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Thanks for joining us today on Street Smarts with Harvey Mackay, where the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement. And now here's your host, managing partner and co founder of harveymckayacademy.com, cliff Jones.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, Cliff Jones with Harvey McKay Academy. And today with us, we have a very exciting special guest, Alex Mendocian, longtime friend, mentor, advisor to the one and only Harvey McKay. And Alex, welcome. Harvey calls you the Warren Buffett of digital marketing. I think that's pretty cool.

Well, that's because I go back to 1995 and for digital marketers, that makes me BG, which is before Google. So I'm a dinosaur in the digital marketing world.

Well, I've known you, I've known of you for years. I gave you money, followed you. And then through Harvey and the Academy, we met, we become friends. Today, whether you're listening to this on the Street Smarts podcast or watching the video on the Academy channel, the focus is how we help authors succeed. Because, Alex, what you're going to be talking about is virtual book tour tour principle. The virtual book tour principle. And this is, this is a very powerful formula based on decades of experience, your direct experience working with authors, writing books, trying to sell books. The game's changed. So why don't you begin by telling everybody a little bit about yourself and why this whole book, virtual book project is such a big thing for you right now.

Well, I started on the Internet in 1995, coming from the infomercial and direct response spot television business. The first commercial I ever purchased media for Harvey was in, and that was Tony Robbins. The personal power one going back to 1991, if you can believe that. So I saw Harvey and he said, there's three reasons why I recommend, you know, getting this program. And these were cassettes back then. So I'm dating myself. It's not eight track tape, but it's a cassette. No CDs, he said, because it works. It works, it works. And I'd never met him at that point and I thought, wow, I like him. You know, it's kind of like Warren Buffett's two rules of making money. Rule number one, don't lose money. Rule number two, never forget rule number one. So I felt I could relate to him. But my expertise or my training is in direct response. If there's no response, then there's no purpose in doing marketing. I don't do general advertising like the Madison Avenue people. And I just kind of fell in to interviewing authors. I was in Larry King's home, thanks to Harvey. And he said he had interviewed 5,000 people over his lifetime, probably more now. I've interviewed 4,800 people since 1993. And what I learned is when someone has a book and they want to establish themselves as an authority on the topic of their book, they will do anything. They will bend over backwards to get on an interview to sell that book. Because there's this narrow window, usually about six weeks if you're with a traditional publisher. If you're self published, it's much, much longer. And I wanted to change all of that, because what they would do back in the days, and I'm good friends with Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield, is they would go to bookstore, to bookstore to bookstore to bookstore, and live out of suitcases and travel and maybe sell about 20 or 25 books per book signing. Some people would bring their books and want a free consultation as they're signing the book. I did that at a Learning Annex event in Manhattan when I first met Harvey in 1995. So I thought that was very inefficient and ineffective. And so this thing of this process of the virtual book tour where you could be at your. In your home, like I am right now, it's early in the morning as we're recording this, or you could be in your office and you could get the word out and then repurpose, you know, change the format of that interview. Authors make money not writing books, but selling books. And so you could have the video like we have today, and then you can pull out the audio, and then you can have a written transcript which you can enhance, and that becomes a promotion vehicle for the book. That makes you an authority, author authority on that subject. So my goal is to teach authors how to write one book every five years versus writing a book year after year after year, because it's very, very difficult to do those things. So it's just a promotional and repurposing concept that started in 2002 when Al Gore visited a bookstore near me. I live in Puerto Madera, California, which is just north of San Francisco, downtown San Francisco, about eight miles. And I went to the bookstore after he and his former wife, Tipper Gore. It was called Joined at the Heart. That was their book by Owl Books. I said, how many books did you sell? And the person behind the counter said, man, it was the best we've ever had. I mean, I think we sold four or five times as many books that we've ever sold. And I said, how many? And she said, about 440. And I thought, gosh, 440, that's about $2 a book. He probably got an advance, and that's maybe $900 against the advance. He didn't even pay for his first class ticket for himself. Right. So that made no sense. So back then it was teleseminars. It later morphed into webinars with video. And then today it's Facebook Live because thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and his sister, Randy Zuckerberg, who did the first Facebook Live ever with Katy Perry, you can click this one button that is called share, you know, and, and that five letter word allows you to be on everyone else's Facebook pages. And it's democratizing the broadcast just like Steve Jobs did with itunes and with music. So we can dive deeper into that. But I think you just need to write one book every five years because you have an editorial calendar in getting the content out with your table of contents.

