The 4 Best Kinds of Leverage in Business (1 of 2)

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we get to listen to Dan Kennedy himself as we talk about leverage. Now in this episode, this is part 1 of 2. There's going to be a couple different episodes here. And this first episode, we're going to be talking about how entrepreneurs look for leverage and especially what are the big rocks that create that leverage on the lever system to be able to give you the most bang for your buck, no matter if that's time, if it's assets, if it's people, people whatever it is that you need to leverage. These are the 4 best kinds of leverage in your business from Dan Kennedy, part 1.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

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

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. We are this afternoon here to talk about some big stuff, not really nitty-gritty, how many words should be in a headline, that sort of things, but some real big issues for you. A handful of big rocks, in some respects tying together a lot of what we're doing here these days, that we are here in Nashville together. And I assume everybody is doing well so far and has lots of notes and lots of ideas and lots of things to sort out. So I will add to the burden if I can. Also sort of give you a way to organize things. So the first big thing that I would talk to you about is how entrepreneurs look for leverage. And you all understand the concept of leverage, right? I mean, so rather than, than brute force, we look for ways to leverage time, leverage assets, leverage people, leverage your ideas to get more out Everybody has heard the basic definition, Archimedes, give me a place and the right lever and I can move anything. What does that really mean? First of all, what's place? Well, place to us doesn't necessarily mean the physical place that we put our foot at the edge of the mountain. Perhaps our philosophy, what we bring to the table about our own belief system and the belief system that we communicate to our customers and clients or patients. It may mean our expertise and the way that we develop and present our expertise to the marketplace. It may mean our reputation. Essentially, it is your collection of assets, which in some cases would be seen by others as liabilities. And so for example, you all enjoyed Anido, right? You had a great time with him last night. Here is somebody who has leveraged a liability into an asset. So arrives in America, doesn't speak the language, doesn't have any money, and so however many years later this is, which it's a bunch, he's still using the legend of the liability as an asset. That's really been the claim to fame. I mean, I've known him for 30 years, and I can't recall any piece of literature any speech, any conversation attempting to influence anybody where he hasn't managed to remind everybody that he came here penniless, unable to speak the language. But on the surface, that would be a liability, wouldn't it? But it has provided, you know, great leverage, and so in the personality business, which I suggest to you, we're all either in or you all should be in the personality business, many times things that could give you great leverage, that could resonate with people, might be viewed superficially as liabilities, but in fact turn out to be great assets. So points of leverage are not necessarily what people would think they are, and it's up to us to search. Everywhere in our experience, in our background, in our knowledge base, in our context, to search for things that we can leverage. Now, it may be actual place, because place gives great leverage, the place that we stand. And so you always have to think about your selected market and your selected market space. Inevitably, every conversation I have with somebody who has a product idea, including conversations here, including conversations on breaks right after I have taught some aspect of this, conversations with people who should know better, who have already been down the road 6 or 7 or 8 successful times, the conversation almost always begins with them telling me about their thing, their product, their service, their business, their idea. It is so rare for the conversation to begin with them coming up and telling me about their market space, their place in the market, where it is that they think what they're about to tell me about fits, where there are unmet needs, unmet desires, how many people there are who are appropriate for this thing, what they know about those people. The conversation almost never starts there. It always starts with, I've got this thing which I intend to sell. Let me tell you about the thing. And what you have to understand is, is that the thing is the least important part of the game. There's rarely real leverage in the thing. So you take a product like coffee and a company like Starbucks, the leverage ain't in the coffee. That's not in any way, shape, or form where the points of leverage that have made Starbucks successful are, 'cause you can get a halfway decent cup of coffee a lot of other places for a lot less money. A hell of a lot quicker. I mean, you know, immortality is going to a Starbucks at rush hour, you know. If you're like 70 years of age or above, it's probably the best way to