Marketing Master David Reiss Reveals How To Compete At The Highest Level By Thinking Differentl

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap them in bacon. For business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your 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.

Hey. Hey.

Welcome back to Bacon Wrap to Business. This is Brad Costanzo, and I am very excited to be back with you guys. As you know, I took a couple month hiatus there from publishing some new episodes. I was working on some pretty big deals, but I'm back and I've got some recent ones that I did with Roland Frazier just the other day and Matt and Joe from Evergreen Profits. If you're just tuning in to podcast for the very first time, make sure you go back and listen to a couple of the previous episodes as well. They are guaranteed to rock your world, just like today's episode is going to do. That I am really thrilled to have a guest on the show who.

Really.

Refers to his background or what he's doing right now as kind of a ghost. You cannot find much information, if any, on the web about him at all. He was referred to me by a couple people that I highly respect, former guests on the show, Marc Anthony Bates and my friend Gene, who I cannot pronounce his last name to save my life. But David is it, by the way, David, is it Reese or Rice?

Reese. Reese.

David Reese, who you just heard, is really such a dynamic entrepreneur, consultant, business owner, and thought leader in this space. He's worked, you know, his entire career with Fortune 1000 companies and bigger, helping them go from 20 million to 200 million and above that, and really understanding how to think completely differently than most standard consultants and business owners in order to achieve really massive amounts of scale.

And I've talked to him a couple.

Times here recently, and I was just really blown away by some of the case studies he shared with me and some of his thought processes. And I asked if he would come on the show and he graciously said yes. So you guys are getting the opportunity to listen to a real live ghost. We'll talk about in a second. But, David, welcome to the podcast, man. I'm really excited to kind of dig in and find out a little bit more about what's going on.

Well, thank you very much. I didn't realize I was going to be that tall. A great intro. Thank you.

Well, and you're right. I googled the heck out of you. I was like, this guy really is hard to find. I can't.

I can't see anything. Yeah. You know, I started as a marketing consultant. It's a hard, hard story. I was 13 years old. My best friend's father's company was failing. And I asked him what was wrong, and he told me, and I said, well, did you try this? And this and this? Which seemed very logical to me, even as a kid. Thirteen. At 13, yeah. And it saved his company. And by time I was 17, I had a lot of word of mouth. You know, I was doing things at 13. I'd go to the zoo with a old speed graphic camera and color Polaroid film that I bought for a dollar and say, your picture in color for $3. And in. In a month's time, I did 3,000 of them and made $2 each. That was 13 years old. Wow.

So for a very long time, then.

Yeah. I can't spell it, but I have definitely been it for a very long time. Yes.

It's so funny. Just as on a side note, a buddy of mine and his wife. Well, his wife just published a book, really, about the journey of the entrepreneur's wife. And it says that on the title. It's like. And this just happened, like, a week ago. The Journey of the Entrepreneur's wife. And the word entrepreneur was misspelled on the COVID It was published and, like, a real publisher and everything didn't catch it. But we were all laughing like, no entrepreneur can spell entrepreneur.

That's like.

It's actually a hilarious gaffe. I was like, keep it on there. Don't even fix it. But sorry to side note, I just thought that was funny because I got the book.

No, that's. That's it. It's funny. You know, I try to do some fun things. Even on my. My iPhone, it says, please forgive the typos. And I put T, P Y O S for typos. You know, just because. Or. Or in a form we just did. On one of the companies I'm a partner in, there's always, I am not a robot. And I put a robot. A robot. I am. I not am. That's awesome.

I love that you got to have a little levity in there, but I want to circle. You said at 13 years old and, you know, through your teens, you had already. You already been a hustler and an entrepreneur and making things happen, probably much more than a lot of your peers. What was the evolution of your career then?

I was always trying to get involved and figure things out. And to me, looking at things, I had answers. It just came to me. You know, people say if I wasn't as successful as I have been, I'd probably be in a room with vulnerable wallpaper. And I don't doubt that. But answ just, I see things differently. So I started doing consulting. I was a kid and still trying to. And then I. I got a chance to speak at the Direct Marketing association. And I did it two or three years in a row. I don't remember the first year. I had maybe 60 people in the room. And I said, I've got nothing. I've got no slides, I've got no script, I've got no pitch or story. How many of you have not a marketing challenge, but an unsolvable marketing challenge? And hands went up and I chose six people. And I took one at a time and said, you have two minutes to explain the problem. I have five minutes to solve it. And I did it six times. And I would say, this is the best weight loss program you've ever seen, because I'm sweating bullets under here. And, you know, 20, 30 companies would come up and say, how do we hire you? And the next year I had almost 2,000 people in the room. And so it was a way of launching. And a lot of these companies were very large companies and they were attracted to the way that I solved problems. So it was really just my brain power, if you will.

