Marketing Is Math + Psychology | Perry Marshall

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 interwebs 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 Brandon, Vermont. That sounds like they were coming up with a name and they just kind of mailed it in like, well, we got a guy named Brandon, so that's, that's what we'll call the town. In any case, thank you for listening. Joining me today, the infamous Perry Marshall. Welcome to the show, Perry. I didn't even add any descriptor to that. That's because like I'm introducing Prince or Cher, like everybody knows who Perry Marshall is.

Well, Christian, it's great to be on here. And I love your artistic streak. And I think we're probably going to go into some interesting spots today. So bring it on.

Yes, I was thinking about where I wanted to start this interview. I have no idea where it's going to go, but where I wanted to start was You know, when I first read your book and started, you know, learning about you and found out that you were an engineer by training, education, I was rather shocked that you did what you did for a living, being in, you know, the marketing space. And I find it fascinating. I find the whole intersection of creativity and analytical, like the two parts of the brain where they join up. I find that fascinating, but I kind of wanted to go deeper into your story. And I'd open with the question, did you ever think that you were—

at what point?

Well, I don't know how to ask this. Was it a surprise to you that you ended up in marketing as a company and a profession? As it was to me?

Well, let me tell you a story. Um, it's probably the origin of story of, of this beginning to happen in my life. I was 20 years old. I was a junior in college at the University of Nebraska. I was majoring in electrical engineering, and I took an English class called English Authors Before 1800. From a guy named Dr. Noll, who might have been the best professor and most loved professor at the entire university. He was legendary for doing amazing, mind-blowing classes. And, and he did not disappoint. That class was one of the favorite classes I have ever taken in my life. And every time you'd go to his class, You would walk out with your mind bulging, like he would connect dots that you never realized could be connected, and he would just do it so effortlessly, and he would make it fun and interesting. And the first reading that we had in that class was Beowulf, which is the 1,300-year-old story, oldest thing resembling English. And, and so we were supposed to write a paper about Beowulf, and I took a chance, and I, I thought, this will either give, give me an A or an F, uh, nothing in between. I— nothing in between. And instead of analyzing the Beowulf story the way you do when you write a paper in an English class, I decided to write a fictional version of Beowulf starring me as Beomath. And I am the engineer who designs a trebuchet that kills the monster. And I wrote it kind of in the style of the Beowulf poem with the little double entendres and And I played little word games with, you know, with the characters in the story. And at the end of it, you know, this engineer kills the monster and I'm the hero. And I turned it in and he gave me an A. Impressive. And I, God bless me for like not pissing the guy off. And When I was walking out of the classroom with my paper in hand, he said, "I would like to talk to you." And I go, "Am I in some kind of trouble?" He goes, "No, you're not in any kind of trouble, but I'd like you to come to my office sometime. I'd like to talk to you about what you're doing in school." And I'm like, "Okay." So, a couple of days later, I go to his office. And he says, so I've been reading your papers and you've been in my class, and I am trying to figure out why you're, you're in electrical engineering. Is that right? Yes. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out why you would be studying something like that. Now, at first I thought that, oh, we're having a competition between the English department and the engineering department here. No, that was not what was going on. He said, electrical engineering is about things and you study how things work. And you understand people. I can tell from reading your papers that you understand people. And I am trying to understand why a person who understands people would think things are interesting. He was, because I'm a people person and I don't think things are, I think they're boring. He was, but, and I said, well, and I explained how I've been building stereo equipment since I was 13 years old and I make speakers and I really, really just I had to understand how they work and why they work. And I didn't want to just look up a formula in a textbook. I had to really deeply understand why, you know, the physics and everything. And he goes, so I imagine that you probably really enjoy showing them off to people and doing demonstrations. I said, yes, as a matter of fact, I do. And he asked me some more questions. He said, okay, he said, so I think I understand you a little better. He said, you understand people and you understand things. And he said, most people either understand people or they understand things and they don't understand both. He goes, it's very rare to have both skill sets. He said, You could have a very successful career in technical sales, but actually, I think you'll be the president of the company someday. Now, nobody had ever talked to me about any of that in my life up to that point. I had never heard the term technical sales. Nobody had ever said, oh, you understand people and things and you could explain things to people and explain people to things and, you know, connect the dots back and forth. And certainly nobody had said, oh yeah, and I think you would be the president of a company someday. And of course, the reason he said that was a president of a company has to understand a whole bunch of things. They have to understand a lot about people and they have to understand how processes and systems work. And so I walked out of that room. First of all, I was like walking on air because it was extremely affirming. You know, I had just gotten married. I was bumbling through, you know, part-time jobs and all that kind of stuff. And I suddenly had a much clearer sense of my future than I had before. And I never forgot the conversation. That conversation framed everything I did. And probably a year, year and a half later, I started to dabble in sales and entrepreneurship. And I started weaving back and forth from the engineering to the people. Back to the engineering, back to the people. And so, if you have that story as a background, then it might make perfect sense that fast forward 20 years later, Google comes into existence and they invent Google AdWords. And I'm like, I'm an engineer. I understand exactly what those people are trying to do. And I'm going to go explain it to all the advertisers who are not engineers in not engineering language so that they can, you know, sell their plumbing or their coaching or their banking or whatever it is that they do.