guarantee living to be 100 is getting in line at Starbucks. So see, their leverage is not the product, right? I'll mention somebody to you later, but I'll mention the product now. And we've seen fitness product after product after product, and when I did some work with Guthrie Renker over the years, I've had experience to work with fitness product. I always tell people, by the way, in case you didn't know it, there's a rule about fitness products sold on television, and that is that the handles almost point up, because if they point down, the laundry falls off and people are unhappy and they send the product back for a refund. But think about fitness products like Jake's ab chair, which which is, you know, a lawn chair with two hinges on it. Think back to, think back to, think back to ThighMaster. Is there any leverage in the product itself? No, as a matter of fact, the product had been laying around for a long period of time before anybody made anything out of it. The George Foreman grill, one of the most successful consumer products of its time, okay, that product had been around for at least 10 years prior to that, got trotted out every Christmas season, put on the shelf in the department store, 'cause it's the kind of product that people buy out of desperation, right? I gotta get a gift for these people. I don't know what gift to get 'em. I don't really wanna give 'em a gift certificate 'cause that looks like I didn't pick anything out. So I'll go to the appliance department of the department store and find some dumb gadget that nobody will ever use. Oh, a grill, great. And so the product got trotted out every Christmas season, sold to desperate shoppers as gifts, and then put away until next Christmas season. Well, there's no leverage in that thing. The points of leverage had to do with George, marketing through television to create demand. So you have to think about where your real points of leverage are, and they never have to do with the thing, but they often have to do with the market space, where you fit in the market, that there is room. See, I always say to people, you need a reason to exist. You know, there's got to be some reason for you to be where you want to be, hoping to extract money, sucking up space, time, and air, other than the fact that you want to pay off your house and go to— and send your kids to college, because that's— the marketplace doesn't give a rat's patootie about that. All right, nobody, nobody is gonna just line up and give you money because you want a Jaguar. It's not a compelling message to anybody but you. So you gotta find market space where you have a reason to exist other than your own personal desires, a legitimate reason that is important to those people. There you will find some leverage, right? And so it can be your place in the market. Think about one of my favorite companies, Disney. So where's Disney's like place? Where is their market space that they have found, identified, dominated, and kept control of generation after generation, decade after decade? G-rated, family-friendly entertainment. That's their space. And for the most part, everybody else who comes into it mucks it up. They've kept total control over it, and by the way, to Hollywood's sort of, I guess, disappointment, almost every year including last year, G-rated movies outgrossed all other kinds of movies by a big, big, big, big, big margin, right? So, in the interest of full disclosure, I are a Disney stockholder. Right here, and if you're, if you're not leaving right away from the conference and you have like some time on your hands to go sightseeing, one of the things you want to go see if you've never seen it before is you want to go to the Bass Outdoor Shop that's between you and the airport. Okay, even if you don't know what bass are, or if you do and you could care less about bass fishing, if the whole thing nauseates you. It doesn't make any difference. Nauseates me, by the way. I actually went fishing once as a child with my grandfather, and 4 hours on a boat in the middle of the lake was like the longest month of my life. I mean, I see no point. First of all, fishing to me implies that you are actually somehow getting a fish. I quickly learned the definition is broader than that. Fishing means 4 hours away from grandmother where she can't reach you with her voice. That seems to be the definition, you know, that fishing is included in that. And I didn't see any fish. I noticed a crapload of mosquitoes. The whole thing has no appeal to me, I don't understand it, but here's what I do understand. Bass Pro Shops has carved out a market space that is incredible. It spans mass affluent to affluent, not affluent, but most importantly their space is experiential shopping for sportsmen, and that's why you should go see it. If you've never been in it, this is the largest one, I think. The one here in Nashville, I believe, is their largest of their experiential shopping centers. Where you can actually test the boat, test the rod, catch a fish, fall in. You can do like every— anything you're going to buy you can use. And people go there for the day. See, this is not— and keep in mind, this is mostly guys who are mostly sort of shopping averse. Mostly we think shopping means going to buy something. Women think shopping is an activity