Rise To The Top: Stop Comparing And Start Growing

What if the focus was getting better rather than trying to get rich? What if chasing getting rich means you chase advertising, you chase promotion, you chase the next buzz, the next hottest thing, but it never builds a long term tail. And I see where the world has shifted when we're all connected on these devices that are in our pocket. Fundamentally, you can't advertise your way to success, you can't hack the system on your way to success.

It has changed completely.

And if you look, look at the.

Most successful companies in the world, the.

Ones that barely advertise, in fact, they don't have a budget for advertising. They don't need it. Why?

Because their product is so good that.

You can't help but talk about it. You can't help but to refer it.

So today I want to share one.

Of the biggest mistakes most people make from a guy who's been advertising and marketing every day of his life for almost 30 years. I did infomercials for 20 years before the Internet existed. I spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing and advertising. And we still do, my partner Tony Robbins and I, we still do the biggest promotions on the planet. We've done 12 events now that averaged a million people registered for the event. So don't get me wrong, I am not trashing marketing, I am not trashing sales. But it's unsustainable. If you're running marketing into a company that's like a colander, there's holes in it and all your money's leaking out the back. And when it leaks out the back, what do you do? You got, you need more leads, you need more clients. Oh my God. And then the more you need leads and the more you need clients, the cost per acquisition for your client goes up. And then the more you, you scrape.

Off the cream of your ideal client, you start getting second rate clients.

And that's why most people online, many people online have a campaign that wears out. They don't have a real business. So in today's world, what I'm going to challenge you to do today is to go upstream to get better. Focus on being better, focus on delivering more, focus on living inside the mind of your prospect and your client and truly understanding their path, truly understanding their fears, their desires, their goals, where they get stuck. You might be younger and you're dealing with an older audience and you don't.

Realize that technology jams them up. And you think, well, they should know.

That most people don't take, most business.

Owners don't take the time to understand.

All the pains of their clients, all.

The desires of their clients, and they find something and build something that they feel is great.

And then all of their energy is.

On marketing and sales and more leads and cheaper leads and affiliates and promotion and roas and all those pieces and.

You need all of that. But today's world, the monster money, the real success, the real wealth comes from over delivering, comes from shocking people. I thought it was going to be this. It was 10 times better. You want people at Starbucks talking about you and your product and your business, not saying, hey, you know, they're okay, right? Listen, I have people that work for me in so many different areas in my personal life and mowing my lawn and doing my gardening and taking care.

Of my pool and the hundreds of employees that we have at Mastermind and.

All of those things. And there are some people that I can't stop talking about. There's some people that are great people, but they just kind of fill the gap. But I wouldn't refer them. You want to be the company, you want to start the business or scale the business that people can't help but talk about. You see, I heard an analogy once that farmers plant summer corn for a quick cash crop because they can get two yields in one season. Meaning they can plant the corn, it grows, they harvest it, they sell it, they get cash, they plant it again, they harvest it and get cash before winter comes. Two yields, it's a cash crop. But you don't make consistent and a lot of money with corn with a cash crop. Then there's apple farm. I grew up in a little town in upstate New York where it was mostly apple trees. And I used to wonder who would want to be an apple farmer. Especially when I would see a new farmer clear land, right? Clear acres and acres of wood and.

Then plant little sticks.

They look like my pen, right?

Just this little apple tree, except it's.

About, you know, I don't know, two feet tall, nothing on it, and plant thousands of these. I'd drive by it, two years later, there's still no apples. What did that farmer know? Why were those apple farmers the richest people in my little town? Because an apple tree, once it produces fruit, will bear fruit for a hundred years after year after year. So we have to look at our business in that way. Are we just putting people into a product that has holes in it? We're not.

We're spending the time on the marketing.

We're spending time on the idea that.

The ideation, the innovation of Getting people of maximizing our sales, maximizing our opt in page, maximizing our sales page. But are we really putting the time and effort, the long term apple tree effect into our product and service? Is our product?

Is our service so good that you get repeat customers? You see, if you get repeat customers and customers who refer you or customers.

Who stay a part of your company or buy more of what you have.

