Licensing & The New Game Of Intellectual Property with Mitch Axelrod

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Profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now, here's your host, Brad Costanzo. Well, hello again. This is Brad Costanzo, and I am excited to wrap some bacon around today's topic. As a business owner, publisher, and consultant, I've used the topic of today's show to create some pretty massive windfalls for myself and my clients. My hope is that you'll be able to do the same in your business. For me, it's all about leverage, shortcuts, and new opportunities. Speaking of shortcuts, I'm pretty lazy. Like the next guy, I don't like to work hard if I don't have to. So I'm always looking for shortcuts. And what I'm going to show you today is one of the most amazing shortcuts to business success that I've ever found. It takes a little bit of art to apply it. However, that's why you're here today, to learn about this. And in fact, there's very few places you can learn about what I'm going to share with you. And I'm going to bring on a guest host very shortly to dive deep into this topic. It's the secret sauce behind many successes that I've had, as well as some businesses that you may not even realize are doing it. Look, let me ask you a question. Who else has what you need? Whatever you need, Customers, content, capital, traffic to your website, products, a recognizable brand name. What is it you need to be a success? And who else has access to that right now? What other businesses, organizations, institutions, individuals have that now? Ask yourself, who else needs what you have? These are two very elementary questions, but what they produce is remarkable. You may not feel as though you've got a lot to offer or that you only do a handful of things, but you probably have a lot more than you think. Maybe it's knowledge or expertise, methods or formulas, systems or a recognizable brand name. Who else could put that to good use if they had what you have? These answers could take a while, a lot of brainstorming, but they're at the core of today's topic. That's because anything you have that you have created, or more importantly could create if called upon, is something called your intellectual property. It's the Space between your ears. And you'll hear my guest host talk about that in just a few minutes. The moment you understand exactly what you have and you find others who can use it, whether as an end user or in a joint venture, you begin to open up new revenue opportunities for yourself. Today we're talking about, amongst other things, intellectual property and how to leverage your own and others, and the concept of licensing or renting intellectual property. It has nothing to do with the law or protecting IP assets. There are no lawyers or contracts at the moment involved in this, so don't worry about it. That's all boring to me. And we're going to talk about exploiting intellectual property for fun and profit in a good way. We're going to talk about how to make money with it. And in just a moment, I'm bringing on Mitch Axelrod, one of the leading experts of IP and licensing. We're going to dive deeper than you've probably ever gone before, especially because this topic is not covered in a lot of places. But first, let me share a quick example of what I'm talking about, just to get to the meat of the matter. Several years ago, I wrote a book and I had no audience for that book. I knew a lot about the topic, but I was not a recognizable name. I didn't have a single person to buy it. And like many would be authors, I would have created the book, put it out there, self published it, maybe try to get another publisher, and just hope and pray that I become a household name. But that's not the way my brain works. I look for shortcuts and I look for leverage points. I needed a way to promote it.

And I didn't have that.

But I did have a client who did. He was already a marketing and consulting client. He had a very big audience and a recognizable brand name in this area. So instead of starting from scratch to get my book promoted, I made a deal with this client. I would license or rent their name and put it on the book. I would leverage their brand and build in the distribution. Then when their customers saw the book with their name on it, I was betting they'd be quick to snap it up, infinitely quicker than if I had my own name on it, because I was a nobody in that market. So I licensed the author's name and brand, promoted it to his own customers, and it became a number one best seller. I retained 80% of the royalties and they got the benefits of giving their audience an incredible book and they didn't have to do any work. Plus they Got monthly income, basically free money. It was a win, win, win. A win for the client, a win for the customer, the reader, and obviously a win for me. And that's just one example of how I've used my own intellectual property, licensed someone else's brand and matched up what I have with what somebody else needs and created two new revenue sources. That's just one way to slice it. But right now I am really excited to dive deeper into this and to open up the mindset and the method and several different ways to do this in ways that you probably never imagined. I'm going to introduce you to Mitch Axelrod. He is one of my mentors. He's a best selling author of the New Game of Selling. He is an incredible guy, a close friend, and he's been at this game for so long that he is quite literally reinventing it.

Mitch Atarad, are you with us?

I'm with you, Brad.

Hey, Mitch, how are you doing today?

I'm great, man. It's good to be with you. Always great to talk to you.

Yeah, you as well. I'm excited about today. At the same time I'm a little hesitant because I've got to put on a different hat than the hat I'm normally used to talking with you on. Because you and I have worked together and I've gotten inside your brain and trying to get as much of that genius out of there as I could. And I feel as though now, in order to explain to everybody who is listening what you are all about and how you can help them, I need to step back and put on a hat as if I had never heard some of this before. And that is always hard for me because you and I get into some really deep and cool and advanced discussions about business selling. And one of the things we are going to talk about today, which is intellectual property. So I'm excited and at the same time, I hope I don't talk over everybody's head, but one of the things that you're known for years ago, you in a lot of ways redefined what's going on in the business world with some groundbreaking work with the New Game of Business. Right. When did that come out?

