Business Models Reimagined With Brian Tracy

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we're going to listen to a very special episode where Dan Kennedy interviews the one and only Brian Tracy. Now, Brian Tracy does a lot of research into business models, and there's 4 particular different states of a business model. He's going to be breaking those down as well as so much more. Dan Kennedy's going to be talking to Brian Tracy about his background. He's also going to be asking him what is the one habit above all other habits that the successful people you work with seem to develop, as well as the predictions on possible business business model changes. Now, this is recorded 7 years ago. Pay attention to see if those predictions have come true. Let's listen in.

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. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to a very promising and very special diamond call with our guest who we'll get to in just a minute, Brian Tracy. Brian and I, of course, both go back to the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. We've both been at this a long time. I pulled today off my bookshelf from my sales section that I use a lot as a copywriter Advanced Selling Strategies by this guy named Brian Tracy, copyright 1995, which has Post-it notes on pages and yellow highlighter marks. Brian and I have been on programs together and he's spoken for our member events before. He was just telling me that as the globetrotter extraordinaire, a couple of new programs he's been putting on. All over the world. China, I mentioned Russia, which— so we'll put you in the column of somebody who is colluding with the Russians.

Of course, of course.

And so business models reimagined, a great program. We're going to talk about that. I do want for people who really don't know you, Brian, and as egregious as that error may be, we may well have some people on the call who really don't know you. Obviously, so much time has passed from your origin story, more than a million people in audiences and all of that, but if you would just start with the nickel tour of where Brian Tracy came from, and how your level of fascination about what makes really successful entrepreneurs tick and really successful businesses tick came to be. If you would share that as kind of a start point, that would be great.

Great. Well, I came from a poor family, as I think we all did. I worked at laboring jobs. I didn't graduate from high school. I dug ditches, I worked on farms and ranches. When I was 23 years old, I was working on a farm as an itinerant farm laborer during the harvest, which means that you work while the harvest is coming in. I slept in the farmer's barn, I ate with the farmer's family, got out to the fields before the first light, worked all day until dark, and when the end of the farm is— end of the harvest, they lay you off. So I kept doing this for years, living on the ground, sleeping in old cars, just struggling. I had this idea. It was a really interesting idea. It had to do with self-concept and beliefs. I had been told that if I didn't graduate from high school, or even better, university, then I didn't really have much chance in life. I had missed my bus, if you like, so I should just take the best job I could get and maybe next lifetime I'd do better. The turning point in my life was when I began to challenge these types of beliefs. I got a job in sales. For 6 months I knocked on doors, an average of about 70 doors a day with no sales. I slept in a small one-room apartment on the floor and hammered and hammered and hammered. Then I asked a question. I studied metaphysics later. Another part of my life. But in metaphysics, they find that every turning point in your life usually comes when you're hit with a new question. And the question that hit me, which is not unusual, was the question, why is it that some people are more successful than others? And in my situation, why is it that some salespeople are more successful than others? And I had never even thought about that. I just went out every morning. I got up at 6:30 or 7.. I went and knocked on doors cold calling all day until 9 or 10 o'clock at night. Worked 6, 7 days, sometimes, per week and barely struggled. Then one day I asked that question, why are some salespeople more successful than others? So I picked the most successful salesperson, which many people have done over the years with me, and I went and asked them. I said, why are you so successful? He said, "Show me your sales presentation and I'll critique it for you." I said, "I don't have a sales presentation." He said, "What do you do when you meet a prospective customer?" "Oh," I said, "I say these things that people have told me to say, little clever things, voice modulation and so on, and try to talk them into buying." He said, "No, no, no, no, no." He said, "That's not how you sell. You sell by asking questions." listening closely to the answers and then structuring your offering so that it answers their questions. I was shocked because I had never heard that before. So I went out and began asking questions instead of talking all the time. My sales went up. Then I began reading books. They said, have you read any books? I didn't know there were books on sales. You and I are voracious readers, but many people have never read a book on selling. And they expect to make their living in it.

There's a survey I very recently saw, and now I forget its source, but they surveyed 10,000 professional salespeople and over 70% of them had never read a book about selling.

