Direct Marketing is Not Dead: Brian Kurtz

Hey creative, are you ready to discuss profits, the money, the ways to make it happen? The Profitable Creative Podcast is for you, the creative, how you define it. Videographers, photographers, entrepreneurs, marketing agencies, you get it. CEO of Core Group and author Christian Brim interviews industry experts, creative entrepreneurs, and professionals alike who strive to be creative and make money at the same time. Sound like you? Tune in now. It's time for profit.

Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the internet where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Pittsburgh, California. Not Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, California. No idea where that is. Maybe somebody got lost going west and named the town after Pittsburgh. I don't know. Anyway, joining me today, Brian Kurtz. Of Titan Media. Brian, welcome to the show.

Yes, it's Titans Marketing, but I do media. That's okay. But I do media. I'll be anything you want me to be, Christian. I'm really pleased to be here.

I'm glad to have you. I got to start out with— now, this is a podcast, audio only, but for the listeners, he is wearing a Yale football t-shirt, which I find fascinating, mainly because I'm a Sooners fan. And Oklahoma actually ripped off Yale's fight song to create their own.

I don't know if you know that.

Yeah. Boomer Sooner, which, you know, all of our adversaries hate that song. And there's a reason. I mean, it's awful. But it was— it was— it had its origin story at Yale.

So. Well, I would say Yale football is not as, as proficient or excellent as Oklahoma football. My son happens to be the director of recruiting for Yale football. And what I find interesting, it might tie into this podcast actually.

Okay.

Let's hear it. We're talking about, you know, special talents and creative and doing what you love. And you know, when he goes out recruiting, I'm gonna try to twist this and see if I can do it. Let me see. Let's do it. I'm gonna do it on the fly. Um, but when he goes out to find a player to play for Yale— Yale's a, a, a 1AA, so it's just below Division I, but it's not Division II. It's a decent level of football. It's Ivy League. Um, he's got to find a really special kid. He's got to get a kid, first of all, that can play football, that can not only read and write but have at least a 3.7 GPA.

Can get into Yale, right?

Yeah. I mean, and 3, you can't get into Yale with a 3.7. You can get into Yale with a 3.7 if you play football. Okay. And then he has to figure out, okay, is this kid, is he going to get a scholarship to Oklahoma or to Florida or to Arkansas where he might be able to go to the NFL one day? Or is he really good? He knows he's never going to be in the NFL. His parents are saying, you can go to Yale and get financial aid. They don't give scholarships at Yale, but get financial aid and be part of the old boy network of Yale. Right. There are parents that push their kid to my son, and then he has to figure out, is the kid good enough to play at Yale even? And once he's good enough to play at Yale, you figure, okay, how am I going to get this kid?. And it's a challenging recruiting, whereas Oklahoma, you know, you go out, you look for the 4 and 5-star players. They might— I mean, they have to be able to, you know, have a basic knowledge of reading and writing, but, you know, they don't have to go to classes all the time. They don't have to be the same kind of student. And I'm not saying that in a derogatory way. Everybody's got their talents, which is what you talk about on this podcast, I think, and doing what you love. And I find it fascinating that he finds it very rewarding looking for these, like, they're not needles in a haystack. They're sort of like, they're like intellectuals inside the brawn kind of.

Yeah, there are actually, I mean, you've seen some of them even in the NFL where they've, you know, gone to Stanford or something like that.

Yeah, they become Rhodes Scholars. They become doctors, get PhDs after they play.

Yeah, there are smart athletes. There are, there are. It's just not what you normally see.

No, no. And if you have to recruit, you know, to play college football, you know, it's a, it's an interesting profile that he's looking for. And yeah, I find it fascinating anyway.

Yeah, I, I'm not going to go down the road of talking about the demise of college athletics. Yeah, the NIL and all that.

Yeah, yeah. That could be its own podcast. I'm not going to do that, although it is very passionate.

I will say that I was a 30-year season ticket holder, and this year I chose not to renew because of the state of college athletics. I'm fed up with it.

I'm done with it. I'd like to have that conversation with you off camera one day. Yes, I'm passionate about that too.

So for those in the audience that don't know who Brian Kurtz is, why don't you give us the short bio?

Yeah. Without, you know, without saying I was born, you know, a poor child on a farm and 1923 or something like that. Were you?

No, you're not that old.

I wasn't born with a silver spoon, but I was born lower middle class in a suburb of New York City. And I had a childhood that was kind of normal. I went to Rutgers State University of New Jersey. And when I graduated college, and I was an English major, and I wanted to learn how to read and write. My parents were unhappy. And speaking of accounting, I know you, you know, I know you're in accounting and you have accounting firms. My parents said, you're going to be an accountant or a lawyer. And I said, no, I'm going to be an English major. And they said, WTF, in their own vernacular, you know, circa 1980. And I said, you know, I just want to learn how to read and write and see where it goes. I don't want to be a lawyer. I don't want to be an accountant. I don't want to get an MBA. Not interested. I just want to, I want to see where this takes me. And where it took me in my second job was to this little company called Boardroom Inc. And Boardroom Inc. in 1981 was probably like a $5, $6 million company. We published newsletters and books and for consumers basically. So, It was, um, and newsletter is important. It's not a magazine. Newsletter means no advertising, subscription-based. You have to make money in circulation. And then it was direct marketing, because direct response marketing is that every— everything you do needs to be measurable. So I didn't know what I was getting into. I just wanted to go to a publishing company and see what happened, right? So I get there and I see this whole direct marketing thing before my eyes, and I'm like, Wow, this is interesting. And I didn't— so I kind of fell into it, but it was a— it was, it was an incredible fit. I still thought I was going to work in the editorial department. We had a newsletter called Bottom Line Personal, which was— ended up being the largest consumer print newsletter in the country at one point in the late 1980s. We got over to a mil— over a million paid subscribers to a print consumer newsletter.