And, you know, just right there. And I actually really want to thank you for that idea because I am. I was just booked to give a speech in front of a very large group for EO entrepreneur organization in a few months. There's about six or seven hundred people there. And I really am not 100% sure what I was going to talk about, but what you. The skill set that you just said is one that I actually have most likely to a lesser degree than yourself. But I'm really good on the spot. Like, and I love the fact that you said that because it just gave me a tremendous idea on how to add value without just having to have a scripted speech, which I hate.

And I send to Bill where tell me what she meant. P.O. box. See, I like. I like bacon wrapped bacon business. Exactly. Because that's. That's even fatter. Well, it was a restaurant had bacon wrapped pork belly. So I thought, you know, that's an amazing. It came with a side of Lipitor. So it was wonderful. I love it. So.

So you did.

Anyway, so it grew. Yeah.

Started seeing you as kind of this oracle like, oh man, this guy's got the answer.

Well, yeah, they liked the way I thought and so a lot of companies came up to me and they were significant. I mean, they were Fortune 1000 companies and they didn't care about track record or who I had worked for. What they wanted was the way I thought, the way I saw things. So they would put me to a little bit of a test. And I started passing these tests and helping them. And all of a sudden I'm in my 20s and I'm working at the CEO level of the Fortune 1000. And one CEO tells another it was the chairman of the board of one automotive company who told the then CEO of another automotive company to call me to solve a problem, which I did. So it was all word of mouth. And then the equity firms who were behind them started taking notes. So I started working with a couple of dozen equity firms who would bring me the deal flow their portfolios. I would not just solve the problems, but I'd see things in companies that ways to increase valuation. I'm really, really good at that because there are so many things people don't see. Well, valuation people say, oh, it's a multiple of ebitda, but it's not. Forgive me, I don't mean this to be rude, but that's a cop out from bean counters, accountants who say, oh well, it's an eight time multiple. You have 6 million in EBITDA, therefore it's 48 million. But that's not true.

Iceberg, right. It's a where to start. But it does determine where you end up.

I had an equity firm once who calls me and says, we've got a reinsurance company that's on the block for 30 million and three large insurance companies are bidding on it. We're missing something. Would you come in? I said, sure. So I came in, I looked at it and I thought, oh my goodness, you got to take this thing off the market. Just give me 90 days. And I restructured a few things here and there and we put it back on the market for 53 million. And the same three companies bid on it and bought it. One of them bought it because you have to know where to look. And I'll give you a very simple example. I'm at a dinner party with some friends and we're in Tulsa, Oklahoma and one of the guys there had a, he was a contractor, he did remodeling of homes and he wanted to sell his business. He had nine vans with guys out there. So it was doing Very well. And he asked me what, you know, here is my numbers, here's what I do, here's how it works. There wasn't a lot of room there. And I said. He said, what can I do? This is how much I can get for my business. I don't want to give you the number, but it was a reasonable number. And I said, well, there's more you can do. I said, let me give you a saying, a formula. OCD equals higher valuation. And he said, huh? I said, when people ask me what I aspire to be, I'm not, but I would aspire to be proudly OCD every T and dot every I. So I said, he. I said, did you come here, one of your vans? He said, yes, I did, because I'm doing a job down the block. I said, show me the van. And he opens the van, and it's what you would expect. You know, tools piled up. And I said, if you were ocd, what would this van look like? It would be pristine. Everything would be in its place. All the extension cords would be wrapped, you know, wrapped up and coiled and hung up, and everything would be meticulous. I said, do that with your nine vans and let the buyer see that, and you won't have to worry about getting the higher valuation. He wanted to get an extra million dollars on top of what he was asking, and he felt he was top of the market. And I said, now, when you do that, ask another 3 million on top of it. And they look at the vans and they go, oh, my God, this is amazing. This guy's crossed every T, dot, every. I've never seen anything like it.