I would agree with you, Professor, that it is rare to find someone that is skilled at both. I am curious what led you down the path of entrepreneurship versus being an executive with those skills.

Like what? Well, that's so, so that would be fast forward about 9 months from that professor conversation. This is one of my funnier stories. I, I was working in a warehouse at W.W. Grainger, which the big wholesale company still exists. A lot of people know what that is. They sell fans and blowers and motors and lighting and stuff. And it was just a dumb warehouse job. And, um, the boss was out of town that day and, and business was kind of slow and me and this other guy. Decided to play a practical joke. And so we were in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the Omaha branch was 50 miles away. And we talked to them and we traded inventory with them. And so we decided to play a joke on the Omaha branch. And I wrote up a fax. And the fax was from the CEO of Grainger. To all branch managers. It said, Dear branch managers, Granger stock has suddenly and inexplicably plummeted from $63 a share to $17 a share, and we will be closing all branches effective Friday. We wish to thank you for your hard work and loyalty over the years, and we will make every effort to meet payroll for the current week.

This is not going to end well. I don't know how this story goes, but I don't know what you were thinking. Sorry, proceed.

So I typed this on a piece of paper and Tony put it in the fax machine and he faxed it to Omaha. And then we waited for them to call us up and tell us, you know, haha, very funny. And we waited and waited. 20 minutes went by and 30 minutes went by and we didn't get a phone call. We didn't want to spoil the joke. Finally, 45 minutes later, Tony calls Omaha and the guy goes, "Oh, that was you? Well, Brenda pulled that fax off the fax machine and she went hysterical and she started calling all her family members. I've worked at this bad job for 12 years and I'm losing my job." And he goes, "So we faxed it to Des Moines and Des Moines faxed it to Sioux City and Sioux City faxed it to Fort Smith, Arkansas." Oh, unintended consequences. Well, so that was my literal first experiment with electronic viral marketing. It was 1990, and I got fired the next—

yeah, yeah. Okay, so you, you realized that maybe the corporate world was not to your personality, maybe?

Yeah, well, well, it was— it stung a little more than that. Um, it was actually a pretty good job for a 21-year-old guy in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was above average pay and flexible hours. I had now been married for 10 months. I did not enjoy calling my father-in-law and saying, hey, Ron, you know, you know, this funny thing happened the other day. But it was, it, it was a real blow to my, like, I'd never been fired from a job before. And it was a huge setback.