Published that book in 2004. Wrote it in 2003. Was talking about it since the turn of the century.

A lot of the things you talked about in there came, came to pass in the business world. Is that right?

Yeah, it was really. I was, I was really more of an observer. I wouldn't go so far as to say I was predicting the future. I mean, I could, but that, you know, I'd be taking it a step too far. I was more of an observer of what was happening. And you know, I'm really fond of da Vinci's phrase. It actually is the first phrase in my book, the New Game of Selling. Its simplicity is the ultimate supposed to sophistication. When you talk about, you know, coming back to the basics, I always believe that no matter how many years you're in business or you're doing something, even when you master it, it's always good to come back to a beginner's mind. Because when you come back to a beginner's mind, you tend to make things more simple. And when you make things more simple, people really can grasp it, you know, and embrace it, integrate it and execute it. So the new game of business really was 10 key distinctions that was transforming the game of business from the inside out. And when I wrote that book in 2004, I literally printed 3,000 copies and gave them all away. And I could have sold those books for 10 bucks apiece and had 3,000 buyers, but I actually wound up making instead of 30,000, I made a quarter of a million dollars on that book because I sold what was inside the book and I wound up that also impacted 50,000 people and 3,000. So that book really was a big hit. And that kind of started the whole new game conversation going.

That's great. And you know, the new game, that's your brand, right? That is what you are known for in redefining what most people have been doing kind of the old fashioned way, or sometimes ways that are ineffective but just commonplace. You put a very unique spin on it. And thus the follow up your next program. The New Game of Selling, obviously number one on Amazon, just one of the best business books when it comes to selling and customer service and generating new business that I've read. And what I like about it is it's a short, simple book that cuts through all the BS and delivers honest promises, gives you very easy frameworks.

To.

Sell whether you are selling products or services. And I want to skip ahead because you just mentioned something that really is going to be at the heart of this interview, which is when you talked about how you gave the book away, made 100 times more than you would have if you sold it. And then you said a very key distinction, which is you made your money on what was in the book, not the book itself. And that plays perfectly into your newest brand. And the thing I think that I'm most excited about in working and talking with you is the new game of intellectual property or the new game of ip? And I really want to dive into this. I've heard you use the word content capitalism in the past, and I love that. And throwing the box away. Everybody else talks about thinking outside of the box, and you really have done an incredible job saying get rid of the box completely and look at your assets, the things you have, tangible and intangible, in a completely new way. So how would you describe the concept of intellectual property or the new game of intellectual property as it's being played at high levels today?

Well, again, coming back to the simple model, I really liken it to real estate in a way, because if you look at what's the most valuable real estate in the world, People and I asked this question kind of as a trick question, but it's not really. And you know, is it Manhattan? No. Is it Beverly Hills? Who knows, maybe the South? Well, the truth is, the most valuable real estate in the world is the six inches between your ears. And we all own it. I mean, it's just amazing to me that we don't capitalize it, monetize it, and actualize it the way that we could because we're trapping it inside the form of things like books and CDs and audios and even in digital packaging. Again, don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of information products. But information products are like a small sliver compared to what the game of intellectual property is. So if you really look at all the ways that your knowledge, wisdom and experience, systems, formulas, recipes, software, maybe you come up with some sort of a proprietary work production. We've got so many different IPs that we've created and deployed in so many different ways that when you really begin to look at intellectual property, even little systems that you use to communicate with customers could be considered. Your Rolodex, your network, your contacts, it's all intellectual property because it's all leverageable. And over the years, and this kind of comes from my financial planning background. The first 10 years of my business, I had a financial planning company called Money Managers Incorporated, and I was a CFP in 1983, certified financial planner. So I look at things from a business and financial background. Well, when you bring that mindset to business and you look around at all of your business assets, tangible ones, you can see, you know, plant equipment, buildings, desks, furniture, printers. That stuff you can see. And the thing about it is, most of that stuff is considered depreciating assets. Building may be an appreciating asset, but in today's economic climate, nobody knows what a building is going to be worth in five years. And anybody who says they can predict it is just blowing smoke. Nobody knows. So you have all your tangible assets that you can see, then you have what you can't see, and that's your intangible assets. And throughout the years, I spent the first 10 years talking about tangible assets with my financial planning clients, many of whom were businesses. Then it dawned on me in the late 80s, early 90s that there's this thing called intangible assets or intellectual property that was starting to become more and more a part of people's net worth. And businesses go far enough to see the intellectual property value of not just the six inches between your ears, but all the relationships that you have where you could combine your intellect with somebody else's. The possibilities are endless. And so I look at it as intellectual property now is the fastest growing capital asset. It's the biggest percentage of capital in terms of balance sheet value of major corporations around the world. It's probably one of the major components of massive growth in personal wealth and net worth. And each of us has it and very few of us are really making what it could be. And so that's what the new game of IP is in a nutshell. It's how to capitalize, monetize and actualize that intellectual property in all those categories. Very exciting game.

