the people around us who we grew up with or who were our school teachers or our family or our employees who we've been working with for 10 or 12 years and come to the conclusion that 95% of them can't be paid attention to and can't be listened to, that they're all wrong. But that is in fact the case. And one of the, one of the things that I, that I heard, fortunately fairly young, and it's actually a message that, you know, a young person likes, that the majority is wrong. So I heard it from Earl Nightingale, and, and Earl said that there's 3 things that— and, you know, Earl, like me, not as prolific as me, probably. Maybe there's nobody who's recorded as much stuff as me because I'm more about being prolific than being good. And, you know, if you want to turn out a lot of material, you just lower the standards, right?

I mean, that's not true.

Great stuff. But, but, but Earl recorded a lot of stuff and, and I've listened to hundreds and hundreds of hours of Earl and I got 3 things that I wrote down that like stuck, you know, that are meaningful. And one of them was Earl said that if you don't know how to do any— how to do what you need to do to get where it is you want to go. So whatever that is, then— and you don't have a model, so you don't have anybody around you who is your model or your mentor, who has legitimacy, who has traveled the path you want to travel and arrived at the destination you want to arrive at. Then what you do is you look around at what everybody else is doing and don't do it. That that's your starting point. And so if you, if you now narrow that to marketing and you think about how most people get into a business, some people like Bill are essentially born into the business, meaning father was entrepreneur. So that's how I got in advertising, right? They essentially path of father. So some people like are like born into their business and they're in the family business and they grow up in it. The other main path is the, the, the, the be your own boss path. So the guy is a car mechanic and he actually kind of likes being a car mechanic. He just doesn't like having a boss. So he quits his job and starts an auto repair shop, right? Or like Earl used to describe— and of course, Earl, World War II era. So Earl described the way most people got jobs is they came home from the military They got out of the military and they went down to the street corner and hung out with their 3 guys, 3 buddies who got out 6 months earlier than they did and said, where are you working? And those guys said, well, we're working over here. And then he went and worked over there. There's not a lot of deliberate strategy to a lot of how people get their jobs or how they get in business. But when people get in a new business, however they get there, what they do naturally is look around at what everybody else is doing and fit in. So if you were ever transferred from one school to the other when you were a kid, junior high school or high school, and you now moved to a new school, what did you do when you got there? Well, you, you wanted to fit in. So you looked around at how everybody else behaved and you kind of did what everybody else did. So if where you came from, everybody went to school in sneakers and now the new school, everybody goes to school in cowboy boots because you just moved from Cleveland to San Antonio, you go home and say, Mom, I need a pair of cowboy boots. Right? And so that's how we've grown up with adaptive behavior. Right? And it may be okay, by the way, for a junior high school kid, but it turns out it's not real productive for adults. But so people get in business, they do exactly the same thing. So guy, guy becomes a car salesman, he gets to the dealership and he looks around at what, how the other 8 car salesmen behave., and he copies what they do. Oh, so that's how things are done around here. Everybody comes out, stands in a line with a donut and a cup of coffee and waits for somebody to come in and they take their turn. Oh, I'll do that too. Right? And then they try and just incrementally improve what they saw. So now, so maybe he dresses better than the other 7 guys who line up and stand there with a cup of coffee and a donut. Maybe he works on his sales patter so that he does a little more effective presentation when he gets his turn. But he rarely says, hmm, I'll bet all 7 of those guys are wrong. And so I don't know what to do, but what I won't do is show up in the morning and get a cup of coffee and a donut and stand in line with the other 7 guys. He rarely throws that out, takes it off the table, and then says, well, if I'm not going to do that, I got an hour to kill. I wonder what I should do with the hour. And I'll start trying to do something that I don't see any of the rest of them do and see how that works out. Right. And so I heard Earl say that, and for whatever reason, it's one of the three things that stuck. I mean, it really resonated with me. And so a basic premise of Renegade Millionaire System and Renegade Millionaire Marketing, I mean, if I have a client and, and I don't do it much anymore because I don't choose to because it's hard work. But so you go into a niche you don't know, and I wind up with a client in an arena that, that I'm not familiar with that arena. I will now gather up what is everybody doing and I look for a couple of things. One, I'll look for a commonality amongst the successful competitors. So, okay, if you narrow it to advertising, So let's say I go into weight loss and I don't know anything about weight, weight loss. Well, I'll go find all the weight loss ads in a bunch of magazines that have been running for at least 3 years every single month. So, and they're direct response ads, so the people like maybe know what's going on. So now I'll look for a commonality in all those ads cuz they're successful enough and they track their results. So if they're all doing 3 payments, I'm gonna start testing with 3 payments because if they're all doing 3 payments, they maybe got there through testing.. But the other thing I'll do is I'll look at what all the dumb ones are doing. Now, in advertising, that's pretty easy. That's the ad that ran 3 times or less and never ran again. Well, what are all those commonalities?