in and of itself. So when you say you're going shopping, you come back 5 hours later with nothing, which again, to me, that's not shopping. I expect you to go hunt something down, bring it back, you know. But so, so, so guys generally don't view shopping to be the thing to spend a day doing, but they do at this place. They go for the day. So if you haven't seen it, you got to see it because they've got leverage because of this position they've carved out for themselves in the marketplace. Now, let's talk about the lever. When you talk about leverage and you talk about the lever, most people think of money. And what most people believe about businesses, by the way, is, oh, I could— and sometimes at a conference like this, you will see like the winners come up, you'll see people tonight competing, you saw the Marketer of the Year awards, you will hear people quoting what may seem to be ungodly sums of money made at ungodly paces, and the usual thought, often not enunciated, sometimes enunciated, is, well, first of all, the first thought is always, well, easy for him to say, but I can't do that because, and then the person rattles out their list of the reasons why they could never do that. The handicaps that they are burdened with, which by the way, there's no leverage whatsoever in that list. So it's not a skill you want to polish, making that list. 98% of people are pretty good at making that list, by the way. That's a skill pretty much everybody has, and there's no leverage in it whatsoever. But the first thing usually on most people's list is, I can't do X, Y, and Z because I don't have the money. You know, and most people think in terms of the number one lever being money. Well, the first thing that's kind of interesting about money, and I don't want to— I know we have people from the financial services industry and the real estate industry, partners in the room, but still, over the last 5 years, if you factor in inflation and you factor in taxes, the average stock market investor is 19% to 15% worse off than they were when they started 5 years ago. The average real estate investor is 4% down from where they were 5 years ago. If you want to know actually, and I've done better in both of those categories, I'm very pleased to say, and you may have done better too, but if you want to know where the real money was, 5 years ago, if you had put your money into this, you're up 67%. It's toilet paper. So if you had taken all your 401(k) money and all your IRA money and you had gone to Costco 5 years ago today and you had loaded up on toilet paper and now resold it, highest return of anything you could possibly have done. So this is for Lee Miltirow, if she's in the room, my brother who is competing for the title of Napoleon Napoleon Hill of the 21st century. He's busily coming out with his new book, How to Buy Beer and Toilet Paper and Grow Rich. So look, money's a very useful thing, okay? And money does make doing certain things easier, but I have always said if you can't make money without money, you pretty much won't make money with money, and that's why as an investor it's a bad idea to invest in companies run by people who have never shown that they have the ability to make money without money. Because then entrusting them with money is a very bad idea, and if you think money's it, you're wrong. Money's pretty much always available for good people with good ideas, okay? There's a lot of money out there, so I don't believe it's the most important kind of leverage. 173 of this year's Forbes 400, by the way, how many in here pay attention every year to the Forbes 400, raise your hands. Okay, that's pretty good, but it's not unanimous. So on your list of the 5,000 things that you should pay attention to every year ought to be the Forbes 400. If you don't read Forbes any other time during the year, you ought to get the annual issue of the 400. There's little mini biographies in there of the 400 richest people in the world and pretty much kind of who they are, what they do, and how they got there. Most people think they inherited it. That's not the primary number. Most people think they're baseball players and entertainers. That's not the primary number. And this year is the first year that you had to be a billionaire you have to be a billionaire or above to make the list. So all 400 people are billionaires or above. A whole bunch of people fell off the list who are worth $400 million, $500 million, $600 million. There were too many billionaires, there's only 400 slots, so they got bumped, okay? But one thing that's significant is 173 of this year's 400 started their businesses with zip, okay? Like Gene said, they started in a garage. Literally, not figuratively, started in a garage with no dough, 173 of the 400. Another 100 started with very nominal resources. In some cases, they inherited very, very, very, very small fortunes, and in some cases dormant or businesses that needed turnaround, and they built them. You could almost count them, and if you wanted to, you'd be at 273 of the 400. Who basically manufactured their billion from scratch through entrepreneurial work. So had they all stood around and waited for money to be their leverage, they wouldn't have got there. So money itself is not it. Capital is not it. Now, application of capital is. So