Isn't that amazing? You know, they did a— I think it was one of the television stations, Fox— they did an on-the-sidewalk interview, and they asked people as they came along the sidewalk, camera and microphone, give me the name of one book that you know about. Not a book that you've read. I'll give you the title of a book that you know about. And person after person after person who came along the sidewalk in New York could not name a single book in the world. They could not even name a book, much less having read a book. I mean, it was just absolutely shocking. I have it. It was sent to me by a friend on my iPhone. I'll send it to you. It's about a minute to watch and it's just shocking. But that's exactly correct. So I began to read and I was shocked at what you could learn from books. I still remember the first book or books that I read. And then I began to listen to the first audio programs and I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I couldn't believe it. The best salespeople in the world had put their very best ideas, practical skills, now do this, onto audio cassette. That's when the cassettes first came out. Then I went to my first sales seminar. I found later that most people's lives are changed when they go to a seminar. A seminar, a workshop, something where you learn from an expert from the front of the room and then they interact with other people. And they are never the same again. People will track back and they told you, "I remember when I went to your seminar," and they will quote back 10, 20, 25 years. "I remember the day I went to your seminar and I sat in this seat next to this person and they were never the same again." They will basically say, "The reason I am successful today is because I went to your seminar or somebody else's." So I began to do all of these things and I became voracious, almost like a piranha in the Amazon because every time I learned something I did this. This is something, Dan, that is so important for the people listening. When you learn something good, 98% or more of people who learn, I think it's 97%, don't try it out. They learn it and they say, "Geez, that's a good idea," and then they go back to watching television or driving their car and so on. So when you learn something new, what I would do, because I was hungry, like Les Brown, hungry. I was hungry. What I would do when I learned something new is I would immediately rush out and try it. And then I learned something else that Charlie Jones told me back in the day. He said, "Remember this, nothing works." Nothing works, he said, "at least the first time or the first few times." So if it's a good idea, try it out 5 or 10 times before you pass judgment on it. Those little ideas Changed my life, saved my life, made me wealthy, made countless people wealthy. I have clients, graduate clients from my courses who are— my best that I know is worth $8.9 billion. And he started off basically pushing a gurney in a hospital and now he's worth $8.9 billion as an entrepreneurial self-made multi-billionaire. But I have countless people who started with absolutely nothing, and they learned a good idea, and like a fumble in a football game, they ran with the ball. So if you learn something new from this time together or from anybody, immediately try it out, and don't expect it to work the first time. It's amazing how many people think that it's going to work the first time. It doesn't. It's sort of like learning to play a new instrument or learning how to ride a horse and buggy or how to learn how to play a sport. It's not going to work the first time. So you just try it over and over again until you finally start to feel comfortable with it. That's what I did. My sales went up in the next year 10 times. The gentleman who had introduced me to this way of thinking was now working for me, as were 100 other people in 6 countries. I made more money than I ever dreamed was possible to make. I just didn't believe it was possible. Then he said, "Well, how do you do this?" I said, "Well, Here's what I did. I explained to them my sales process which I developed over the years. I've written books on it and articles. My audio programs on sales are the best-selling in the history of the world. More people have become millionaires according to Nightingale-Conant listening to and practicing my audio programs, my audio programs on sales, than any other influence. It's basically this. This is what you do. This is why it works. This is how it works. This is what you do. You do it over and over again until you get the results that you desire. And this is what you're famous for, which is why I'm delighted to be able to talk to you and talk to the people on your inner circle.

So I have this core, central, pregnant question for you, and you alluded to it a minute or so ago, and it is a question all about habits and what Napoleon Hill called habit force. You know, you mentioned that the overwhelming majority of people have the habit of reading or hearing or discovering some good idea, a different way of doing things, a potentially better way of doing things, But then, and they will even nod and, you know, in our rooms clap and sort of be gleeful about the discovery, but then they won't so much as try it. They will go right back to doing the same things they were doing the same way they were doing them almost immediately. And repetitively pretty much throughout their entire careers or lives. And so that's a habit of people who never really do well. I'm interested in your thoughts on habit force overall, and the core central question is, what is the de-habit above all other habits? That all the super successful people you work with seem to share that would surprise a bunch of folks? Sort of a hidden, concealed habit.