Yeah, it really is. A couple points. Number one, I love how you redefine the term intellectual property really for entrepreneurs and the mindset that you and I share, as opposed to, I'd say the majority of business owners and just general folks out there, when they hear intellectual property, they think lawyers, legalists, complex arrangements. And yours is much more about.

How.

To take advantage of your intellectual property as opposed to protect it. A lot of folks out there, they think IP and they kind of turn off because it sounds like a very defensive, I have to protect my ip, I have to get lawyers involved. However, yours is much more. The new game is how do I leverage what I know, not necessarily what I have. And that is another great point which kind of goes back to the book where you said you sold what's inside it products, whether it's an information product or any other type of product is in a lot of ways it's a static version of either what you know in a book's case or what you have produced. And it's static. And once it's out there, once it's in the box, it's got form versus the way that you use intellectual property and myself as well, as opposed to being what's already there. What can I do? What can the knowledge that's in my head, the six inches in between my ears do for somebody else? How can it help somebody else achieve their goals and how can I leverage that? And you've talked about this a lot in the past with me personally, for the highest and best use possible. And I want you to tell this story in just a second because I love this story from a prior deal that you've done, which is when most people just take their intellectual property and put it in a form and go try to sell it to everybody. As a one size fits, excuse me, as a one size fits all, it almost imprisons the value. It links the value and the price together. You price this at $100 and that's what everybody is going to pay, regardless of how they are going to use it. However, you were brilliant and I'll have you elaborate on this in realizing that how somebody uses what you know can vastly change the value of your intellectual property. And the example that I wanted you to talk about, and I don't want to spoil it because I want you to, is when you took in your big box of information or your binder and you had somebody pick and choose what they wanted and as opposed to everything else, and you made a lot more money for it. So I wanted to tee this story up because I think the people, especially anybody who listens to this, who sells information or expertise, can greatly benefit from this deal that you've done in the past.

Yes. So geez, you're taking me back 20 years more. So in 1992, I got an insurance company, the 12th largest insurance company in the country, to put up $100,000 to film, produce, edit and give me a finished training program that I wrote. I then turned around and licensed it back to them for a quarter of.

A million dollars and then another quarter.

Of a million dollars of speaking and training fees. So it turned out to be like a $600,000 deal. No inventory, no overhead. And I walked away with a product that I owned and then sold a whole lot more to other companies. And the finished product that was produced was one of these huge, huge binders, like a 6 inch binder with audio cassettes on one side and like 37 modules and there's 462 page workbook. If you could imagine, nobody today could even comprehend this because we live in such a bite sized world. So I used to carry it around with me because it was. First of all, it was really impressive. Second of all, it had their logo on it. So it gave me instant credibility to be able to carry their package to their competition, right? So I carried into this insurance agency, and the guy has about 50 agents, right? And he heard about me and he said. I picked up the phone, he called. He says, come on in, I want to talk to you. I want to hire you. I want to buy some. So I walk in with this binder, you know, under my arm, and he laughs. And he says, what's that thing? And I said, that's no thing. That's my, you know, maximum sales. It's my new workbook and it comes with the cassettes and it's $295. And he says, you think I'm going to buy that thing? You're crazy.

I said, why not?

He said, open it up. Let me see what's inside. Let me see the table of contents. So I snapped the binder open and opened it up, and he says, I'll take these five. And he points to five modules of the 37. He says, how much? So I look at him and like, from Mars, you know, like, what are you crazy? You buy the whole binder? We're asking me for five modules. So I'm a Jersey guy. I'm a bit of a smart ass, you know, I figured I'm going to come up with a number. This guy's going to just say, I might as well buy the whole workbook, right? So I quoted him 100 bucks a module per person. And he said, okay, great. When do we. Let's start. He says, why don't we do a, you know, you come in once a month and at the end of the five sessions, we'll do one session. And I'm looking at him like, what, are you crazy? And then I said to him, okay, explain to me why you wouldn't just buy the whole workbook and throw the rest of the damn thing away. I don't know.

It would have been cheaper, too. It would have been 300 to buy the whole thing. But he was going to pay what, 500?