where do you put capital? Somebody asked me again yesterday, One of the questions I was asked when I was taking a picture was, "Gee, if you had to do it all over again, tell me what you would do differently." I didn't name this as one of the first two things, but probably shouldn't with Carla in the room, but I would have got a prenup. But setting that aside, here's one of the more useful answers., and it's the opposite of this. Given a fictional $100,000 to spend on their business in a sort of test discussion, only 2 of 100 owners— by the way, that variation of this question is on our new member questionnaire. Some of you who are new members may have noticed it. If you're a relatively new member and you didn't notice it, like, the questionnaire's in 2 different places, guys. It's in the back of the Income Explosion Guide, and we also send it to you loose. Believe it or not, we actually look at those things. I look at every one of them that comes in. Thousands. I skim, but I look, okay? Because I need to know what's going on with you in order to be effective in what I do. So there's this, there's a variation of this question. On the questionnaire, but only 2 of 100 owners, when told, here, I'm gonna hand you $100,000 to spend on your business, you can spend it any way you want, only 2 of the 100 say in any way, shape, or form, I'm gonna spend it acquiring customers. Only 2 out of 100. They say all sorts of other stuff, but they do not say I'm gonna spend it acquiring customers. Customers. So if I had to do it over again, I'd have bought my own building instead of rented, but most importantly, I would have spent more money buying customers. There's a leverageable asset. The money's not very leverageable. The customers are really leverageable. And I don't care what your business is, pizza shop, barber shop, shoe repair shop, insurance agency, some mundane, local bricks and mortar, local services, the most mundane thing you can think of, manufacturing, I don't care. The asset that you can leverage the most is the customer. Because when you control relationship with the customer, there's all sorts of things you can do. People will pay you. There's a thing called, hopefully you know this term, There's a thing called toll booth position. This is how you own a toll booth. Toll booth's a real cool thing to own, and some states are now finally selling them. They're selling the toll booths on the turnpikes to the private entities. Long term, not a good policy, by the way. They're also selling their lotteries, so the states are getting big, giant sums of money up front, which the governments will spend at blinding speed, thereby, 'cause every dollar they get disappears as fast as they get it, so it'll be gone, and the private guy will own the toll booth and the income forever, and the state of New Jersey or Ohio or whatever will be broke, but, you know, really no harm done. They're broke now, they'll be broke then, what difference does it make? But, see, a toll booth's a really cool thing to own. Right, because the only way to get from over here to over there is to pass through the toll booth, and you can pretty much demand anything you want for them to pass through. Charlie Martin, Dr. Martin, his office is in Richmond, Virginia, and every time I go there, I marvel, first of all, at the number of toll booths there are just between the airport and his office. You know, that's why people from out of town are not bothered bothered by his $40,000 fee for dentistry, they've spent about $28,000 getting to the office. I mean, and Richmond has no problem raising the tolls. Why? Because you got to get there. So when you own a toll booth— so what's the only toll booth, as a practical matter, you can ever own in life? The toll booth to your own customers. And if you have valuable enough customers, on this side of a toll booth, and you sit here in a toll booth, there's all kinds of people who want to get to them, who will pay in one way or another to get to them. So let's talk about the 4 best kinds of leverage. Number 1 are points of financial leverage within your own business. Most people look outside. You want to look inside. No investment I've ever seen usually is better than buying your own customers, and usually there's more opportunity for leverage inside than there is outside. So for example, I'll just give you a couple of examples, there's lots of them. So what's the point of financial leverage inside a business? Well, one is average transaction value. By the way, most people don't pay attention to the right stats. There's a whole chapter in my new book, first plug of the afternoon, No BS Ruthless Management, there's a whole chapter about the statistics you need to know and monitor in your business that your CPA doesn't understand and won't tell you. And I can usually in a consulting day stump somebody on the first 3 or 4 math questions because everybody's paying attention to the wrong numbers, right? Mostly they pay attention to historical numbers that tell you what happened after it's too late to do anything about it. Okay, so average transaction value, abbreviation is ATV, is usually a point of great leverage. To leverage it, the first thing you gotta know is what it is, right? What's the average transaction value in my restaurant? Well, how do you