Well, absolutely. Let me just back up. You and I, we always have to back up one step to answer a question. When I started to be successful, I started to become impressed with the possibility of getting smart. I wanted to be an educated person, if you like. So I began to read everything I possibly could, including philosophy and including Aristotle. Aristotle, who is considered the greatest philosopher in history, said that 95% of human behavior is determined by habit. So your goal in life is to develop good habits and make them your masters. I'm sure you've read this 100 times. This idea of habit force is so important. Successful people have success habits. Unsuccessful people have failure habits. And you can decide at any time which ones you're going to have. Now Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, one of my favorite stories, I read it recently, were at a dinner party at Bill Gates' home in Seattle. And he had more than 100 guests. And they were chatting together because they're very good friends. They played bridge and so on. They're chatting with Bill Gates' father. And one of the guests came up and said, excuse me gentlemen, you're some of the most successful people in the world. What would you say is the key to success? All three of them stopped their conversation and all turned simultaneously and all said at the same time, focus. Focus is the most important key to success. If you have focus, you can accomplish anything. If you don't have it, you can't accomplish anything. Somebody was observing this conversation taking place and it was published in a national magazine, Forger. Fortune or Business Week or something else. Well, that's something that I had learned decades ago is that successful people have the habit of focus. I call it clarity. I say in one of my seminars, and I speak to about a quarter of a million people a year, about 70 to 80 seminars still all over the world, and about 70% of my work is overseas. I always say my favorite word is clarity. Clarity, clarity, clarity. Be absolutely clear. And we talk about goals. The starting point is to be absolutely clear about your goals and then be clear about step by step what you're going to have to do to achieve your goals. And then my third favorite word is concentration. Concentrate single-mindedly. Develop the discipline to work on one task and stay on that task and stay on it until it's complete. And you just keep working at that. If you'll do that, you can conquer the world. And if you can't, you'll always have to work for someone else who will make you do it. Someone else will make you do it, supervise you, and pay you peanuts compared to what you could earn.

So let's jump and let's talk about this recent work you've been doing that you chatted with me very briefly about, about business models. This is a subject near and dear to my heart, and most of the people on this call are very, you know, aware, cognizant of of business models. We talk a lot about sales funnels. We talk a lot about companies really being process companies, not product companies, the product being incidental to the successful process. And so you started this conversation with me off call, then we had to start the call, so we'll restart. Tell me about this business model work you've been doing.

