Marketing Titan Brian Kurtz Overdelivers Direct Response Wisdom From 40 Years Experience

For business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

Alright, you animals, we're back. This is Brad and I've got a special treat for you today. It is very, very rare that I invite guests back for twofers for a second showing here on the podcast. And today is one of those rare exceptions because he was one of my favorite episodes previously and he is literally one of the titans of direct response marketing and somebody that not only you can learn a lot from, but the people who you learn a lot from him. His name is Brian Kurtz and he is the author of a book called the Advertising Solution, which you may have read and we talked about on the previous episode. But now he has released a new book here in the past few months called Over Deliver. Build a Business for a Lifetime Playing the long game in direct response marketing. Brian's got about 40 years of experience in this business. Personally, I've got about 10. And it doesn't go nearly as deep, doesn't scratch the surface of what Brian's been able to do. He's worked in every single medium, probably in advertising. He was with Boardroom for I believe it was 34 years. And if you're not familiar with Boardroom, it is a publishing company that produced print and electronic newsletters from business to health to really help wealth and all of the various aspects under there. Under Brian's tenure, starting in 1981, they went from about $5 million to about $150 million in 2006. And he's been responsible for sending about 2 billion pieces of direct mail and selling tens of millions of dollars of books. So when I say this is one of those episodes you want to tune into, I mean it because it is rare that I get a chance to get somebody like Brian on the phone. And one of the things if you'll, you'll recognize if you saw the last episode is he's extremely generous with his knowledge. So, Brian, welcome back to Bacon wrap business.

Yeah, I like the fact that I can come a second time. It was one of my favorite podcasts that I did for Advertising Solution and you know, the Advertising Solution was a book that I did with Craig Simpson and it was, you know, we profiled six greats of marketing and I got to get a little of myself in there. But I think when I finished that book and I give Craig, a lot of credit for getting me off my butt to write this book, this new book, because I realized I had a lot more to say about and go further than I was able to chime in an advertising solution. And I'll just mention that there's a big difference between 40 years of experience and one year's experience for 40 years. And hopefully I'm the former and not the latter. So. But I will. I will try to share as much as I can from the book and anything else you want to ask me because I love doing podcasts. I never turn one down and I never turn one down a second time when they ask me. So I really appreciate you having me on again.

It's my pleasure, man. So here, all we want to know is how do we make the quick, easy money with absolutely no work whatsoever?

Well, that's something that I'll have to tell you on a different day.

You're keeping that secret to yourself, right? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, and I know you. I know you're kidding, but it's a really good place to start because, you know, it's not an easy button. It's, you know, you. You really have to work at it. And I think that, you know, as I've gone on into my, you know, fourth decade in this business, it's not that the new marketers of today are not as good as the old marketers. In fact, I'd say the new marketers of today are even better than most of the marketers from before. But the one mistake that they make, if they make a mistake, it's that, you know, it's all about quick money. It's all about, I have an offer and I'm going to put it on the Internet and I'm going to do email, and I'm going to make some money. And it's one way to go, but it's not the way that you build a business for a lifetime. And so, you know, I do want to talk about, you know, what it takes to have the stamina. We call it marketing stamina. Yeah.

Well, in 40 years, that's a. You. You've got some credentials to be able to do that. And you mentioned in your book, I'm paraphrasing, but a product and a promotion is not a business.

Yeah, that's really. I got a product is not a business from Chris Farrell, who's a guy who's, you know, an online marketer. And. And, you know, it's just so obvious that, in fact, I learned in 1981 when I got into this business and I read Bob Stone's book on successful direct marketing and one of the first things he says is no direct marketing business can succeed without repeat business. Now anybody in marketing today obviously knows that. I mean, what do you, you get a pop up for an upsell before you even get the first sale. So everybody knows you gotta have multiple products. So a product is not a business and a promotion is not a business is really important. I got that from John Carlton and John says, you know the guys that develop a promotion like for Clickbank and it crushes it, hate that word, but crushes it. And you know, then the thing is going on and they have nothing else because they haven't developed the next promotion. And I was taught in the 1980s and it's true today the control is meant to be beaten. And so, you know, one of the things that I always said is that the day you have a successful promotion that becomes a control is the day you try to start beating it. And so always have other copywriters and other people in your world that are going to help you always improve upon what you're doing. And as my mentor Marty Edelston said on a stationary good, better, best, never let it rest till the good is better and the better best. So that's a direct marketing.

Do that one more time. That's awesome. I love that.

Good, better, best, never let it rest till the good is better and the better best. And it's just.

That's definitely a great quote. You know, I want to go back, I want to contrast because you're one of the few people who can really give great insight on some of the evolution in the industry, especially having started back, I think you said the 80s where, and I know a lot of boardroom was built with, you know, direct mail. I mean direct mail was the workhorse. Yes, right. And that this is before all the Internet advertising, et cetera. And you know, the copy could easily be hard hitting and like sometimes you just get one chance to be in front of that person unless you mail them again and mail them again. Somebody's ability to research you as a person or a brand, et cetera, was limited. And they kind of just had to, if they either liked it or they didn't, they threw it away or they bought or they bought later on. And these days, obviously now somebody's ability to research a company and a brand becomes, you know, is infinite, that you can get dirt on pretty much anybody if it exists.

They can't get dirt on me or you. But on Everybody?

No, not us. I mean, we're angels. You know, what are some of the things that you've seen when it comes to especially. Let's just look at customer acquisition because in a minute I want to talk about some of the more innovative backend and retention strategies. But I think my question here, if I try to frame it well, is when you put that first piece message in front of somebody for your offer, whether that's through direct mail, whether that's through Internet, et cetera, have you noticed much of an evolution in effectiveness of kind of the hard hitting nature versus maybe kind of softer selling up front and then supporting that through a lot of different advertising channels just to kind of stay top of mind. Does some of the hard hitting stuff still work? I mean, obviously it does, but I'm just kind of curious to see your view of the evolution of it and kind of, you know, what's working really well now.

I mean, there's a lot there. What you just, you just. Yeah, there is package in there. So I'll try to go with different directions and you can interrupt me, but chapter three of the book is called How Paying Postage Made Me a Better Marketer. And so what I'm trying to say in that chapter is I think going to get to the crux of your question, which is it's not that, you know, direct mail is superior. In fact, it's not. I mean, email is the killer app right now and every other medium. And advertising opportunities are now infinite. Whereas back in the 80s you had, you know, very select, you had direct mail, you had print, you had tv, you had radio, you had inserts. But it was very finite, what, you know, the media that you could use. So what chapter three is about when I say how paying postage made me a better marketer, one of the things it's about is discipline because everything you're sending, indirect mail has to pay for itself because you know, you're paying postage and printing and it's a lot more expensive. So fast forward to now that you say, well, email's cheap and I can just throw it out there. I say you can't because. Because every time you interact with your audience, you're either if you're not selling something, you may be turning them off to the next email. So that's a big cost that you don't see. Whereas in direct mail you see it because you spent for it. And so that's a subtle thing because everybody says, I'll just bombard them with email, for example, and there's no cost in that. Well, there's a huge cost if you send them the wrong thing.