And that kind of concept, that how you do one thing is how you do everything. And I imagine if a buyer sees those bands in particular, like, these are. These are amazing. The rest of his business must be amazing as well, right? Like, it kind of all flows well.

It's interesting you say that. Can I share another example of a company that I bought? I went out to look at a data company. Now, anytime you buy a technology company, here's the. The big secret. Everybody's software code sucks. I'm sorry, that's a technical term, but it sucks because it's all. Get to the documentation later. We don't have time. We got to get to market. They're rushing to market. It's terrible. So there's a company I was looking at, and it was 5 million, and it legitimately was 5 million. It was worth it. I go in and I bring in sort of a team of forensic programmers and I say, I want a 200 page spiral bound book, you know, three ring book rather. That shows me why their code sucks. And they do this analysis and of course their code sucks. And I put it on the table and I say, I'll give you 4 million because it's gonna cost me a million dollars to fix your code. And the CEO and the investors, there's nothing they can say. You've now found their worst nightmare of a secret. And they know it because they know it. They can't argue it. Now here's the reverse of that. If I'm selling a company that's worth 5 million, I'm going to sell it for 7. Why? Because I go into the code and the way I write code is aside from the programmers, documentation, which means nothing. Everyone says, oh, we're dod, we do, you know, Department of Defense standards, again, a technical term. Bull, bullpucky. I go in and I do a. I have a narrative for every module because everything's written in a modul modular fashion. Every module has a module written in English, a narrative of what that module does. It has links to the screenshots, it has a screencast with the end user using it and discussing it. And then there's an audio recording at MP3 with the end user talking to the developer, the programmer, where the end user goes first and the programmer goes second because otherwise he'll tune out after he talks. That's in the code. So when they bring their people in to look at the code, they go, oh my God, look at this thing. Yeah, if he did this, I can't even imagine how good everything else is, right?

And boom, sometimes you get higher things that. I mean, it can be probably just a nightmare to get it all together, but I mean, if you can increase or decrease the valuation in the seven figures, sometimes even more by doing that, it's a step that most people aren't willing to take, right?

Well, yeah, I mean. And where do you look? I'll share some of the secrets if, if you don't mind me sharing it with your audience. Yeah, that's what I thought on this reinsurance company from 30 to 53. What I did was I said, okay, what's the persistency? How long do accounts usually stay on? Okay, this down 31 months. This company, they were on 74 months. Do you know what an incredible profit that is to not have to go out and spend the cost of acquisition for new customers and to not have that kind of salesforce because they stay on how many admin people does it take to service every hundred clients? They were running at 40% of industry average, four people for every 10 that the industry had to service them, which meant they were incredibly efficient. So I went, I go down those routes And I found 10, a dozen things that were there. Now I, you know, then you get into lost carry forwards and credits and a lot of financial things as well. But when you put the entirety, the totality of the package together, we were able to take it from 30 to 53, which is, you know, incredible. Yeah.

I mean unless, unless you don't like those extra taxes you have to pay on all that extra money.

Yeah, you know, capital gains besides, you know.

Exactly. So I'd love to dive into just a handful more of examples about the way that you think differently versus I guess, conventional business and marketing wisdom. From some of the things that maybe you impressed the Fortune 500 CEOs from the early days in your 20s to some of the ways that you're doing now, like how's the way most people think? And then what are some of the twists that you bring to the.

Well, I look in different places. I don't look at things head on. That's the easy way. I look at things from inside out, up, down, backwards. There's always a back door and I take contrary views. I can sort of shotgun a few of these to you. A battery technology company came to me. I didn't go with them, I didn't have the bandwidth. But they were having a struggle. They were very high end battery tech for large corporations and they decided to create their own home battery to compete with Tesla and only their battery was much better. Now I didn't use their battery. I just went by the specs they sent me and they had brought in five different marketing consulting companies and they said, we need a comparison chart, but it has to be disruptive. So they called me because the Silicon Valley investment banking firm had suggested they give me a call. And I said, well, my guess is that they just gave you a comparison chart and said, this is how you be disruptive, show that you're better. He said, yes. I said, well, that only puts you firmly in position number two. And the longer you do that, the more you're gonna smell like number two and that's not what you want. I said, what you have to do is use the comparison chart as a support, not as a main message. And he didn't understand. Then he said, you know, give me an example. I said, you have to take a strategy. So it's about Spin and positioning. So let me digress for one second and give you an example. It's all about what's in it for me. You could want to save the gay black whales for Jesus, but it's about you and your family first. So a priest goes up to a bishop and says, you, Eminence, do you mind if I smoke while I pray? He says, of course I mind. Praying is a sacrament. I refuse to allow you to defile it by smoking. I forbid it. Okay. Two weeks later, a new priest gets off the bus in the seminary and says, your Eminence, do you mind if I pray while I smoke? Oh, go right ahead. So it's about your motivation. So in this case, they wanted to go up against Tesla home batteries. So I said, yes, put up the comparison chart. But at the top of the ad, you say, we are committed to helping Tesla raise the bar on home batteries. Now show your comparison chart with a bar over Tesla and a higher bar over you. And below it say, come on, Tesla, we know you can do it. And if you need our help, please feel free to call.