And I was, but I mean, you got it, right? Like, yeah, no, I understand why I got fired. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, I got it. I got it right away. But here's the lesson that really drove home. So 3 months later, after I get fired from this job, I actually got fired from 2 more jobs that summer. One of them was, I'd say both of them were for really stupid reasons. Kind of political reasons, like Perry asks too many good questions kind of reasons. Mm-hmm. But I'm 21 years old. I'm in the summer before my senior year of college, and I've now been fired 3 times. So I had this friend invited me to an Amway meeting, and the Amway meeting is talking about You need to own your own business because you can get fired at any time and there's no job security. And if you're, oh, you're 21 years old, well, you're going to— you think you're going to have a secure job and there is no secure job and you're going to die broke when you're 65 and you're going to go, you know, the whole shtick. And because I had been fired from those 3 jobs, I was suddenly much much more willing to listen to something like this than I ever possibly would have been had I not been fired from these jobs. And I actually thought, you know, maybe I should take this seriously. They're right. You know, you go out and get a job and it's a secure job until the day that it's not. And then, you know, and if you have a family and all the rest of it, like, So I get it. And so, um, in addition to that, I had also had a speaker business, and it was part-time, and it was just part-time money. But since I had been about 16 years old, I was building stereo equipment and selling it to people. And I knew from doing that that I did not know very much about business. I didn't know how to turn a little part-time hobby business into a full-time living. Um, but I thought making an actual living from a business would be a pretty good idea. And so that's how I got on the entrepreneur track. And so, you know, literally a year later after the professor had told me that, um, I was straddling, I was doing, going to engineering school. And I was going out and recruiting people into MLM. I was doing both of those at the same time and kind of going back and forth from one world to the other.

By the way, Amway has not died. You'd think it would have died. My son got solicited by somebody when he was working at Dillard's in the shoe department while he was still in school, and they picked him out. He has a very similar skill set. He's very good with people. Yeah. And he also has a very analytical brain. And they were like, this is— this is— they put a target on him. He, he, he negotiated that, navigated that, and, you know, obviously did not pursue that. But it's fascinating to me that they're still around. But Okay, let's, let's— I want to go back to this conversation you had with your professor because, you know, when, when people see things about you and they speak that to you, it has an impact like it did with you. And I've talked multiple times about the story when I was in Dallas at one of your events in a hot seat. And he said, well, Christian, you're an artist. And I actually took affront to that. I did not like that term. And when you explained it, I'm like, okay, yeah, I can buy that. I don't like the term artist, but I agree with what you're seeing—

saying.

And, you know, I was 45. I was old enough to have had that insight, but I didn't have that insight. I didn't understand that about myself. What do you— I have since said, I think the— so to retell the story for the audience, you defined it as artists and builders are the two types of entrepreneurs. Builders are ones that see an opportunity, a problem solution, and a way to make money, and they create a business because of the opportunity. And the artist is passion-driven, and therefore their motivation is different. I think of this more as a continuum of what What your primary motivation is. And I still wrestle with that because I see opportunities all the time and I just can't get excited about them because the money is not the primary motivator. Because I understand at some level that just making more money is not going to scratch any itch. Yeah. How have you navigated that?

Well, so to put a little more color on those terms, I think an artist is a person who does what they do out of a value of some kind of aesthetic or a pursuit of the truth or for some kind of intrinsic, for the intrinsic value of something. Or the enjoyment of something. So like when I worked at W.W. Grainger, Grainger is a wholesale company that sells fans and blowers and lighting and stuff. And everything about that company is business builder. There is not a speck of artist anywhere. It's pumps and fans and blowers and fittings. Right. And stuff like that. And an artistic person finds that to be incredibly boring. It's obviously a great business. It's been a multi-billion-dollar business for decades. And God bless them. I'm not putting that down. But an artist cannot just do anything for money unless there's a gun to their head and they just have to feed their family and they'll drive the Uber. Or, you know, or they'll deliver groceries or, but an artist will never be fulfilled just because they are making business transactions happen. An artist is somebody who, you know, they're making speakers because they like audio or they are, working, helping people's marriage problems because they care about marriage problems, or they, you know, it could even be somebody who is doing cryptocurrency because they want to reform the financial system, right? But there's some kind of underlying driving motivation that's based on their values, and it's not just about business processes. And, and so for me, I'm, I'm at least 75% artist, and business is absolutely a means to an end. And like, when, when I started making enough money, there was a couple years where I didn't even know how much I made. Now, I also found, as a person in your business immediately appreciates, that you cannot run a business and not know how much you're making. Sooner or later, that turns out bad. But as an indicator of my personality, like, I was obsessed with money, when I was broke. But when I was no longer broke, I didn't even want to think about it. Like, no, we got stuff to do. Like, let's go do the stuff. Hmm.