Yeah, Opportunity cost of lost attention.

Totally. And that's like a very, very important element of email, say, versus direct mail. But your other question about whether you can do hard hitting versus everything's got to be softer. I don't think any of that is true. I think that, you know, to me, you know, the best package is the best package. Good copy is good copy. A good sales letter is a good sales letter. A good sales letter can be a good video sales letter if it's done right. And there's no such thing as short copy is better than long and long is better than short. It's. You can't just be boring, you got to be interesting. And of course you can't do long copy, say on Facebook. But you want to be able to use all of the techniques that all of the great copywriters used in direct mail and use them online. And so I used to, right at the beginning when the Internet was getting popular, we actually took our direct mail and just put it in an HTML format and in long form put it online. It didn't always work, but it was still pretty effective because you couldn't do the sidebars that we had in our direct mail and all that because you're telling a story, you're telling a narrative and it was interesting enough for people to read a magalog. Why wouldn't it be interesting enough to read through a long sales letter online? But I think the evolution has seen a lot of techniques that you can do in online that you couldn't do in offline. You know, you've got the technology available, you've got hyperlinks, you've got all kinds of things that can get them to an order page faster, that can get them moving towards an order faster. But you still can't rush it. You know, you talked about people didn't know about you when you were offline and they can find out everything about you when you're online. I hadn't thought about it in this context, but I'm glad you brought it up because in the offline area, you know, we had to sell our company because no one knew who we were. We had a million subscribers to Bottom Line Personal and we were the most unknown million name subscription file ever or newsletter ever. So we had to tell a long story to tell what we were about. And online today, yes, you can do the searches and all that, but if you're still an unknown brand, you've really got to put all of those elements in still, you've got to add credibility. You've got to be able to tell people who you are, why you're good for them, why they should care. And shortchanging that in copy because it's online to me is silly. As I said, there are formats that lend itself to shorter copy, that lend itself to different formats. I mean, that's the nature of the media. But I see a lot of similarities between great direct mail and great email. And you know, it's funny, I think a lot of the copywriters that I dealt with in the 80s and 90s, a lot of them have, have made a nice transition to the Internet, but some of them haven't. And I think it's because they didn't adapt as well. But I think they still are able to make some headway because they have the talent, they have the ability to write great story, great narrative, tell a story of a brand that you have to tell from scratch or you have to tell the story of that brand so people can get it. So that's some of. I think I answered some of your questions.

No, yeah, you absolutely did. And you know, it was actually kind of top of mind today. I was talking to just a close friend of mine who has got an offer coming out and it's very biz op related. He was asking me to just give a quick copy critique and it was so like just hard, hard, hard, hard hitting. And like part of it is I'm just a little jaded because I've seen so much of that. He's like, what do you think? I'm like, yeah, I kind of wanted to throw up in my mouth. I'm not gonna lie.

Right, right.

But I was kind of saying, you know, I actually think you could. Granted, there's a difference between hard hitting, effective copy and then just overly hypey copy. Right.

Sometimes it's in the eye of the beholder and sometimes it's not. You know, you don't see it right away. But I will say this, online marketing, because direct mail was an opt out medium, meaning that you get on a list, you can rent that name, you can mail it as long as you want, and you have to unsubscribe. Whereas email is an opt in medium. So technically the name should be opted in. They should be double opted in. They should be, you know, not everybody is, but that's the nature of it. So. So the compliance, not so much the hard hitting, that's one issue. But compliance is a lot tougher online. So if you're selling, it's getting worse. Yeah, it's a lot worse. Or some people would say it's better, you know. Well, yeah, yeah, but it's getting.

Let's just say getting more restrictive.

Yes. And not to say that you can get away with everything in direct mail, but you can do some stuff in direct mail and it'll play. And, you know, people look, have. US Postal Service is a little kinder and gentler than Amazon and Google and Facebook when it comes to that. But Google, Amazon and Facebook have a much tougher barrier because of they're out there in the ether and the government is looking at it and everybody's looking at it, whereas the postal service has that too. And you can still get arrested for mail fraud, but, you know, it's a lot tougher. But I'm not saying go to the point of fraud. I'm just saying that compliance is something, you know, you want to have a good attorney when you're selling things in the health area or in the finance area. And then you got the SEC and you've got the FDA and all of that. So compliance is. But the idea of your point about. Is really well taken about aggressive. We'll say super aggressive versus hypey. And sometimes it's a thin line because aggressive can be, you know, very much really great selling. Whereas, you know, hypey can also be great selling. But, you know, I always say it's like pornography. You'll know when you see it. So for me, I know when I go over the line, but that's my line, and everybody has a little different line, so. And the line has blurred with so many people because the Internet has such a low barrier to entry that people can get in. And so, you know, you've got a lot of people doing a lot of, you know, shady things that you would never have seen in direct mail. There was shady people in direct mail.

Oh, yeah.

Wouldn't see it because the barrier to entry was so high.

Yeah. And now you just. You can't get on the Internet without seeing the carnival barking just in your face. And it also makes me think, you know, with the growing restrictive nature of what can and can't be done online from anybody who's out there doing Facebook. Right. Facebook ads right now knows that. I mean, they're just denying and shutting down ad. Either ad accounts or just denying ads for some of the most, you know, innocuous infractions. I can't say you in this, can't call somebody out. I mean, that's A call out is one of the most, you know, standard direct response. Are you this, that or the other? Do you face these issues too? I mean, so that's why like with some of that evolution it also makes me wonder if some of the. I don't think this will happen in mass because I think people are really used to the really cheap online mediums. But it makes me think that the smart business owners will start to kind of revisit direct mail in that to go. Well, I can't this stuff works to say but if I can't say it over here, there's still one place I can say it and that's either in the mail.

I mean my mastermind groups are, you know, they're multi channel marketing and they're all online but they're all looking for ways to do it's an and not an or. And the other thing is, you know, the most dangerous number, in tribute to Dan Kennedy, the most dangerous number of business is one. And so you know anybody who is like I knew a company that did $30 million on Amazon and you say Amazon's like the most permissive maybe and they got wind of an ad and they shut them down. And it's 100%, it's not even 80%. And so the idea of, you know, in my book I have a thing on O2O2O online to offline to online. And it's not just that the online market, the smart online marketers aren't just looking at direct mail, they're incorporating it into their online operations. So for example, someone does a launch for a digital product and it's got all kinds of stuff in it and they offer a hard copy of it and it gives them an opportunity to not just send the digital files but to send a physical product which then can have other things in it. I mean the physical product, it's like, you know, package inserts is something that, you know, the online business doesn't even know about. But that's a big business in offline marketing. And if you ship a product you can put stuff in the box. You know, that's the simplest thing that I can mention.

