Cop Turned Copywriter: Expert Wisdom From "Doberman Dan"

Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we get to spend the time with Doberman Dan. Doberman Dan is one of the absolute favorites from the community, and we are so excited to be able to have him highlighted on the podcast today. You're going to hear about Doberman Dan's backstory, and if you've never ever listened to him before, we hope that he becomes a favorite just like he has for all of us. You're going to be learning what kind of media he uses online or offline. You're going to learn how he got started, which you may already know from the title itself. You're going to hear about mindset. You're going to learn the lessons he has taken from Gary Halbert and his biggest recommendation for copywriters. Let's jump in with the cop turned copywriter expert wisdom from Doberman Dan.

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 what 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.

My guest today likes to be known as Doberman Dan, and we will let him explain that. It does not really refer to his physical appearance. Or I believe to genetics. So there's another reason for it. Dan is a world-class copywriter. He won't mind me saying in the Halbert School of Copywriting. He has to some extent MI. He's a first-class direct marketer. He has an enormous amount of experience in the health, wellness, nutrition, diet, fitness, bodybuilding freak categories, but his experience ranges far beyond that. And I'm going to let him flesh out his introduction and his origin story for you, and then we are going to roam a little bit about copywriting and marketing, about the state of the human condition on the planet as we know it, maybe a little Halbert story, and then we will open up for, of course, Q&A and discussion with those of you on the call. So, Dan, welcome to the call.

Thank you, Dan. I appreciate it. Excited to be here.

And I appreciate you taking the time. You are in, I think, Australia, Sunny Florida, right? You are not here in dark and gloomy and gray and wet Ohio as you once were.

No, but I totally understand what you're talking about. Spent a lot of decades there, but yes, I'm in sunny Florida now.

All right, congratulations. So I'm going to let you give us the thumbnail, not all the way back to the womb, but of your origin story. And how you came to be in our strange little businesses of copywriting, information marketing, and direct marketing.

Well, there's a guy responsible for that, or perhaps I should say who is to blame for me being in direct response marketing and copywriting, and it's another Dan from Ohio, by the way. So my story is I'm from Barberton, Ohio, and I think you can always trust a guy from Ohio, and I think you'd agree with that, wouldn't you, Dan?

You can almost always trust a guy from Ohio.

So my early conditioning was I should pretty much just expect to— the best I could expect would probably be a little bit more than a minimum wage job. And when I got me a civil service job there with that Dayton Police Department, that was the, the highest level of success somebody from my raising could ever expect. But somebody hit me up for the Amway business, which I know you're familiar with, Dan, very well. And I got to give the Amway business a huge kudos. I, somebody, you know, with my early conditioning never would have thought that they could have their own business or be an entrepreneur. But that Amway deal got me thinking along those lines. And what that led to is after I'd become a cop, for 3 years. For 9 years I was full-time cop, part-time entrepreneur. The Amway business was one, but that led to a string of other businesses, oh, about 3 per year. This was prior to discovering direct response and another Dan from Ohio. Anyway, they were all huge monumental failures that left me depressed, dejected, and broke. And in debt. Finally, out of desperation, I stumbled upon this Dan Kennedy dude talking about magnetic marketing. After enduring what I endured, 9 long years of failure, the idea of customers and clients coming to me rather than me going out face-to-face, belly-to-belly and still failing sounded really engaging. So, Dan, I invested. The money in the Magnetic Marketing System. Well, I put it on a Visa. I didn't have any money. And so the idea was that was to save whatever business was failing miserably at the time. But what I did, I just totally ripped you off. I saw how you sold Magnetic Marketing and I developed where I self-published a bodybuilding course and started selling it the exact same way as you were selling magnetic marketing. I had studied nothing about direct marketing. I had just observed you. Just by doing that, observing you and totally blatantly swiping you, which I'm not embarrassed to say, that little bodybuilding mail order business after 9 years at least 25 straight consecutive business failures over those 9 long years, that, that mail-order business was the first business that was successful. A little less than a year later, uh, that business got me free from the police department, which was the whole goal in the first place. And so that was like '95, and ever since then I've been supporting my two bad habits and expensive habits of living indoors and eating with this direct response marketing stuff in one way or another, either by starting various direct response businesses and 3 different supplement businesses to now working as a freelance copywriter.