That's an interesting insight because I, yes, I could see that because as, as an engineer, you know, engineers are always the smartest people in the room and they know how everything works. Uh, that's why we don't have engineers as clients. Because they're going to tell you how to do your job. And it's interesting, accountants and engineers are cousins. Like, they're— they think very similarly.

Yes.

And it's interesting to me that you, as an engineer, having that engineering mind, didn't care or focus on that. That's interesting to me.

Well, so as an engineer, I found engineering school was a dreadful slog for about the first 2.5 years. In engineering school, you spend your entire freshman and sophomore year and some of your junior year just learning chemistry, math, physics, like really rudimentary stuff. And then about the time you get to your junior year, you start being able to do stuff with it. Right. And until we got to the part where you could do stuff with it, it was absolutely drudgery. And the thing that kept me going was I had built enough stereo equipment to know what I didn't know. I knew how to get a result, but I didn't know why it did what it did. And I had this very deep instinct that says, you need to know this and you can't chicken out just because you got a C+ in calculus.

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, I, I think that that translates to what, what I've said on this program multiple times, is that I don't care what your business is, whether you're a creative entrepreneur, if you identify as an artist, it, it, that does not matter. As a business owner, because the buck always stops with you, you have to know, as you said, a lot about a lot of things, you know, and you can't, you can't abdicate that responsibility just because you don't like it. Like, it will cause you problems, right? Like you said. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there are some foundational things as a business owner that you have to know. And, and finance and accounting is one of them.

Yes, as a matter of fact, we have a twice-a-week meeting called our heartbeat meeting, and we go through all the major numbers of the entire business in about 5 minutes every Tuesday and Friday. And I learned that if I have a heartbeat meeting and I know exactly how much money is in the checking account, and I know exactly how much money is coming in, a whole bunch of surprises go away that I really did not like, even though I was not intrinsically interested in that information. If I want the artistic part of my life to go smoothly and if I want my credit card to not get declined when I go to the restaurant, I need to do that Heartbeat meeting. So yes, everybody's got to have some accounting in their life.

Yeah, just like you were saying that, like, you know, you, you you knew in order to do what you wanted to do, like just with the speakers, like you know how to do it, but like you realized there was something lacking in your understanding.

Very much.

And you knew that you needed to know that.

Yes. Yes. Yeah.

One of the things I talk about in my book, Profit First for Creatives, is this paradigm, which you've kind of alluded to, that, and it came up as I was interviewing clients, that there's this false paradigm that business owners get into where they feel like, well, I can do the soul-sucking work that I don't really like to pay the bills. Or I can do what I'm really passionate about and starve. And my posse was that that's a false paradigm, that it's really about refocusing, repurposing your creativity into a different way. What would you say to that? And have you experienced that in your entrepreneurial journey?

Yeah, Megan Macedo has a saying. She is speaking to artists who are trying to have a business. And she says a lot of times if you're an artist, you can't always get paid to do your work, but you can be paid while you do your work.

Okay.