But that's one of those things that whenever I order something, I buy a lot of stuff online. Sometimes directly, mostly through Amazon, but other times, you know as well buy directly from other companies. And sometimes I'll just buy them to see, you know, their.

What's in the package?

Yeah, what's in the package. And I'm so blown away by how few times I actually get any real package inserts. Unless it's like I'm literally buying this from a direct response marketer.

It's always the direct response people. It's always the people that have done direct mail that understand that. But I will say this, that the idea of using direct mail specifically on the back end of a digital marketing business is such a no brainer. Like I'll give you an example. Let's say you sell a $47 something online digital and then you upgrade them to a fifteen hundred dollar product. They're your VIPs. You've got a lifetime value now of that customer that's so much higher. And the idea of sending them something physical to them, look, the mailboxes are emptier. That's an obvious thing. So if you can send something to that mailbox that sticks out that supports your online business, it's a no brainer. These are your VIPs. And I'm not saying just send them a love gift, I'm saying send it to them as a bonus for what they bought already since they spent so much with you. And it's amazing stick strategy. It's an amazing way to cause a barrier to switch if you have competitors. And even with direct mail, like I used to do direct mail to millions of people selling $39 product, this is a whole nother kind of direct mail. You have a list of say 10,000 people who bought your digital product and then another thousand people that bought the next thing and then 100 that bought the next. Those hundred have spent a shitload of money with you. I think that sending those hundred people a Federal Express envelope with a book and a note and another offer or whatever, I'm not going to go through the offers. But that's direct mail too, you know. And so direct mail's definition has changed. That's a big evolution because you're not going to do, you know, look, any business that is exclusively in direct mail now is sucking air. Any business that is launching just in direct mail is not going to do that well, but any business that's not doing direct mail as a supplement to its online business is silly. I know a guy in my Jeff Walker mastermind, Will Hamilton. He's fuzzy yellow balls. He does tennis instruction.

Oh yeah, yeah, I'm familiar with the commercials.

Yeah, he's amazing. And he just did a thing where he said, you know, I really want to. He wanted to do some physical products. So he has these digital courses on playing better doubles and serves and all that. And what he did was he had, I think it was like an offer where he kind of identified what their thing was, whether it was their serve or their doubles game or whatever. And he gave them a playbook. And the playbook was not only digital, but then he sent them a playbook. It was actually, you know, a spiral bound book. And then the interesting thing that he did is that each instruction, each video in the playbook had a QR code where you could have the book in your tennis bag. You go out to the court, you point your phone at the QR code, and you could look at the video while you're on the court. So now the direct mail physical product became portable digital. That's like a great example of O2O2O. And is that a digital. Is that physical? It's both. And it's. And I've seen a lot more examples like that.

And people do love. I mean, we all do love to get something in the mail that has any value. It's still so rare. I mean, most of us get either just total junk mail or bills. Right. How often do we get cool stuff in the mail that isn't just from Amazon?

Yeah, Lumpy packages with handwritten notes is a form of direct mail that. It's just phenomenal. I mean, like, I did a thing where even just like with my mastermind group, you know, they pay me a lot of money and I give them books at the events and I give them all kinds of stuff. And I came home from the event and I said, ah, there's that book that I wanted to give them. And I forgot. So what I did was I sat here with my assistant and I wrote to every single one of them. There was no offer. The offer was this will tie right into customer service and fulfillment and back end. But I basically sent them each a handwritten note. It was like, you know, 30 people, and I sent 30 books. I sent my assistant to the post office with 30 packages. And it was just. I wouldn't even call it a love gift, because if it was a love gift, I'm not getting anything in return. It is a love gift. I love them. But could that be the something that they'll remember when they come up for renewal? Maybe, maybe not. But I'll take my chances with something like that.

So did you buy the books and then write a little note and then had those mailed out?

Yeah, I mean, in this case, it was. This one was in April. I mentioned to you before we went on record that I had a stroke in April and I had to cancel My May Mastermind. So the May Mastermind, I was going to give everybody a copy of Over Deliver. It came out April 9th. So that was a good example. I did buy the books, but I had them in inventory, and I wrote a note on each one and I sent them. I've had situations where I wanted to send something in the holidays that wasn't just a card. So I bought a bunch of different books. I went to the discount table at Barnes and Noble, and I picked out some really interesting books, and I actually, they were targeted. I had, you know, six that went to these people and five that went to this. And. And it just gave me an opportunity to let them know I was thinking about them. That. Because I figure I wrote a blog post once called Christmas Cards in July. And Christmas cards are nice, but, you know, you get a Christmas card, you look at it, great garbage.

And you got a hundred other ones in the mail.

Exactly. But you get a package, you're opening it. If it's a book, they're not throwing it out. And if it's targeted to them, that's kind of special. So.

Yeah, it really is. You know, one of the things I'm trying to think, who did this? Because speaking of sending books. So there was a company. Okay, now I'm remembering, man. I'm going back in the bradipedia archives here.

Oh, okay. I saw the smoke coming out of.

Your ears, but I always thought this was cool. And you just made me think about it. As I said, I haven't thought about it in, like, six years. But there was a company, I think it was called Quarterly, Quarterly Co. And they would work with influence. They still may be doing this, I don't know. But they'd work with influencers. And, you know, you could buy. Let's say it's like $100 a month, and I want to follow Tim Ferriss or somebody like that. Right. And then. So every quarter, and I know Tim actually had one of these, but every month you'd get a curated box of some of the stuff that he likes, and he'd send it out to you. Oftentimes it was a book, maybe a product he was using, maybe something else of that nature. And this one wasn't Tim, but it was another kind of celebrity who did this, where they sent one of their favorite books and they had gone to the extent. Now, granted, the celebrity person didn't do this, but they had. It was actually Ferrell. Is it Farrell? Is that the name of Pharrell, the guy who sang the Happy, Happy, Happy.

Yeah, I think it's Pharrell.

Right. But anyway, yeah, man, as I said, it's like, as I'm saying, this is rushing back to me, but he took a book that he really liked and he did this once, which is. He went through it and put little post it notes, like, I don't know, 10 different post it notes on different little areas with kind of a little note and a little arrow to the quote that he liked.

And.

And then he had the team just systematically do this. I don't know how many hundred or thousand books created, but it was very noteworthy. When you get something from, you know, somebody you really like, and they're like, here on this page.

It's mass customization. It's fantastic.

Yeah. So I've got over deliver and I see. And I open it up and I see all of a sudden like three or four or. It doesn't even have to be a lot, just things directly from Brian himself. Especially if you're on like, yeah, if I'm a $1500 customer, if I'm a VIP customer, you may not have a ton of these, but it probably does go a long way with giving that extra valuable, you know, kind of does.