I notice today, probably like you do, a lot of successful business owners have a book in them. They're getting a book out of them onto the market, juggling that like Harvey did for decades, growing a company, leading a company, selling books. Unlike Harvey McKay, who sold 10 million copies of seven New York Times best selling books and growing, unlike the best selling New York Times authors, today the games change for authors. So talk a little bit about what the reality is for authors and even getting one book to sell any number of copies is all about. Then we're going to go into the formula of your virtual book principle.

Okay? This may be offensive to some authors watching right now, and it may fly in the face of what many publishers believe is true. I think the publishing business out of New York and any other city or part of the world, I think it's obsolete because of all the different types of media that have come out. So I believe the purpose of the book isn't so much to make money from the sales of the book. In many cases, it's a 250 page business card. You know, it's an authority. I would call it an asset. It's an artifact of authority where you hand it to someone and looks like you've done some work. So I don't look at making money from the book itself. I look at making money through different iterations of the book. I have a colleague, his name is Paul Culligan. He and I wrote a book in 2007 which I think 90% of it now is no longer relevant. And it was called the Business Podcasting Bible. And the reason it's no longer relevant is because podcasting has changed over the years. We sold 200 copies, I believe maybe 250 if we're lucky on Amazon. But we made several million dollars from that book because the table of contents, the six chapters turned into a podcast secrets course, which we did a couple million dollars from in the following year. So you can turn a book into a course. You can take a book and put it on eight and a half by 11 inch sheets of paper, drill three holes down the side, put it on a three ring binder and you know, now you have something that's much more valuable. The same number of words, same content, but it's more valuable. You could turn that into audio. We have audible these days, but you can have a how to course. The book can end up becoming a two day workshop. The book can be a membership site of content, the book can be a series of Facebook live every week, you know, once a week, or it can be a podcast. So rather than changing content, rather than going to the next topic like many authors do, you've done a lot of work in developing a table of content contents and you have all the pages, many of which never made the book because you know of the revisions and the editing. And so why not have that radically repurposed for at least a year, you know, week after week after week and get this net out to fish instead of having bait on a hook with one fishing rod, as many authors do. Most authors sell lots of books. In fact, most of the books that don't get sold get recycled and they're turned into toilet paper, which most people don't know. And that's not a joke, that's absolutely true. So if you've killed a few trees because you've written a book, why not repurpose it electronically so that you become an authority on the topic that the book is about?

This is a phenomenal topic and right on point. Let's just reverse this for a second and I'll just inject my story. I have four of the world's worst books co written ever. I invested a decent amount of money, time and energy getting them through a non traditional publisher to market. And what I know is my shelves are full of those books, they're on Amazon and nobody's bought them. However, in those books were the seeds, the genesis of my core coaching program. It became a workshop. And I've coached, as you're just saying, coached and trained thousands of entrepreneurs in the system now called clarity, which will become the next book. But right now I'm growing a company. I don't have time to write a book. Harvey holds me accountable. But the point you're making is authors. Unless you're Harvey McKay or somebody extraordinary, which even today the rules have changed, Harvey's not getting big advances for books anymore. Like you said, the publishing industry is dramatically different. But if you are passionate about the way you add value to people, your reader and you write a book, what happened to me and no name was I had instant credibility from the book with the famous names. And then people saw me differently in the business world and it was easier for me to promote and sell my coaching programs, which turned into a lot of money. I don't talk about money. Stuff money as you talk about and live. It's a byproduct of the good we're doing in the world. But I want to take people into your process for this virtual book tour. Because as long as everybody's clear at this point that a book serves a highly useful purpose in a number of ways, getting us clear and aligned with our vision, our message, vetting it through publishers and editors and people who help us make a better product, and then we end up with this body of work. And like Harvey said when we started the academy, I said, harvey, why the heck would you want to do this crazy online stuff? He says, cliff, I want a legacy. I want to change millions more lives. And you can figure this stuff out for me. And I don't want to travel and count on selling books anymore. And here we are and you're talking about that. You've taught online for years. You travel all over the world teaching this stuff. Let's take everybody into the kind of, the guts, the blueprint, we don't have time to go through it all today of the virtual book tour principle.