Was this— was that before or after Kiplinger?

'Cause that's one of them. It was at the same time, same time. Kiplinger, I knew the people at Kiplinger. They had a tax letter, they had the Washington letter. We used to exchange names in direct mail all the time. So yeah, you're old enough to remember. I see those of you who aren't on video, he's got gray in his beard, so. Yes. Yes, he's got wisdom.

I'm 55, for the record.

55, I'm a lot older than you, but that's okay. But you've got a lot of wisdom in that beard and in your mind, so that's good.

That's what I'm going for with the look.

Yeah, no, you got it. Well, you fooled me, Christian, so that's good. So I really felt like, okay, this is interesting, but I thought, okay, at some point I'll be in the editorial department. You know, I'll write or I'll edit. And a couple of years in, Marty Edelston, who was the founder of Boardroom, ended up, you know, he was a genius marketer, well known in direct marketing circles as as a genius. Um, I went to him and a job opened up in the editorial department, and I said, you know, I— and this, this ties into this podcast, it's about doing what you love, right? And I thought what I was going to love was, um, writing, because I remember I went to college to learn how to read and write. And so I said, and I said, Marty, I'd like to have that editorial job that just opened up. And he just looked at me— this is like one of those moments where, you know, in your life was where, you know, the horizon is like just ahead of you and it's everything opened up. He says, Brian, you have a nose for marketing. Now I'm 23 years old. This is the president of a company, the CEO, the founder. He's taking an interest in me. Who the hell am I gonna decide what I have a nose for? Right. And I just, you know, didn't know what I, didn't know what I was doing. I was 23 years old. And I guess one of the best things I did was sort of I trusted the process. I trusted someone smarter than me, wiser than me, someone who had experience to tell me that I had a nose for marketing. And I have a big nose. You can't see it on camera, but, you know, but I do have a nose for marketing. And I did. I didn't know what marketing was. I mean, I was learning it and I was learning it from the list side. So I was creating You know, we, we had, we managed our list in-house. So Boardroom, Bottom Line, all of our newsletters and our books, we had all the buyers and subscribers and we didn't take advertising because it was a newsletter and books. But we, we rented our list to people like Kiplinger and Money Magazine and Disabled American Veterans and, and Consumer Reports. They all used the Boardroom list because they were affluent executives. Who bought through direct mail. And people who buy through direct mail continue to buy through direct mail. And I— you could tell just by me telling the story, I was hooked. I was hooked on everything about this direct marketing thing, this measurable marketing, this return on investment marketing. And so that's the origin story. And from there, you know, I'm saying, say the rest is history. It was like, it's 44 years since then.. But I created just an amazing— I carved out a career by being the list guy initially. And being a list guy, I didn't— who said, oh, is that a passion? Being a list guy? It can be because you're looking at the people. I always say lists are people too. It's not just a bunch of names on a piece of paper or in a computer. They're people. Every person is a living, breathing human, believe it or not. And I just was so fascinated with that concept and that when I learned the idea, the concepts behind list segmentation and learning how to slice and dice a mailing list to be able to— and I do it today. I mean, fast forward 2025, slicing and dicing a list so that you can mail one message to one piece of the list and another message to another piece of the list. It's all the same principles. It's just on steroids with the technology and AI and everything that's happening today. But the principles are all the same. And the interesting thing is that over 44 years in the business, I've been able to stay relevant, which surprises me some days. It really does. 'Cause I'm an OG from, you know, I'm an original gangster to a lot of people. But I'm looking for the NGs, the new gangsters, and I bring them into my mastermind to speak and they come in and they are just state of the art with AI and with media buying and YouTube and, and reels on Instagram and how they're making it pay out and making it profitable. And I'm like, I'm a kid in a candy store. I am just absorbing everything. And you know, one of my mentors is Jay Abraham. I think we talked about this before we turn the recording on. And Jay Abraham, who wrote the foreword to my book Overdeliver, uh, told me from the day I met him in 1983— I met him really early in my career, and he's been a mentor ever since— he said, once you learn it, once you know it, once you've done it, you have a, you have a moral responsibility to teach it. And I'm in the teaching phase of my career. That doesn't mean I'm not still learning. I learn every day, but I'm trying to teach what I did and then bring in anything new that I don't know. Because if I'm not going to— I'm not going to sit there and be stagnant and say, okay, what I've got in my knowledge base is satisfactory. It's not, especially today when it's changing every 15 minutes.