get that? Well, you figure out the number of people who came in this month, you take your gross revenue, you divide it by the number of people, now you, okay, you got average transaction value. Now you got to sit around and figure out how can we bump the average transaction value. There's an ancient story from the Depression which I always bungle. I can never remember whether it's Elmer Letterman or the other guy with an L, and every time I do this, 180 people send me a letter telling me it's one, and 180 people send me a letter telling me it's the other guy, and I keep being too lazy to go look it up, but none of that matters. But whoever it was, Red Motley Elmer Letterman, or it doesn't matter, but he tells a great story of how the drugstore chain with soda fountains, frame of reference, soda fountains used to exist in things that used to be drugstores. Well, look, you see, you laugh, but a whole bunch of the room doesn't have any. Gene Simmons and I sat the other night while he was signing your books, and Sherry was in the room with us, and Jean and I were talking movies. Nobody he or I named did she know. So we had to sit there and patiently explain who Ernie Borgnine was, you know, she is, huh, who, what, you know. So I'm sensitive to frame of reference, okay. So there used to be these things called drugstores where they actually sold drugs, not lawn chairs, barbecue grills, stuffed animals, Coca-Cola, and somewhere in the back, if you could fight your way to it, you might actually find Excedrin. Okay, and they had soda fountains in them, which you sat at and you got like milkshakes and stuff. And they all had them, and working folks ate their lunch there, sandwiches and milkshakes. Anyway, the drugstore chain was saved in the Depression by a little sales script that was, would you like 1 egg or 2 eggs added to your milkshake? Brought the average transaction value up. Why? Because almost everybody picked one or the other. Real simple sales strategy, by the way. It's an upsell script that gives them a choice of two things, not a yes or no choice. Now fast forward a whole bunch of years. Our friend from last night, I was producing his audio albums when this happened. He got, you know, the Hickory Farms people, the cheese and the sausage guys? That have all those stores, he got them to give him, look, there's no such thing as an unconscionable sum of money, but he got, well, market determines value, right? So what you can get is what you should get, but he got them to give him as close to an unconscionable sum of money as I have ever seen that you might call unconscionable, for creating a script for Hickory Farms, a little cross-sell, a kind of laminated card for everybody at the cash register. So if somebody walked up there with sausage and they didn't have any cheese with it, the person said, you should have cheese with that sausage. There's two sausages— or there's two cheeses that go great with that sausage. Would you like this one or this one? And if they walked up there with cheese and no sausage, then they had two choices for that. Hickory Farms gave him a ton of dough, a ton of dough. Pretty much you don't do anything without getting a ton of dough. They gave them a ton of dough for putting that in to increase their average transaction value. So a great point of leverage inside almost every business is how can we increase our average transaction value? And one of the things you want to revisit all the time is these points of leverage. It's like if not every day, every week, or every month, or every calendar quarter, or certainly every year, you want to be brainstorming just that. Okay, what's another point of leverage, financial leverage inside a business, would be transaction frequency. How many times can we get them to come back, right? So the restaurant industry, the fast food industry added breakfast umpteen years ago, but A while back, none of them were in the breakfast business. Now they're all in the breakfast business. The fast food industry uses coupons, but here's what I've never caught any of them doing. Keeping track of who only comes in for breakfast and giving them coupons for dinner, and keeping track of people who only come in for dinner and giving them coupons for breakfast. Nobody ever figures that out. See, but that's a way to increase transaction frequency. The best way to increase transaction frequency is what? Who knows the best way to increase transaction frequency? Communication. That's good. Who said that? Who said that? Good for you, very smart. Okay, you don't get a prize. I don't have anything I better give you, but you know, you get the glory of recognition from the stage. Yeah, continuity, because now the transaction frequency frequency is predetermined, locked in, the person has to fight to get out, they don't have to be made another sale. You should all be familiar with this. This should not be a secret strategy to you. It should be a very visible secret. You're all in continuity. Some of you are in multiple continuity. Some of you are in multiple, multiple continuity, alright? And the best thing about continuity, here's my favorite continuity story. We're producing an infomercial for a product called Acne Statin. This is before Guthrie Winkler's Proactiv. Same kind of product. Skincare product kind of cures acne, good skincare product as well. Makes wrinkles go away, etc. And we hit the motherlode of testimonials. They actually were from Nashville, come to think of it. Franklin, Tennessee. 