Then you don't have to advertise for them.

If you have a one and done, then every Monday you're starting over. Every first of the month you're starting over. Every quarter you're starting over. Every year you're starting over. It's just not sustainable.

That's why most people you see, I've met, you know, I haven't been in an Uber in quite some time. You know, many Uber drivers I met. So I just couldn't handle the churn. I couldn't handle waking up every day and have to go after it. So I said to hell with it, I'm out. It's in many cases is the fundamentals of success we're missing. You see, we're all connected again with this little device in our pocket. And we're connected in a way where we could share when something's horrible fast, can't we? And good news travels slow, bad news lightning speed.

Over promise and under deliver.

Oh, people know really quick. Under promise, over deliver though it's slow, it's like an apple tree. It builds momentum. You know. It was 27 years ago, 28 years ago. I was watching an infomercial with Tony Robbins and man just felt like the guy was talking to me. And I never bought a product before. I didn't know what the knowledge business, the information industry, it wasn't even a thing. And it was just kind of like Tony Robbins and a few other people and people he got it from, like Dale Carnegie and Earl Nightingale and Napoleon Hill and you know, some of the goats of this industry. Long story short, I had never bought a product before. So I felt like Tony was talking to me. I bought everything he had and I got that course. And it was a weird time in my life of transition. We've all been through those transitions. I was doing okay. I had a collision shop, I had an auto sales, I had a tow truck and I was building houses, had some apartments. I'd done better than anybody in my entire family. But you know that feeling when there's just like, you know, there's this next thing that you're dying to do, right? I wanted that Next thing, wasn't sure what it was at the time, so I get Tony's. I think it was personal power. Sony Walkman, way back in the day with the orange earbuds and cassettes. That's how long ago. This big cassette player on the side of my body, and I'm listening to this, and I didn't know what to expect. I had no idea there's a purpose to me telling you this. I didn't know what to expect. As I started listening, I felt like the man was talking to me. But I remember this feeling at first of like, man, I just paid four or five hundred bucks for information. All right, let's see how this goes. You know, read a book, I guess, before YouTube. So. But when I started listening to it, I had this feeling of it being so valuable, so priceless, that this man had learned this stuff from all the.

People he studied, starting with Jim Rohn and all this. All these great. All the books he read, the experience he had.

I remember feeling, wow, this guy shared. This is worth millions of dollars.

My life's gonna change.

And it did. I made big, bold moves after that. I realized life happened for me, not to me.

I jumped in this industry.

I decided, hey, this man saw me, what he knows, I'm gonna sell and.

Teach people what I know.

But the feeling of him over delivering to me is just my personal experience. It made me sit down and write a letter to him. I mailed a letter to Tony Robbins 27 years ago saying, thank you. Didn't know that, you know, a decade or so later, we'd meet, become best friends in the world, and now we're partners, and we talk every day of our lives. But that feeling will never go away in my life. And I know there's been times in my history where I've loved my product, but I knew it could get better. And I want to tell you, there's this connection. I want you to hear me on this one. There's this connection that happens that when.

You know, you go from a good product, a good service to freaking lights out, blow your hair back, greatest thing on the planet, something changes inside of you. Your depth of persuasion, your depth of influence exponentially grows because you get this feeling, this is so, so damn good. When you.

Let me ask you something.

When you go to your favorite movie.

Or you watch a movie that becomes your favorite, can you.

Do you love telling people about it or a book you read or a meal that you have? Well, when your product and your service is so freaking good that you Worked on focusing on getting better, not just getting rich. You focused on apple trees that you knew would be referred and people would love that you replaced short term profits for a real massive company.

When you know you did that and.

You know you have something amazing, people say to me, dean, why are you and Tony so good influence? It's because we love what we do.

So much that we feel bad not getting in people's hands. Now, where that backfires, if it really isn't the thing, I have to tell you, Tony and I own a company as I'm filming this called Mastermind. We're co founders, co owners of Mastermind. We help people do just that, right? We help people unlock their, their greatest asset, their life experience, and turn it into a business, a thriving business, right? I have to tell you, the first six years, first five years, I believe I've only been doing it 70 years, 74 years between the two of us, right? And I love the product we created. Loved it. Our first launch, the knowledge Business Blueprint, many, many years ago, seven, eight years ago, was the biggest launch anyone had ever seen. And people went nuts over the product. I have to tell you, if I'm going to pull back the curtain and be honest, I loved the education, loved it. I love that we updated every year. We, we learned as we were going.