Yeah. I mean, I think you actually— you know, the axiom of those who don't know teach, I think is exactly backwards. I think that you actually learn best and at your highest level when you're teaching. Yes. And I'm, I'm curious. So we got connected by Perry Marshall and in one of his recent newsletters. Yes, he still sends a print newsletter.

Yes, he does.

He talks about the death of direct marketing. I don't know if you read that. In the newsletter.

You know, he's been on that for over 10 years.

So, so, so the news of direct marketing's demise is a little overstated. I guess that's what I was going to get your opinion on. Yeah. What your thoughts on that comment is.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of layers to it and Perry goes into it and anything Perry says, once Perry makes an argument, usually I end up agreeing with it, even though I disagree with it initially. So I won't disagree or agree with Perry, 'cause disagreeing with Perry is a perilous place to be. On the other hand, on the other hand, I will say that the news, the Mark Twain quote, "The news of my death has been greatly exaggerated." And I'd say that about direct mail. I mean, direct mail, people say direct mail is dead. It is so far from dead that it's crazy that it's, it's actually, it has a resurgence now. Now, is it the same as it was? Of course not. You know, to, to do prospecting in direct mail with print, paying print and postage when email is basically free, you'd be crazy to do prospecting. But using direct mail on the back end of a digital business is genius. Having, having physical product and tactile product on the back end is— it's just, it's a differentiator more than anything else. And then once you differentiate, you innovate and you invent even. And so I don't think direct marketing is dead. The old way of direct marketing, the old way of mailing millions and millions of names and getting, you know, 2% response rates on a $39 product, that's pretty dead. It's pretty dead. But direct mail, direct marketing, direct response marketing, measuring your response, getting— I don't think any of that is dead. Now, I think Perry likes to make the headline, and then he goes into— it's layered, you know, it's a layered thing. But so I, I don't agree with the statement that it's dead. I do agree that there are elements of old-school direct response marketing that are dead, more in the techniques and more in the tactics, not in the philosophy. The bedrock philosophy It's as sound as it's ever been. In fact, there's a book written by Gene Schwartz, who's one of the greatest copywriters of all time. He was a friend and mentor of mine. I'm so proud to be able to say that. Um, he wrote a book called Breakthrough Advertising in 1966. I have the exclusive rights to it today. Um, and the book is 100% relevant to everything that's being done in marketing today. You cannot go into that book. Now you'll see I, I added some ads from, you know, the 1960s that he has in there and they're dated in a way, but the principles are there. They'll live on forever. Things like the levels of sophistication of your audience and how the level of sophistication will determine how you market to them. The level of awareness of you, your product, your service, All of that is so universal. And so, um, and that was all direct marketing. Now I will say that when I talk about Breakthrough Advertising as a book about copywriting, I'm doing it a disservice because it's about marketing too, but it's also about human behavior. And that's the key, you know, marketing is human behavior. And so if a book is about human— I mean, look at Cialdini's book. Influence, one of the greatest books ever written. And every copywriter I've ever met says it's one of the top 3 or 4 books in their library that they read constantly. It wasn't written as a copywriting book. It was written about, you know, how to influence people, how to communicate properly, how to not just get under their skin, but really relate to them. Mm-hmm. And to me, that is part of direct response marketing. So how could that ever be dead? So I'm sure Perry would come back to me and give his argument and we get into it a little bit, but I don't think he can disagree with what I've just said.

No, I think what I took away from his article was that the attribution of a lead or a sale is much more convoluted than it was.

It's been convoluted forever and it's more convoluted than ever because the multichannel approach. In fact, at that time, I hosted a Titans of Direct Response event. I told you about it before. We turned the camera on, uh, in 2014, which Perry spoke at. In fact, I think his— I think he said direct— it was a Direct Marketing is Dead.

That's where he started this, this nonsense.

Yeah, I think when he started it. Um, and it's interesting because it's— it was an interesting conference because it was all about like the historical significance of so much of the direct marketing that came before and what was coming ahead, and they were so related, they were so intertwined. It was, it was unbelievable. So I, I, I, I just think that it's a mistake to dismiss the past. However, to, to not acknowledge that, um, everything is, everything is on steroids now. It really is, to, you know, to put it I hate to use that. It's kind of an overused phrase, but everything is super duper. Everything is high tech. Everything is. And yet the principles still live on. And I don't think anyone can argue with that.

Hey, listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now. Yeah, and I'm a consumer of marketing services as opposed to a deliverer. And so my perspective is different, but I have crossed that gap of marketing pre-digital and post-digital. And I don't know if this is correct, but for me, that was 25 years ago and the advent— or not the invention, but the ubiquity of the internet. And you're exactly right. There are some things that don't change. I'll tell you. 2 things that don't change that just fascinate me that they don't change. The first is my costs. My costs, you'd think with digital would go down. Now we're in a very high trust business. And so, but our costs have stayed the same relative to the client revenue before and after. For 28 years. And that fascinates me because that tells me that there's something driving that more fundamental than the method or the channel or the strategy. The other thing that hasn't changed is our conversion percentage. So it bounces around, but we close about 1 in 3, maybe 40% on the high end, of our quotes, which again also fascinates me because it would seem to me the better you got at identifying your target market and your messaging and your offer, that that close percentage would go up, right? Eventually, you'd close a higher percentage.