Now there's also some Gary Halbert influence and people who read your newsletter who were familiar with Gary's can't miss the influence. What got you to Gary?

Well, you know, I don't ever think— I'm just being honest here— I don't think I've ever had an original idea in my life. I've simply stood on the shoulders of guys like you and Albert and just duplicated what I've seen you doing. So I found out about Gary from you. Of course, after buying Magnetic Marketing, I subscribed to your newsletter. So here I am, subscriber since 1995, nonstop, Dan. And I think, I haven't added it up, but I think I now may be one of your 6-figure guys who's invested at least 6 figures with you over the years. So you talked about Gary Halbert in your newsletter. Again, this would be very early in that relationship, probably 1995 and '94, '95. So I subscribed to Gary's newsletter and he told in his newsletter one time, he gave some techniques for getting the attention of a whale or a player with money. And I just simply turned it around on him And one of those was, I, you know what, I just clicked with Halbert. Maybe it was the Barberton connection. Maybe it was we're both, you know, have warped minds, but I just decided I'm gonna mentor with this dude. And I wrote a fake newspaper article about these two Barberton guys, Gary Halbert and Dan Gallop, who I was not yet Doberman Dan at that point., and how we decided to collaborate together. And we started a mail order business that was so successful and made so much money, we bought the entire city of Barberton and turned it into the world's largest parking lot. And of course, I included a bunch of Barberton references in there, you know, about it being the chicken dinner capital of the world and all that stuff, the magic city, stuff I knew he "Fine Humors." And I had it formatted to look like it was an actual article in the Barberton Herald. And I framed it in a really expensive frame and delivered it via FedEx to his office. And that's what got me on the radar. That wasn't enough to get to mentor with him, but it was about a year and a half of constant stuff sent in the mail like that with theater to get his attention. You know, a $100 bill letter, you know, lumpy mail, at least one a month, Dan, just constantly. And finally, I think he just figured, man, this Barbarden kid is not going to leave me alone. And, you know, finally he kind of started taking me under his wing. And what happened when we really started working together was I had moved. This was another extreme thing I did to get his attention. He wrote a newsletter issue about Costa Rica and I sent him a letter referencing that and that got a call from him while his Costa Rican girlfriend was in town to answer my questions about Costa Rica. The next correspondence he got from me was an email that said, "Hey, I really enjoyed the newsletter about Costa Rica and I enjoyed the conversation with your girlfriend telling me about it. And I've never visited there before, but it sounded so intriguing. I sold every single possession I have except my Doberman and my laptop and I moved there. I'm living here now." And that, of course, totally blew him away. And when he came into town, we had dinner. And the next time he came into town, he said, "Hey, could I crash at your place for the weekend while I'm visiting my girlfriend?" Now that sounds like Albert.

Yeah.

And you know him, Dan, or you knew him, Dan. His sense of time was way different than the rest of us. So his definition of weekend turned into about, I think it was a little more than 4 months. He stayed at my place in Costa Rica for 4 months. And then, as if He, you know, he didn't drive me crazy enough. He talked me into moving out of Costa Rica and moving to Miami, moving into his client apartment there in the same building with him. And I, I probably lived there for about 8 months.

So today's business, you're like, if I'm correct at the moment, because you do change from time to time, You're like three-legged, right? So you have your newsletter, which is terrific, and, um, some things attached to that. You do some copywriting for clients, and you have a nutrition business.

Yes, to all three. The, the newsletter attached to that is a membership site, a monthly webinar, and then I periodically do small group coaching on various things. I have done coaching programs on my system for starting a nutrition business. And so I'm the proverbial serial entrepreneur. The nutrition business, which I haven't had time to update you about this, So I launched it and got the numbers to the point where it could be scaled up and then realized, oh, wait a minute. Now I—

okay.