And what she means by that is, is people, people may not want to pay for the thing that you most want to create, but they will pay you to teach them how to play the piano, for instance, or like you find ways to weave your work into the transactional business structures. You find a way to weave the transactional business structures into your work. And so, like, usually I find that the thing that I'm most interested in, a customer may only be peripherally interested in it, but I can always find an intersection where my work has something to do with something they really care about that really does solve their problem. And it— and one can ride along with the other. And I can find— I can find some fulfillment. And so, like, an example of that would be that, you know, when I describe how I knew what I didn't know about stereo equipment and I needed to deeply understand engineering, Well, now I do, and I have a whole engineering toolbox. Well, I use that engineering toolbox in my marketing and my business strategies all the time. But I don't label it with engineering words. I label it with civilian words. I find language that people can relate to. Now, So, here's an example, I think, of what Megan was talking about. Maybe 5 years ago, I decided to offer a course to my audience called Marketing in 10 Dimensions. And what I said was, hey, this is not guaranteed. To be instantly actionable. You know, take this information and deposit it in the bank account next week. This is not that kind of course. However, well, so like if you're not sure about your next car payment, like just please ignore all of this. Right, right. But if you're willing to cut me some slack and you want to go on a little adventure, I'm going to run this course and I'm going to show you, I'm going to tell you the engineering and the math and the fractals and the nerdy science stuff behind all this language and the models that I do. It's going to be very trippy. And it's going to be serendipitous. Like, I can't promise you what you're going to get. But, you know, if you can afford to and you want to go on a little adventure, I promise it'll be completely different than anything else you ever took. And it'll be certainly interesting for some people. And if you don't like it, we'll give you a refund. So I had a surprisingly good uptake on that course. And I've had a few people give me absolutely flipping rave reviews of that. That was the most ingenious thing I have ever seen in my life. I would have never found that anywhere else. And really, I just gave them a map of my brain and they could take what they could take and they could leave what they could leave. And some of those people were not I'd say most of them, they weren't even technical people at all, but they picked up really beautiful things that they could relate to and they enjoyed it and they loved connecting the dots. Well, that actually describes my best customers. My best clients are people that love to go down a rabbit trail, love to have an adventure, love to have a surprise, love it when things go off topic. Oh, Oh, he's off topic now. Now it gets really interesting. Well, in business, in consulting or in teaching or whatever, it is possible to cultivate an audience that will indulge those things with you. And it's probably not ever going to be more than 5 or 10% of your audience. But my experience is, whoever you are, 5% of your audience will follow you almost anywhere.

Yes, yes. And I find it, you know, when you talk about marketing, um, my observation of those people that are in the space is they, they usually fall into one of two camps, and there are are aforementioned. They're either the true creatives, like they're the people that come up with these brilliant messaging or branding or marketing ideas that really deeply resonate with people. But there's not really, it's not scalable. It's not like they can't necessarily do that on demand. It's true inspiration, right? Yeah. And then the majority of the people in the marketing space are more on the analytical side. So like they're looking at the numbers. And I think that's what is truly the rocket fuel is when those two things combine.

Hey creatives, Delaina Ely here. I have a question for you. If you could pay yourself more, why aren't you doing it? For real. S-Corp is an option for you, the creative entrepreneur. To move your business to the next level, to pay yourself more, and to cut your tax savings down. Yeah, less money to the IRS. We want that, right? So why haven't you done it yet? What's going on? The reality is you probably have 50,000 questions in your brain. You don't know which way is up and down, and you're still too busy to do all those things plus also create, right? Well, the good thing for you is that Core Group is actually the place to be to get that S corporation section rolling. Yeah, we have an assessment. Let's see if you qualify. Come chat with me. Core Group, turning passion into profit.

I don't know if you and I have talked about Alchemy, Rory Sutherland's book. But, and you may have, hell, I may have gotten that as a recommendation from you. I don't even remember. But I love his, I love his book because he basically talks about the idea that people— this whole Age of Reason, it really was not a book about marketing. It was really more of a discussion about the failure of the Age of Reason. Yes. And how we think that everything's understandable, right? And we try to put people into that, which you talked about how people are usually either thing or process oriented or they're people, person oriented. But it's this strange overlap because no, people are not predictable as individuals or even as large groups. You just have to look to an economist to figure that out. But they do follow patterns, right?