I think that marketers sometimes forget what the total take is on that customer. And I say take in not a positive derisive way, but. And, you know, sort of like, I mean, there's a store near me called Stu Leonard's and they have this, this training thing for their, their workers and they say, you know, when you walk around this store, you have to look at the person with the wagon. And if they're a regular customer, there's a. I don't know what the number was. Let's say it's, you know, $6,000 bubble around their head. That's what they spend with us. So if you, if you. And whatever it is, whatever your business is, and it goes back to recency, frequency, monetary value. If they're a recent customer and a frequent customer and you know that they spend a certain amount, always think about that because they, because they've spent so much with you, you have a little extra money to spend on them that still is part of your roi. And that is a, it's an underused methodology when it comes to direct marketing. Direct marketing, you know, you pay for the media, you get the orders, you make your money back in some period of time or whatever the measurability is. But this says I make a lot of money and now I can give them a little bit more as I Go along, because I made all that up front. And that's just your budget. That's just, you know, your marketing budget for that customer. And it can go a long way. When they come up for renewal or they come up to buy another product from you, they might remember, and that's all part of the mix. But you didn't just. It isn't like you just threw it out there. You knew you had the cash from them in the bank. And that's a really important thing to think about when you're thinking about your best customers.

Right. And especially. I don't know where I first heard this line. Actually, I do. I first heard Perry Belcher say this, but I don't know if it was originated from him, but it was that. It's never been harder to sell somebody something the first time, but it's never been easier to sell them something second, third, fourth, fifth time if you satisfy.

Them and you take care of them the first time. I mean, absolutely 50% returns on their first product.

So, you know, as long as it's not a piece of crap. But, you know, with the ability to follow up with them, with the ability to. Also the fact that because there's so much noise out there in the system, trust is a lot harder to earn. So once you earn that trust, then it becomes easier because people aren't just giving their trust to absolutely everybody. But this is a great way to do it. I want to segue in to one of the things that, as we mentioned, you really drilled down in the book over deliver that you said you didn't really talk about in the advertising solution. And this is. It dovetails into exactly what we're talking about right now, which is really seeing customer service and retention as a major marketing strategy and profit center. As I segue into that, I just want to bring up something that you just talked about when you're talking about the numbers and the financials. Like, okay, how much money do you actually have? How much are you playing with? And it reminded me of a. One of the podcasts I did with my close friend Ron Lynch. Do you know Ron? Right?

I don't think so.

I would have thought that you'd know Ron. So Ron is sold, like three or four billion dollars of products on infomercial. So he's a big infomercial guy. Like, he was responsible for GoPro and just a whole bunch of stuff.

Wow, that's great.

Yeah, it's a really amazing interview that I did. I'll actually put a link in the show notes for Everybody, if they want to listen to it. And one of the things that Ron talked about on the financial side is he goes, any real direct response company that really knows what the hell they're doing, they engineer a profit margin of, I think it was 10%. He goes, Especially if we're doing infomercials, et cetera. He goes, if we're making more than 10% profit margin means we're not buying enough advertising, like dump it back in and engineer that. Don't just be like, hey, we're made 40%, let's go buy a boat. I mean, it's working double down. And whether you engineer a 10% or not, it is an interesting thing if you do, if you are, let's say you got a million dollar business and it's successful, you got a 25% profit margin or something super healthy. I think wearing that hat, it allows me to go, all right, I've actually, I'm playing with more money than I should be playing with. How can I spend some of this money on the back end, like, as opposed to just the front end? How can I delight my customers? How can I retain them more? How much am I spending to retain customers versus just acquire? I do think that it's one of those things that it's just so I believe such a minority of business owners actually think about how much do I spend on customer retention. And you talk a lot about that in the book. So I'd like to kind of hear some more of your thoughts.

Yeah, I mean, that's chapter eight. It's there intentionally, not because it's less important, but it's kind of like I wanted people to get it, that it's a lot easier to keep a customer and then to get a new one. And, you know, keeping customers happy and fulfilled is. And then the chapter nine is lifetime value and continuity, which is, you know, I talk a lot about the bogey, which is something that Dick Benson, my direct mail guru, taught me in the 80s. But it's whatever you're doing in your business, you got to have a bogey. And your bogey is, how much can I lose? Forget about making money, how much can I lose in year one to make it back sometime after that? Now we went from a one year bogey to a three year bogey because we accumulated a lot of cash. But that's a lot about reinvesting the money in the acquisition. But you don't want to keep on going after acquisition, after acquisition program without spending time on cross selling products, upselling products and Then taking care of customer complaints. You know, the people on the front lines of your business, the people who are answering customer service calls, are right there with the customers. Those people should not be your least trained employees. And in a lot of businesses, they are. They shouldn't be your lowest paid employees. And in a lot of businesses, they are. And so at boardroom, we used to do things like I used to listen in on the customer service calls, and we had trained customer service people. And that was a really good way for me to get a sense of what are our customers complaining about, what things can we improve that way? And that's like small hinges creating incredible leverage in your business. I remember Dean Graziosi, a great marketer, talked about that he hired a secret shopper, which we did too. But a secret shopper is someone that you pay to go through everything in your business. The people who they're interacting with have no idea that they're being paid to do this. And they complain intentionally. They return and then. Or they, they return something and then want it back. And then they. They become the biggest pain in the asses. They do everything they can to break your system and do everything, and they just are just awful. I mean, and what Dean did, he had a nice angle on that. He had the person keep a diary, the secret shopper. And every step of the way during their journey through your customer funnel or whatever it is, they would say, okay, I did that, I did that. How did that make me feel? And they'd write it down in a journal. And I think one of the. I think I have it in my book. One of the big things that they found out is that they had a live event that they charge money for, and then they sold a $15,000 something or other coaching program. And so let's say they sold it at the live event on a Saturday, and they realized that no one contacted the person that bought it until the following Wednesday. Now, buyer's remorse, you know, whatever spouse bought it, the other spouse at home is going to say, what the hell did you do? And you've got five days for them to return it to have buyer's remorse. So they worked into their system that on the next day they got a phone call and started coaching them. And you, you know, realizing what they bought and how beneficial it was going to be. That's just one example. But those kinds of things, you're not necessarily going to find out because you're too close to it. So secret shopper is a great way to do it. Listening in on Customer service calls is a great way to do it. Making sure that you compensate and take care of the customer service people, the people who are fulfilling the orders, because those people are gold to you. In fact, if you have people who've been with you a long time and you give them some power to give away a certain amount of maybe not thousands of dollars, but maybe hundreds of dollars in merchandise to save a customer, all of a sudden, I used to play the game. I tell the story in the book. I used to stay at the office late in the 1980s, at 8 o' clock or so, just to see what calls would come in. So the call would come in. There's no automated attendant. So of course the phone's ringing. I pick it up. I know it's always gonna be a customer complaining about something. And my goal was, the game was, how can I make this customer. They're really pissed off. How can I, at the end of this call, make them a customer for life? Didn't always work. And I had the. Of course I had the power to send them anything I want. I could have sent them a car, probably, but I would send them, like, a series of more books. And I took care of them. I made sure that everything they wanted was taken care of. And when they hung up, I said, I didn't lose that customer, and I probably kept one for life. That's one example.