So I sold my last supplement business in 2012 and now I started a new one that was to the point I could scale it up. And I realized, you know what, I don't really want to scale up another supplement business. So I actually just recently sold it.

About a month ago. Yeah, you know, um, uh, John Carlton says that he works for a few years getting his life exactly the way he wants it to be, and then he blows it all to smithereens and starts over. So you, you may have stopped just in time from, from putting yourself in charge of a real business. So So let's start with direct marketing and copy, and let's start with a proverbial topic that people are always interested in and argue about and debate and so forth. Let's talk— let me get your aerial view and your current thoughts on online versus offline.— and online by itself?

I love talking about this. And everybody misinterprets what I say. So I'm going to try to be as clear as possible. I— that mail order bodybuilding business I told you about, that— what I figured out real fast is yes, they would buy info products. And that info product business got me free of my job. But that's not what they really want. What they really wanted was the magic pill, right? Not necessarily what they needed. So the way I dealt with that was I sold them what they wanted. That got me into the supplement business. And then I gave them what they needed, which were the info products. But That supplement business, so that was late '95, I guess '96 that I started getting into the supplement business, bodybuilding supplements. And so I was selling supplements online in 1996, which I didn't know it at the time, but those were the pioneer days of the internet. I didn't know what I was doing. I just put my sales letter that was working in direct mail, I put it up on a website. I was the first advertiser in the bodybuilding market to use a URL as a call to action. So I love online. I mean, back then it wasn't really a viable media, but I started learning how to use it. Then I got sucked into focusing exclusively on what got me there and what got me successful, which were space ads and direct mail. You know, somebody convinced me that was a dying media and the internet was where it's at. So I had my ads out there with my URL in there and I totally focused on the internet. And immediately things took a nosedive.. But I was just going to make it work and force my way through it and forget that old direct mail stuff and space ads. That's not the future. And it was about that time that I got the ear of Halbert. And he's looking at my numbers and he's like, okay, wait a minute. Explain this to me. So when you were doing direct mail space ads, 'You had an extra zero at the end of what you're earning, but now you're focused on this internet thing. You sure you want to do that? Why don't you like not stop doing the direct mail and the space ads?' And I thought, 'Well, okay, I guess.' And I started sending direct mail again. You know what? This happened just like Gary said. I added an extra zero to my income. Since that day, I have never gotten away from it. I see no reason why not to use all available media. I think that's the biggest mistake business people and marketers are making, wanting to focus just online. I've seen it time after time after time. I've seen people double their sales in a really short period of time when they just add direct mail to the mix, specifically direct mail selling back-end products to their existing customer list regardless of if they were acquired online. I'm pretty passionate about that because I've never seen it not fail, Dan.

Well, it's hard though, and I'm sure you have it with clients too. I mean, the temptation because of the superficial economics, meaning virtually everything you do online is free or nearly free. Or pay by click or pay by pay as you go, the temptation for people and the peer pressure for people is enormous. I had clients here yesterday, new clients, and very uncharacteristic for me, it was a group of 8 people. Usually you can't get anything done with a canoe that full, but the youngest of the bunch, I would say 30-ish, protested the idea of ever sending anybody a DVD because, quote, nobody watches a DVD anymore. My laptop doesn't even have a slot for it. I patiently explained to him that Netflix has almost 6.5 million customers to whom they ship DVDs every month. And in value, those customers are worth a multiple of the live streaming video. And many of them would refuse to be a live streaming video customer if they couldn't get DVDs. And every national direct response advertiser on TV pretty much offers an information package including a free DVD and they're not all idiots and that people consume it differently when it's on a DVD than when it's online, etc., etc., etc. But when it was all said and done, I'm not really sure I won the debate. I think I got acquiescence, not acceptance. And I find the same thing with all of it. The thought that all of the hard media is dead and "nobody" wants it or pays attention to it or responds to it anymore, and quote, quote, "It's too expensive," even if they did. And the temptation to default just to digital is just enormous, and I'm constantly dragging clients back from this brink, almost always having the experience you've described where, gee, look how much money you were leaving on the table. And often a differential quality of the customer depending on whether they're obtained online or offline as well. But it's just a constant fight and it's getting worse. And I think as it gets worse, the mistake gets bigger because more and more people make it. Leaving more and more opportunity for those who don't. You have a client group in nutrition you work with, I know. What's going on there? Are you succeeding at keeping them to using both online or offline? Are they successfully integrating the two? Are you losing the battle?