All right, that is pretty amazing.

Now. Now you're in position one.

Yeah.

And so the CEO. So they all laughing and said, what if they raise the bar? I said, I hope they do, because the next ad is, congratulations, Tesla, we knew you could do it. Unfortunately, we raised our bar as well. So you still have a ways to go again. Give us a call if we can help.

That's so great, because Tesla is such a strong brand with a lot of emotional appeal to most of the, you know, most of the country because of who Elon is and what he represents and all the publicity they get without any marketing. And I love how you used as just a psychological tactic to kind of just have the client put themselves above even, because, you know, in order to do that, you have to be, you know, you're assuming a superior frame as it is. There's. There's a lot of cool psychological things. I love that.

And I'll give you the biggest secret about marketing. This is what no one will tell you. And I'm glad that I share it all the time. Marketing is psychology. If you want to be a marketer, study psychology. Read all the social psychology books. Gladstone, Airlie, Gladwell. I'm sorry, Gladwell. Airli. You know, all of them. Read those. Yeah. Oh, especially Saldini. I mean, Persuasion and Persuasion are fabulous books. And read the Elements of Power, The Green book. Robert Green. Robert Greene. You know, understand how. Read the Game by. Yeah. Neil Strauss. Read things that show how people respond. That's what it's about. One of the largest furniture chains in the country had come to me and they were making their own sleeper sofa. And they couldn't give it away. It wasn't a brand name. And it was seen by everyone who came in as sort of a sloppy, you know, attempt at making it something. It was a, you know, second class citizen. And so they asked me what to do and I said, show me the display. And There were like 15 sleeper sofas at all the stores. And I said, okay, go back the two rows, go over three. Put it there. Now you know that big red sold tag that goes on a item that sold. Put that on the couch. They couldn't keep them in stock, everybody. Well, it had already given people permission to buy it because someone else had bought it. You know, there. It's about the psychology. Many Years ago, late 70s, I'm dating myself. I was a zygote at the time. Friend of mine built townhouses in Southern California in the valley, in San Fernando Valley. And he had, I don't remember if it was 20 or 24. And he was selling them for 349, which was high then. It was like really high end, late late 70s, early 80s. And he could not sell them, he just couldn't move them. And he came to me, said what do we do? And I said I don't. What? I don't know what you do. I know I have no problem, I have no money invested in this. But I said, here's what you do. Raise the price to 395. He said are you crazy? He said I'm at 350 and I'll go down to 275. I said raise the price to 395 and say if you buy within the next 60 days you can choose either a completely refurbished concours condition Ford Mustang coupe or convertible or a Camaro in the driveway. 69 Camaro, 67 Mustang Classic refurbished within 30 days. Every one of them were sold. The cars cost them 20 grand each. Yeah, yeah.

And you know, like another kind of a marketing campaign or something else. Something like this drives directly into the desires of a, of a. Of the consumer. And I just want that so badly.

It has to do with relative value.

Yeah.

And what value people put on it. We used to run contests and we'd say the winner gets a round two round the world airline tickets. Well, if you go up to 10 people and you say how much do you think it costs to get an unlimited stop around the world airline ticket, that's good for a year so you can go around the world. Two of you. People say, I don't know, 100,000 each, 50,000 each, they're $2,500 each. But the perception, or I would say the winner has their mortgage based on national average, their mortgage or rent paid for a year, that's $746 at the time we ran it. I think it's nine something now. Or we'll pay your income tax based on national average. It was like $14,000 and you know, tax on top of tax. So maybe 20. But the perception is over the top.

Yeah.