Two examples to just accentuate your point there. My very first job out of college was at Disney World, and I was working at Epcot, but went through the training, et cetera. And there's nobody better on the planet, probably, at delighting customers than Disney. They have got it down to an absolute science. But one of the things that they taught us is a very big part of their philosophy then and is now. They call them take fives and magical moments. And they empowered even the janitors at the park to anybody to where if we see a guest or especially a child, but anybody just not having a good day, like, you know, kids crying or just something's going on. We had the power to walk over. And I've done this. Like, I saw a little kid kind of, like just kind of crying, mommy, whatever. He may have been in a bad mood. But I said, hey, is everything okay? She goes, oh, yeah, he's just being moody. And I said, well, hey, come with me. And I've got. I've got a surprise for him. And I walked 20ft over into a gift shop, grabbed a little Mickey doll, and I just told the woman behind the counter, I mean, I'm in my badge. I've got my badge and everything. I just said, service recovery. And I just walked over and I handed it to the kid and obviously all smiles, and the mom was super happy. But Disney empowers their low. I was making minimum wage for the empowers. Give those little moments to people. And one other example on that, that I became a Mac fanboy for life. It was August of 2011. I remember it. I just bought my first MacBook computer, and I was so excited. It took me a week to get everything all set up. And I spilled a cup of coffee right the keyboard. I was like, oh, you gotta be kidding me. And you know, AppleCare didn't cover, dumbass.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I do remember, and this was the thing that I never forgot. So because I just bought it, most of us who buy things on credit cards, there's a credit card insurance, like 90 days, even if you screw it up. So I called my insurance company, my credit card insurance company. They said, yeah, we'll cover this. Well, I took my MacBook into Apple and per insurance company's instructions, and I said, yeah, they need to get in a quote on repairing or replacing this. Here's what I did. And I know it's not covered with AppleCare, blah, blah, blah. They said, okay, yeah, we'll take a look at it and we'll call you tomorrow. So they looked at it and they said, yeah, you can come pick up your MacBook. And I went over and got it, and they said, yeah, it's all fixed. And I was like, well, what do you mean it's all fixed? Like, I didn't actually want you to fix it. I just needed you to give me a quote so my insurance could take care of it. And they said, well, we looked at it. Everything was messed up in it except the hard drive. So we replaced everything in it. You basically have a new computer, and we saw that you just bought it. So we just went ahead and took care of it for you, no charge. Don't worry about insurance.

You're a Mac fan for life.

I said, you got to be kidding me. And this was just the guy there had the ability to do that. Granted, Apple corporate probably granted him that, but that spent eight years. And I remembered it to this day.

So that surprised customer. You're a lifetime customer.

Yeah. And as I mentioned on the phone, what's one of the things this week I'm going to be working with one of my clients on is a customer retention strategy. So he sells a done for you. Sales and marketing and operations service for real estate investors and agents. They basically do all the customer acquisition, marketing, follow up, sales, etc. And we realized after taking a look at some of the churn numbers, how do we strategically go in and just increase the retention a few months because that'll really move the needle. So these kind of ideas like what you're talking about are very top of mind.

Yeah. And there's so many things. I have a bunch of things in that chapter that talk about.

Oh yeah, no, I've got it all highlighted. A few of the other questions that I kind of wrote down. Are there any kind of cool because you know, you've got your mastermind and you've got your ears to the ground of kind of like what. Who's doing what at really high levels. Are there any either opportunities that you think people are overlooking or people doing just really innovative stuff that we should be paying attention to? That's kind of two separate questions. But I'm just kind of curious at, you know, what you're seeing with your.

Yeah, I mean so in my groups what I'm seeing is because my group is focused on multi channel, so I see a lot of this. O2O2OH. Using direct mail with online marketing. And so there are a lot of neat things to be doing. I think there's a lot to be done in. I mean it's all old stuff first of all, because it's not all new. And so being able to.

Using physical product and using those things that we talked about on the other side on what's new, like whiz bang. I think I'm in Jeff Walker's mastermind group and it's a really innovative group because they are doing. I mean I'm seeing some real neat things on YouTube that I hadn't seen before. It's harder to read responses and get a real sense of roi. But it's also, it clearly has some ability to scale in numbers of not just views but people interacting with video. I think that I've seen some launches online using. I saw one launch that did Facebook only, which I thought was very innovative. And I saw it's like fixing things that aren't broken, plus taking what works and keep doing it. It's the combination of that. So, you know, you have a launch, it's not broken. You know, you can do it every year and make a certain amount of money, but there are some things you can tweak that are very innovative. And you know, one of them is like, do the whole launch live, you know, do it all live instead of doing it on video, like on Facebook.

Live streams and live streams and things like that. Yeah, yeah.

Or you could do it on a live, like live webinars and.

Yeah, everybody's trying to do everything automated these days because there's so many tools out there. And when everybody's trying to get automated, if you kind of go the other way and just get much more intimate and real. Yeah, it's zig. When everybody else is zagging.

You were talking about, you know, putting notes on the book and stuff for each person and it feels so much more personal. So that's some of the stuff I'm trying to think.

You were mentioning one of the things on with YouTube and video, et cetera. I don't know if this is one of the strategies you were kind of referring to, but it's something that we've been talking about testing over here recently with some decent results. Which is. Have you heard of a term. They called it, I believe it's RLSA remarketing list from search audiences or something like that. But it allows you, if you can get a lot of people to watch a YouTube video, let's say you run ads really cheap and you're just running an ad to a video. If you can get them to watch. I believe it's like 15 seconds. I could be a little wrong. I'm not the one managing the actual strategy. But if you can get them to. Let's say you build a list of 10,000 people who've watched 15 seconds of your video. Then those people, if they then go tomorrow or the next day or something of that nature to Google and they search for something they want and you're bidding on those keywords, the cost per click on that because it's your market is like 95% cheaper and it's awesome. So we're about to roll because we've been testing with some other clients and we're about to roll this out actually for my wife who's a mortgage loan officer. So we're going to be, we filmed a few videos and we're going to be running to people in certain demographics all around San Diego area where we live and just try to build up a list of, I don't know, 100,000 people who've watched, you know, 15 seconds of her video. So then when they go and type in real estate related keywords which are notoriously expensive, we should be able to get them for a lot less and then just get them right into her lead acquisition. That's great.

There are so many things, and I think that what Ryan Levesque is doing with Ask Funnels is just the idea of using quizzes in your marketing is becoming much more widespread and it makes such sense. I mean, the idea of sending one size fits all emails and segmenting your list is so critical. And so tools to help you do that is, I think, you know, some of the most interesting technology that I see. So that's really good. And I think, you know, obviously Russell Brunson's doing some really interesting stuff with clickfunnels. So, I mean, I see it, I see it all. I find that when I'm in groups of digital marketers where, you know, I'm not the expert, I'm just a total student. And being a student, I doubt that.

That happens very often that you're in a group of digital marketers where you're not. Oh, you mean you're not the one leading?