What's going on? I've been reluctant to share these numbers with you because I'm afraid you're going to accuse me of lying. So I ran 2 coaching groups teaching the Doberman Dan way of starting a nutrition business. And group 1, well, the mistake I made initially was I underestimated the time to launch. I was thinking from start day of the coaching program to them launching 8 weeks. I was off a little bit. It was 12 weeks for the first 4, 4 out of 8 or was it 9? I forget. 4 out of 8 or 9, whatever it was. And I did something really contrarian for a lot of good reasons. I did not have them launch online. I had them launch online in one specific media, which is a media We're all told it's dead.

You mean you had them launch offline? Yeah, offline.

My bad. In the media, we're all told it's dead and dying.

Newspapers.

They didn't get near a computer to launch this business. I wouldn't let them for a lot of reasons. They needed 10 times more capital to launch online, and based on my experience, their chance of success was really low, they would probably need 20 times the capital even launching online and a hell of a lot of patience to get that thing to work because they are up against the best marketers with the deepest pockets in the world that they're competing with online. But I launched them in the—

I'm sorry, go ahead. And the clutter and chaos is huge.

It's a portal to a million distractions. I mean, I want to control the sales, the selling process. It is really hard to do that online because of the clutter and chaos.

So you forced these guys to use newspaper? Yeah.

You know, it was funny.

The first—

well, actually both groups because I did two different groups. A lot of these guys had experience online. And when I introduced them to my method, it was almost like a relief. They said, "Oh, thank God." And one of them— actually several of them were really experienced online copywriters and marketers. I mean, one has had numerous successful controls, financial controls that have been all launched online. But when I told them, "Yeah, we're launching the newspapers.", and here's why. They're like, thank God. And so we had 4 launch out of the first group in about 12 weeks. I think the 4th may have been closer to 16 weeks after we started. But newspaper ads, the responses measured in MER, media efficiency ratio, which all it is is just ROI on ad spend. So, my number 1 guy to launch launched with a 1.8— I forget, maybe 1.8 or 1.9 MER, first time off the bat. It got better as the tests went on and we tested some different headlines and images. Number 2 launched, first time off the bat, a 3.0 MER. His ads are running everywhere now. He scaled up big. I even saw him in the National Enquirer. Number 3, 1.9 MER. And this, you know what, these numbers may not mean anything to anybody unless they've recently tried launching online. And somebody getting 1.9 return on ad spend online would be popping Dom Pérignon, or as I like to call it, the finest bottle of Dom DeLuise. I mean, that's a major accomplishment online.

Am I right or am I right? You are right with the single exception of somebody who is doing something very small, right? You can get those kind of ratios with things that are very small, but when you try and scale it, It's almost unheard of. And offline, you know, a 1.9 to a 3.0, I mean, it means you're positive at customer acquisition, which is terrific.

Absolutely. That was the whole model, getting them launched in newspapers and then the few that had been experienced online. Thought they were going to be collecting emails from the customers and I said, "Good luck with that. If you're lucky, you'll get 20% of them to give you an email because most of them don't use email." So here's your follow-up process for backend sales. And I know this isn't sexy and it's probably stuff that nobody wants to do. And the only people who want to do it are the ones who make a lot of money. The backend selling process is direct mail and outbound phone calls. I know it's not sexy and I know it's not the magic online money button, but it was the highest possible chance of success way of launching with the least amount of capital.