Well, I have had this obsession all my life with the question, "What works?" Peter Drucker said that— I love Drucker— he said the only question in business is what works. Does it work? Does it get the result that you want? So I'll say to an audience, I'll say, "I'm going to be offering my 2-day program the next time I come here.". And it's called Business Model Reinvention. And there are 4 different types of business models in terms of whether or not they work. Number 1 is the business model, and your sales and profitability are going up steadily and predictably week by week, month by month, year by year. That means you have a good business model. That's how you can tell. It's almost like taking a person's pulse or checking their health. The second type of business model is where sales are going up and down unpredictably. This means that your business model, just like your health, may be in trouble. Third is your sales are flat. If your sales are flat, then you know that your business model is incorrect for today's market, today's product. And the fourth, worst of all, is where your sales are declining. And you'll see that in the newspapers and all the financial magazines and publications, they're always looking at these four things. Are sales growing? Are sales fluctuating? Our sales flat or sales declining. So there are 55 different business models. The more I studied this subject, I just became— I just died and went to heaven, Dan. I just love this subject. The great majority of people back into their business model. In other words, they don't even know what they're using. Harvard has done some wonderful work in this. I mean, really in-depth work. They said that 80% of Fortune 500 companies are using the wrong business model. Incorrect, inaccurate, inadequate, or something. And that 80% of Fortune 500 CEOs, top executives, admit that their business model is really not that great. It's getting them by. And they say, well, why don't you change it? And they say, well, the risks are too high. And this is what holds people back. One of the things that I have found, and again, I talk to business owners, rooms full of business owners like you do, not so much as you, but this is my market. I'll say to them that the biggest enemy in your life is the comfort zone. You become comfortable doing things in a way that is no longer working. But because you are comfortable, you are more fearful about doing something new or different than by changing. So what you have to do is you just have to say, is this the correct business model? There are 55 business models. As I began to do research on this, it's like studying philosophy. You can get into libraries for material. Some of the best thinkers in the world today are working in this area. There's 55 business models that are in common usage worldwide. 55. And the possibility is that the one you're using is incorrect. Partially incorrect, a lot incorrect, or completely wrong. And what happens is a business model that is the perfect business model will change, and it will no longer work at all. What most people do because of the comfort zone is they will just keep on pounding away like beating a horse and it will not generate sales and profitability. All that matters is does it generate sales and profitability? Sales and profitability. Sales and profitability. What you have to do, like a doctor or a nurse, is you have to take the pulse all the time, all day long, every day. You're taking the pulse of sales and profitability. It's not complicated. And sales and profitability means that you're offering a product or service to a customer who wants it and needs it and is capable of paying for it in the short term. So I keep talking to people about keep being open to the possibility that your business model is no longer correct. It doesn't mean that it is no longer correct. It just means that the possibilities are extremely high. Stand back. If it's not working, say, what do I need to change? I say in business there are only 4 ways. In 2001, I put together a coaching program, a business coaching program, and I taught a series of models that combined together called the Focal Point System, all based on focus. Anyway, I said there are only 4 ways that you can change your business, whatever it is. Way number 1 is you can do more of what you're doing right now. So what should you do more of? And the answer is do more of those things that are working and getting you the best results, which sounds like a logical answer, but it's astonishing how many people are doing things that are giving them lousy results or no results, and they're doing them even harder. The old joke, don't use a bigger hammer, just don't. A hammer is something different. Just use a bigger hammer. Well, the second way that you can change your business is you can do fewer of other things. So what is it that you should be doing less of? And the answer is clear. Do less of those things that are not working, that are not giving you the best results. You've only got a certain amount of time each day. You've got to focus every minute of every day on those things that are giving you the very best results and stop the others. Number 3 way you can change your business, you can start doing something completely new or different. This is, again, the comfort zone. This is traumatic, Dan, is that people are loath to move out of their comfort zone and try something new and different. Then the 4th way you can change is you can stop doing certain things altogether. One of the processes that I teach, and I've worked with more than 1,000 large companies, in business management strategic planning. I've given more than 5,000 seminars, by the way, in 83 countries and trained more than 5 million people face-to-face. So I've had a lot of this experience. One of the things I say is ask this question. I call it zero-based thinking. Is there anything that you're doing today that knowing what you now know you wouldn't start doing again today? If there is, what is it? And stop it immediately. So then I teach my students, I say more or less, stop or start. More or less, stop or start. Whenever you're not happy with your results, what should you be doing more of, less of, start or stop? And what should you stop doing completely because it's no longer working? It's no longer giving you the results that you want. So this is my whole approach to business in our world today, and it's quite astonishing. I get enormous audiences who come back to me when I come back to town 3, 6, 12 months later and they have literally transformed their businesses. Many of them become wealthy. After several years they become millionaires and multimillionaires. Several of them, which just makes me so happy, have become billionaires. They were struggling. They were basically struggling in their 30s and now they own large corporations and employ— one of my clients in Kiev employs 1,800 people now, and he was bankrupt when he came across my material. He was invited to come to my first seminar, and his business had just gone bankrupt in the slump of the '90s, and he started a brand new business based on what he learned in the seminar. Today he's got 1,800 staff, he's worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he's one of the most respected business people in the country, and he comes to every single talk I give in that part of the world, and he says the same thing. It was those ideas that changed my life. So that's what you and I do, and that's why I'm with you right now, is because we love the opportunity to help people change their lives. Sometimes one insight, one insight will transform.