Because—

and they're the majority, by the way. So if you think TV infomercials— why I got in the TV infomercial business, right? At the time that I started to do TV infomercials, there were over 5,000 new shows testing a year. And 100 shows staying on the air for any length of time. So 4,900 of them were, quote, quote, wrong. 100 of them were, quote, quote, right. Well, so you look at all 4,900 of them, you know, what are they doing? And we know not to do that, right? And but see, most people don't think that way. So that's like the first premise is look around at what everybody else is doing And for God's sakes, don't do that unless there's empirical proof that they're successful at what it is that they're doing. And even then, you got to question it because it's been derivative and cumulative. You know, we have this thing on harness racing horses, as you know. And if you get an older horse that has been passed through 5 or 6 or 7 trainers, as horses age, they develop different you know, physical problems or whatever. And everybody sort of adds on equipment as a way to handle with that. So the horse started wearing nothing but a bridle and a harness. And then for one reason, he was bearing out. So somebody put a head pole on him and they put a special kind of boot on him and they put a special bit on him. And then he developed a problem in his thigh that might have been temporary, but it caused him to hit. So they put weighted shoes on him. So by the time he's like 8 years old, he's wearing the kitchen sink. You get him and he's got all this crap because everybody just kept adding stuff to deal with the problem. And the smart guy takes it all off and sees what happens and starts over. The dumb guy leaves it all on and adds something else. So everything becomes derivative of what was there before, right? So the first premise is to look at what everybody else is doing, kind of strip away everything and start from the majority's wrong and let's take a minority viewpoint, even if we have to create it. The second premise is that breakthroughs come from outside of business, not inside of business. And so again, most people get into a business and they're adaptive to how things are done around here. So they're sort of Amish in that they operate in a closed community. So if you're in the insurance business, you go, well, think about our business, speaking business, yours and mine. So what? So somebody sees a speaker and they go up to the speaker after he speaks. So somebody comes up to you, comes up to me, comes up to Brian Tracy, comes up to Zig, comes up to Jim Rohn, says, I really want to do what you do. How do I do that? Well, if for no other reason than ease of giving a short answer than a long answer, what almost every speaker does is say, well, you should join the National Speakers Association. And so now they go to— they join an association, which that industry only has one trade association, and then they go to that industry's convention and they now surround themselves with a circle of other people already in that business. So it's like moving into an Amish community. Right. And so everything now becomes incestuous. I joke about marketing incest, but everything becomes incestuous because we're only looking at what everybody else is doing, right? So they're all making butter with a butter churn. And if that's all we see and if that's the only way we think it's normal to make butter, then we get ourselves a butter churn and, you know, we spend an hour a day pumping a stick up and down in order to make butter. You know, I mean, And so everybody in their own industry does that. If they're in the insurance industry, they hang out with insurance guys, they read sales books written by insurance guys, they go to the Insurance Industry Association convention, they only read the insurance industry trade journal. Well, only incremental improvement at best can come from that. No breakthrough can come from that because nobody's trying to have a breakthrough. Everybody's just trying to do what everybody else is doing and try and do it a little better. So the second premise is breakthroughs come from outside. Not inside. Okay. The third premise that, that I think renegade millionaires understand better maybe than anybody else. And Bill talked about like sort of the process of finding this kind of marketing, questioning maybe this kind of marketing, experimenting with this kind of marketing, and ultimately embracing this kind of marketing. And then a big leap is when it becomes the most interesting, enjoyable, fun part of the business that you do. The premise actually is, is that is the business. And so most people, if you ask them to describe what they do, they state it in very narrow sort of shopkeeper terminology. So a guy, if we go over here to the neighborhood shopping center and we go in a jewelry store and say, what do you do? The guy, first of all, will look at us, you know, like we're idiots. But then he will say, I'm a jeweler. Okay. If he's a little bit more business-minded, he might say, I own a jewelry store. And we go next door to the people that have a little ice cream shop. They're going to say, well, you're in an ice cream shop. But see, really, that's how they think. If you ask them at a cocktail party, you'd get the same answer. Right. We understand we're in the marketing business and the thing or things that we choose to market are ancillary to the marketing. Everybody else thinks the marketing is ancillary to the thing or things that they do. And that's such a huge shift in your thinking. So own clothing stores, almost everybody, if you go to— what's the menswear convention?