Okay? What a virtual book tour is, is like a book signing that you would go into physical bookstores, only you're doing it once and you're giving the backstory of the book. You're explaining the book. So I've done three of them with Harvey. And I'm the one who went to Harvey originally and said, why don't we repurpose your life's work? You know, your son, your daughters, you know, they're not going to be your legacy content wise. They do other stuff. Why don't we take your books and repurpose it? And the net result was the Harvey MacKay Roundtable, which still lives on with reunions. And then there's now the intensive that you put together, which are two day events. That's a repurposing structure from the body of work that he's done. So the virtual book tour is having a book and launching it. Now we have Amazon. So It's I think 24 cents out of every dollar spent online goes to Amazon. And Jeff Bezos love them or loathe them, it's true. And so that's a buying environment just like ebay is. It's not Google which attracts browsers. It's not Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn which attracts browsers. These are buyers that are going there. So what we do is the book is written and we recommend self publishing because a traditional publisher doesn't make it easy for us to do this because they have limitations. They're usually multimillion dollar companies. And so you can't mess around with irresistible offers and things like that. So the book is written and the virtual book tour is an interview. I usually do the interview, which is like a Larry King exchange with the author. I read the book and for about 40 minutes the author explains the book. And we take the Kindle version, which is the digital version. It's Amazon's digital version and we take it down to 99 cents. And the reason why we take it down to 99 cents and we do that for about seven to 10 days is so people buy it. And so if a CEO has 500 employees, the 500 employees could be reimbursed $1. And now there are 500 sales instantly. Now that creates an Amazon bestseller, which isn't difficult to do, but then it allows you to become a bestseller on the Wall Street Journal and USA Today and New York Times is very difficult. But now they're counting digital sale. So when you have a, you have a person purchasing a kindle version for 99 cents now you can have a certified review on Amazon. So when you get a certified review on Amazon and you have a hundred of them that are five stars now the algorithm kicks in and you start showing up with little pop up boxes. And if you bought this, then you might want to look at this. And you know Amazon does a really, really good job without even advertising of selling stuff. And so you just tip the scales in your favor of selling that. Now you can bring the Kindle version back up to the whatever price you have, maybe eight or nine dollars and then the physical version. But once you have an Amazon best seller, then Amazon is working and you have a physical book. If you want to have speaking gigs after the virtual book tour is done, you can say, hey, I'll speak For free. If you buy 500 books at $20, well that's a $10,000 speaking fee. Not a lot, but it's worthwhile. And you can do a four hour talk, you know, with, with a break in between the two hour segments for an entire company. And they have the book, that's the study guide, that's the how to course, and you speak and dive deeper into that book. And then as a bonus, you have them go to the virtual book tour recording, which I do on Facebook Live these days. They used to be teleseminars and webinars and it becomes a bonus gift to drill even deeper. And once you have the reviews, once you have the book sold on Amazon and once you have bestseller status, then you become even more of an authority. Because of a little Starburst that says best seller, that book can be turned into a course and put that into a membership site. That book in the table of contents could be a podcast over a 52 week period, it could be a sequence of articles. So you take the content and rather than writing the new book in the following year, which is a lot of work, you know, you don't see your kids for a while when you're writing a book. I was writing my book from 1am to 5am in the morning and I'd be exhausted going to work. So you're casting a bigger net through repurposing the book, which is in printed form, repurposing it on YouTube, on your YouTube channel, on Twitter, with thousands of tweets, on LinkedIn with video, one minute videos and little excerpts from the book. So you already have the raw material and you're promoting your topic, you're not promoting the book. If you looked at a hub and spoke scenario like a bicycle wheel. I used to be a professional cyclist, so I use this metaphor. The hub is the message, the hub, the wheel is the target market or audience. And then the spokes, the media, all the different media forms, people think the book is the hub. The book is not the hub. You're the hub in a bicycle wheel. You are the message, you are whatever topic it's expressed through you. The spokes are all the different repurposing channels and a book is another spoke. So if you have one spoke, that's not a wheel. If you have two, that's not a wheel. But if you have 24, then that's a wheel. So it's just redefining what the book stands for. And the net result is making a lot more profit. We've done this With Jack Canfield, we've done it with Harvey, we've done it with the CEO and founder of Business Network International, Ivan Meisner, and many other people. There's a lot of smart people who think the book is this message that they're getting out. And all it is is another vehicle and another channel to get that message out.