Well, it's a powerful quadrant that you just described. It's also somewhat corollary, you know, Welch's theory was that you should basically kill 20% of everything once a year. So you should fire 20% of your employees once a year, do away with 20% of your product lines and distribution, and just, you know, 20% of everything accumulates just in 12 months to the point that it doesn't work. But we're continuing to do it. And I think that you're right. I think people are— it's not really risk-averse more than it is just, you know, change-averse, sometimes even out of ego. You know, I find people that really are willing to step in and put their foot down about something and/or totally change their mind about it are really some of the most interesting people. Bezos at Amazon gets great credit in my book for the 180-degree turn from, "I'm going to destroy brick-and-mortar retail. Why does it even need to exist?" to, "I'm going to get in brick-and-mortar retail." and marry it to everything we're doing online and will dominate in both places. And what he's already demonstrating the ability to do with Whole Foods is remarkable. You got a guy like Iger at Disney who put his foot down on what he called one-and-done movies. The investor conference call shareholder conference call that I was on was right after Disney had that movie with Tim Allen and John Travolta, and I forget who else. And there are 3 old guys on motorcycles roaming around the country, right? Right. And Iger described the movie and said, that's the last one of those damn things you're going to see us do as long as I'm running the company. We own franchise characters., and we should be in the business of doing the sequel to the sequel to the sequel to the sequel of our franchise characters. Why are we mucking around with movies anybody could do? And I think, you know, those are some of the most difficult for most people, I don't know, revelations and decisions to make. Either change of mind or foot down against some creeping thing that is not working taking over the company. I think those are the most interesting things to observe and see, the most difficult to get clients to do, but when they do them, the results are often really dramatic. So I'm going to put you on the spot about two things. I'll tell you both of them. So that half of your mind can be thinking about the second one while you're answering me about the first one. So one is about really dramatic change. Maybe a case history, an example of somebody from your client or coaching world and the triggering of it. Handling of really dramatic change. And then the second thing I'm going to ask you about is maybe a prediction or two about business models and business change of the future. You have the perspective of doing two-thirds of your business beyond the boundaries of the United States. Most of us, me included, are really pretty provincial people. So you have a different perspective than many people on the call. I'm always interested in people's ideas about the future, not just about the present. So that will be the second way I'll put you on the spot. But the first one is about really dramatic change in a business. Okay, great. So some examples, some case history, some— thing you've been a part of where the change is really not incremental, it's not even 200% increase or 300% increase in sales, it's some monster leap from point A to point B. What drives that? How do people trigger such a change?

Well, what has driven me, and this is after decades of being a very successful speaker on personal success and sales success and leadership and so on. What really drives me is the ability to build a highly profitable business in any market and irrespective of what the market has turned out to be today. So I constantly think in terms of the customer and the entrepreneur. How can you meld those two? Now what Jeff Bezos did, and I do agree with you, I just You know, they have this little ditty that the university students use. It's called SMS, SMS, SMS. They put on their messages. It says, "Shaking my head, shaking my head, SMS, shaking my head." Well, I'm always shaking my head when I look at Jeff Bezos. This last week he hit $151 billion personal net worth. I'm sure you read that. I'm shaking my head. I mean, wow. He did it with one idea, is to serve people faster. It's just take customers and serve them what they want and need and are willing to pay for and give it to them faster and better and at the best price. He started off with something very mundane, books. Of course, you read the history of his books, he had to buy the books himself and then send them out. Then he had to arrange agreements with the publishers. He would take the orders online and he would send the orders to the publishers and the publishers would bill the clients and so on. And we kept thinking, how can we do it faster and better? Faster and better, faster, better, and cheaper. And if you come down to business, all of business is aimed at making people happy. I've got this thing, please bear with me if I run all over the place, but I realize that if you make a sale to a customer in a competitive market, It's because the customer believes that you are going to make them happy from buying your product or service. If you make a second sale in a competitive market, the customer believes that you are going to make them happier than if they bought from someone else. So I said everybody is in the "er" business. This is probably going to be my next book, is "The Er Business" or "The Er Factor." E-R. Yes, happy, er, cheap, er, better. More dependable. But everything is the comparative. So people buy from you or come to your home or your restaurant or buy your product or service or anything else because they have limited resources in terms of time and money. So they have to basically be careful with what they have and they have to spread it out judiciously. And so therefore, we are in the ER business. We are in the business of making our customers Happier, faster, better, cheaper, easier, newer, more dependable, and so on. And that's the key. And anybody who's in business has to think about this. And that's why I say, and it sounds like, it sounds a bit trite, is you have to love your product. You have to really love your product. You have to use it. You have to consume it. You have to think it's a great product. You have to get up in the morning. You have to love to talk about it on a bus stand when you take a bus. Second of all, you have to love your customers. You have to love the idea of helping your customers improve their lives, making their lives better, easier, cheaper, more enjoyable. You have to love this idea and you have to love putting the two together. If you don't have that, then go home because you won't be successful in business. Now what happens is because there are so many competitive offerings, customers are continually changing. Their tastes. So you have to be prepared to move quickly to change so that you are still offering better, faster, cheaper, newer, easier, and more convenient, which is what Jeff Bezos has done. He's really a model for entrepreneurial success and entrepreneurial millionaires. That's all he does is he thinks every single day, how can we make our customers happier? Happy-er, that's all. And that's what you and I are in, we're in the er business. And you can tell, it's real simple, this is not a complicated thing, it's like taking your temperature. I've just been going through some medical stuff in the last few weeks, so I've had my temperature and my blood pressure taken over and over again. And the first thing they do is check your blood pressure and check your temperature to see if it's high-er or low-er or bad-er and so on. And that's what Jeff Bezos does. Constantly taking the temperature. I love his little idea that at every meeting where Amazon employees come together, there's one empty chair. And that one empty chair is this symbolic chair that represents the customer. So every single conversation that has taken place at Amazon has to be taken place as if a customer was standing there listening to them talk about how they were going to serve that customer. How they're going to take care of the customer. So therefore, if a person is having a problem right now, again, it sounds very simple, but it's usually because they're stuck trying to do something that somebody else is doing better, faster. One of my favorite stories, which I use in my seminars, is the story of Domino's Pizza, a very famous story about how he came up with this idea of just delivering pizzas faster. And how could they deliver pizzas faster? And today They're the most successful pizza operation in the world. And the gentleman who started it, he and his brother, they're billionaires and multi-billionaires. They have wonderful lives. But the one idea was how can we get pizzas into the hands of our customers faster. And here was his insight. His insight, because he was delivering pizzas for a small pizza place, is that people would be mad at him. He showed up with a pizza.. And they would be mad and they would always say, "How come it takes so damn long to get a pizza?" And they would throw the money at him and he would go back to the same thing. He came up with this insight. The insight was when people order a pizza, they are already hungry. When people order a pizza, they are already hungry. They are not going to be hungry in a couple of hours. They are hungry now.