What's the—

the MAGIC show? Yeah. So if you go to the MAGIC show in Las Vegas, which when you say you go to the MAGIC show, people think it's a bunch of magicians. Yeah. It stands for—

what's it stand for? Mid-Atlantic Guild for something.

So anyway, it's magic. It's magic, baby. Yeah. There it's— it— I've walked around once and I didn't see anything magical, but nevertheless. Oh, bad. But so, so, so, so if he goes to the magic show and, and talks to retailers and you sit in the cocktail lounge and have conversation, most of that conversation quickly goes to, to the retail, the technical, the clinical part of the business. So they'll talk about merchandising and inventory and seasonal changes of inventory. And if you try and steer it to advertising and marketing, see, they, everybody will view that as the ancillary part of the business. Some will view it as like the necessary evil part of the business, right? If we go and sit in the cocktail lounge at National Speakers Association, the conversation will all be about performance. Absolutely. It'll be about telling how do you, how do you being funnier, being more dramatic on stage, being more, Hey, it'll be about that. If you go to a chiropractic convention, the cocktail conversation will be about technique, whether you use the activator gun or you use art, or what do you think about spinal decompression, yada, yada, yada. Okay. And they will view advertising, marketing, and sales as either ancillary or necessary evil. Right. I spoke 3 years in a row at the National Guild of Hypnotists. Which is the trade show and convention for professional hypnotists. And, and I spoke for 3 hours on marketing and we'd have a break and they're out in the hall. And the first thing you got to know is nobody's talking about marketing. Actually, they're all hypnotizing each other, right? So they're all wooing each other. One guy's got the moving coin, you stare at this, and the other guy's doing his chants. And, you know, chiropractic convention, they're all adjusting each other. That's what they're doing on the breaks. So one of them's got a guy on the floor, the other one's got a guy up against the wall, and they're all adjusting each other, which, by the way, try and get them to adjust you without X-rays in their office. But at the convention, they'll slap the guy up against the bathroom stall in a hot second. And I mean, I love chiropractors, but, you know, but so, so, so everybody views this as ancillary. We view it— Renegade Millionaires learn to flip that equation. And we actually view the business we're in as marketing and the thing as ancillary. And ultimately that viewpoint leads to being to our greatest core competency, our greatest skill, as well as our greatest interest and enthusiasm. The thing we have fun with being the marketing, which is really empowering because once you can market one thing effectively, you can market anything effectively. If all you can do is pick which clothes should be on the shelf in the fall, then that's not a, that's not a very transferable skill. It's not really an expandable skill. If all you can do is give a great chiropractic adjustment, that doesn't mean you can go next week and be a dentist. It doesn't mean you can go own a clothing store and do that effect. But If you can market, you can market anything. And finally, what we understand that a lot of people don't like hearing is the doer of the thing is the most interchangeable component part in business. So I can, I can own it. I can successfully own any kind of business I can legally own. Now, I can't own a chiropractic practice. I can't own a law firm. There's laws against it. They've, they've kept outsiders out. You actually have to have the degree.. But otherwise, I can successfully own any kind of business because I can hire the doer. He's an interchangeable commodity. It's the person who brings the customers in the door who's really got all the power. So you can move around and go do anything you want, but the person who has the doer skill can only be the doer. And so he's really not a lot better off than the factory worker at Ford. Who's been there for 23 years at Ford, and all of a sudden the auto industry is leaving the United States. And you'll see these guys interviewed on TV. This is all I've ever done. This is all I know how to do. What do I do now? Really, most small business people are in the same position because the interchangeable skill is the marketing skill.