There's one, I think, huge thing I'm hearing you say, Alex, that people could take away possibly is the money's not in the book. I know unless you are a major best selling author, there's way more money to be made in exactly what you're talking about. Repurposing, meaning taking the core body of work that would go into a book and distributing it in many ways to generate revenue through coaching programs, workshops, online training courses, all of which happens here at Harvey McKay Academy, happened at the predecessor of the academy of the university. So if you doubt any of this works, ladies and gentlemen, know Alex and I have lived it, Harvey's lived it. Alex does this routinely. But Alex, this presumes people have a book in some marketable shape or form, doesn't it? And if a person doesn't have a book, I mean, we got a lot of wannabe authors. What do you tell people that don't have a book about getting a book ready to hit your platform?

Well, those who don't have a book have a much better advantage because a book is the written word. And the written word requires video and audio if you're going to be repurposing. If you don't have a book and you decide to do a video podcast or a weekly video show on YouTube or on Facebook Live like I do every Friday at 12 noon. I've done it for the past six years. Then from that content, you give it to an editor. I call it a content manager on my team. Her name is Jessica. And from there you pull out the book. It's a lot easier to write with your mouth than write with your hands. And so I find that having an audio podcast, which is audio, there's no video there in most cases. That's easy to write a book that way because it's coming from you, it's on a topic, and then the book just becomes another spoke in that bicycle wheel, the hub and spoke scenario. So if you haven't written a book, it's even better because then there's no confirmation bias. You're not consigned, and you're not putting yourself in marketing jail of sticking to the content in the book. You can find out hey, what do people want to get from me? If you blog once a week on a blog and you write a bit, you have a book after six months. If you have a podcast, you have a book after three months. If you do video, you have a book after three months as well. And so I love video because from the video you can take audio, and from the video you can also take a transcript so that you have articles and blog posts, you have audio in the form of podcast or put audio on Facebook as well. And then the video, you have YouTube and Vimeo, and you can. You can have a YouTube channel with it. LinkedIn allows you to have video, as does Twitter. And so if there's no book, then that's a good thing, because now you're really in the position of going to heaven without the inconvenience of dying, because you're getting content out and you're finding out by curating it through demand. What do your people. What does your tribe want most? And that becomes the book.

I'm thrilled you're here. I want to assure everybody listening and watching. Alex will be back. If you're watching this on the Academy right now, you're on the path of an author and a hungry fighter. Alex, I want to talk as we get towards the end of our time together about the real essence of making any of this work. Let's go back to the hub and spoke analogy you talked about from your cycling days. I bet you were a hill climber, too, weren't you?

I was a hill climber. I don't know how you know that.

Because I'm a cyclist and I hated guys like you. But Now I weigh 170, and I got a shot at being a hill climber.

I had a farmer's tan, you know.