And you would ask me before we started this about techniques for the small entrepreneur, the smallest startup guy, I had a. I'll give you two very quick stories about competing, about competition. Competition is a wonderful thing if you know how to use it. Guy comes to me and I don't remember where I met him. I think it was just through a friend. And his family sold carpets, rugs, you know, art carpets. And they wanted to get online and there were already a few 800 pound gorillas selling carpets online who had all the traffic. He said, what do I do? I said, I want you to form five online companies. I want five different websites, five different names, colors, phone numbers, as if you are five completely different companies. And again, he's sort of looking at me and saying, what are you, 40, short in a jacket, ties behind you in the back, you know. And he said, why? I said, because on the first one you're gonna say, we will not be undersold by a name number two. And on number two say we will not be undersold by a name number three. And on three, name four. Four name five. Five name one. Now start generating traffic to it. Well, it was exponential. And eventually he bought out the other guys, the big 800 pound gorillas who had lost enough weight to be, you know, 80 pound gorillas and or 60 pound monkeys. And he bought about because he took over.

So that's great. So I want to just kind of recap, make sure I understand that. So he was, his product that he sold was carp, like really nice carpets, et cetera, right?

Yeah, they were art carpets. Everyone sold the same things that basically it was the same catalog.

So he created these other ones which gave him this at least the illusion of a big imprint and a big. What do you call.

Gave him a chain where one became five. You got five, you got so much traffic because whoever was on one went to two. Whoever was on two and where it says you're giving them my right, so, so if I went to site number two and it says I'm not going to be undersold by 3, I go, well let me see what 3's prices are. So one piece of traffic, one person going to, to the first websites ends up going to five. So basically it was getting five times the value of the traffic. For every one he got, he got five different hits on five different sites.

And, and if they buy from any of them, it's all his.

Oh, game over. Yeah, game over. Many, many, many years ago I did an infomercial that was a little different. It was early 90s and computers were becoming all the rage. The Internet was really in its infancy and there were some people, I think it was called Net zero, offering free Internet access. Yeah, yeah. And Encyclopedia Britannica had just come out on DVD or CD rather. And so I got on and I was king of sort of the discount clubs, travel clubs, health clubs, doing this for all the banks and insurance companies. And I provided all the benefits and some of the marketing. And So I said 1000 free software programs when you take a 30 day trial membership in our discount club, a discount shopping club. And then it was of course, but wait, there's more. If you call in the next 10 minutes we'll give you free Internet. And for the first 500 callers you get the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on CD, a $500 value absolutely free. I it was September, they were going to come out with their next year and I bought their entire stock for a dollar each. So, so what I knew was everyone was going to copy this. They weren't gonna. I went through, got all the contracts and got signed agreements with all the programmers. They didn't care, other people would just copy it. You know how many AB flexes were there? So what I did was I had bought all the A time, A time meaning the prime time at that time. I bought all the commercial time during Star Trek and all the places where people who had computers would be. And I had quietly bought the B time. So I created a second infomercial with a different name, different announcer, different product design, everything but the same offer and I'd get on. And just about three weeks later, when I figured everyone was ready to start copying me and launching, I launched my own competition to compete against myself and say don't buy from them. We were the original. They took our idea and went with it. We're the ones with the contracts with the programmers. And so I started an Online battle on tv, battle between the two. And I'd get letters from people saying, I bought from you, because I know you were really the first one. And, you know, it became this cult, if you will. And we pinned the needle. I mean, we dominated this whole genre. And then, of course, everybody started offering free product if you take a trial membership. So great.

You know, I've heard. I've heard of that concept many times, which is start. Start your own competition and start a company out there. I have not yet talked to anybody who has actually done that. And I love that story because, as I said, I've always been fascinated by it and I kind of get it conceptually, but I love the fact that you actually did it.

That's so great. I teach people how to do it all the time. Here's one for digital marketers, because we're working in a digital space. How do you live in an Amazon world? How many times have you put. Have you seen a product that's on Amazon and it starts to scale and it's moving up and what happens? All of a sudden you lose 80% of your business. And what do you know? Amazon has the exact same product. And because they own the customers and the traffic, they're develop everybody to their product.

Yeah, it's a big problem.