But have you looked at another metric which could tell you, I think, even more, which would be renewal and lifetime value, which is a— so, in other words, the conversion is one thing, but I would venture to say if you are, and I get the sense that you are doing things at a more sophisticated level today than you've ever done them. You're doing them with more skill and empathy and all of the things that go into a good marketing message and all of that. I would say that if you're doing it right, your renewal rates are probably not the same. They would probably go— that's where, and that's where profit goes up. So I know your book is called Profit First for Creatives. And I know that that's where— that's the bottom line. Like, are you making more profit? And if you are, I would dig in a little more and say you're probably doing— because I think, you know, there's a fundamental of direct response marketing that says, you know, it's easier to keep a customer than get a new one. Yes. And so, and I think the notion that the top marketers today, online and offline, they understand that the really good ones and the ones like you, I'm going to put you in that category. But, and, you know, people say they're not marketers, but everybody's a marketer. So, it's okay.

You can admit it. Daniel Pink wrote a book about that. Like, everybody's in sales, right?

Everybody's a salesman, right? Right. But I think that it's interesting because, you know, in fact, there was someone that once said to me, This woman had a really interesting business. She sold to coaches and she sold memberships and all of that. And she had a quote. She said, "Onboarding is not housekeeping." Onboarding is not housekeeping. So, what's onboarding in marketing? It's when you get a new customer, you bring them on, you treat them like gold, you do everything you can to make them feel welcome, all of that. But onboarding is not housekeeping. It's onboarding. And I went on and said onboarding is forever. You're always onboarding. You're always re-onboarding. And if that's your marketing philosophy, you can see that it's not always about the new shiny customer. It's the old customer that's been paying you for the last 6 years. And so, I'm just obsessed with that because in my, in my business at, at Boardroom back in the '80s and '90s, our big newsletter was Bottom Line Personal. We got to a million subscribers, and, you know, we didn't make money on the first year subscriptions. We used to lose money intentionally to make it back in year 2 based on the renewal rates that we would expect. It's called— we called it the bogey. It was something that my, my direct mail guru Dick Benson invented. Everybody had an acceptable value calculation. He called it the bogey, and he, he didn't copyright it, but it was his thing. And so I knew how much I could lose in year 1 to make it back in year 2. As we got bigger and we started accumulating cash because of that, I knew that I could lose money in year 1 and not make it back to year 3, and I'd still be more profitable that way 'cause I accumulated some cash to reinvest. You have to really watch your numbers because if you lose track of that, you're gonna go south very quickly. You'll go in the red. And so, but I think that knowing, and I remember sitting in Marty's office one day, we're looking at some spreadsheets for the company and we're looking at all the new promotions we're doing for books and the new promotions we're doing for newsletters. And then we get to the column of renewal income. And it was like the lion's share of the revenue and the profit. And Marty looked at me, he goes, Brian, we're in the bottom line personal renewal business. Mm-hmm. And we were known as like this state-of-the-art marketer using the best copywriters, using the best, um, uh, creative promotion, um, you know, state-of-the-art formats. I mean, we were known as the most, one of the most creative direct marketers in the world. Your audience probably never heard of us, but in, in our circles, right, we were known as super creative, only spent for the best copywriters and the best creative. Um, but we were in the business, but, but the, the new, the new business we had to— you always have to get new business to get renewal business, of course. But, and what happened was, fast forward 20, 20, 30 years later, You've got a whole slew of online marketers. I'm not saying the kids, and I'm not going to say I'm grandpa at the picnic here, but what they do, what they do do is they get the glamour of cold traffic. You know, cold traffic is like, you know, that's a new customer, has no relationship with you, and you get them to buy, right? That's the definition of cold traffic. And I wrote a blog post once. I said, don't play in traffic. And the reason why I said that is not that you got to go after new customers.

Right.

It's a whole different approach to go after someone who's new versus someone who's existing, of course. But focus on the existing first because that's where the money is. That's where the profit is. That's where the lifetime— In fact, the subtitle of my book Overdeliver is Build a Business for a Lifetime Playing the Long Game in Direct Response Marketing.

It says it all. And, you know, people don't— I know creatives in general don't like to deal with numbers. And but if you're a business owner, there's a certain level of fluency in finance that you have to understand. And one of the numbers that you absolutely must understand is the lifetime value of your customer. Absolutely. You have to understand it. Because if you don't understand it, you have no idea what you can spend to acquire them. And I mean, it's just one-on-one, right?

Dan Kennedy has a quote on that. He says, the marketer that spends the most wins. Now, he's not saying you spend the most indiscriminately wins. But if you can spend on marketing and make it back within a reasonable amount of time within the parameters of your profitability and what your company needs to do, that's when you have a business. Otherwise, you have a product or you have a promotion. And a product is not a business and a promotion is not a business.

Yes. And I think there's this fundamental disconnect and it's not new. And maybe it existed pre-digital. I don't know. I was not aware enough to observe. But right now, I know that digital agencies are totally fine with a 50% churn per year. Yep. And like, that's normal. That's just the way that the way things are. But, but I keep telling them that means there's something fundamentally broken.