So, yeah, you real cyclists, you guys can't do anything but pedal those things. You're all lungs. Okay, let's talk about what really counts here. You're talking about content you know, people take for granted. Content you know as well as I do who's going to write your website. Oh, we'll do the content for that. Yeah, right. Who's going to get the content out of your head, into the drafts ready for the editors? How does that happen? And let's just narrow it right down to what I think it is. Harry McKay says, Hungry fighter. Hungry fighter. Hungry fighter. If you're not super hungry and really clear on your message and your purpose and your mission, your way, you want to make a difference. Isn't it almost impossible to get a book Put together. Because for me, that's the driver of all the money I've made and the articles there. It just flows out of what I want to do as a human. So talk about that. How do people connect with that as authors?

Well, you pitched a very slow, fat softball to me. So I'm going to see if I can hit it out of the park. Where I'm sitting right now in Corta Madera, California. Less than 10,000 population in Marin County. I am literally 8.5 miles away from the Golden Gate Bridge. The Golden Gate Bridge had a blueprint before it was created. Any building has a blueprint. Anything that that is going to be physical has a blueprint, a design. The first blueprint for the Golden Gate Bridge didn't look anything like the Golden Gate Bridge looks like today. People travel from all over the world for something that I take for granted that I could run to. Now, the version 2 and 3 and 4, those blueprints weren't even what the Golden Gate Bridge looks like. It took a few iterations. So you need plan, you need an intention, and Prepare to Win could be Harvey's next book, because that's the theme of everything he's ever done. The way he wrote Swim with the Sharks is writing a bunch of vignettes of experience. And by putting those vignettes together and weaving it together, he ended up. I think his sister was his editor, was very, very talented. He ended up, you know, writing a book that people love, swimming, Swim with the sharks without being eaten alive. So as far as content is concerned, if you have a blueprint where you can dump from your mind with the spoken word, or even writing spoken is a lot easier, then I think that you're in a place where you're going in the right direction. Only thing worse than going in the wrong direction is doing it enthusiastically, which I've done many times in business. So there are four different questions you want to ask yourself on a specific topic or subtopic. The first is, what's the definition of this thing? So what's a virtual book tour? All right, that's the what and the what is all about the head, right? You want to get those academics out of the way because they're very impatient. What learner? And this. This comes from the work of David Kolb. He got his doctorate degree when I was born in 1964. And it's Kolb. You can look them up. He calls it different things, but I call the what is the head the definition of what the topic is. So virtual book tour is a way to sell your book virtually instead of going from bookstore to bookstore, doing it virtually on a Facebook live, a teleseminar, a webinar, etc. So that's the what. So you have a topic, you just put what and then colon, and that's defining it just in a few words. The second is the why. Now, the why is all about the heart. So you got the head, the what and the why, the heart. Why is this so important? So why is a virtual book tour important is because it's the launching pad that can. It can catapult the book to become a number one bestseller on Amazon. And at the same time, it gets you out there without you moving from city to city to city. You know, the why. The bigger the why, then the easier the which is the third thing in the blueprint. And this is what Jim Rohn used to say. The bigger the why, the easier the how. And the how usually takes the most amount of time. The how is all about the hands, step by step, by step. So how do you do a virtual book tour? Well, heck, I could talk to you for an hour about that in detail, but basically you set up a virtual event. You have a book, you put the Kindle version down to 99 cents as an irresistible offer. You ask them to buy the book and do a certified review. And if they do a review, you ethically bribe them into another bonus webinar where you go even deeper. And that's repurposed content. So what the head, why, the heart and how, the hands, and that. Usually that's the content portion of a talk. Step by step by step. You know, seven habits of highly effective people. I interviewed Dr. Stephen Covey when he was living. I know his son very, very well. His son wrote speed of trust. Dr. Covey wrote Seven Habits, and we did a virtual book tour together. Right. Even though he was a bestseller at the time. And then they merged with Franklin, and now it's Franklin Covey. So what, why, how? And then the final part of my blueprint of writing content is what if? What if? And that's about humanity. Well, what if you do this? What will your life look like 30 days from now, 90 days from now, one year from now? What if? So what, why, how? And what if? And these are different learning styles. But if you hit each of these four learning styles, which I learned from David Kolb and he called them different things. Now you're agnostic in your content, because if you're why focused, then your book is all going to be about why. Start with why, right? That's a famous TEDx talk, right, with Simon Sinek. But if you do what, why, how and what if, and do it in that sequence, because the what and why learners are the, they're the most impatient, you know. So when I'm on stage, I define my topic, I tell them why it's important, and then I get into the how, the how learners, they're methodical, you know, they want to know the step by step. You can't leave it out. But if you're a how learner, then you may start with the how and then you'll lose all the what and why people and then the what if, which I'm a what if learner. Okay, great. So what if I wrote a book? Then what should my life look like five years from now? That's the humanity of how you're having impact on others. So head, heart, hands and humanity. What, why, how and what if?