I'll give you a story., and then we'll go to an entirely different topic of conversation, but you'll like this. So I'm working with a client that has almost entirely, and they are B2B, not B2C, they have almost entirely for 2 years marketed by email, and they have a relatively small universe to work with, about 25,000 eligible buyers. And so they've been marketing almost entirely by email, driving to web, driving to video sales letter, etc. And I have no objection to any of that and use it for a lot of clients. I'm agnostic about the whole thing. A typical 4-step, once a week for a month email barrage to drive people through a sales funnel online against those 25,000 eligible candidates has typically produced about 250 going through the funnel and about, 70 to 80 who then buy and become customers on an ongoing basis. So we did a 4-week, once-a-week postcard mailing driving to requesting the old classic free report sent to them by mail. And follow-up steps by mail and a telemarketer to those who requested the information. We drove over 650 leads through the system and we sold over 250 into their program and they are stunned. They are just shocked that this could happen. And that their particular person would respond to mail and would pick up the phone. So they're just shell-shocked. They're trying to figure out why the hell this would be. And of course you and I know exactly why it would be. For the sake of the clock though, I'm going to leap and go very broad for a second. So the reason you periodically decide you'll never write copy for a client again and go start to build businesses of your own, at which point, of course, you decide you don't want businesses of your own and you go back and write copy for people. But when you decide that you will never write copy for a client again, it is because of the incredible dysfunction of clients. And when you decide you'll never coach anybody again, it's because of the incredible dysfunction of the coaching. So the observation I'm looking for is really about the human condition as we know it. What the hell is going on? Why are the successful people successful? And why are so many people falling on their ass?

Well, I certainly am seeing a big difference in work ethic, but that's not the principle That's not the principal reason. This all comes down to a mindset issue, I think, because— well, for example, when you were telling me the story a minute ago, I'm thinking, okay, so we have results of A, the online stuff, and the results of what you put together. Now explain to me again why people don't do that too. I mean, I'm not saying abandon your online stuff, but— and so I'm still in the process of figuring that out, Dan, why certain people always seem to be successful and why others don't. It all comes down to a mindset issue. Like the handful of really intelligent clients I have, rational clients, Well, human beings aren't rational, but we can be rational at times. Those clients, even though they may be opposed to certain things, once they see the results of them, they're like, yeah, whatever, that makes sense, let's do it. They don't seem to be stuck in some mindset that says we are an X company, whatever that is, so therefore we must stick with that. When shown other ways that they can make their business successful, you know, vis-à-vis the example you just gave, adding the offline component to an online business. So, you know, I guess it all comes down— it comes down to mindset. And here's something I just don't see anymore. I shouldn't say don't see anymore. I don't see it that often, is people just willing to do whatever it takes and making the decision, I'm going to do whatever it takes. Because, you know, Hill told us this, you have to be willing to do whatever it takes. That doesn't mean that you have to do whatever it takes. It means you missed the point if that's what you think. It means you have to be willing to do whatever it takes because— and this is not getting into woo-woo territory. I'm the most pragmatic dude you will ever meet. If we can't measure it, see it, taste it, feel it, you know, you're going to have a hard time convincing me it exists. But what I'm talking about now can be measured. The quantum physicist guys can measure this stuff. There's an energy When you make that decision that you're willing to do whatever it takes, there's an energy that happens as a result of that. That energy influences other molecules. We can measure this. Again, I'm not getting off into woo-woo territory. This is all very pragmatic and measurable. So that's what I see consistently in the people who are successful. They made the decision to do whatever it takes. Therefore, that affects every other decision they make, and then that affects every other thing they do. Like I said, doesn't mean they have to do whatever it takes. Sometimes just making that decision is enough to put things in process. I hope— I may have gone off on a tangent that you didn't want me to go off on.