So those are the 3 big premises behind really everything we're going to talk about. Well, you know, listening to, to that interpretation of the, of the basic premise of the Renegade Millionaire marketing system kind of proves what you just said, Lee, which is the fact that dispelled the myth that Dan Kennedy often says that he's more prolific than good because, you know, I've never heard him yet explain the Renegade Millionaire system as he just explained it. Which goes to show you that he's prolific and good.

Okay, let's get into the first building block that we promised everybody. And the first building block listed is thoroughly and completely understanding and committing to direct response advertising. So why do you think that's so important?

Well, first of all, we should do probably a little background again of definition, as we did with the Renegade Millionaire system just a few moments ago. So let's talk about committed to direct response advertising. The first thing that anybody listening to this has to embrace, and if you don't embrace it, all you're going to do is you're going to just— you're better off just taking your money and flushing it down the toilet or taking your money, as I did last night, and betting it on a horse at the track that they invited me to go to. You got a souvenir. I got a ticket, right? But the first thing is that you have to understand the fact that you've just got to stop being what is referred to as being an advertising victim. Because, and this happens, I don't care if you're in a small business, 'cause you know, I came from retail, or whatever business that you're in, Um, most people can easily become what we call an advertising victim, which is some either media sales guy, you know, newspaper, radio, internet banner ads, uh, uh, creating a website for you guy, uh, or some advertising agency comes to you and they they talk to you about this whole notion of, of, you know, you got to have your advertising out there and you got to build your brand. And so then when somebody is thinking about buying what it is that you are selling, they will think of you and then they will come and, and, and seek you out. So that's not what this is all about. And that's, that's how you become an advertising victim. I'll never forget In Baltimore, Maryland, where I live, you know, for, for months there was a business publication in there and they ran an ad consecutively advertising for advertisers. And one of the biggest things that they— not the big one, but the thing that the whole, the whole, the whole theory behind the ad was the fact that you've got to run your ad 21 times before somebody notices it. 21, 21 times. That was their ad. So you gotta be in my publication, this business publication, 21 times before you get some results. And yeah, I mean, there will be results that would be gotten by running your ad 21 times. And the results that would be gotten is the fact that the newspaper will get 21 ads. And, and so they will get good, they will get good results from all the money that you've given them for those 21 ads.

And what I'll do really well is the bankruptcy attorney in there running his ad 21 times.