I'm not the leader. I mean, I'm like. I mean, sometimes I think I'm the dumbest guy in the room. And it's great because I get to be a student for that period of time and then I can bring that knowledge back to my mastermind groups. My mastermind groups, you know, they're looking to me for certain knowledge and leadership, but they're. I'm looking to them for. In fact, we have like great guest speakers at my mastermind. But what I realized that my members are all into something cool. So I've got like, my members doing, you know, spotlights at the meetings, and I've got these. They're just some of the best marketers around. So, you know, they're as good as some of the guest speakers. So it's, it's just, you know, everybody, I guess it comes down to everybody is an expert about this much. And I'm holding my, my thumb and my index finger, you know, three inches apart. And if everybody is an expert. And that's why I think, you know, specialization is so much more important today because I say that if someone comes to you and says, it's like the old agencies in the 80s, and if you want one, stop shopping for all of your marketing. I didn't even do it when marketing opportunities were not infinite. Now that marketing opportunities are infinite, how can you get any one person that knows everything about everything, and there are people that set themselves up that say, oh, I can do your Facebook, I can do your search, I can do your direct mail, I can do your creative, I can do everything.

But I would do everything.

Well, yeah, nothing. Well, if you're going to do everything that they probably do one thing well and find out what that is. But I would just run away from those people and just. I think buying a la carte is the key today. And it was that way back in my day, back when I was doing direct mail, that for instance, on the creative side, if you're a great copywriter, you're not working in an agency, you're working on your own because you're getting royalties and you're really good. So I would never go to an agency for everything or anything. And I'd get my. My list buyer was. My specialized list buyer was here, my insert broker was here and my copywriter was specialized, freelance and top notch because I had to pay more. But it was worth it.

That's how I built my. I've got a very boutique consulting company. I don't take tons of clients. I don't pretend to be a one stop shop. I also don't pretend to have 50 employees that I have to manage. But I've done a really good job at connecting with some of the best of the best. And this podcast is one of the best ways that I've been able to do that. And very selfishly, if I want to know who's doing really kick ass things in let's. I just mentioned YouTube advertising or Facebook ads with this or copywriting, I make a habit of building my deep connections and relationships with them so that when people come to me, you know, my value proposition is really, it's really, I've got it handled and you don't have to worry about are they on my payroll and are they any good? Because we can afford to go to the best and get that to work. You know, one question that I'd written down, and it may not be in perfect linear order for this convo, but I'd love to get a little more of your insight on it and it comes to the area because I know you've probably hired a ton of copywriters.

I've worked. I'm not, I'm not bragging, but it's true. And it's not bragging if you did it. I mean, I've worked with probably the best copywriters that have been alive since I got into the business. I mean, that goes back to Gene Schwartz. And did you work with Gene? I did. He was a mentor and I used to go to his house for lunch. And I own the copyright to Breakthrough Advertising and Brilliance Breakthrough with His wife. Now, I didn't know that.

That's fantastic. Yeah. Such a, such a, absolute classic of a book, Breakthrough advertising. The question there then, and this also stems from a conversation I was having with another friend earlier. We were talking about hiring copywriters and some of the nu of that, because you're hiring something that you don't know if you got good money right until it's all done and if it's going to work and somebody can have a great portfolio, they give you a great piece, you're like, all right, yeah, your past stuff looks pretty good, but how do I really know if it's going to work for this, that or the other? And when it comes to paying copywriters, the more credentials they have, the more experience they have, the more expensive they are. And that's fine, as they should be. But if you're not a eight figure business, but you're a six figure, a seven figure business, and you're really trying to get good copywriters to work for you and to make sure that you're not getting taken and make sure you can really trust, do you kind of have a framework for working with them, compensating, etc. That is kind of working.

Yeah. When I get a request in my email saying, do you know a good copywriter? And I get two or three of those emails a week, I know a lot. Yeah, it's the wrong question. The right question has to start way before in terms of what your product is, what your market is. And I actually, in my book, I just turned to the page because I can just go over these quickly. I had every great copywriter was. I identified seven characteristics that were present in every great copywriter. I'm talking about a plus copywriters. Gary Bensivenga, Jim Rutz, Gene Schwartz, Clayton Makepeace, every one of them. And the seven were. The first was that they had to have a hunger. And you could get that by interviewing them or talking to them, that they have a hunger for the business. That. And by hunger, I mean, have they spent the hours really? You know, it's maybe it's 10,000 hours, maybe it's 5,000. But they've had to do so much work to get to that point. So how can they show you the kind of hunger that they've done? And that is the research that they've done, clients that they've had and how they work with them and how they went, you know, a mile deep instead of a mile wide. The second one is just insatiable curiosity that's also one of the things that when I hired a great copywriter, they would be asking me questions as I'm asking them questions about my product, about my market, about the list that I mean any, any copywriter that I was going to hire that wouldn't ask me for a list history. And in the case of online, the audience that we've done well with versus the audience we haven't done well with. But in direct mail you knew all the lists that we mailed that if they didn't ask me for a list history, I'd be suspect whether they knew what they were doing. Because in the advertising solution I talked about particularly Halbert and Schwartz, but all six of the guys that we profiled, every one of them always, you know, you think they'd be bragging about their copy? No, they were saying that it's not a brilliant burger, but it's a hungry audience. And so they had to. It's the list. That's what's important. That's the 40, 40, 20 rule or the 413920 rule that the list is the most important. The third is I'd ask them who do they hang out with? Like who do they check their copy premises with? Every one of them, every one of the a copywriters had one or more other a copywriters that they bounce copy off of, that they bounced ideas off of. You know, you can't write copy by committee, but you can get interesting insights from your peers. And if they're writing copy in a vacuum, it's just not as broad, it's not as going to be as deep. Number four was passion. You know, I like the fact that I think when I do this in a speech, I, I use a reverse funnel and I say, you know, you got to go narrow and I put it upside down. So you got to go narrow to wide. So you start in a very narrow market and the best copywriters of all time, eventually they were able to write about anything. They didn't start that way. They started in a narrow, very narrow universe. And in fact, I would say that some people today in online marketing are actually their best owned copywriter. But they, because they're writing in the one area that they know better than anything. And for the freelance copywriters, if they started in an area they know more than anybody about, then they branch out. That's much easier to do than being a writer for everything. Number five was that they really have to understand direct marketing principles. They have to understand lists, they have to Understand segmentation. They have to understand lifetime value. They have to understand the relationship between lists, offer, and copy. So anybody who doesn't study and hasn't studied marketing books, as opposed to just copywriting and copy books, is someone that is probably not, you know, the top of the game six is humility. I feel strongly about this. You know, I had a. I had a guy. I tell this in the book. I had a guy come to me in my last couple of years of Boardroom, and he wrote me an email, and he said, brian, I'll be the best copywriter that's ever walked in the door at Boardroom. And I'm thinking to myself, God, does this guy know? And he gave me his site, went to his site, and I can assure you he was not the best copywriter that ever walked in the door at Boardroom. And he had no idea, you know, who had written for us. And I wasn't being a snob either. Just the fact that if you're going to be better than Jim Rutz and Gary Bensivenga and Gene Schwartz, you better have some chops. So I wrote back to him, and I go. And I was a little sarcastic, but I wasn't mean. And I said, you know, shame on me for not knowing you, because if you're better than anybody who's ever worked at Boardroom, how did I miss you? How did I miss out on you? Then I went on to say, well, frankly, I looked at your stuff, and, you know, it's good, but it's not really up to snuff. At the time, you know, I let him down easy, but I really want. I didn't understand where his lack of humility was coming from. And then I go the other extreme. Gary Bensivenga, who's, like, the best copywriter living today, had incredible humility. Like, he would talk about all the other writers and how great they were. Now, once he started writing, he wanted to beat them for sure.