Like, you're a product. And then if you, if it's your product, that's the worst.

Right. Something, something is, is not in line if 50% of your people are leaving within the first year.

Exactly.

And I, and I, I think the, the disconnect is that there's not an understanding of what the value that they're delivering and the problem that they're solving. Right. And so I see this all the time in my experience and in watching people in the space is that it's so much chasing the wrong things. I think there's one of the things that you said that really intrigued me was this list. And I can envision you know, old school where, you know, the list was uber valuable, right? But it hasn't changed. Like, the list is your customers, and it is the most valuable thing that you have. Absolutely. And the, the tendency to go chasing new rather than focusing on the old is real and it's probably amplified now with technology. And there's a lot of things that you can do that don't have any cost. Nothing is free, but like email is a great example. But I shit you not, I had a client who probably doesn't know me personally because I don't do client-facing work anymore. So I'll give him the benefit benefit of the doubt. I had sent him an email about our upcoming live event in October here in Oklahoma City. And I just said, hey, Jack— that's not his real name— I know you've probably heard from somebody else in our organization about this, but I wanted to email you, let you know. And I gave him my spiel. He emails me back. Which was surprising because most of the people that I emailed didn't email me back. And he said, "Yeah, I think I'm fine. Can you take me off this list?" And I'm— I literally responded with a rolling laughing emoji. And I'm like, "There's no list. I'm just trying to tell you about this kick-ass event." You know, like, but the thing is, is that the tendency for me was, well, email's easy. I'll just send it out. But what's happening is they're ignoring it. And if they do perchance respond, it's like, take me off your list. I'm like, there's something wrong there, right?

Like, yeah. In my book, I talk about the 41-39-20 rule, which I didn't invent, but I kind of changed it from the 40-40-20 rule. And there's a rule in basically direct response marketing that says the 40-40-20 rule says that any promotion or any campaign depends on— its success depends 40% on the list or the media or the audience, 40% on the offer, and 20% on the creative and the messaging. Now, I kind of put— I turned that on its ear a little bit, so I made it the 41-39-20 rule. With 41 being the list. Because I think that if you have your list dialed in first, that's the key to the success. Because, and I proved it time and again in on the battlefield in marketing, because we had— if you have like the perfect list with a mediocre offer and mediocre creative and the— but the product is to that audience, you'll make some sales. The opposite is not true. You could have the best offer and the best creative. If it goes to the wrong audience, you get zero orders. So that's step one. Step two, that I— and I took this, this wasn't in my book because I learned, I figured it out afterwards— was that because people said, ah, 20% creative, it's like half as important as the— everybody says creative, that's the way, right, right, that's the, the bright shiny star. I want to do great creative to a new audience. I'm gonna, I'm gonna just blow them away with this new creative and messaging. And I said, it's not, it's not half as important. It's only half as important until it isn't. And what I meant by that was that once you have the list dialed in and then the offer, the creative is the most important. Because remember I said that if you have the list dialed in, mediocre offer, mediocre creative, you make some sales. Now, if you have the list dialed in and you have good, good, a good offer and world-class creative, that's direct marketing nirvana, right? That's like, that's everything. And so, and I proved that also on the battlefield because every promotion— I did thousands of promotions at Boardroom— every promotion that had the biggest lift was based on new creative. And you'd say, well, you're a list guy. I had the list dialed in. I had my list segmentation was so advanced. We did regression modeling. We had our list so dialed in and the outside list. I researched outside lists even like new lists to the T. I had a whole system for it. I'm not going to go into it in this podcast, but I was so dialed because I was a list guy. I remember when I started this, but that was the purpose of me giving you my origin story. I was a list guy.. And so, the lists were given. I used to tell my best— I have copywriters who are some of the best who've ever lived, including Gene Schwartz, but many others. And I used to make the joke. I said, you guys are only as good because of my list segmentation. Now, there's some truth to that. However, when one of those copywriters gets me 100% lift to the existing control, that's not all my list. That's their genius, right?

No, it's more like the accelerant, right?

Exactly.

Exactly. But if you don't have the fuel underneath it, the accelerant just—

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's just, it's like, you know, it's like making a fire without sticks and without matches and without gas. It's like, yeah, but we have the best copywriter. Right. The best copywriter. Well, you know, what's he working with? What's she working with?

Putting lipstick on a pig.

Exactly. Exactly. It's so— it's interesting. And those are, again, these are basic fundamentals. They don't go away. No, like, they don't go away.

And I think it doesn't go away because what you said is very true. You're dealing with people, and people, you know, as much as they do change, there's a lot of ways they don't change, right? And buying habits, you know, sure, buying habits have changed. The way we buy, the way we go The way we look for things has changed. And that has driven the way we market. However, there are fundamentals. Like, in my case, it's a high-trust thing. Like, I'm not just going to turn my financial information and my financial success over to anybody. I remember— I probably shouldn't tell this story, but I'll tell this story. One of my very first clients, I went to lunch with— it was a family business and there was father and son. And we went to Hooters because that's where they wanted to go. I just am tagging along. And one of the waitresses came up and started talking to the father. And it was very apparent to me through the course of this conversation that he and she had a relationship. All right. Now, he was married. And what I quickly learned as being the accountant to business owners, and I would say the majority of them were men, not exclusively, but I think when it comes to the finances, there are people that are more interested and more concerned about their money than they are anything else. And I would know things about them through their finances that other people in their lives wouldn't know, like their spouse. Like, and that's the intimacy that I'm dealing with, right? Like, and you can't— that's not going to change. That's not going to change. Doesn't matter what the messaging is.

