Apply THESE Strategies To Profit MORE In Your Business | Joe Polish

So today I'm going to talk about how to build an army of influencers. So in this picture, you'll see a lot of people that I have no clue who they are, but they all have one thing in common, is they. They're holding up my book. And this is my Dutch book that I'm selling. I've been selling this book for over eight years. And we've seen a big growth in sales in the last couple of months simply because we started using this technique that I'm going to share with you today. So how does it work? How can you get an army of influencers promoting your book or your product, your offer, whatever it is.

A year ago or so, hardly anyone had even heard of Periscope or Meerkat or Blab or Facebook mentions. And right now we all have this portable television studio in our pockets and we could broadcast to the entire connected planet for free and build an audience. And what we're going to talk about today is about owning time, which is really the most valuable asset that we have in our lives.

The marketing Buddha is going to dazzle.

Us for the next hour.

So go ahead. Dean, welcome.

This is great. Thank you, Timothy. So welcome, everybody. Let me take a good look at who's all here. Is everybody here? Yes. Okay, here's what I want to do in this session. It's going to be a little different than sessions that we've done in the past where normally we have a guest and normally we're going into an interview process. What I want this one to be is more like it's you and me and more like if we had a chance to get together over coffee, like I see my friend Stacy Perragoom right there drinking her coffee high that we were together and we were doing this just us one on one. And I see Brian Margolis there and I see all the people that I know that imagine if we had a chance to get together over coffee and I could spend an hour with you and go completely over your business as a diagnostic and identify. Where's the big breakthrough for you in 2022? Where's the big opportunity? That's what I want to kind of think of this as an. As I was trying to prepare, this is quite a thing to think about to get the best kind of 50 in 50 minutes. What could we do that would have the biggest impact on your business? And I've been working on this process of our. Our eight profit activators. I call it the breakthrough blueprint. That's what we focus on. I Love marketing for all of this time on the framework of these eight profit activators that we can trigger in your business right now. And everything that we've done is a subset of those eight things. Now, when we look at it, I'm going to take just a couple of minutes and set the stage for you about what the before unit, the during unit and the after unit is. So you can kind of guide your framework here. And then I'm going to go down a path for 50 minutes going each of the. The profit activators in the before, during and after, giving you the the best way to identify where these are either growing or slowing your business right now. And then at the end, I'm going to open it up and we're going to have some time for your questions as well. So. And we could do that because I'm in charge today. So there we go. Now here's the thing. I've got approximately 60,000 hours of time invested in thinking about the eight profit activators over the last 30 years. For the first five years of it was sort of unconsciously as I'm trying to figure things out in my own business. And once I got the framework, I've spent the last 25 years consciously fitting things into developing and advancing this thought of the before unit, the during unit, the after unit and the eight profit activators. And the entire body of work that we've got in all the hundreds of episodes of I Love Marketing support this. So you've got a whole resource to go deeper in the things that we identify today as the big opportunities for you. So to set the stage and kind of set you on a path of how to identify where, what is your after unit and what is your before unit and your dur.

Your.