Yeah.

And he would beat himself.

You can be humble and competitive at the same time.

Humble and competitive. That's the key, you know, and it's.

And it is one of those things where if you're not humble, I believe it shows that you don't have much marketing experience, because some. I remember somebody else told me that, you know, marketing boils down to two things. Guessing and testing. And how often are we wrong? And we could. Like, I've come up with great angles and, like, this is gonna quote crush. It's gonna be the best thing ever. And it is an absolute flop. And you're like, that was. I thought I was being smart and good. And then you throw something up there, kind of. Maybe you weren't even thinking that much. You were just like, I'm just gonna get it out and it does better. And you're like, man, maybe I don't know. And maybe it really is. Just know the fundamentals, put it out there, test it, watch the numbers.

And your audience will tell you. Your audience is always gonna tell you.

Your audience will tell you. It's like baseball, right? Even you know you're gonna strike out more often than not.

That's right. You're only going to bet 300 and you'll be a Hall of Famer. And the seventh thing, it's funny because you say to people, show me your portfolio. Show me what you've done. That usually is the first thing. That's my seventh thing of seven. Once I go through all the others, then I'll look at their stuff. And I really. I don't go through this that much anymore because I'm not hiring writers today. But when people ask me about copywriters, I send them my blog post that talks about these seven things. But I also tell them, you know, are there specific things in your market that you think that a writer should have or should know or should research? Because that's where you kind of want to start, but you also want all those other things, too.

Yeah, one question there. And I know this can range on who you're hiring and how you're hiring, but did you prefer to pay people a flat fee, a fee plus performance bonus, or.

Yeah. So I'll go back to the original. Like Jim Rutz and Gary Bensivenga were one of the two of the first royalty writers. And it was way back in the late 70s, I think, and they would actually not charge you for the package, and then they. Would you pay them a royalty of either? You know, at that time, it was probably 20 or 30 cents a name. Excuse me, 2 cents or 3 cents a name. $20 or $30. A thousand.

And that per. Oh, for how many people? It went out to mail.

This is direct mail. So that was the origination of a royalty agreement. Then they got. They were so good and they always got the control. So then they had a line out the door, and then they started charging like $30,000 against royalty and all of that. But my rule of thumb is if it's an up and coming writer and they've gotten some royalties, but I'm not so sure that. And this was a boardroom so we were going up against some of the best writers. I would try to negotiate something. I did think that the writer should get something on the back end, should they write a winner. That's my basis. But it didn't have to be a royalty over time. So what I would do is I had some deals where I would pay them a one time bonus if they got the control or I pay them a bonus on the first two continuation mailings or something like that based on some criteria that we set up up front as to what a success is. And usually it was that their package became the control and that we mailed it for most of the names for that product. But I think that for new writers, while it's nice to get royalties and it's nice to get a percentage of the gross and all of that, you know, if you're just starting out to demand that up front is unless you can back it up with an amazing track record, it's hard to do. Now on the other hand, if I'm a marketer with very little money in my budget, maybe you can come to me and say, I'll do it for nothing. Although I hate writers working for nothing. I don't really like people working on spec because then, you know, but if it's, I'll do it for nothing. But I want this incentive. Should I get the control for a cash situation, cash flow situation, that might work better for a marketer. But again, I think if they're that good, they're going to get the control and they're going to get an incentive on the back end. So maybe it is a decent way to do it. But I don't, I have to really look at their track record, look at who they've worked for. As far as a new writer that's just starting out with no track record, the best I'll do is like a fee plus a bonus maybe because I want to see them prove themselves, you know, and then there's a lot of things in between you can do. You can have the royalty be against the upfront, you can have the upfront be a fee. And then if they get the control, the royalty starts immediately. So there's a lot of ways to jigger how they get paid. And I've done every. Every. I mean, I've done enough of these where I've done.

That's why, that's why I'm asking you every possibility. And again, that's valuable. That's valuable. Especially as somebody who does hire copywriters occasionally. And I do Some copy, because I like it. But I'm not necessarily just a copywriter for hire.

Right? So. Yeah, but you could, you could easily, you know, whatever you want to charge for, you know, a sales letter or whatever, and you want to charge 5,000, 7,500. And if it becomes the thing about online is that you can get the control and you're going to lose it in 15 minutes in direct mail, you could keep a control for a year, you know. So I think one of the things you can, the bonus situation, if you get, say, 7,500 for the package, and if it becomes the control and they do and they mail it again, you get another 7,500. That's a nice way. So that they're not beholden to you, you're not beholden to them, but you get an incentive for success, and that's always a good thing.

That's fantastic. So, Brian, this is the part in the convo where I always ask everybody, I've asked you before, but are there any nuts you're trying to crack right now? I think you, you've got the book out, you're obviously taking care of your health, you've got your mastermind, you're doing a lot of advisory stuff, etc. But is there anything out there right now that you're trying to, whether it's people you're trying to meet, something you're trying to learn, get access to?

Yeah, I'm not. I don't sell my masterminds. I just, you know, I keep them kind of small because I want them intimate. So it's not about money really. But one thing that I'm really interested in, and I've made some small strides to it, but I haven't been focused on it. But it is a nut I'd like to crack, using your phrase. And it's the ability to sell online with a bill me and a real bill me. I'm talking about a physical product or a digital product shipped without any money sent, and then bill them after the fact and collect like we used to in direct mail, you know, 60 or 70 or 80% on the back end or get it returned to us. That's With a physical product, would they.

Typically be billed after they get it or after a certain period of time?