And yeah, yeah. And there's some— it's not an exact fit, but there's some metrics that could go along with that. And one of the metrics is something in my book, which I didn't invent, of course. I have never invented anything. I've just adapted.

You're into R&D, rip off and deploy.

That's what I— Exactly, exactly. And it's RFM. RFM, recency, frequency, monetary value, is— it's not even a rule of thumb in marketing. It's how people behave in the marketplace. And Perry, talking about Perry, He added a different dimension because as we got into online marketing, it was RFT—recency, frequency, and time. How much time do people spend on your marketing and with you? And when you said trust, I'm thinking it could be recency, frequency, and trust also. But the key is, you know, it was fascinating when I got into direct marketing. I realized it didn't make sense initially because they said, you know, someone who bought from us recently is more valuable than someone who didn't buy from us recently. I said, that doesn't make sense. They just bought.

They have no money. They buy again, right?

Again, it's the opposite. Of course, that's how people behave. And frequency is if they bought from you 3 months ago and buy from you again today, now they're a multi-buyer. And they're recent, that's even better. And if they spend a lot of money with you in total, that makes them even better. So all of those list segmentation things I was talking about, they were all based in RFM. Like, we had a model that I had a— in fact, he was— he lived in Oklahoma. He went to Oklahoma State, actually. Um, he was a PhD from Oklahoma State. He lived in Colorado, and he basically did statistical models on my buyer list and my prospect list. We had a list at Boardroom of like 9 million customers, previous customers, expires, um, um, bad debt people. And we had such a big database of names, but they were all people, as we've just— have we— we've all decided that name lists are people too. And he would do these elaborate statistical regression models on these people all based on RFM. And so, you know, if you have something like that, again, that doesn't go away. It did, you know, the idea that someone all of a sudden is going to be less valuable because they bought from you recently doesn't happen. Human beings haven't changed. They haven't.

No. And it doesn't just apply to businesses that have millions of potential customers. It applies to you if you have, you know, 50 potential customers. It's all the same, right? Your 6 clients recently.

You know, there was this woman, I think I told the story in my book. I definitely told it in a blog post. But this woman had, she was, she did like, she did products for psychologists. And she had, I think, like something like 28 different products and courses.. And I asked her to make a grid of like all of— because she never did like an RFM kind of analysis. She just went out to them and she did very well. And she did a grid for me and it was like, okay, 100% of the people bought one product, 80% of the people had bought two products, all the way down to 28 products. And of course, the punchline of this story— I won't get into all the other details, but The punchline is that there was one person that bought all 28 products. So I said, if that's not a relative or it's not you, you need to have dinner with that person. Yes. And what I meant by that is you go deep with your best customers to find out how do you find more best customers. And that's what regression modeling is. It's like you have buyers who have certain characteristics and you map them, and then you go out to your bigger audience and say, how do I find more like them? And if you're tagging your file with all the data, which is all doable— it was doable in the '80s and '90s, it's even more doable with Lotus. Yeah, now it's on steroids, as we said. So it's— so I'm not saying it's easy, you can— you have to pay for it, it's, it's data, but it's cheaper than it was. Um, but to not do that to not, not look for more people like the ones that are your best customers. That's, that's marketing. And, you know, that's— yeah. And I don't— I think people love— again, it's the lure of the, of the cold traffic. Again, it's the lure of that new customer that comes in, and it's a thrill, right? You get somebody who never heard of you before and they become a customer. That's exciting. Yes, I find it more exciting when I get a 5th-year renewal. To my mastermind. Someone who, who, who sends me money for 5 years as opposed to the person who sends it to me in the year 1, I'll take the person over 5 years. Now I'll take them both. I'm accepting everybody, right? Um, but it's interesting that the, the glamour of the new buyer, as you said already, you mentioned this, the glamour of the new buyer seems to supersede the value of the repeat buyer.

Well, and I want to reemphasize what you said about that psychologist. Perry talks about this. Perry should pay us for sponsoring his content on this show. Yeah. The idea, the 80/20 Pareto principle applies also with your customers. In that a— and it may not line up 80/20, you know, but some smaller percentage of your existing customers will spend more money with you. And 4%, which is 20% of 20%, will spend even more with you. And this idea of can you develop a service that captures the whole value of your existing clients. You're not even having to go out and find new ones. Can you leverage what you already have?