3 generations of women, all all using the product. Fabulous. You ain't gonna get a better testimonial than that, are you? We're gonna show them grandma, mom, the two adult daughters all using the glop, right? This is fabulous. And they're from the South, they got Southern accents, this is great. So we fly them in for the filming, right? We're doing the pre-interview. Grandma's like, I don't know, 116. So first of all, she's about 3.5 feet tall, right? She's got— by the way, I saw on the news today, this guy turned 100, and to celebrate his 100th birthday today, he went and drove a car 100 miles an hour down an airstrip and then went to a boat and drove the boat 100 miles an hour in the river. That's pretty cool, isn't it? So anyway, this woman's like 106 years old, she's like 3.5 feet tall, she probably weighs 40 pounds dripping wet, and 38 of the 40 pounds are wrinkles. This woman looks like one of them Shar-Pei dogs, you know, where you can lift up 4 of the jowls, put a little food in there, put the jowls back, the dog finds it a day or 2 later, he's excited, right? So, like, she needs skincare glop. I'm talking to her and she says, "You know," she says, "when I first started using it 30-some-odd years ago," she says, "you know, it comes every month and I pretty much used up the supply every month. And then when I got a little older and I needed less, I was sharing it with my daughter, but then she, you know, moved to her own house and she signed up for her shipment every month." I've got my granddaughters, they got their own shipments every month. And she says, a box comes every month. And she says, you know, I don't need that much anymore. She says, I've got in my basement cupboard where I have my jams and jellies that I make, she says, they're stacked from the floor to the ceiling. And I've got them in the closet. And I mean, I'm like, I'm digging my nails into the table, you know, not to say Hon, you know, you could have them stop, but I mean, you know, they're my client, you know. I mean, so, you know, her entire estate consists of continuity-delivered jars of skincare product. That's, you know, but look, that's how continuity works, right? So, I mean, see, You've got to think about this, and you can't ever say, can't work in my business. Bill made it work in retail clothing, really just for the fun of proving to make it work. Diana Cotu, who's here, and a number of other people from Rory's group have made it work in restaurants. Diana makes continuity work in a pizza place that has no sit-down dining for pizza. You can make it work. So another point of financial leverage is thinking about how this— how you increase transaction frequency, right? Here's another point of financial leverage. How can we sell the parts instead of the whole? That comes from the timeshare business, right? So if we cut this apartment up and we sell 52 shares of it, we can get more for it than if we sell it to one person. Birthed fractional jet ownership. And now there's fractional exotic car ownership. There's expensive jewelry fractional ownership. In case you didn't know it, there are companies where they're selling the right to wear the piece of jewelry for one week out of the year to 52 people for a whole lot more than they could sell the piece of jewelry to one person to have it all year long. Alright, so there's lots of ways to skin this cat. You gotta think about all these ways, and this is all within your power, and it's all within your existing business. One last thing on this point: financial leverage within your business. Improving yield on what you already got or what you already do, on money already invested. Alright, so where are those points? One, for most people, is their telephone. We have sort of two people on planet Dan I'll mention to you if you don't know them, Jay Guyer and Chris Mullins. I don't know if either one of them are here, but they are both worth finding and taking a look at if you have a business of any kind where somebody calls in on the phone and talks to a human being, because there's a place to increase the yield on the dollars you already spent, in some cases dramatically. If you want to prove it to yourself, just go have somebody secretly mystery shop your phone, okay, and call up and play prospect and record it for you 4 or 5 different times during the week. And then after you're done vomiting, you will be motivated to do something about it because now you should know, here's a number you should know, how much does it cost to make your phone ring? What does it cost for every person who calls in to ask a question, schedule an appointment, appointment, whatever. If you have an auto parts shop, X number of people are calling every day to ask, do you have a flibbertigibbet for a '56 Chevy? You spent money to get that phone call. You need to know how much it costs so you can start to think about how much you already have invested in it, so should you spend another $5, another $7, another $10? Okay, next, the in-person. Okay, so you spent a lot of money to get somebody to walk into your place of business come to your showroom, come to