Yeah.

And it's a mystery. It really is. It is a mystery that requires both aspects of your brain to— you're not going to solve it, but you can at least be guided by it.

Well, a long time ago, Gary Halbert said marketing is arithmetic and human psychology. That perfectly encapsulates. And, you know, funny, even older story. When I was a junior in high school, I sold a pair of speakers to another kid in school. And he said, "You should take the marketing class. You would like it." I was like, "What?" And he convinced me to take the marketing class. It was okay. It wasn't great. But I think my friend in a very primitive way figured out that marketing is both of those things. And when I a huge leap forward in my sales career was— so I, I struggled. I struggled in Amway. Then I got a sales job as a manufacturer's rep. I struggled in that, like being a traditional salesperson who goes and sits down with people and sells them stuff. I always struggled with that. Then I discovered direct marketing in the late '90s. Before it was mainstream. The internet made it mainstream, but it was not mainstream. It was very redheaded stepchild back then. And what it was for me, it was a version of sales that I could understand because it was linear and analytical and experimental and scientific, like Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. And the engineer, the linear engineer part of me that needed to understand processes and steps, all of a sudden, when I was learning how does direct mail work, it was much more concrete than listening to a Zig Ziglar tape and him telling me like how to sell pots and pans to some lady in her kitchen. Which I found, I always found that very difficult. Like, I would never say that to somebody. I guess it's natural for him to say that. I would never, those words would never escape my lips. Like, I can't figure out how to make, I hate knocking on doors. And all of a sudden, what I discovered was I don't have to knock on doors. The postman can drop the letter in the mailbox. And the message can be delivered that way. And a sales pitch, it's essentially what you would say to somebody in person, but it's all written down and it's on linear pieces of paper that have a beginning and a middle and an end. And it has these ingredients and this is the list of ingredients. And it's like baking a cake. And all of a sudden it was like, oh, Oh, I like that. And I remember going on sales calls and then jumping in my mind over to, this is just like a sales letter. I need a headline. I need a promise. I need a guarantee. I need to rub some salt in the wound. And now I'm talking to a person and I just go through that sequence. And amazingly, it works. And I was doing it backwards from the way it was invented. The way it was invented was somebody who sold pots and pans you know, somebody else sat and wrote down what was happening. Right. And, but I read it out of a marketing book and then I learned how to sell. And, and, and so, and then you have that human psychology element, which is what Rory Sutherland is all about. Roy, Rory Sutherland is saying, people are not linear. They are not spreadsheets. They are not logical. The shortest point, the distance between two lines is never, ever, ever, ever a straight line. It's always like folding the time-space continuum of the universe and popping through a wormhole. That's how every, all the interesting stuff actually works. And it's like a field manual in the weirdness of the universe. That, that's what you're talking about. And so one of the things that I like about marketing is that it has a place for people across the entire spectrum. And being deeply embedded in the marketing industry now for 25 years, there are so many types of characters.

Yes.

Like there is not just like one kind of marketing guy. Or gal at all. They are all different. There's like, it's like a trip to the zoo, you know, there, there's snakes and reptiles and there's birds and there's cheetahs and there's elephants, there's everything.

I want to, I want to wrap up by asking a, a completely different question. So we, talk a lot on this show. I haven't in a while. So this would be a good refresher. We talk about money mindset and how what beliefs you pick up before you get into business follow you into business. You don't automatically assume a different persona when you start a business. What were some of the money mindset beliefs that you brought into the business that didn't serve you, that caused you problems?