So speed is more important than quality. I talk to direct marketers about it and people in our business, you and I. Information marketers, I talk to them about this all the time. When somebody at 3 o'clock in the morning sees a TV infomercial and they order something from it, when did they want it? At 3 o'clock that morning. So their disappointment grows with each passing day. This links to my number one Post-it note in your book from 1995. I'll save you some time on writing your new book. Go back and steal some stuff from page 198 and 199 in Advanced Selling because the great sentence is that people buy the consequences they hope and expect from owning and using the product or service. They don't buy the product or the service. And the key word is consequences. Yes. There is the breakthrough. And what you're describing is really what people want is speed. Yes. It's just like when a fast food place overly complicates their menu and then they can't serve the food fast. Well, by definition, you didn't go to a fast food place to get good food. You know better. You went to a fast food place to get fast food. That's what you went for. And so people lose sight of this consequences concept that you enunciated so well in that book. And that is like the page out of the book that, you know, has been most useful to me. And big breakthroughs can come from,— we'll use your Bezos example— from having the customer symbolically sitting in the room. So let me go to my second essentially unrelated, put you on the spot question. A couple of predictions. So based on everything you see, everybody you work with, all your travels, coming all the way back granular to the small business owner, the sales professional, the entrepreneur, what are 2 or 3 trends you see, expectations you have about how doing business, business models, the consumer, how things are going to be different in a significant and important way 36 months, 72 months, 7, 10 years from now?