Your during unit. Because every business is slightly different, but every business is universally impacted by these a profit activator. So I'm going to share a couple of overlays so that we can see what we're talking about now, the after unit of your business. Here's who we're talking about. We're talking about that in the last 12 months, let's even say just the last calendar year, you did some amount of business, a knowable amount of business. If we just looked at it, we know that you did some amount of revenue, even if it was zero. But whatever that amount of revenue you did, some portion of it came from people who already knew you, liked you, trusted you, and had done business with you before. Not all of your business comes from new people and Maybe it does. And if all of your business comes from new people, then we've got a huge opportunity because that means that you're not paying any attention to the people who've already done business with you and like you and trust you. So we want to focus on identifying for you how big is this opportunity. But if you're a business, if you're in a business where you have high dollar volume transactions, but low volume of transactions, that's different than a business with low dollar volume and high number of transactions, you may have thousands of people that are that go through your business every year. If you own a convenience store or you own a retail store or a restaurant, you may have thousands of people that come through and maybe they come back and maybe they don't. If you're a real estate agent, like my friend Stacy, that you've got maybe you have 50 or 100 people that you do transactions with. If you're a really great real estate agent, you may have 20 people. If you're an average real estate agent, so you may have 20 transactions over the course of the year, but some number of the transactions that you do are going to come from people who already know you, like you and trust you. So for you to first overlay that mindset and framework on your business right now, just kind of, it'll help for you to at least make an estimated portion of how much of your business is coming from your after unit, from people that know you, like you and trust you already, who've already done business with you, and how much is coming from new people. Then the purpose of your after unit. The two profit activators that fit there are profit activator 7 and profit activator 8, which are about nurturing lifetime relationships with your clients and orchestrating referrals. So that's the after unit of the business. That's what we're going to, when we focus on that, that's what we're going to be talking about. The during unit of your business is the part of your business that does what it is that you do. If you're a chiropractor, the during unit of your business is from the moment somebody comes into your office and says, can you help me with my sore back to the treatment that you give them. Maybe the treatment protocol, if it's going to be a six week protocol or a six week program that they're going to go through, all of that would be the during unit. Until people say, okay, I got it, I'm happy, thank you so much for that, that now transitions people into your after unit. That's where we look at what is the unit, the time, the timeline of your business that is actively involved in helping people right now. And so you look at right now, there are people that you are what we would call actively involved in with your during, you're currently working with them. They're the people that are coming into your office this week. If you're a chiropractor. They're the people that you're out looking at homes with right now. They're the people that you're meeting with. They're typically real time in the now. And we want to break your before unit into the middle to profit activators, which are profit activator 5, which is create a dream come true experience for your clients and profit activator 6, which is to provide after sale service. So when we get in and talk about your during unit, we're going to divide it in half that typically you've got the transactional time frame. Like with somebody who's looking for a home. They come in, you're working with them for several months or several weeks, you're looking at homes all over the place. And then they find one that they love and you write a contract. You get the, go through all that escrow and get the closing. And then typically what happens is most people shake hands or hug at the closing table and then they go their separate ways and they never run into them anymore. 88% of people say they had a great experience and would love to work with the agent that helped them. But then when they do these refer these surveys, at the end, only 22% of people actually used the agent that helped them last time. So there's a big gap there in the way that we keep track of, of and keep these relationships going. So we like to have a transition into the after unit. So we count the end of the transactional part as the midpoint and we start to offer a provide after sale service where we're nurturing out into continuing this relationship even after it seems like you've been paid. Like if somebody comes into your office for a series of six treatments and they get paid and then you, everything's done, everybody shakes hands and they leave. They may be satisfied and they may be happy that they got the result, but it's going to make a bigger impact if you were to provide after sales service where now you're checking in with them or you're continuing to provide something extra for them or something that's going to enhance the experience that they had or enhance the results or the longevity of the result that they're going to get. So we'll explore some of those great opportunities there in the during unit and then in the before unit. This is the engine of your business that drives new business. This is the best way to think about each of these units of your business is to think of them as independent operating units. That we think about your before unit as a supplier to your during unit. Your during unit is the core. And almost everybody would love nothing more than just to be involved in the during unit of your business, right? Every professional, every real estate agent, every chiropractor, every dentist, every surgeon, every attorney, every coach, every consultant would love nothing more if all they had to do was work with people who readily want their help. And if you could just go to the, you finish with one and there's another one lined up right at your door ready for you to help. That's what we're looking to to provide with your before unit. And the way to do it is to separate it from the day to day operation of your during unit. Because what happens is most of the time, people get very busy in the during unit. And then only when it's not busy in the during unit do they then turn their attention to the before unit to say, oh yeah, what do we do? I need to get new clients, so I better do some marketing, I better turn on some Facebook ads, or better do something and then they start running ads or they do something and then they get busy again and they drop the marketing. So we want to separate it and think about it as a supplier, as a unit of your business that can constantly keep you going. And as a supplier, you want to think about what is the number, what's the happy number that you have that if you could buy new clients anytime you wanted to, how much would you happily and cheerfully pay to have a new client? And that's what we're looking for with your before unit. Now you may look at and say this is a trap that a lot of professional or personal service companies run into is that they don't price their offering in a way that allows them to have even a small cost of acquisition that they, if they want to get $50 an hour or a hundred dollars an hour or whatever it is. They price their service based on their personal time. Like they're a freelancer in, you know, invoicing for the amount of time that they spend. So they look at every bit of advertising that they spend as now an expense that's taking away from the amount of money that they're actually making as opposed to thinking about and elevating the way you think about what you do as a business. And a business is to support the entire operation that you're running, your before unit, your during unit, your after unit, so that you can afford to maintain a long term relationship with people. But we're going to show you how to multiply the things that you that you do have in your during unit. But we're going to look at in your before unit the key driving metrics here. The key driver of everything is your list of unconverted prospects. The better you are at getting in front of people, getting an audience of people who could be your next client. That's where we really want to focus our time. And I'm going to show you how to think about that as a capital investment versus as an expense. So that's to set the stage.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. And in this talk, Elko will show you exactly, step by step, how to build your own army of powerful influencers. Elko's title is how to build an army of influencers to promote your products. Please join me in welcoming Elko.