your store, come into your office for an appointment, come into your seminar room, come to your trade show booth, etc. You spend all this money to get them there, and then what? 102 flaws that are diminishing the value of the dollars you've already invested. Sydney's program, which you heard about yesterday, addresses that. Web traffic, you spend all this money driving people to website, figuring out how to get traffic. Everybody's always talking about how many visitors they got and they're working to be up higher on the Google list and all this, and then nobody's paying any attention to their conversions. Nobody's trying to leverage every one of those people. So earlier today in one of my meetings, Charlie Martin and I are sitting there thinking, okay, we got all this traffic. Here's how many conversions we got. Let's not worry about how to get more traffic. Let's figure out right now what we can do to rearrange this thing to like triple, quadruple. Ari Galper, who is here somewhere, brilliant at this. So there's things you are already spending money on, things you already own, things that already have value to you in your business that are points of leverage if you will work on them. The last one in that category I'll mention. Simply has to do with the economics of your business, price and profit, the subject of all day tomorrow. Second commercial plug of the day, if by some chance you have not planned to stay tomorrow and haven't registered to stay tomorrow, if you still wish to stay tomorrow, you can still arrange to pay for that and to do that, and the people in the red shirts at the back of the room will be happy to take your money. It would be a smart thing to do. I happen to know most of you are staying, so I'm not going to beat you up, but there's great leverage in most businesses just in price. And so tomorrow we'll spend all day on that. Okay. Second kind of leverage, very quickly, leverage in marketing, where I live and spend most of my life, right? The first great point of leverage in marketing is switching from institutional brand image only to direct response, right? How do we get somebody to respond to us directly? But there's all sorts of great strategies, and you gotta be alert for all of them. One of my favorite most recent ones, I don't know, is Dean Killingbeck still around? Is Dean here somewhere? There you are, okay, so stand up. He's a guy in a plaid shirt, you know, he looks, he's from Central Michigan, he looks like he's from Central Michigan, you know. Easy to find. Okay, so Dean, for many of us, many of our clients, many of the niche info marketers, one of the things Dean does is handle birthday mailings. And so in case you didn't know it, somebody who knows what they're doing like Dean can get not just of your customers but can get lists of everybody in your zip code or in whatever, pretty much anywhere you want them, of people having a birthday this month, right, and we can send them a birthday mailing. Well, that's, it's a brilliant strategy. It's highly profitable for a lot of businesses when it's done right and it's not mucked up. The response rates on these direct, on this direct mail defies all normal response rates of direct mail. So there's something in place that's very successful, very clever, very work, Works great, we could all go to sleep on it, but really everybody sits around thinking, okay, that's so good, how can we get more leverage out of it? And I don't know who to give the credit to, whether it was Dean or Bill or, I don't know, but somebody concocted the half birthday. So they can mail to the same person twice a year. If it works once, It'll work twice. See, that's fabulous leverage. Group selling versus one-on-one selling, okay? Normal to us. Not enough businesses do it. Ed O'Keefe, I don't know if Ed's here. Ed here anywhere? Went home. Should I still give him a plug? Okay. All right. Ed is one of a number of people who work with the dental profession. Ed has figured out and is pretty consistently creating in cooperative offices $100,000 days, days, with group selling events rather than one-on-one selling. Okay. Not enough people understand group selling. It doesn't have to be done physically, by the way, teleseminars, webinars. See, you're all familiar with these because we do them to you, but a lot of people never turn around and figure out how they can use them to sell furniture or carpeting or cars or insurance or real estate. Great leverage in selling to groups, to clumps of people at one time rather than to people one at a time. There's a ton of free media out there that you can leverage. Not a lot of people use it well. I was just informed by our geniuses that the video being used of us as we are here right now is in the top 10 in the education category on YouTube. I only know that, of course, because I was told. I have no frame of reference for what that means, but kind of top 10 anywhere sounds good, and I think it's free. So that's pretty good leverage, right? So you've got to think about all the ways you can leverage what you know about marketing in your existing business. So here's what's true about most people. Even as much as they're exposed to, they're using like 5 things when there's 50 things that they could be using.

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