Yeah, he was going to pay 500 for five modules, right? And he says, you're right. You don't understand. You want me to buy it your way. I want it my way. If I buy the whole workbook and I give that workbook to my agents, they will laugh at me. It'll go up on the shelf. I might as well throw 300 bucks down the toilet and piss it away, because that's exactly what I'm going to do. On the other hand, if I pay $100 per module and you come in 5 months and do one module a month, all I need is 1 SAL over the whole 5 months from each guy and I got my money back. And everything else is profit from there on out. And I'll put my. I have a much better shot of getting that sale if I don't give him that big workbook than if I do and just give him one. One session a month, One module a month, and let them work on that for a month. And then he says, I'll hire you to come in and train it, and you'll make more money and I'll make more money. And he taught me something in that moment, and this is so important. We fall in love with our products and services. Chapter 7 in the new game of business, don't fall in love with your products and services. Fall in love with serving people. When you fall in love with your products and services, you try to sell your products and services in any way possible to get them to buy. But if the way that you package your product and service is not what the customer wants to use it for, because it's onerous, it's too cumbersome, it's too complex, it's too big. It's too big. The old game is funny. And this is why people created big workbooks back then. You heard the term the thud factor.

Yep.

Back 25 years ago, people figured J. Abraham was one of the first to do this at his protege program. He had a UPS kiosk in the hotel. Because he gave you two boxes you couldn't take on the plane. You had to ship them home. That's happening.

Oh, my God.

But you were paying. You were paying $15,000 a person for protege training, right?

Yep.

And then Jay turned. Jay turned around and hired me to train his protege because they were falling out by the wayside, and he realized they didn't know how to sell. So he actually turned around and hired me to train his protege. That's a whole other story I shared with you once before. So think about this. When we package our product, whose way is it? It's our way. When we offer our intellectual property to somebody to use it their way, we now shift from being McDonald's, which is who everybody in the industry is today. McDonald's. I'm the only burger. I'm one of the few burger kings, the only one I know in the. In this intellectual property space of author speakers, there's other people licensing and rent and doing with their ip, but not with this mindset of. My intellectual property is an asset you can use, and I can deliver it any way you want to use it. You tell me how you want to use it and I'll make it happen. And that totally changed my life, my business and everything since.

Yeah, it's really profound. It really is, as a. Because it opens up so many more opportunities and you use the term a lot, and it's such a great term that big doors swing on little hinges and that concept. I'm sure we could Talk for another 20 or 30 minutes about that alone, but exactly the little hinge is understanding. It's that little shift, at least the way I define it. By shifting your mindset just a little bit about the way you view what you have, and even what you can have access to, you can open big doors. You don't need to go out and sell 100,000 copies of a book. If you collaborate with the right person, you can get 100,000 copies out, make a lot of money, because you are, in essence, partnering with somebody who needs what you've got. I think when we first met, we met at a Mastermind, maybe a year and a half ago. I may have mentioned this. I don't know if you remember, but one of the things that I always try to solve. Three questions I ask when I'm trying to solve a business problem is who else has what I need or needs what I have? And then the second question is, what if? What if is the brainstorming session. What if we combine this.

What if we do it your way?

What if we do it my way? The what if can have a thousand different options until you come up with the one that works for both parties. And then the last question I ask is simply, why not? Is there any reason this wouldn't work? But the very first two questions go back to exactly what you were saying. Who else has what I need or needs what I have? In your case, if you own the expertise on selling, for instance, there are a lot of people who need expertise on selling, whether they want to buy a book or provide it or private label it or do whatever. You are seen as a problem solver, because what you can do, not necessarily what you've done or what you've produced, but what you can do and what you can produce going forward for them, for their personal situation, whether it's big or small, gives you so much more leverage. And at the same time, when you ask that question of who else needs what I have?

Well, who else has what I need?

Well, as an expert like yourself, what you need is more eyeballs on your content and your expertise. And there are people out there who have thousands, hundreds of thousands of customers and relationships that can easily place you right there where you need to be. And it's really an amazing way to collaborate with intellectual property. Mitch, you really quickly dropped two little words in here that we haven't talked about much, but I want to elaborate on these. The words licensing and renting. As it comes to licensing, it's another one of those words like ip. It sounds like a very complex term, but if you really realize it, licensing is simply giving somebody else or giving somebody the right to use what you've got for a negotiated fee, however you do it. And renting is really a remarkable way to simplify the term licensing. You've got another book or course or really a brand called Rent yout Content. And I want you to talk kind of quickly about the concept of renting your content as it applies to number one, the expert who has the content, and number two, the business owner and how they can capitalize on other people's content to become more profitable. Because I think this is a really cool takeaway for whomever is listening, whether they have IP or they need it.

Well, I really love your question. Who has what I need or needs what I have? I don't know if I got it right. Yeah, it really speaks to the heart of the IP game, which is collaboration. And when you're selling in the traditional way, not in the new game of selling, but not a lot of people are playing the new game of selling yet they're still stuck in the old game of selling. And when you're in that old game of selling and you're selling, you're not in a collaborative conversation because you're not on the same side of the table as your customer. See, I'm never selling. Now, that doesn't mean I don't sell, but I'm never selling. I'm in the profit improvement, asset accumulation and personal net worth building game. That's my game you're in.

You're in the business of solving, not selling. Solve your problems, you know what problems you have.