I think I came into business with a crippling, debilitating set of beliefs that I have had to systematically and ruthlessly dismantle for 40 years. So I was a pastor's kid. So here's a, here's a story from my childhood. My dad worked at a nonprofit organization called Back to the Bible, and he was an editor of one of their magazines. And my mom, my mom went to the store. The cupboards were bare. She had 18 cents in her pocket. She went to the store. The cheapest thing at the store was a can of beans for 19 cents. And she prayed for some kind of an answer. And the stock boy came over and marked the beans from 19 cents down to 18 cents. And she bought a can of beans and the family got a meal. And Dad went to work and said, "I can't feed my family." And his boss told him, "Well, if we gave you a raise, you'd make more money than Mr. Epp." And Mr. Epp was a married guy with no kids who had taken a vow of poverty. And so, You know, so no, you can't have a raise. And, and, and, and so I— and so he worked, he worked at that organization, and then later he was a pastor at a church. And I always knew that when I got a pair of tennis shoes or my allowance or we went to the store that that money was coming from a little old lady with blue hair who wrote a $10 check from her Social Security. And it's like the widow's mite in the New Testament, you know. And so, you know, like take as little as you can. And I had a very negative perception of salespeople based on the vacuum cleaner salesman and the used car salesman that we ever met. And so my feet were like pressed hard on the brake financially, even though I go to some Amway meeting and here's how to make more than $32,000 as an electrical engineer. And even though intellectually I'm on board with doing well financially, emotionally, I had all kinds of blocks.

So, how did that show up in your business?

Well, it showed up in the form of baloney sandwiches and ramen soup. The earliest form, I think, was doing multi-level marketing for years, making no money, and not pulling the red lever and saying, hey, this doesn't work. I'm worth more than that because I treated it like a mission.

Mm.

Yeah. Rather than treating it like a business and getting paid first.

So where did that flip for you when you started your business? Like, can you recall like the first instance where you're like, no, I actually want to get paid?

Well, so it started with bottoming out financially and getting fired from a sales job and realizing I'm literally 2 months away from selling our house and moving to Nebraska and living in my wife's parents' house and like getting ourselves back together because We were in so much debt and this isn't working. Um, and, and then I got, I, I, I finally had to get completely honest with myself about what I was good at, what I was not good at, what was actually working and what was not working. And I formulated an idea of what kind of sales job would actually work for me. And then I found that job. A few months later. And I'll never forget the first commission check. It was the biggest paycheck I'd ever gotten. And I breathed a huge sigh of relief because it meant the wolf was no longer at the door. Okay.

Take that further into the business. Where did you— Where did you become comfortable with making money? Like, when did you become comfortable with that idea? Like, it's okay.

Like, well, so it was probably in that same sales job.

Like, you weren't doing something bad for making money.

Well, so one of my— so one of the things I learned from the story of my dad asking for a raise is it's very disingenuous to ask for money. That is one of the conclusions that I ingested. Okay. Asking for money is gauche. Asking like, well, so in that job, I worked out in addition to my regular commission, I worked out a deal with my boss that every time I publish magazine articles or PR pieces, wearing the marketing hat, I would get a set amount of money for different kinds of collateral that I put out and got published. And so I would take my magazine articles to my boss and I would put them out on the desk and I would say, so this, this one's $500, this one's $250, this one's $100, you know, you owe me $650. And he'd go, "Um, nah, I'll give you $300." And it turned out this was always a negotiation every single time. And I hated it. But my wife was on the other side needing to pay the mortgage. And so it's like, well, you're stuck in between. So who are you going to piss off? Are you going to piss off the boss or are you going to piss off your wife? I'm going to piss off my boss. And so I, every month I would have this fight with my boss over how much my articles were worth. And I finally got, I got it drilled into my head. It's actually okay to negotiate and ask for money and assert your value. I learned the hard way to do that. Now, in my marketing education, I grew up in the land of Dan Kennedy. And Dan is very good at teaching people how to assert their value and charge high fees. And I slowly, I slowly bent my thinking from a Walmart mentality that like, you know, the cheapest price of peanut butter is the most virtuous thing that you can do to a high-end consulting mentality, which is, so here, I'll give you a moment, a major moment that I think answers your question. I had built a website for a client for $3,000. And the client was fighting me about something about the website. And I had recently joined a program with John Carlton. And John allowed me to send in questions. And I sent him a big long question about the fight I was having with the client. And John wrote me back and he goes, 'You did all of that for only $3,000? You should have charged them $15,000.' He said, 'Listen, Perry, you're not a mouth in the food chain. You are the food chain.