No, no, no, no, no. I— look, I think it's very relevant, and I think it's— I think it's right. I mean, so I had a sign when I had a real office and, you know, you had offices and the comptroller was in one office and this person was in another office. The sign on the door of my office when I got it was President and I took it off and the sign I put up was whatever it takes. And I remember late in the game, somebody coming in and seeing it and commenting, well, that's an antique, isn't it? And so I think you're exactly right. We— really successful people are about the desired outcome and tend to be, even if grudgingly, relatively flexible about what is required and the means and the mix of things to get there. And really unsuccessful people tend to be all about the means and the mix of things that they are predetermined they're willing to do or should be doing, as you pointed out, by the very definition of the business. So somebody defines their business as an e-commerce business, for example. They preclude doing a bunch of things. If you watch Warren Buffett over the years, even people who are pretty dogmatic and determined— so I mean, Warren for most of his career made a big point of refusing to invest in overseas-based companies. He obviously didn't mind being global, but he wanted it based here. And it's only about, I don't know, 7, 8 years ago that he changed his tune about that and has invested in companies based in Israel and several other countries. And changing conditions on the ground and what is required now to get the results he wanted required him to change his dogma about that, his predetermination about that. And I think you're exactly right. There's tons of people who come to the table predetermined, you know, about what they want, what they are, what their business is and isn't, and what they're willing to do., and, um, um, I was just in your neck of the woods in Florida at Disney and, uh, at Disney Studios, which used to be Disney-MGM Studios. Um, they were ripping out, uh, 15 acres of Hollywood-themed, movie studio-themed attractions in order to very quickly build Star Wars park within the park, for obvious reasons. But imagine how many companies would hand-wring over that decision, maybe never getting to it because they had predetermined that that park was all about classic movies and the history of the movie industry and 1940s Hollywood. Which is how it's themed. And, you know, IGOR has no such qualms. And so I think it's a, you know, it's a very significant thing. And I think what for us makes a good client or a bad client is how much predetermination is in the way of getting results with them. So I'll leap again, watching the clock. Many people on the call will have some awareness or familiarity with our friend, the late Gary Halpert, and you spent enough time with him. So the two questions are, what's like the most important thing about what to do and the most important thing about what not to do that you learned from your time with Gary? I'll give you a third one too.

What's the biggest copywriting-related thing you learned from Gary? Oh boy. All right. I'll try to condense this. One of my favorite quotes from him is, "Motion beats meditation." That wasn't just a cute little thing that he liked to say in his newsletter and at seminars. He truly lived that. In the most mundane of things. And I'll show you a perfect example. I'll tell you a perfect example. So when he was staying at my place in Costa Rica, he decided he was going to stay there permanently. He was going to stay in Costa Rica permanently. So he needs to find an apartment. And I go online to whatever the site was, you know, the local sell-it-yourself site there in the San Jose area, to start, you know, I'm going to find my mentor an apartment. And I started asking him, so tell me about what you want. You know, do you need 2 bedrooms? Do you need that? And he got really fed up with that because I guess that just wasn't progress to him. And he grabbed the newspaper. Paper and said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know what, I'm just going to start calling. And he started from the top of the want ads of apartments for rent and started working his way down. Now, the fact that he didn't speak Spanish didn't even register to him as a problem. He just knew motion beats meditation. He was going to put that into practice. And he was going to find himself an apartment while I wanted to screw around and ask questions about his ideal place. He truly lived that. And Scott Haines, another copywriter who worked with Gary, told me a similar story when they stayed in a place in one of the Keys, I think maybe in Marathon. Gary decides he needs to buy a car down there and he did the same thing. Just grabbed the one— Scott's asking, well, Let's go out and look at some cars and how it's like that, screw that. He grabs the one ad and just starts calling every ad from the top to the bottom of cars for sale.

He truly lived motion beats meditation. Well, so Schwarzkopf, who I followed on the Peter Lovett thing, Schwarzkopf always said, I'd rather have everybody marching in the wrong direction than not marching because it's easier to change direction than it is to get people marching. It's really sort of the same principle. I had a guy in coaching many years ago, phone coaching, and he paid. He came to his call every month for 2 years working on one sales letter which never got in the mail. He's like the classic case of— never really doing anything. Um, and, and the world's full of that. So, uh, so the most important thing you learn not to do. Hmm. Oh, goodness sakes. Okay, I don't speak ill of the dead, but, but, but I assure you Gary wouldn't care.