And actually in some cases I've met people who don't want to solve their problems, believe it or not, right? So I'm even I'm in a solving game. I'm also more, I'm in a serving game. I come from very humble beginnings. And I put myself through college with nickels and dimes, literally, by serving. Serving people over a counter. And I learned early in the game, like at 15 years old, that if you love and serve people, I mean, you really love and serve people in a way that makes you feel good about being of service. They reward you with their money. Okay, so I solve problems, but I also. I look at this as. And I guess maybe this comes from my financial planning background. I'm an advisor. I'm your conciliary in every conversation I have with somebody. I don't take the role of, I've got a product, you've got money. I want to sell you what I've got. I take the role of the most trusted voice of choice.

I want.

When you stop and think about making a decision, I want you to have me whispering in your ear because you trust my advice and counsel as well as anybody. And if I can be your most trusted advisor, I may not get your business, but I will always have a great opportunity to serve you. And if we don't make money together, then maybe you can introduce me. And I can't tell you how many hundreds of clients I've gotten over the years from people I never did business with. So coming back to your question of licensing, Licensing is. I think that was your question. Right. I went sideways there. Remind me. So I don't. Oh, you were talking about ranks, your content. I'm sorry.

Yeah. More specifically. And more specifically, how? Because I want the folks to have something they can like a real epiphany. Because every time I talk to you, I have crazy epiphanies like, oh, crap, how come I never thought about it like that before? So I want people to have this experience of, number one, if they believe they have an expertise or information or knowledge that is at the core of their business or even just part of their business, how somebody can capitalize on if they are providing content. But at the same time, there are a lot of businesses out there, and these are a lot of the times the folks you joint venture and work with as clients and partners, businesses who can use somebody else's content, who can use somebody else's intellectual property to help them improve their profits. So kind of both sides of the coin. And I think that will be a tremendous takeaway.

Okay, great. Thanks for getting me back on track.

Okay.

Sometimes I go sideways. So the best way to frame this is to tell you the story of how it started. Okay. In 1996, my wife and I divorced, and I didn't want to Be a weekend dad. All right. So I decided, after eight years of on the road speaking 100 days a year, I was getting off the road, and I was leaving to go to Utah, believe it or not, to go film with Brian Tracy and Dennis Waitley. A series that was going to go live through theaters.

Never happened.

But we did get the videos out of it, which was great. And as I'm walking out the door, a guy calls me that I had been out there twice, three times a year, speaking. And he said, hey, I'd love to bring you out, but I can't. I can't afford you anymore. I said, that's okay, because I'm winding down. I'm off the road now, and I can't travel. He said, but I have a proposal for you. He says, what if you. Every month, you send me an audio and a video from your material and a workbook module, and I will train my people. I would like you to be. Back then it was Blockbuster. Today it'd be Netflix. He said, I would like you to kind of be the Blockbuster of personal and business development for me. And he says, every month, you send me a new module, a new chapter in the video and the audio, and I will train my people. How much? And I said, are you telling me you want to rent my content? He says, yeah, I guess you could say that. I said, holy crap. What happens when you listen to your customers? They tell you exactly how you can serve them better. So I said, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. And then he says, but I also want to do something else. I'd like to be able to use it to train my best, to teach my best customers. Because, remember when you used to come out and speak for me? I used to offer my speaking clients a second speech or a second talk with their customers. I call it a customer appreciation event. And every time, I got booked for a speaking gig. This is. We're going back 20 years now, but I would do the same thing today. I would say, look, would you like to bring in your customers for an hour, hour and 15? I'll do a second talk. I'll let you record it, and I'll let you actually give the recording to your customers. I'll charge you an extra 50% of my fee, and about 30% of the time, my clients would scoop it up because it was a great use of their money and a great, great added value to their customers. So he says, I'd like to do that, too. And I said, okay, 1,000 bucks for your people. 1,000 bucks for your customers, $2,000 a month. He said, done deal. I said, you don't even have to send the stuff back. Keep it. Just keep renting it every month. So every month I would go to the mailbox. Back then I had an assistant do this. I didn't do it and put a video and audio and a module and rent it to him. And then I went back and called every one of my speaking training customers. And within like 90 days, I had six people, six businesses renting my content. And all I had to do was go have my assistant go to the post office once a month and put it into a package. Right? And so now why do I share that story? Because today, Fast forward to 2014, 20 years later, the opportunity has never been greater. Because as I said in my book, the new game of business, content is the currency of the new games of business. And content is not just a sell to where I sell you, my new game of selling to your company's 50 salespeople. And you use it. Now, content has the ability to be a sort of through, where you sell through distribution. Now you go back to all your clients and say, hey, maybe we could take my content and sell it through you and we could make money together. Or maybe you would like to use my content as a way to attract, convert, keep, multiply, and reactivate your customers, because my content will help you do that. I'll rent it to you, you give it away to your customers. Now, let's, let's pause right there.