Exactly. Jay Abraham wrote a book. I have multiple copies on my shelf because I give them out. And the title is Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got. That says it all right there. It's like when I used to go, when I started my own business, I used to go out to new clients, and the first thing we did with a new client— and I hate calling it consulting. Everybody say, I never tell anybody I'm a consultant because it sounds like you're unemployed. Um, in my town, you know, if you, if you say you're a consultant, you know they're unemployed. Um, but it's basically, um, I would go in and say, we need to assess your assets. And basically people don't even understand what their assets are sometimes. And it's usually the first— number one is your list of customers or your list of prospects or the list of people who are former customers. That's one of your best assets, always. It's probably your number one asset. You already said it. Yes. So I'll repeat that. But also it could be where are your other lists? You know, people don't understand that, you know, um, your Facebook account while not always the best list of— they're not all your best BFFs, they're not all your best friends. But that's a good place to start. In fact, I did something. I have some people doing some social media for me and someone was posting an article on Facebook. And I remember I edited it and I didn't realize it was for Facebook. I thought it was for LinkedIn. And what I did in there is like I told people, if they wanted. It was a— I talked about a, um, a presentation I had given at this event with a bunch of copywriters that was just the highlight of my career. And I said, if you like a video of it, email me at, you know, brian@briankurtz.net. And I had a few p— I had quite a few people from the Facebook sending me an email. And I said, wow. And, and one of them said, That he said, that's genius. You're getting, you're getting email addresses from Facebook. I said, well, why shouldn't I? Why do I— why? I mean, email, I don't own the platform, but I own it a lot more than Facebook. Uh, oh yeah. And then you can control it, right? You control the environment. And I realized what I was doing. I knew what I was doing when I did it, but then I realized I didn't have the video. Now I have to go and get the video because I had like 10 people And I want to— and those people are engaging with me. Some of them are in my mastermind already, but some of them aren't. And so now I've got prospects doing that. And, and, and I think the idea is it's all about engagement. It's all about always encouraging engagement with your audience because lists are people too.

I, I, I've, uh, I've— I'm going to I just haven't yet. I'm going to start publishing a, uh, a format, a tabloid. It's not going to be a newsletter. It is going to be a tabloid newspaper, um, on a quarterly basis for our clients and our target market. And I, you know, because yes, it's, it's infinitely more expensive than sending, uh, something via email, but the engagement, based upon my experience with Perry Marshall, and I read his newsletter It's like 12 pages. I read it front to cover every time I get it. Right? Right. And the idea that I can get someone to read that and I'm going to have great content in it. I've even thought about doing it as a subscription, like a $29 annual subscription. Right? Right. And I'm going to send out a couple of copies, a couple of quarters for free. And then I'm going to take it away. And like, the thought process is, that if I've got good content and it's to the right people, that they're going to pay $29. And what does that tell me? Well, that tells me that they've raised their hand and exchanged money. There is trust. There's, there's something there, right? So now that— now, as you're saying this, I'm like, well, you know what? The Holy Grail is not just the email. It's can you get their physical address?

Can you? Can you? Yes. Right. And the thing is, I did a presentation for a bunch of online marketers 10 years ago, and I said something to the effect of, you may be sitting on a gold mine and you already have it. Um, because— and I— what I said to them is that they were selling digital product and courses online on credit card, which meant they have the postal address of every customer. What they didn't know, because they didn't know anything about direct mail, I said, do you understand that direct mail is an opt-out medium, not an opt-in medium? And what that means is in, in online email, you have to opt in to get the email, and usually it's a double opt-in. Correct. Direct mail, once you have a postal address of a customer, you can mail them until the cows come home, unless they're on the do not mail file with direct marketing, you know, the, the Postal Service, and you need to suppress those names. But until they say, opt me, take me off your list, You can mail them. Now, of course, it's expensive to just do direct mail indiscriminately. So, you don't want to try. I always say direct mail is like making sushi. You know, you can do it, but why? You know, like there are experts for that, right?

I have not made my own sushi.

I have not. I've used that many times in my career and it's always like a person that says, "Oh, I make sushi all the time." I say, "All right, sorry." You know, God bless you.

He probably changes his own oil too.

So— But yeah, you, you should do your own direct mail also. But, but the point is exactly what you said, that, you know, there's— and again, the differentiator, like, how many people in your industry are doing a paper, you know, a, a print newsletter? Nobody. And, and you're going to put better content in because you're going to put— be serious about it. You're not just going to do half-ass, right? Because if I want to charge for it, it's got to be good. Right. And you know what, I don't even think that you should even decide now whether you're going to charge for it or not charge for it. Just producing it quarterly and then maybe even monthly, you know, your clients, you know, look, your clients are forever, so you're just doing a service for them. And yeah, it's costing you. I have, I have, so I have a mastermind. It's a virtual mastermind, inexpensive. I had, I had a high price mess. I had a $25,000 mastermind with 30 companies for 8 years, and I— it ran its course after the pandemic, and I decided to fold it. But I didn't fold it into the— now I have a virtual mastermind, which I actually launched before the pandemic, so I predicted the pandemic.

Um, I didn't. Thanks for letting us know.