Wow, you just teed up a big fat balloon for me back. Because you just concluded your blueprint with impact, a key word. I take away from what you just said, it's beautiful impact. Because the entire premise of the Academy is if we can be legendary leaders and we all have that potential. But in the context of your formula, writing a book, making a difference, building a company, being the best employee you can be at work, that why that formula you talk about, it basically keeps us going through anything that might hold us back. Because let's go back to the hub and spoke. What we're saying is if you can follow that formula as you being the hub of the spoke of the wheel, talk about the spokes as we get to the end here, because people come to us and they're like, hey, can you do an interview with us from the academy? Can you email your mail list? And the point is, when you get into the spoke, there are many different ways this content gets distributed, used, free, paid, monetized. So address, if you could, the top three spokes in the wheel that you suggest. Authors with a good body of work and that energy, the push, oomph, hungry fighter, they gotta do, they gotta focus.

On the interesting thing about hub and spoke. And when I give my radical repurposing talk, which is a keynote I give, I have a wheel builder that I hire from a local bike store and you know, I give him a hundred dollar bill and then his job is to build the wheel in less than an hour, which he typically does. So I show the hubs, the hub, I show the spokes, I show the wheel And I, and I tell my audience, these things are worthless when they're disconnected, but once they're connected, now they have purpose. And one of the greatest inventions of humanity, you know, the wheel. So the hub is where the spoke is getting threaded, you know, from. So there's. There's a little nipple on the end of the hub so that you can thread it through the hub. But then what's interesting is each spoke is a media format. So that means a book is a spoke, that means a YouTube channel is a spoke, that means Twitter. Your Twitter channel is a spoke, that means your Facebook channel is a spoke, that means a public speech is a spoke, that means a monthly or weekly teleseminar is just another spoke. Hopefully you do it consistently. The message is coming through that spoke and through that media, which is not that important because they become obsolete. If you're a MySpace expert, you're out of business these days, right? And so the idea is have at least 12. Now, you said top three. Well, top three would be number one, it would be LinkedIn, number two, Facebook, and number three, YouTube. Why? Because all three allow video. Why is that important? Because if I do video, I just have to create the content once, and then my repurposing team pulls the audio out of that video and also pulls a transcript out of the video. And I do one thing, and I get three things. I get visual word, I get spoken word, and I get written word. What's interesting is on the wheel, that's where the wheel is trued. You have a little truing key. If you build wheels, and the wheel is trued by turning the other part of the spoke, the other nipple on the other end by truing it until it is nice and clean and is turning in a true way. So you true it not near the hub, you true it near the wheel. And the wheel itself, or the rim is. That's the market. So you want to constantly survey your market. Did this work for you? What was the biggest takeaway? What was your aha. What could I improve? What was disinteresting to you? And that's truing that wheel. And you got to stay close to the market. Many authors aren't. Many novelists aren't. They're curmudgeon. You know, I know many fictional novelists. They're just, they're in. They're very reclusive, but they have a, you know, they have a great publisher and they know how to distribute, you know, their books. But if you stay close to the market through public speaking and through Social media, and even through your company, because hopefully your team will read the book, then the wheel will be true. You put a tube and a tire and then you build another one. I think you only need to build one wheel every five years. And that's offensive to many authors, but, you know, it's so much work. Why not focus on multiple channels and consistently through radical repurposing, getting that message out versus writing a book every year, it's putting the focus on the message versus the book, which is just the media form.