Just for anybody who may not, I want this to sink in. I want it to hit people like a brick. So how could a piece of content, let's just say it has to do with one of the things you're best known for is your selling skills and training. So how could a business owner, and I'm trying to tee this up for you because I obviously know the answer, but how could a business owner use content to attract, retain, reactivate, convert more customers? I'm sure there's a lot of business owners listening to this and go, well, that sounds good in theory, but practically, how would that work? How could I do that? Okay, how do you do that?

Let's look at three of those examples, because you could actually, there's seven touch points in the new game of selling. There's six plus a seven, which we're introducing in our next iteration, attract, qualify, convert, keep, multiply, and reactivate customers. Every single company on the planet, whether you're number one, Fortune 500, or you're working at your Kitchen tabletop has to attract customers, qualify them, convert them, keep them, multiply them, and in many cases reactivate them because they've fallen off the books or they've stopped buying. Okay, now there's a seventh, which is affiliate, which is a whole other conversation, and that's outside the realm of control. So let's stick with those six. So let's take an example. In 1989, I'm going to take you back so far back to show you how long ago I started doing this. In 1989, I was hired by an insurance company to be the trainer on a program where they took my content and they matched it together with this retirement planning content, and they sent it out to a demographic slice of their past customers, all of whom were approaching retirement age. They called it harvest years. And how do you basically harvest years of your life? And basically they reactivated by sending out like 50,000 pieces because they had a lot of money and direct mail was big and they had owned a printing company. They sent out 50,000 pieces of mail to reactivate past customers, but they didn't send out a product information guide. They didn't send out a launch of a new product coming out. Basically, they gave them great content, a brochure, nice special report on what is it going to cost you to retire? 10 years out, 20 years out. I did a training audio. We sent a training audio. In that case, it was actually a cassette. And so they took some of my content, licensed it, and used some of their content to help reactivate past customers who they knew were nearing retirement age but didn't, you know, hadn't bought anything in a couple years.

Okay?

So that's one example of taking a piece of content to reactivate customers who may be in a particular demographic. Let me give you another example. We licensed to an estate planning business. And actually, you know who they are because you and I met a few months ago, okay? And this was almost. This was probably late 1990s, somewhere in 99. And I'm giving you different examples because they go back a long way, and we're doing the very same thing today, except it's so much more lucrative today and opportunistic. They loved what I had, a certain twist on how to qualify a buyer, and they loved my approach. So they brought me out to speak at their national convention. And then we negotiated a way where they could take what I developed. They would license it and they would add it as part of their deliverable to their license. Their attorneys who were coming on board to license and be part of their organization and it became part of their startup package. So every attorney who signed up with them would get my content along with their content, and they license it from me over a period of like three years. Okay. So they use that as part of their conversion package to say, hey, not only do you get everything we offer, but by way of our relationship with Mitch and the new game, we're also offering you these particular modules from Mitch's material that are going to help you to qualify your new clients, better going to help you to reactivate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So there was a packaging job on the conversion side.

We don't have to discuss what the fees were in the actual deal, but I'm willing to bet, especially with the concept of licensing and renting, had they wanted to have somebody come in, another renowned expert like yourself, and in essence buy out the content and do it all at once and say, mitch, we want you to dedicate the next two or three weeks or month, whatever, just to us, and we want to develop this out with you or try to do it on their own. The amount that they're going to have to spend in a lump sum to just buy it outright is going to be in most cases cost prohibitive. But because you are able to offer, you are flexible, you offer them flexibility. You saw the ability to grab an income stream as opposed to a lump sum payment and then capitalize on that. It probably made you more money and at the same time allowed them to have a cost effective solution to their needs by renting the content. We rent everything else. It seems like in our lives, we finance it. We can do the same thing with intellectual property and oftentimes get a much better deal. I wanted to bring that up because I think it's an important thing for people to realize that you don't have to buy it necessarily. A lot of people who have IP have what you need. Never even thought about renting it. A lot of your colleagues in the information and expertise space never even think about it.

Try all of them.

Exactly.