Okay, well, that, as you know, is very hard to predict because one new change in technology— I mean, just look what Apple did when they came up with the iPhone and then the iPad and totally transformed the world of communications. It became the richest company in the history of the world. Nobody expected that. It came out— sometimes I'll ask my audience, I'll say there are 3 critical factors in selling. One is the demographics of the customer. What is their age, education, income, family formation, and so on? What is the structure? And these are things that you absolutely have to know. Second of all is the psychographics. How do they think and feel and work? Greatest problems, concerns, fears, desires. You know that a simple thing— of course you know because you're my mentor— but we find there's one reason why people don't buy a product or service. You have to find what it is and remove it. There's one reason why people hold back. They want and need the benefit of the product or service, but there's some fear or doubt that is holding them back. You have to emphasize the major benefit and you have to take away the fear. You have to find out what that fear is. Many companies, one of the ways they do it is with guarantees. They say, look, you buy my product or service, you take it, you use it, you try it, and if you're not happy for any reason, you can keep the product and I'll give you your money back. In other words, they really make it easy to overcome the fear. Here's the third thing that I think is one of the greatest breakthroughs in marketing and it's called the ethnographics of the customer, the role that your product or service plays in their lives. And this is where people like Bezos and people like Apple and people like these other people that made such an incredible change is that their products or services are integral to their lives. And so I use this example. I say, how many people here have ever gotten in their car and had driven off to work and you're a couple miles down the road and you realize, oh my God, I left my phone at home. What did you do? In any audience, any side, everyone raises their hand and turns and says, I turned around and what, drove back. That's why, that is an example of how important that product is in the lives of the customer. It's really, really important for them. So what I think of with customers, it's a very simple thing and that's why I think of having a lot of fun with this Ur-Factor and making it so simple that everybody can use it. Many of my customers are changing their whole marketing based on making customers happier. And so I say this, I'll say, ladies and gentlemen, before I came up here to speak today, I did a little bit of customer survey in this city. And what I found was that your customers are really quite remarkable people. And of course, I've got them from Hello. And they lean forward and they're curious. I say, your customers want you to be rich. I've been interviewing them and asking them, and they all want you to be rich. They want you to make a lot of money. And that's all that they think about all the time. And of course now they're completely confused. They don't know what I'm talking about. They think I've been smoking something. Really good. I said, "Yes, and they want you to be happy. They want you to become rich by making them happy. If you will make them happy, they will buy your product and they will buy your other products and they will tell other people to buy your product and they will make you rich. That's all they want is they want you to make them happy." I said, "Well, how do you find out what it takes to make them happy?" Well, it's a very simple thing. Ask them. What can we do to make you happy with regard to our product/service area? And what do we have to do? And then do it. And they will buy from you and buy again and tell their friends. And serve it to them like Jeff Bezos, serve it to them faster, cheaper, easier, more convenient, everything else. And so you are just living surrounded by customers who all want you to be rich. And the key to becoming rich is to just go and ask them, what do I have to do to make you happy?

And whatever he is doing. And I'll extract and translate just a little to make a prediction for you since you chose to dodge it. Uh, and it has to do with your integral, uh, with identifying that third thing, is that, look, all the fortunes of the future will be made in the same way the fortunes of the present and the past have been made. Yeah, something— by something for at least a significant length of time really being integral to customers' lives. So, right, not optional but completely integrated, right? Yes. I mean, all the fortunes made with railroads were because for a period of time it was the only practical way to travel any distance. And from the very beginning, the federal government passed laws. It's why Buffett says he owns railroads to this day, stock, is because if I have a railroad line that goes from Cleveland to Pittsburgh, by law you can't come and run a railroad line next to it and compete with me. It's one of the last remaining monopoly industries. When, when fortunes were made with railroads, the same thing went on with railroads that you just described has gone on with the phone. Yes, with the mobile phone, is it became such an integral and integrated part of consumers' lives that, that they were beholden to it. In reality, I would argue the phone is more an addiction than than a beholden to a utility, but I'm in a growing minority about that. But nonetheless, you're absolutely right. 90% of people who would leave it somewhere would immediately go back to get it. And so the prediction I'll make is anybody and everybody who figures that out for their product, service, or business, or transfers their skills to a product, service, or business where that can apply, they're going to make a fortune.

Yes, I absolutely agree. Some people will use it as a gadget. Young people, for them it's a toy and a communications tool and entertainment and everything else. For people like you and I, it's an essential part of our business because time is more important to us than money. Being able to communicate with the important people in our business lives quickly and efficiently, and it really makes a difference to us. And then on the side, weekends and so on, we can use it as a, a play tool.

But actually, actually, it will, it will surprise you. I'm still an opt-out. I don't own one and I don't use one. But wow. But, uh, but most Business people, of course, use them. To your point, they can be used productively or they can be used unproductively. The bigger point is, and your bigger point was, that I call it importance marketing. That to the extent that you are really an important and significant part of somebody's life, Yes. Not necessarily as a utility. I mean, you and I have prospered by making ourselves important and significant parts of people's lives. That you build what Buffett calls a moat around you. You have insulation against competition and commoditization and, you know, all of that. All right, my friend. Friend. I thank you for being on the call, Brian.

Thank you, sir. Thank you.

Bye-bye.

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