And we go to my example as living proof what you're talking about. If you have a body of work and you put enough air in the tire to propel a trued wheel, the air to me is the purpose, the wheel is true. How we're getting that message out, which is a function of studying your market and knowing your customer and getting it, then we get traction, because tire pressure and the trueness of that wheel, as on my fat bike in the wet dirt yesterday, that affects how we roll or don't roll. And how we roll affects the time we get to the finish line. And people who come to the academy, they get the benefit of education and knowledge and awareness like this. The reason Harvey and I love having you as part of our network is a. You've helped Harvey. I mean, we're living what you're talking about. I have lived what you're talking about. You could have a crappy book or books, and as long as you're out there rolling that wheel forward proper, you get traction and you can make a great living. And most important, you can make an impact. You can change lives.

That's a great point, Cliff. You could have a crappy book, but a world class speech, right? The book could be crappy because it wasn't written well, but the talk could be world class, worthy of devotion. So it's just part of the message. And if you take anything from this interview in the time we've had together, you are the hub. The book is not the hub. You are the message. Right? And the media or mediums. You know, media is plural. Those are all the spokes that, you know, connect with the wheel. And people, some people are readers, some people are viewers, some people are listeners. I don't watch broadcast television anymore. I watch YouTube. So my behavior has changed, you know, over the years because of social media. That may change in the future. So if you have this message, why have more than one in five years? Why not build it out for five years? And most businesses go out of business in five years. Most small businesses, I've heard up to 80% go out of business because they run out of cash. I think they're running out of cash because they have too many messages. You'll be bored of the message. And like David Ogilvie, who's one of my, he was an advertising maven, he said, you're not presenting your message to a grandstand of people, you're presenting it to a moving parade of people. So you'll be just tired and sick of your message long before the market will be.

It's a great point in wrapping up. Here's a very self serving, reiterate, reinforcing element. What you talk about. You talked about a blueprint. It had four, four parts. What is it? Why are you doing this? The how part, right. Which is where you start satisfying the more methodical learner. And then you get into the what if? The possibilities of making an impact. And the truth of it is, if you're powered by that purpose and you really desire to make a difference, you can make a great living. We're here to help you. And the underlying blueprint we teach at the Academy is called Clarity. It's my entire body of work. It had many different names, but it's a strategic blueprint for leadership. The personal part of this and then the business transformation, the business of being that hub, the personal brand. Unless you're leading a bigger company brand and a team, all this fits in together. And you will come back, right? You're going to come back and help us out. Because this is big stuff and I want to extract as much as we can from you because you're living it, you're breathing it, you're teaching it all day long, helping some of the best names in the business.

Well, on your website, Cliff, for the Academy. What is the Academy? Define it in less than 50 words. Why is it important and relevant?

Yeah. You want me to do that?

Yeah. Well, let's do it right now. Why is it relevant and important? So you disqualify the people. You can't sell hamburgers to vegetarian. So you. It's not about pre qualifying, it's about disqualifying the people who don't belong there. How does it work? Step by step. And what if you were an Academy member for a month? What would life look like? What if you were a member for three months? What would it look like after a year? What would it look how and what if? So go for it.

All right, no pressure, guys.

Right?

Alex is putting me on the spot, but we live Eat and breathe this stuff. So what the Harvey McKay Academy is, is it's a leading online platform for people all over the world to get really affordable. 24. Seven pennies on the dollar. What Harvey normally charges 35 grand for a keynote, $10,000 for an event, an intensive, 75 for the mastermind. For 18 bucks a month. Wherever you are, come to home or your Office, on your phone 24, 7 you can get training and knowledge like this. Because if you're watching this, you're in the academy. And if you don't have a free membership and you're watching this, get, get one. So what it is, is it's a learning platform. It's a network of influential leaders, right?