So, so, so, and so, you know, like what I first heard Dan talk about was that, you know, you can't multiply zeros, you know, and if you, if you get a zero response on the first ad, well, you know, what makes you think you're going to get a terrific response on the next 20 of them? So you got to stop being an advertiser. You got to stop listening to other people teaching you this whole notion of, you know, getting your name out there. And I mean, the only people that that kind of works for, and even that could be significantly improved, but the only people that kind of works for is the people that have these unlimited budgets of, you know, of, you know, Coca-Cola or something like that. I mean, I'm always amazed, you know, American Idol, you see the Ford Motor Company as the, as the main sponsor of American Idol. And here's a company that's spending whatever, millions and millions and millions of dollars to be on one of the top rated television shows, very, very heavily watched. And as they continue to lose billions and millions and millions and hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter. So it proves to you even the big dumb companies can't make this whole, you know, just getting your name out there and your brand out there in order to be productive for them. So you gotta stop being that advertiser. You gotta stop thinking about that, you know, in the original, in my former life, to use your language, okay? So now that I've been reincarnated into, into not a frog though, right? But now that I've been reincarnated. Well, we haven't talked to Karen lately. Okay. Yeah, my wife Karen would, would have some very interesting observations about what I've been reincarnated into. But, but in my former life, retail, you know, 90%, you know, in spite of everything I've tried to do in order to teach them otherwise, But 90% of all advertising is, is, is hardly any direct response at all. It's still about getting your name out there. A lot of it is about putting a specific product out there with a specific, specific price. And usually it's lowest price, which is again, really the wrong thing to do because you'll never be able to be the lowest price provider. I don't care who you are. And as evidenced by the fact that Walmart today is starting to falter, which is just a continuation of every other low-price provider who has eventually faltered. If you look back at the history of, of the retail world, for sure. So, so, but as I said, 90% of all retail is about that. And, and really what we're going to be talking about here today is not that we're going to be talking about using good direct response advertising in a very, very different way from that. And, and I want to mention that, you know, a lot of it is about hitting the right emotional triggers in order to get people to respond. And also a lot of it is about getting your advertising noticed and responded to. And, you know, listen, I mean, at Glazer Kennedy, we really are— and we'll get a little bit, a little bit later on to this recording about who we really serve best, but We really are the champions of what I would call the small business owner, the independent entrepreneur, you know, not the person that's running out, out over there with the billion-dollar company. You know, we, we really fall into a really nice niche of, I don't know, Dan, would you say $20 million and under?

You know, we have a few of the big guys who sneak in just like we have some attorneys that we keep sneaking in. But yeah, and, and by the way, and they get it. I know. Yeah. And so, but, but for the most part, you're right. It's like the mid-sized company owner down to the local merchant, right in that range.

And so those are the people that sort of embrace, embrace this whole notion of number one is developing your marketing that gets noticed and responded to, which when I say responded to means knowing how to use— and we'll talk about that today— knowing how to use the the right direct response sort of building blocks, if you would, and also in hitting sort of the right way to talk to your client, customer, or patient in order to make them want to do business with you and only with you.

You know, if I may, our whole mindset of programming in our reality has always been institutional advertising. That's what everybody has always known. And the whole Renegade system is like 100% opposite of anything we've been programmed to do by the media or education.