Thank you, Tim. So today I'm going to talk about how to build an army of influencers. So in this picture, you'll see a lot of people that I have no clue who they are, but they all have one thing in common as they're holding up my book. And this is my Dutch book that I'm selling. I've been selling this book for over eight years and we've seen a big growth in sales in the last couple of months simply because we started using this technique that I'm going to share with you today. So how does it work? How can you get an army of influencers promoting your book or your product, your offer, whatever it is that you want to offer? Well, it's very simple. What you do is you pay influencers to post about your offer. This is a book in my case. So let me see. So. And that's it. You just pay people to promote your product and that's about it. So why would you want to do that, well, first of all, you can have very fast growth if you have other people, other influencers. So an influencer could be somebody on Instagram with a large following or not even that big of a following, and they start promoting your book, they put a post or maybe a story where they talk about your book and then they say like, swipe up to get the book. Works very well. So you have fast growth, you have a lot of social proof. So I get a lot of messages from people that I know that send me screenshots of other people that are promoting my book. And again, I don't have a clue who these people are. I'm going to talk about how it comes that I don't have a clue. So what you're going to have is you have a lot of messages from people that say, like, hey, everybody is talking about your book. Because from a lot of different influencers, they're promoting your product versus hey, man, I see your ads all the time. So also, it's very profitable. If you do it well, it could be way cheaper than normal ads and for example, Facebook ads or YouTube ads or stuff like that. So how do you do that? How do you have an army of influencers? Step number one, and I will send all of you guys the step by step plan. I'll send it to Eunice and she'll send it to all of you guys. But step number one is slide in the dm. The DM is a direct messaging system of Instagram. It's very simple. You ask for their physical address. So you tell them like, hey, I got a free gift and can we surprise you with a free gift, free of charge? Step number two, and very important before you go to step number two, even before we go to step number one, is who not how. So I said, I have no clue who all these people are. The whole strategy that I'm explaining to you right now, I have not invested any hours of my personal time in it. It's just one person in my team, actually two people in my team that are consistently doing these steps. So it's not my hours and as we all know, who not how is the way to grow. So if you want to apply this step by step system, I would advise you not to do it yourself. But have somebody that you can trust to do this and then it can be very profitable. Step number two, first you ask for the address. Step number two is you send the book for free. And you don't charge shipping costs. You just send them the book or your product or whatever. It is that you have for free. Step number three oftentimes, and that's a bonus, that's not step number three, but it's a bonus. Oftentimes when they get your book for free or your product for free, they already posted on their social media. Not all of them, a lot of them don't, but a lot of them do as well. So they, that's a free promotion. But that's not even, not even the goal of this step by step plan. Step number 3A. Sometimes they receive, they respond like, hey man, thank you for, for the book. That's amazing. And then you respond to their message after they receive the book and you ask if they are open for a paid promo. So you send the book, then they reply on dm, like, hey, I got your book. It's amazing. Thank you so much. And then you reply and ask them if they want to promote it to their following as a paid promotion. So you just pay them. Or step number 3B is if they don't respond after they got the book, if they don't out of themselves respond, you just follow up, say, hey, I think you got the package? Did you get it in good order? And what do you think of it? So that's step number 3B. And then you just ask them like, hey man, can you, can we do a paid promotion? And what you then do, if the price is right, you agree. You don't negotiate, but you agree. You never negotiate on the price. You just agree or you don't agree, you're like, okay, it's too much, but thank you so much. So what you see in this image as well is I'll just say, like, all right, let's go for it. We're easy partners.