Now, if I'm. If I'm a marketing consultant, I say kudos to Amazon. I have to. It's brilliant. But if I'm the guy who made that formula, I'm not happy. So do you think there's a little guy with glasses and a bald head sitting there waiting for a certain number to hit? No, it's an algorithm. So I say to people on Amazon, take your product and make five of them and start scaling all five. You'll never get as high as you would with one single one, but the height you get is times five. And you stay under their algorithm and you end up making more money than if you had one that scaled all the way up. And certainly you never come. You get to be on their radar.

You just own more real estate.

Right.

You've got. You may have five on one page as opposed to one. And you can take that scattershot approach. I love that. That's it. Because I know that that's a very real. It's a very real issue for a lot of Amazon sellers out right now. There was actually. There was a great. There was a great article familiar with the Onion satire. I'm just looking for it right here. There was a funny article that just says, it's Supposedly it's not written by Jeff Bezos, but it supposedly is. And the title is, my advice to anyone starting a business is to remember that someday I will crush you and then your articles. He gives, like, great entrepreneurial advice, and he's like, and this will serve you up until the time we come and take your entire market with one 10 stroke.

Well, you know, perspective is interesting. I've traveled a lot, and then I was in Madrid and I went to a bullfight because I wanted the psychological and cultural experience of this. And you're. The matadors are. You know, they're vicious and they're really hurting the bull. And you're saying, oh, my God, you know, this is terrible. Then the bull gets angry and rams the matador, and you go, wait a minute. That's not right. You know. You know, go get him. So it's how it changes on a dime. Well, here's how I look at Amazon. I'm a big Amazon fan. I have tremendous respect for Jeff Bezos. I think the man is brilliant. Because if I were a marketer doing what he does, I would do exactly the same thing. And there's not one person, I believe, listening to this today who doesn't, wouldn't want to be Jeff Bezos if they could and do the same things. The problem is everyone is most people. Everyone who's not Jeff Bezos is at a different position, saying, he's hurting me.

He's consumers, investors love.

Right?

And the only people love him are small business who are trying to compete with him.

But so if you're a small business, don't. Don't be angry. Learn from him. Look at what he does. He's a wonderful strategist. You know, people say he bought Whole Foods. Well, if you dig deeper and you look into the future, and we're going to talk about future in just a few minutes, if that's okay. All those Whole Foods, you know, originally he bought half of the Radio Shacks that went out. He's buying standalone locations. He's not buying something that's in a high rise. Well, what do you think the flat roof of a Whole Foods can be used for? I mean, talk about a staging for drones in the city, you know, so there are strategies. You know, people say to me, I would say to people, you know, in 10, 15 years, 15 for sure, there won't be any franchise car dealers. The OEMs have been trying to get rid of them for years. They tried in the recession. Chrysler, you know, shut them all down. They all had to come back. The franchise laws are so strict, but you know, the way cars will be sold, if they're sold at all, and they actually won't be, would be in shopping malls because electric cars are an inevitability.

We know that does theirs, right? You see it, you go Tesla dealership.