I did a panel when you mentioned the words content capitalism. I was on a panel in 2009 at the speakers and Authors Networking group with Jack Canfield, Brendan Burchard, Tony Alessandra, and John Kilcollen, who is the face and the publisher of the Dummies books. Right. And so my topic was content capitalism. And I talked about how I built my business over the years on selling to, selling through and then renting content. And I said what you just said. I said, you Know, we rent everything. But here's the problem. When I packaged up my big training program and I walked around with that big workbook, there was a hard cost of that workbook that I had to recoup before I had profit, okay? And back when there were packaged goods, for some stupid reason, somebody started pricing packaged goods as multiples of hard cost versus the value of what was inside the packaged goods. Selling a book for 10 bucks and selling 3,000 and making 30 grand versus selling what was in the book and making a quarter of a million like I did. And I thought that was kind of silly, especially after I realized when my clients said, I don't want you to, I don't want it packaged your way. I want it packaged my way, okay? I want it delivered my way. Well, then I thought, well, geez, if somebody can't afford to buy, buy my work and I have a certain amount of hard costs in there, there's no place for me to go because I have to at least recoup the hard cost and some profit. So there's got to be a minimum price I have to charge. Well, guess what? The car industry realized they could make a whole lot more money on financing cars than on selling cars and leasing cars. So why don't we take our content to people who really may be cost prohibitive and doled it out and licensed it or rent it one piece at a time or a chapter at a time. I sold one chapter of my book for $25,000. I don't know a single other person I've ever talked to because I tell the story all the time and nobody has yet told me I've done that. And I hang with some major best selling authors and speakers and none of them do it because we think, inform, and there's an ego to part of this, which is, hey, I have a book. And believe me, I have books too. I'm not against information products. I love them. I just feel like they're just a small part of what the big picture is. And when you shift your thinking to making it client friendly and letting them use it their way, all kinds of possibilities exist. Because today not only is content the currency of the new game of business, it's customer capital. And if you can deploy it and use it. I go out to every business and say, imagine if you could give a value proposition, and I'm talking business to business now, that I can help you help your customers recoup their investment in your product by you showing them one simple method to attract, convert, keep and Reactivate customers. You take my content, add it as value to your customers. If your customers make more money, you are the source of them getting back their investment. Why would they ever leave you? I can help you accomplish that by using my content in unique and creative ways. Let's talk about how we make money together.

So now, Mitch, there may be somebody out there listening. Oh, it really is. There may be somebody out there right now listening who is not attracting as many customers as they want, not converting them, has some past customers that haven't.

Spent money with them.

Right now, do you work with any companies, big or small, right now? If they want to rent or collaborate with you on your content, and you've been a prolific content creator over the years and you've got some amazing, really well documented and proven results. Can people work with you right now? If they have a business and they want to rent your content, is that even possible?

Yes, we actually encourage them to do that. Because if you think about it, what is the marketing currency today? I mean, advertising people, Again, there are different types of businesses, so you can't universalize everything. But for the most part, if you look at the trend over the past couple of years, three, four years ago, when I did that presentation at Sang in 2009, I talked about the marketing budgets in big companies, big and small, and virtually no money was going into content marketing in 2009. Now, five years later in 2014, virtually every major company and small and large across the spectrum are either investing internally or hiring it out externally, or licensing content because they recognize that the major transformation in the attraction game is from advertising, promotion. PR is still good to content marketing. So everybody's scrambling for content. Not just crappy content, but valuable content. And if you have valuable content that could really help a company attract and convert or keep customers or reactivate customers, you can have a conversation with them. And so yes, I'm always open to companies who want a license, because think about this. Go after your customers. Customers. Don't just go after customers, go after your customers. Vendors, suppliers, buyers, distributors, jobbers, agents. Okay? That's where the gold is. Because you could sell to a company, you could sell to one company with five employees, and maybe if you have this thousand dollar package, you'll sell $5,000 worth, let's say, just for argument's sake. But what if that company has 10,000 customers and you can license something every month for them to use for their customers all of a sudden? Or what if they have a supply chain of 50,000 suppliers and distributors, all of whom are business people. And let's say you take my mega referrals program or you take rejection proof networking. I mean, we've got a whole slew of different programs that we could slice and dice and say, hey, if you could help your distributors make one more sale this year, it'll be well worth the modest investment you pay to rent our content every month. And we'll let you rent it. You don't even have to buy it outright. It just completely changes every conversation. It takes a while, as you know, Brad, because you and I have been talking now almost a year and a half. It takes a while to shift your thinking. But once you shift your thinking, man, everything changes.

Well, it just opens up so many new opportunities. And one of the big questions, we're not going to fully answer this here, but one of the big questions people have is, okay, I drank the Kool Aid and let's just say this is the people who have intellectual property. They have expertise or content where they've sold it in the past. Maybe they're info product creators, and they're like, man, Mitch, I love this. Do I have to go out and advertise? And I don't really want you to answer this straight up, but do I have to go out and advertise? How do I get a hold of all these companies? How do I find these companies who will pay me money for my product?

And.

That seems to be the very first question on people's heads. Like, okay, basically all you're doing is saying, sell to the corporate market, which is really not true. There's a little bit of, oh, no, no, no.

But no, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that at all, by the way.

Right.

But for people, that's what people are hearing.

That's what they're hearing because they hear. They think. In the very beginning, this is what I thought, too, because all I heard, everything else got deaf. And I heard corporate budgets, ooh, they've got big dollars. They've got money for my stuff. And I immediately went into the, okay, how do I sell the corporate. And that's not what it is. However, you have got an amazing resource for folks. And this is where I want to give you, like, a heartfelt plug for folks to learn more about this and take the next step. And this is whether you are.

Whether you feel as though you have.