I timed it in December of 2019 for some reason. Um, and so I have 250 members We do 2 to 4 live calls a month. We've got a Facebook group, a private Facebook group. We've got, you know, we do hot seats. I get guest speakers. Perry has spoken there and all that. But one thing I added to it, just like you're thinking about the add-on of a print newsletter, I was going to do a print newsletter to the mastermind on a monthly basis. I was a little lazy about it. But what I wanted, basically, I was going to put the transcriptions of the calls plus like a swipe of the month, like some promotion that I have in my archive that I can critique, and also like something from the High Price Mastermind, a presentation from the 8 years, and put that into the newsletter. I said, I don't need a newsletter, I only need a USB. So what I do is once a month— so actually, so we do the calls, we do the live calls and they go into a portal, a digital portal. Anybody who wants digital can have digital. But once a month, I just finished the letter for this month. Everything is on a USB in a plastic case. So, it's got some— it's got some effort to it. And I put a letter in there saying, you know, describing the 3 calls, describing the swipe of the month, describing the thing from the Titans Vault, which is the presentation from a previous mastermind. And is it repetitive? Maybe, because they have the digital portal with the calls. But man, talk about, you know, the, the value of physical product. Yes. You know, I have every— I, for 6 years I've been doing this mastermind. I have every one of those plastic cases on my shelf. Anybody who's been in my mastermind for any length of time, they're not throwing them out. No, not throwing them out. So now you have a library, and you can say my library is in my hard drive, and that's fine, but there's something about a library of physical product. There really is. Now it takes up space. Some people are like allergic to that all the time. Um, usually, usually it's, you know, they always say that, you know, anybody under 30 doesn't want physical product. I say bullshit to that too. I agree. Oh, people under 30 are definitely checking their mailboxes. They're They're definitely getting packages from Amazon. They definitely love the surprise and delight of the mailbox. There's no question that to say that my audience is younger, they won't respond to anything through the mail. Bullshit. If you make it compelling, you make it meaningful, you make it complimentary to your digital business, they will open the, they will love it. And the key is retention. Because now, I mean, and that's why I go back to your thing. Your print newsletter is a retention device more than anything else. Now, it can be used to prospect new clients for sure. Anybody that you prospect gets on your list, and then they get the newsletter. But your existing customers, you know, now talk about trust. You know, you're not their accountant. No way. You're their trusted advisor. And once you become a trusted advisor, as a— and it's true for copywriters. Dan Kennedy, the great marketer, talks about this. He says, you know, any, he, he goes to like the copywriting conferences and he has this cartoon he puts up of this bum sitting at the side of the road with a sign and it says, we'll write for food. And he says, if you're writing copy for food, especially in, in the, in the age of ChatGPT, you're nuts. But if you're, if you're using AI and you're a trusted advisor and you're advising on their marketing while you're writing for them, Now you're really valuable. That's where you come in, in the accounting side. You don't want to just be their bookkeeper. You also want to do their tax returns. And I know, I can tell, we haven't, don't know each other well, but I can tell who you are. And I know you're with Perry, and I know, I know the kind of person you are just by, by, by association. I know that you're a person that wants to be a trusted advisor and not be a bookkeeper and not just be an accountant. And the newsletter fits perfectly for you.

Perfectly. Brian, two, two old men on a park bench. We could go on forever, but we have to draw a line. Screaming at the wind, right? Yes. Get off my lawn.

Get off of my lawn.

How do people find you if they want to learn more about you and what you do?

So they can go to BrianKurtz.net, B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z dot net. A lot of free content on my site. All of my blogs from the last 10 years, 11 years are on there, um, no charge. Of course, they have to opt in. Uh, there's an interview actually with Perry Marshall. That's my, that's my welcome mat. Um, nice. It was an interview Perry did with me 9 years ago, and it's still the best thing I can give away because it's like an hour and a half of the 3, like, the 3 biggest successes from my career. And they're all great stories, they really are. So that's that, that's the— so you get all of that for free. If you want to get on, you can get it, then you get on my list, which means you're part of my online family. And I don't say that like, you know, just as just throwing it away. I— because lists are people too. I live it every day. So here I am, a list guy for over 40 years, And I have trouble saying, get on my list. I say, get into my online family because I do treat my— because I engage with people. If they respond to my blogs, I respond to them. Maybe not immediately, but I respond to everybody who responds to my blog because that's the engagement piece. Without the engagement, where are you going? You know, where are you going? It's just going to be a one-way street. And I don't want that. I want to have dialogue with my customers and my prospects. So, BrianKurtz.net. If you want to buy my book, OverdeliverBook.com has an amazing bonus page. You also get on my list, my online family. And it's 11 amazing bonuses. One of the bonuses is the day I did with Perry Marshall at Boardroom in 2013. So, the full video of that is in there. I've got 21— no, 19 keynote presentations from Jay Abraham in there. I've got, um, 2 full PDFs of 2 books from my direct mail gurus that I grew up with, Gordon Grossman and Dick Benson. People haven't even heard of them. These books are out of print, and it's like the history of direct mail, and usable too, because as I said, direct mail is not dead. So overdeliverbook.com. You can also get everything that you can get at BrianKurtz.net, plus you'll get my book and you can buy the book on Kindle or audio. And my book is, you know, I'm really proud of it. So.

Perfect. Listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, send us a message, shoot us a message and tell us what you're interested in. And we'll get rid of Brian. Until then, ta-ta for now.