Next to them, right? But if you think about it, dealer makes five times more in the service department. I've worked in like 30 industries, so I'm a wealth of useless information. They make five. Well, you haven't spoken to my wife. So anyway, they make five times more in the service department than they do in sales and there won't be anything to service, so that goes away. So the dealers, in their inevitable wisdom say, I'll make it up on sales and f and I finance and insurance. Well, you're not going to buy a lot of service contracts on a car where the whole motor costs, you know, 500 or $800 to replace. So there's not a reason to buy extended warranties on all these things. And because there's no barrier to ent to electric cars, the Chinese and the Indians are going to come in and Eastern Europeans are going to come in. So it becomes a commodity. So how can the dealers survive? Now, that being said, all the parts companies, the support companies for the dealers, all of that goes away. That's going to have a big hit on the economy. Cars are going to be autonomous. Yes, we know that, but do you think the cities are going to just say to Uber and Lyft, hey, knock yourselves out? Well, the cities are losing parking revenue from meters, no tickets. They still have to maintain, maintain the roads and the streets. Maybe not traffic lights anymore. So where's that going to go? You have to start asking questions about where we're going to know how to frame your business within it. And so that's, that's important. I'm sorry, I love that. Yeah. This is where people really take my measurements for a white jacket that ties in the back. I teach time travel and I do this in my mastermind group. I've done it to corporations, I've trained multiple departments. Time is a construct created by our minds to help us create mile markers, if you will, and navigate through our lifespan on Earth. That's really what it is. It gives us relationships, it gives us analogies, points of reference. But the way that we're wired is that we can only answer present and past tense questions. So let me propose something. Every project we're going to call a project Project X, you decide you're going to do something, and we're calling it Project X. So, Brad, you have three sides to Project X. The Project X you plan to do the Project X. You actually launch and do that same Project X. A year later, you look back on with hindsight and wish to God you had done. Mm. Which is the best of those three. Hindsight, always. Mm. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could see the future? Well, if we could, we'd all be living at the beach driving Aston Martin's, so that's not viable. But what if you could go into the future? What if you could, and I'm not Talking about an H.G. wells time machine, I'm talking about using certain. I mean, again, this is the white jacket and foam rubber wallpaper conversation. But I've created techniques, I teach them. It takes about 45 minutes to go through the process. Takes about an hour and a half to teach them where I can take you ahead into the future, 30 days, 90 days a year, two years, three years, five years. I can actually get you to a point where if I asked you what year it is, you're going to say 2023. And you will believe it. You can actually sit there believing you are in 2023. And I've perfected a way to do this. Once you're there, I don't need to worry about your inability to see the future, because I'm going to ask you past tense questions about the project you launched five years earlier in 2018. What happened when you launched? What did you learn? What was the response? What was the reaction? What did your customers think? What did your suppliers do? Were there regulatory issues? What did your competition do? I start asking questions through different lenses. One of the most important lenses I use is what did the critics say? And now you look back and you find all the holes in your product. Because now you have to face reality. Because if I ask you what the critics say, you're gonna have to look at it through their eyes. I'll digress for a second. When I would interview someone, they would. I'd say, what are your weaknesses? And they go, oh, well, I just work too hard. I never know when to stop. I just. I push too far. And, you know, employers are going, oh, yes, and it's all crap, right? What I say is, when I call your references, and I will, and I ask them what they consider to be your weaknesses, what are they going to tell? Well, now that. Now they're backpedaling and they could do some damage control. So they're very open about what their real weaknesses are, because they know I'm going to find out and they want to do damage control. So here's the same thing. If I say, what did the critics say? So a Silicon Valley software company, very prominent software company, calls me and they're coming out with a new product, really cutting edge at the time. And I look at it and I do this exercise in my mind all the time with everything, and I think about what's missing and I say, okay, I do this exercise with them and I say, what? Show me your version 2 and your version 3, list of what you want to put in. And they do. And I say, I bring them through this exercise and I take them five years in the future. And I look back and I ask them all these questions and we whiteboard all the answers. And then I get to what did the critics say? Did they give you five stars? Or how many stars did they give you? And what did they say you were missing? And when I asked that question, they start filling in all the holes. What do you know? A lot of those holes were in version 2 and 3, which in the present day you say, ah, well, put it in later, we can't do it now. And I show them how for the little bit of extra time. And this was the difference between launching in March or launching April. I'm sorry, January 1st or April 1st, they basically came out with version three, because once they were committed to taking version two and three and blending it in to their production schedule, their programming schedule, it didn't take much longer. Well, they launched to five star reviews, and that particular software at that time period was. Dominated the market. You can use this.

Yeah. You know what I love about this? Just psychologically, the effect is that at least what I'm hearing and what I kind of believe, that putting yourself in the future and looking back, it almost disassociates you from. Because if I'm thinking right now, what could go wrong in the future, there's still. I'm still so involved in the present and so invested in it. It's really kind of hard to zoom out. But if it. If you imagine that it's already done, you're a little dissociated from it. And I think it's a lot easier then to kind of view it with an impartial like, okay, I'm looking back, I could see how these things went. Because it's not what's out in front of you, it's behind you. And there's less emotional attachment to all the potential negatives I don't know if that's part of the psychology of what makes it work, but I can see it as one of the reasons it's freeing.

Because if you are in the present trying to look for the future, one, we're not wired that way, and two, it's a struggle. If I take those barriers away and free your mind so that you believe it's the future and you're looking back, it's easy. It's a piece of cake. You remember things from 10 years ago and 10 days ago, and in your mind they're the same.

Yeah.

They happened at the same moment. So once you understand and I teach people how to pin themselves, when I say pin, you can jump to 30, 90 days a year, two years, you can just jump to a certain pin in a map and stay there and live there.

Well, this works also perfectly with one of my favorite strategies I learned years ago, and I employ it both in my life and in my with my clients.