No, the after period. I mean, the bill me that you see now is that we'll ship it to you in 30 days, we'll, we'll charge your credit card and then it becomes automatic. And then, of course, in 30 days they forget and then they Send it back and you got chargebacks. That's one model, my model. Because in direct mail we used to ship the book. No cash, no money, no credit card, no nothing. And when they got the book, the first invoice was on the book. And then we had a billing series of six efforts. Now the reason why you can do that in direct mail is, is that you can do a credit screen on the list before it goes out. So you can get a lot of bad debt out of there. You can get a lot of names. And we used to, on outside lists, I mean, on house lists, we used to get 70 or 80% pay up because we knew they paid up before. On outside lists we used to get 60 to 70% pay up. And believe me, getting a bill me up front with a high response rate, it's going to be anywhere from 3, 4, 5 times what a cash with order will do. And if you get 70% pay up, you will make so much more money. And for the bad debt, it doesn't even matter. So the linchpin in this is that you offer it this way. They go to a squeeze page and when they put their email in, I need a credit bureau that in real time can move them to because it says, bill me, don't send cash. Subject to approval. You go to the page and if they're a bad debt or they're a bad person, based on your criteria, they'll go to a page that they have to pay cash where. So that's the piece that I haven't figured out. I have some people that say they can do it. I haven't been convinced they can do it. And you have to do it in real time.

Yeah, really quickly dynamic question on that because that's obviously older school than what I had ever seen when they got it. So if I got the book, I ordered the book from you, I get it in the mail and then there's an invoice with the book. Right. Like, okay, pay.

So we called it the acknowledgement. We didn't even call it an invoice. It was an invoice, but it's the acknowledgement invoice. And so, yeah, but it was an invoice. So.

And then would I be responsible for either writing a check or making a call or something like that?

It was all they purchased through direct mail. They sent an order card back. Some people went online, but not many after the Internet. But there'd be a business reply envelope in there, an invoice, and they could put their credit card right on there. Or they could send a check and they put it in the envelope and send it back.

Interesting. This is not apples to apples, but are you familiar with some of the strategies in using PayPal's PayPal credit? PayPal bill me later.

A little bit, yeah. A little bit, yeah.

In essence. And I've only used it once, and it's been a few years ago. I do know some other. I have some other colleagues who've had some success with it. I think it has to be above $100.

Yes.

And maybe up to, like, I don't know, 10,000. But in essence, it just says, like, PayPal is automatically qualifying me or not. And if it says yes, let's say I'm buying something for $100, then it's gonna. I don't have any payments or interest on it for six months. Granted. I have to start paying at, like, at six months. I either have to pay it all off or interest. I gotta double check now, or it starts charging me back interest for the whole thing. But if somebody doesn't pay, like PayPal pays me, the vendor immediately, they'll pay me my hundred dollars and they'll just take the credit risk. So there's a degree of similarity there. It's not the same thing, but yeah.

It'S not quite the. Again, the full bill me. But that would be.

There's the merit to that. Especially let's say you've got a $2,000 offer and you're pretty. I mean, hopefully you're pretty confident in it. You're like, listen, it takes most people three to six months to really start to see some results from this, that or the other. Utilize this. Save your money for all your other marketing expenses. By then, you've kind of made the money.

They have to be PayPal approved.

Yeah, exactly. So that's an interesting one, but no, that's a good nut to crack.

In fact, if you're delaying their cash for six months, if it's on credit. So that's a long time to wait now, of course.

Well, remember, you're not getting. You're not waiting. You are literally getting paid the same day.

Oh, okay. Okay.

Yeah. So you get paid. Yeah, no, it's really good. I think Mike feels same as the. Do you know Mike? Yeah, I know Mike is the first one I saw using this when he was selling. I don't remember if it was a software or a course, but I remember thinking that was a pretty innovative way is to utilize that.

That is.

But if you figure that out on your other end.

I Will let a.

Lot of people know. Yes.

That's super cool. Well, man, Brian, that brings us to the end of the epicizzle, because, you know, other podcasts have episodes. This one's so hot, we have epicles they can wrap. So if people want to grab your book, there is obviously going to be a link here on the page, but is it overdeliverbook.com I'm not looking at the www.overdeliverbook.com? nice. And there's a bunch of bonuses and whatnot on there as well, right?

Bonus page. It's got. I set up the bonus page the way I did because if I have a book called Over Deliver, I better over deliver on the bonuses. So there are 11 different bonuses. I got a swipe file going back to 1900 of mailing pieces from some of the greatest copywriters ever. And if you say, well, what do I want? Direct mail from the 1920s. You do. You'll get copy ideas and platforms and subject lines and all sorts of stuff. There's a course that Jay Abraham did that took him $200,000 to put together. He's not selling it anymore. It's all on there digitally. Also, 21 keynotes Jay has given, which is amazing, two books by two of my gurus in direct mail, Gordon Grossman and Dick Benson, that are just phenomenal. And you can't really get these books anywhere. So I have a PDF of each of them. There's actually a PDF of Gary Ben Savanga, best living copywriter called the Benson Bullets, which are some of the best things that he ever wrote. And he allowed me to put it in one PDF. Dan Kennedy was at my Titans event, did a 270 page swipe file that he let me offer as a PDF. On this page I have the lost chapters of Over Deliver, which is all the stuff I wrote since I put the book to bed, which is another 178 pages. Not that anybody wants to read more of me after they. And I have some videos from the titans of direct response in 2014. So it's just an amazing bonus package. So you go to the site overdeliverbook.com you go to either you push a button, you go to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indie Books, you buy the book, you come back to the page and you put your order number in, you opt in and you download all of this stuff. The other reason why I did such an extravagant bonus page was because these are all my mentors. And I realized when I saw the movie Coco, I don't know if you've seen the movie, it's a Pixar film, but it's all about, you know, honoring your mentors. And it's about Dia de Muertos. It's a Mexican film, and it's all about that you're not really dead until you're not remembered anymore. So I. I have some people on this. On this page that are dead. Have a lot of people who are still alive, too. So why not keep them remembered? Yeah. Be remembered. It's always remember. And that's what I'm doing on this page. And I encourage everybody. You know, I think the book is good. I think they'll get a lot out of it, and they'll certainly get a lot out of all the bonuses I'm making available. And they'll also be opted into my blog post every Sunday, which is all content. I don't do affiliates. And it's just a lot of information. And that's kind of what I'm up to, you know, since, as I said, when I had my stroke in April and I survived, I didn't say, you know, now I'm going to live because I haven't lived before. Well, that's not the case. I'm 61. I've had a great life. I have a great life. But now that I have a second chance, I can continue to teach and share and contribute. And that's what this page is about, too. And my book.

That's fantastic.

Well.

And I hope we get a whole lot more out of you. I mean, we just lost a titan, right? So.

And I hope we get a lot more out of you. We definitely will. You're a lot younger than me.

A little gray in your beard, but it's coming in. All right, Brian, well, thank you very much for stopping by the show today. Really appreciate you. Fun to talk to you on this special twofer episode. And for everybody else, stay tuned for the next episode. Okay, this episode is almost done, but our time together doesn't have to end. At least not yet. Subscribe to the show so you don't miss the next episode and head on over to baconrapbusiness.com where you can find more bonus material. And you can leave me a voice message with your question. If it's good, I'll read it on the air. And if you have a business problem you'd like my brain on, send me an email to ask Bradacon wrapped business dot com. Tell me more and I might be able to give you a second opinion.

On what's keeping you stuck.

See you on the next episode.