Valuable intellectual property that you wish to capitalize on, or you're a business owner and wish to do more, improve your profits by leveraging other people's IP to Help you leapfrog your competition. Where would you send these people to download your brain as much as they could today? Is there a resource And I'm teeing this up. I know there is.

Well, yeah, the first thing I would say to them is go to thenewgameofip.com and we have actually a three level membership there where you'll get to watch the video of me presenting on that panel that I just mentioned about five years ago with Jack Canfield and Brendan and Tony and John. There's also a really great webinar I did there on eight key distinctions that transform information products into highly valuable intellectual property. You watch that. If that doesn't get you off your chair, then this game is not for you. It's just that simple. That one webinar, if you watch that one webinar, it'll show you eight different ways. And that's just eight ways, you know, that I've used. There's more that you can actually go out and do this right away.

Three or $4,000, they got to pay for that or what?

Yeah, it could be because the value of it is. But you know what? What I understand, by the way, I'm joking.

I want people to know I was joking. It's actually free. I cut Mitch off when he said that, but keep on going.

The value, yeah. I'm basically giving my 20 plus years of experience condensed down, which I'm pretty good at, condensing things into the bullion cube of what you need to know. And I've always believed in. And long before content marketing became famous and popular, I built my entire business, every business, starting in 1978, on content and information and valuable advice and counsel. Because I figured if I was the most trusted source, that when it was time for you to be ready to buy a product or service that I sold, I would be in the game and chances are good I'd be first in line. And that has been my philosophy all the years. So we're giving you this webinar because I know if you watch this webinar and it doesn't get you out of your chair, this game is not for you. On the other hand, if it gets you out of your chair and you say, holy crap, if I really knew how to do this, I could really do some damage. So here's your. It's like anything else, you can go to college for it, except there's no college for it. You can learn it on your own, like I did. And I would encourage everybody to do it on your own. You know what I mean? Do it. I don't care how you do it, just get in the game. It's a great game. Obviously, I've got 20 plus years. And so people kept coming up to me asking me that very same question, question, how do I do this, how do I do that? And it's like, well, you know, if you want to hire me privately, you're going to pay a lot of money and you're hiring a partner. Because I don't do coaching or consulting on this. I do equity deals. If I'm going to help you make money, I'm in the game with you, okay? But I can't work with everybody privately. And frankly, I spend most of my time licensing and looking for new opportunities to bring my new game to the world. So we created this playground, this playing field called the new game of ip. And we just had a coaching session yesterday. Actually you were part of it. And yesterday we talked about the importance of the three M's of ip, money, mindset, motivation and method. Well, guess what? If you've got the mindset and you've got the motivation, all you need is one method to do really well. So you can go figure it out on your own like I did, or you could join a community like ours and get coached every month and get some resources and tools and fast track your success. Many of the people that I meet over the years, you're right. The first question is, how do I do it? Well, it's like anything else. I think it was Aristotle or Socrates or one of those smart dudes. They said for the things that we have to learn before we do them, we learn by doing them. IP is a game that you learn by playing it, you don't learn by studying it. So at the very least, go to the new game of ip, grab your free resources, get a free membership, and we're constantly adding new more stuff and we're encouraging you to get into the actual monthly coaching where I work with.

People in a group.

So that's my suggestion.

Absolutely. And you know, the name of our show is bacon raft business. And really the philosophy behind that is if you can add, you add bacon to any food, it's going to make it better. The games of IP selling business that you play, the spice that you add the twist, if you would, is a perfect example of wrapping it in bacon. This is wrapping your, wrapping your brain in bacon in a lot of ways to. And it's bringing something to life that you never would have thought about on your own until somebody kind of shows it to you. So I want to thank you very much for sharing this time with our listeners. And guys, if your curiosity has been piqued, whether you are an IP owner or a business owner looking to get more out of what you got, follow Mitch's advice. Go to thenewgameofit.com, check out his book on Amazon. The New Game of Selling is a best seller and I'm sure that you probably provide people at the New Game of It the ability to get in contact with you, whether it's through your assistant or direct email in case they are interested in collaborating with you and renting your personal content to help their business. But I just want to give you a heartfelt thanks for being on the show today.

My pleasure, Brett. Always great chatting with you.

Okay, it's just you and me again. Hopefully you enjoyed that and if you did, I'm going to request that you leave a review on itunes about the show in general and tell me and everybody else how much you love it. And if you have any specific questions that you'd like to ask me. If you'd like to find out if this is applicable in your business. If you'd like to work with me and rent or license some of my my intellectual property and work together in order to solve your own business problems and challenges, I am happy to see if I can help. Send an email to askbradaconwrappedbusiness.com I'll try to reply if it warrants it and I will reach out to you if I think there's a way that I can help you. If you've got your own bacon wrapped business idea, strategy or tactic and you may want to be featured as a guest on the show, also send an email to Ask Brad at baconrapbusiness. Com. Until next time. I look forward to it. Now go wrap a piece of bacon around something in your business.