If the CEO's hand isn't shaking when he writes you the check, you're not charging enough.' Yes, because the reason why you were having to fight over the $3,000 that you'd agreed to was because he, your customer, did not understand your value.

Right, exactly. And so the mentality completely flipped.

Mm-hmm.

You need to be the most expensive person under consideration. And you need to make a completely coherent, cogent, unassailable argument for why you are worth that amount of money and why it's going to return in profit, in revenues, in saved advertising cost. And so for years now, my website has said Perry Marshall is one of the world's most expensive business consultants. And what it does, it forces me to continually set the standard and raise the bar. I had a seminar last spring and a very, um, highly respected marketer named Paris Lampropoulos came to the microphone and he goes, you just set the bar again. Hearing it from him, I was like, I set the bar because he would never say that if it wasn't true. And that is so different than Walmart or Kmart and whatever. I mean, we grew up with stories of they marked the can of beans down a cent so my mom could buy them. It's completely different. And I want to add one other little story. Last summer, I was hosting a client meeting and we were at dinner. And this client said, he made some comment like, well, you know, you've gotten rid of all your financial head trash, but I've still got mine. And I go, hold on. No, no, no. I said, I still have financial head trash. And I would be doing you a disservice if I allowed you to think that I just like, I don't know, wave some magic wand and that I never have those issues anymore. I said, I still have to fight through my cobwebs.

Well, I'm glad you said that because my statement was going to be, it sounds like that may be something that you're still struggling with, right? Because I think you're exactly right. Those beliefs that we pick up as young people, I don't know the psychology of it, but my guess is that our brains are so pliable at that point that those beliefs are so deeply ingrained and buried that I don't think that you can get rid of them. I think the best we can do is to be aware of them and work through them. I don't think they ever go away.

I think you're basically right. And I think what we do is we wire pathways that become more efficient and more effective than the old pathways. And they just become like, you know, if you want to go from Chicago to LA, you don't go on Route 66. You go on an interstate. Right. So Route 66 is still there. And I think, I think that's what it's like. And what I've found that I've had to do, I've had to reframe the old belief. So, for example, a lot of my work now is in science and medicine. And I learned how to ask for the money in marketing. But when I went and started a nonprofit called Reversing Cancer, and eventually I became the president of a cancer early detection company, and, and I am now doing something that you could easily frame as ministry work or, you know, doing the good work of, you know, solving the world's problems and not just selling items on e-commerce. I had to, I had to revisit all of those old beliefs and push through another layer of learning to ask for the check. And in some of those situations, it's created huge amount of pushback from sometimes it might be, oh, but this is holy work. Why are you asking for money? Sometimes it's, well, this is a venture startup and that's my money, not your money, and anything in between. And so I don't I don't think these things go away. I think you learn to live with them, just like, you know, if you're in athletics, your body has certain things that will do and certain things it won't do. And you just learn to work around them to do whatever it is that you need to do.

Perry, I think we could go on all day. However, our time is short. If someone wanted to hire the most expensive consultant in the space, how would they go about doing that?

You can go to PerryMarshall.com. I suggest what anybody should do is read my book, 80/20 Sales and Marketing. And if you go to Sell8020.com, S-E-L-L-8-0-2-0.com, You can buy it for just shipping, which is $7 in the US, and that book will completely change your life. I have had hundreds of people tell me, "Oh my word, that book changed my life." So, yeah, I would start with the 80/20 book.

That's what got me addicted. That was the crack cocaine that you gave away to hook me.

Any accountant can understand that book.

Thank you.

It's a numbers book. Yeah.

No, it is a brilliant book. I highly recommend it. Listeners, we'll 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, you're welcome to shoot us a message and tell us what you'd like, and maybe we'll get rid of Perry. Until then, ta-ta for now.