We learned where people got stuck.

We invested in the product. I mean, one of the products alone we're over $7 million in to get to the point where we're at now, right? Energy, putting money back in long term. But I have to tell you, in the last 12 months, I know it's everything we ever dreamed of. AI wasn't available eight years ago. Now we got AI tools weren't available that they were so pricey. Now they're available at a discounted rate. So to have the education, the AI, the tools, it's not about me selling you Mastermind. What it's about is conversions have gone up, stick has gone up, people talking about us has gone up because it's sometimes takes a little longer. The damn apple tree takes a little longer.

We are at a point where we.

Love this product so much that now we can't help but move forward. It's being referred at a rate we can't even, we've never even imagined. So I hope I've stressed enough that in today's world, you cannot market your way to success. You can't sell your way to success. If you do, it's temporary. You're just hustling sweet corn. You're hustling summer corn. You're putting money into a colander and.

Then you got to figure out how to do it.

And then again that self fulfilling prophecy, if it doesn't work out, if they're.

Not sticking, if they're not referring, if they're not buying more products, then you got to go get more people and.

Then the lead cost goes up and.

Then you got this thing.

And then that's why people go poof. 95% of all businesses out of business within 10 years. Why? I believe this is one of the biggest factors. So what could you do about it? Listen. Listen more today. Find a Facebook group. I don't care if you're 100 million dollar year company or you're just getting started. Find a Facebook group or an Instagram or LinkedIn. Find where your people live and go hear their pain. Truly listen. See, when we create something again, I have to be honest, 74 years of Tony and I do some of the stuff we create. I'm like, I know they think it's overwhelming, but they gotta do it. Cause we know this.

We really listened.

We found where they got stuck, we.

Greased the Runway, we try to fill those spots again. Have we always been perfect?

Hell no.

But if you listen, go hang out.

Where your ideal client hangs out and understand their pain, understand where they get.

Stuck, understand what they're afraid of, understand where they've felt ripped off before, understand why they worry about doing business with you. And also understand their goals, their desires, their dreams better than anyone on the planet. And then look at your product, your.

Service through a new lens.

Look at it as if it was your mother, your sister, your cousin, someone you love, your child that you love is going through. And they have those fears, they have those dreams, they have those roadblocks and.

Fix it for them.

Invest in getting better. Stop focusing on the metrics of how rich we could get or the marketing campaign that made you money last month. Because then next month and the month after, you got to come up with the next marketing campaign. If you're putting me in a product that sucks, that they don't refer, they don't love, and they don't buy from you again. If you truly want to build something big, something magical, something that transcends anything you ever imagined, then in today's world.

More than ever, you got to invest in the product. You got to go deeper. There's so many people that want to do their own thing. I get it. You should. I'm just going to be honest. You should. But so Many people take that career mindset that they want to run away from. They come over to the entrepreneurial side and it takes a little bit to truly understand marketing. It's a little uncomfortable for some people. And then they get start getting sales and they start getting momentum and a campaign happens. They realize, wow, if I put the right ad out, if I put the right emotion, I do this right thing. On social, I get sales and money goes into my bank account and we get tricked into believing that's success. Success is when you get people saying, thank you for this product. I can't wait to tell my family about thank you for the transfers, thank you for whatever it is that you do. Imagine being the person people can't wait to talk about their friend to their friends about at Starbucks, texting online. Think of the biggest companies in the world these days. They're not running ads every second of every day. They're over delivering. So audit your product, audit your service, audit your customer experience. Look at the path. Live inside their fears, live inside their goals, live inside their desires. Be a secret shopper in your own company.

Look for the holes. Invest in your product, invest in your.

Service for the long term. Plant those apple trees and your competition will be gone in three months or three years and you'll be here for a lifetime. I hope that helps.