Dan, they're going to speak ill of us when we die too, so whatever. They might—

they're not really waiting.

Oh my gosh. Oh, this— okay, so this I learned from Albert, but unfortunately I learned this lesson years later, or, or I'd have a much bigger fortune parked somewhere. I learned how not to manage money from Gary. Now, I'm not telling anything that he didn't reveal himself. He was quite open about— money just fell through his fingers. It was amazing. I would see large amounts of money come in, you know, and by the end of the week it was gone. Or I'd see cash, you know, like a big wad of hundreds in the desk drawer that a couple days later was gone. Now he didn't, you know, he spoke about his drug habit, but that was all in the past. He didn't drink, he didn't do drugs, none of that stuff. He wasn't going visiting prostitutes, none of that bad stuff that people will assume. I don't know, man, like it just slipped through his fingers. And he told me about back in the old Halbert's days, the coat of arms days, when he was making so much money he couldn't give it away fast enough. He told me all those lessons about what he spent money on. And, you know, I just wish I would have listened better because back then I was doing the same damn thing. It just had whatever came in, didn't matter how much or how little, just didn't matter. It all went out. Just as fast. And it took me several years to get that lesson right. But I think that— I don't think— that's what he was trying to get through my thick noggin back then. Don't do what I do because he saw me doing it and it was a great lesson. And apparently, Dan, after speaking with a lot of entrepreneurs, this is a problem a lot of entrepreneurs have because the skill set of making money and keeping money are almost kind of diametrically opposed to each other.

So that was a huge lesson from Gary. Yeah, if you think about— so again, I'll use Disney. If you think about Walt and Roy, um, Walt had Halbert's ability. First of all, Gary had very little regard for money, and Walt had very little regard for money except for the things that it could do. And if it hadn't been for Roy Disney World would be a tent in the middle of a swamp with a stuffed mouse in front of it. And neither, you know, there would have been no wealth. And so sometimes you see people, because as you say it's two different skill sets, you see people do it by some sort of partnership. It might be the spouse. It might be a business partner. It might be a hired gun. Otherwise, you really do have to develop sort of a schizophrenic personality about it, which I think I have. And you have to put some disciplines in place like X percentage off the top goes into what Ringer calls untouchables, or most entrepreneurs and certainly most creative entrepreneurs will burn through it. So last thing before a couple of announcements and then questions. If you could only teach everybody one thing about copywriting, what would it be? By the way, I hate this question. I hate being asked for the one thing, but— and I generally refuse to answer it, but, but I'd like you to answer it.

Well, your timing's good. That's a hard question to answer. The one thing is always hard. But your timing's good because I'm writing about this very thing for the December issue of my newsletter. Here's what I've seen over 20 years of doing this stuff. Once you understand us flawed, fallible, irrational human beings and how we think and how we make decisions, then you can nail the big idea. And whatever it is that you do, if you sell belly to belly, you sell over the phone, you write copy, it's all the same.— in my situation, it's almost always been writing copy. When you get the big idea right, I'll clean it up for your audience, Dan. I use a different word. Even mediocre copy can produce really good results. In fact, a lot of people can get by with mediocre copy if they get the big idea right. If you don't understand all this stuff and you don't get the big idea right, well then you could, you know, go ahead and do a séance and resurrect Halberd and Gene Schwartz and Ogilvy and all these guys and have them write the most brilliant of copy and that copy is not going to do very well at all if just flat out fail. So nailing the big idea, I guess, would be the one thing.

Cool. Very few people probably have ever accused you of this, but that's almost profound.

Listen, you need to talk to my wife and tell her that I say profound things because she doesn't think so.

No, I get that. Yeah. 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. Now 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.

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