Well, again, you have to back up to the majority is always wrong. So first of all, when, when you realize most advertising you see is from big dumb companies, so to look at that, right, are they on the path you want to travel getting to the destination you want to get to? No. In fact, a good percentage of them the path that they travel and the destination they ultimately arrive at, as Bill pointed out, is bankruptcy and extinction. Now, in some cases it takes 5, 6 decades for that to happen because they're big, dumb. It takes a long time for a dinosaur to die. But, you know, while, as he said, while Ford is blithely spending money, is sponsoring American Idol, they're going out of business. And if you But if you had 500 people in a room who just watched American Idol and you let 10 minutes pass and you ask them what car company sponsored it, they, 90% of them get it wrong. Does it influence their behavior? No. Is there any way to measure what you, any value you're getting from that? No. The ad agency doesn't want it measured. The company doesn't even want it measured. And they're worried about what Wall Street thinks and what the vice president of GM thinks about what they're doing. And oh boy, I got American Idol and you can't have it. You, so, 'cause I, we're Ford and GM can't, there's a bunch of dumb stuff going on. So, but you're right. See, we've been conditioned to think this is the thing to do. But again, the majority, and see, people like Walmart's a great example. See, people cannot conceive of an American landscape without Walmart, especially if they're under the age of 45. Okay, but before Walmart, if you have any historical perspective, there's been Walmarts who have come and gone and over and over and over again. So low price. Okay, so right now gas prices, so all the car companies are scurrying to produce cheap small cars that get high gas mileage. Well, I can name you 10 car companies in my lifetime who entered the marketplace with that premise, died in the marketplace with that premise, and are gone from the marketplace with that premise. But here we go again. And it's not the solution to their problems at all. And the contrarian approach would be, if I was running for it, I look around and say, let's see, GM's scurrying to produce a bunch of small, cheap cars. Chrysler's scurrying to produce a bunch of small— everybody's scurrying to produce small, cheap cars. Not only aren't we going to produce any, I'm gonna eliminate the whole line and I'm gonna produce honking big expensive cars with giant profit margins and sell less of them for a ton of money. And I'll pay my fuel surcharge tax to the government for producing a gas guzzler, which right now I think is $2,000. If they don't meet their fuel standards, they gotta pay $2,000 a car. I'll pay $2,000, I'll add $4,000 to the price and you know, I won't care. I would do the opposite, right? But we're all conditioned. The thing about direct response, the direct response element of all this is, first of all, it's the only scientific approach to advertising. David Ogilvy, who, who built one of the largest ad agencies ever, traditional ad agency. But David was a DR guy who really came from direct sales, door-to-door pot and pan sales. And anybody, by the way, if you want somebody around you really knows anything about advertising, find somebody who actually came from sales. But so Ogilvy used to scream at his people that privately in their agency, although ultimately he talked about it in his autobiography, that we're all idiots. And the only people who really know what they're doing are the direct response people who have always been looked down on in advertising as the guys doing ugly stuff. 'Cause direct response really came from mail order. So it's like advertising, real advertising over here and those mail order guys over there. But they're the only ones, as Ogilvy pointed out, who really know what they're doing. Because unlike Ford sponsoring American Idol, classically they would run an ad with a coupon in it and you can count how many coupons you got back and you spent X and you got Y number of coupons and well, is that good or bad, right? You know. And so direct response is the only scientific approach to advertising. Everything else is theory. So do you want to put your money on theory or do you want to put your money on science? Second, it's the only disciplined approach to advertising, again, because we count. So whether you drive the traffic to the website, you drive the traffic in the door of the store, you drive it to the phone, you actually get a coupon in the mail, whatever, we actually count. So we're about spend a dollar and determine as quickly as possible with a series of measurements whether we're getting a good return on investment on that dollar or a bad investment on that dollar. And then we make changes based on whether we got a good investment on that dollar or a bad investment on that dollar and tend to be very, very, very disciplined about it. At the meeting we were all at last night, was a local meeting. Chiropractor came up to me and he said, in my market, I see, I see Dr. Tom Schacht stuff all the time. I see his freestanding newspaper inserts and it looks to me, Dan, like you write them, you know, like they're yours. And I said, actually, I don't. I haven't. I do a few every year and Chris does most of them. And I said, well, I'll tell you something interesting about them because there's a lot of them. I said, every about 6 months, every 6 months we get together. I do a few. Chris does 8, 10, 12 new ones. We all look at them and we each rank which ones we think are the best and which ones we think are the worst. And then Chris tests them all. And he and I haven't been right once in 3 years. All right. Some of the ones we, we created that we like the least are the most productive. And usually the one that he and I love the most, the most is one of the least productive. And but we have no emotional attachment to that test. Which one works? Use the one that works. Throw out the one that doesn't. Getting to that point as quickly as possible. So very disciplined approach. And you see, most people, when you start to talk about renegade, most people immediately like picture the show that's on FX right now, The Sons of Anarchy. So they picture the long-haired motorcycle helmet, you know, rebel guy. I'm on the verge of getting a motor trike. I saw one at the Bergen County Fair. I love this thing. And so I'm about to get myself a Harley-Davidson motor trike. Oh, Carly, that's thrilling. It's got two wheels on the back. I mean, you know, it's the, you know, it's a motorcycle for chickens is what it is. But, but so, you know, most people picture that when you say renegade, they get a picture in their head and it's not of a disciplined individual, but renegade millionaire marketers are extremely disciplined. They do what's considered renegade marketing by everybody else, but they do it in a very disciplined way. As a starting point, as long as we're plugging stuff, well, you know, he did a commercial earlier.

There's a like a— was it a commercial?

That was a resource on there too.

Yeah, I understand. Phil's going to keep us on track here.