Well, to me, it's getting access to 50 years of sales and marketing know how for less than 50 minutes a week. Okay, so that could be the truncated version. So why is it relevant to business owners?

If you're in the top 20% of what we call the hungry fighters, you're craving for knowledge and access to people that have been where you're going. So it gives you instant access very affordably to the resources and the human beings. We set the table for each other.

And if you're not in the top 20%, it's the fastest way to get there.

It's the fastest way to get there. I love that. Yeah.

How do you consume it? How do you consume it? Yeah.

So the way to consume this is half of our customers, tens of thousands of people all over the world, they're on their smartphones consuming it. That number is growing each and every day. As you know, everybody else is on a computer from the home of their office. They log in, they have one login.

Let's, let's do it. Step one, you have a username and password. Step two, you log in. Step three, what do you do?

First, you choose the content, the learning track, whether it's leadership, networking, sales. I want to be an author. I want to be a million dollar speaker. I want to be a great.

Step four, I say carve out 30 minutes a day to log in with your username and password and study so that you have spaced repetition and you end up making it a habit. That would maybe be step four. Step five could be connecting with other members. Step six could be reaching out to Harvey. Step seven could be going to an intensive for $10,000. So you see the progression. The how is the step by step by step? Because if you don't give it, they don't give them a clear roadmap. They Won't know what to do. And then what if they did that? What if they were an academy member? What would a member's life look like before and after three months from now?

So what you learn from every legendary leader who came from maybe terrible circumstances or not. They read books, they attended workshops. They injected themselves way out of their comfort zone to meet people like you and Harvey McKay. That's how I did it. I started buying Harvey's books years ago, reading them. Here I am today. And nobody from New Hampshire business partners with Harvey McKay is in my virtual mastermind group for many years, along with the other people I admire and respect. We all learn that from Think and Grow Rich. And ladies and gentlemen, if you're stuck, if you're just getting started, if you know you have a book in you, a powerful way of changing the world, making a difference, hang in here, because we will help you get where you're going. We know how tough it is. We've all been knocked down. Harvey's been around the world a million times like you have, Alex. And I mean, how fun is it to wake up and make a difference for people every day doing stuff like this?

So the what if for me is if you follow these steps, then you put yourself in the position to double your profit. Not revenue. Revenue and profit are different. Many people don't realize that, and they get in the tax trouble. But you double your profit and you triple your win rate. What's that? That means Harvey's made all the mistakes. And so whatever's in the academy and everyone else who has content there. My biggest terror is going in the wrong direction. Enthusiastically. Which I've done a lot. So if anything, if you stop losing money when. Which is Warren Buffett's rule number one, don't lose money. Rule number two, never forget rule number one. So if you stop making mistakes because you're being spoon fed the path to go to the promised land, then you're going to triple your win rate. So I say double your profits and triple your win rate. And I would measure that because they stopped making mistakes as a result of consuming the content. And that's a very clear, concise, and easily transferable what if.

Well, you just nailed, as we wrap up with Alex Mendocin, is you just nailed knowing what not to do, how to focus on what to do. That's the essence of all great strategists. War, business and life. This is psychology. This is math. As Jason Fladlin teaches us. Alex, thanks for being with us. Hope to have you back and Ladies and gentlemen, if you don't have a free membership and you're watching this video, go to harveymckay.com and get on the bus absolutely free. And you can see all the other great things we do. Thanks, Alex.

You're welcome.

Thank you for listening to Street Smarts with Harvey MacKay. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you consume your favorite audio. Don't forget to leave a positive rating and review before you sign up for your free membership@harveymckayacademy.com to learn more about Harvey McKay, make sure to visit www.harveymckayacademY.com. thanks for listening and we'll be back soon with a new episode SA.