The, the No BS Direct Marketing for Non-Direct Marketing Businesses is sort of the primer for all this. There I put what I call direct marketing diet in there, which is pretty rigid, pretty strict, that the business owner who's never done this before and is making the transition, the idea is just like if you were putting yourself on a new diet physically, you really go on a strict one for the first 90 days. And then as you've developed good disciplines, you can let yourself cheat a little here, cheat a little there, experiment a little there. You know, well, what happens if I— so like when I was diagnosed diabetic, had to get diabetes under control, really rigid diet. You eliminate everything white for one thing. You pretty much, if it's white, you don't eat it. 70% is going to be vegetables. And if your idea of vegetables is french fries, you're like in trouble. You know, technically they're a vegetable, but you know, Oh, they're white. No, they're brown. See, so they're white inside. But, but then after you get the blood sugar under control with the diet, then you can experiment a little bit. You know, you can eat 12 crackers instead of 12 pieces of celery with your cheese and see what happens. And you can measure it because you got a little doohickey that you go draw blood and you can look at the meter and you can see what that did, right? So that's like what direct response is all about. So you start, you put yourself on this rigid diet. You get rid of pretty much everything you've been doing the way you've been doing it. And then gradually you can start experimenting and trying different things, measure it, see what works, what doesn't. Right.

You know, but before we just leave this, this one little topic of sort of committed to direct response advertising, I want to just make one point. I want to clear up one, one thing. The one point I want to make is that Yes, you have to totally embrace direct response advertising. And but at the same time, you've got to be very, very careful who you are getting your advice from in regards to your advertising. Because I mean, think of it, and I know people that are listening to this, they're guilty of this, is, you know, you go out and you maybe go out and write a sales letter for your business or create a postcard or, or you create it, have a website created for you, whatever. And who do you show it to? Well, you start showing it to maybe your employees, you show it to your spouse, you show it to your friends, you show it to your competitors within your same industry, and they're the ones that are giving you advice. And quite frankly, and I don't mean to, you know, talk down to any of these people, but they're really not qualified to give you advice on this. So the first thing is, is embracing this whole idea of direct response advertising and becoming a student of it. And, and understanding what good direct response advertising is. So the same way that, um, a, a heart surgeon, uh, has to go to school to first get his medical degree and then beyond that go and get his next degree on being his, his expanded degree on being a surgeon, uh, it's the same way that really all of us that are out there teaching direct response advertising and also employing it in our businesses We're continual students of it ourselves, and we've invested in our education to really learn what works and, and, and, and so that we can apply these principles. So again, it's not just for Dan and I who have, you know, have invested, you know, more years than we'd like to admit in learning this stuff and continue, by the way, to invest time. And we're constantly students of it, but it's the same way that we find our best members/students They're constantly looking to, to learn more, which now gets to my second point, which gets to dispel this whole comment, Dan's comment about the commercial I made, which was not a commercial, was really a tremendous valid point of the fact that you've got to constantly look for— once you start the first step here, you got to look for more and more and more resources out there that you can continue to learn from. And like, you know, Dan's book on No BS Direct Marketing for non-direct marketers, you know, for, for, I don't know, Dan, how much is that book?

Around $15?

Yeah, whatever the price is. Or you could probably go to Amazon and get it even for less, unfortunately.

You know, you know, if you wait long enough, you'll be able to find it at a flea market for a buck. The cost of waiting though. Yeah, yeah.

I do have to keep this on track, don't I? No, I think you're doing us a great job. Because we don't, we don't want people to wait long enough to get it at a flea market.

You know, Jim Rohn tells a story about this person who's all messed up, you know, and so Jim gives him the 5-minute talk on why he should read Think and Grow Rich, you know, and go get Think and Grow Rich and go read Think and Grow Rich. And the guy at the end of the story says, I think I'll wait till it comes out in paperback.

Well, you know, so, so, so, okay, so, so when I was having my, Herculean growth in my menswear stores, you know, which was translating into hundreds of thousands of dollars additional sales every year. I mean, you know, I would've been foolish to be not going to seminars and investing in a couple thousand dollars to go to a seminar or buying every book I could or buying every good resource that I could. So it's the same thing here is, you know, you gotta look at this as This is an education, and like every other education, you've got to invest in your education and not only in money, but also in time. And what you're about to hear today is going to prove that out to be the case.

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