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Step number five is pay them fast. So if they say like, yeah, it's a hundred bucks, or it's 500 bucks or whatever, if they send the Invoice, pay within 24 hours, they love it. They'll be like, wow, you're the best partner that we ever had. And then they start promoting it on their Instagram in this case. And then what you have to do is track the sales. So for example, you pay 500 bucks, they start promoting and they see like, hey man, we only got like 14 sales of a book or we got like 140 sales of the book. That's when you see when you have a winner or not. So is it a winner? Is it a winner? For example, in this case, I don't even know. Sure, but we might have paid like 500 bucks for this promotion. And you see these are book sales and this is all within one hour. And this is within one hour. So probably we had like over 100 book sales just from this one promotion. We paid 500 bucks, which means that we only paid like five, five dollars per book that we sold. So that's a winner. And if it's a winner, what you're going to do when you have a winner is you schedule another promotion. And this is the goal of this step by step system is when you have an influencer that has a really good engagement with his or her audience and he or she gets a lot of results for you, then you schedule another promo, let's say other month, the next month, and another promo, and another one, and another one. Because they are gold for you. They are like your sales reps, but they're way more effective because they can close in larger amounts and they're oftentimes pretty cheap. So with this whole system, this is my long term vision. I want to build an army of influencers that are happy to get paid and happy to promote at any time. So at any time that I want to send out a promo for a new product, a new course, a new webinar, new offer, a new opt in page, whatever it is, we send them an email and they promote to their following and boom, we have omnipresence for years to come. So I want to build an army for years to come. So reasons why I like this, first of all, it cost me zero hours of my time because I have a who and I have a system. And this is extremely scalable as well. There's almost no technical stuff, no ad accounts, no click through rates, no nothing. It's just very basic, but it works very well. There's consistent traction around my brand. So simply because all of these influencers keep on posting about this guy with this book and he's amazing. And of course they know the right words to say because we teach them what to say. This is not depending on algorithms, Facebook or Google policy, or you know, when you're ever your Facebook account is banned or your Google account is banned, doesn't matter. This is Your own assets, like your partners are your assets. You'll have consistent sales. So whenever you do this and you do it well, you have consistent sales. So let's say you have a new influencer every day that promotes the book. It keeps on going and going and going. There's no need to ask for a favor. So you know, you can also work with other people like JV or affiliates, but it's asking for a favor. I'm very bad at asking for favors and I oftentimes don't like to return the favor if I'm not a big fan of like what they're offering or whatever. But now they can just promote me and we just pay them. It's very good for your follower growth. As you see, they always not just promoting the book, but also promoting my brand. So my ad handle, it's growth on demand. Like you just send them a message and they'll promote for you. And then you have growth on demand. There's unlimited potential. This is just in Holland and we just been doing this for like two months. The potential of this is crazy. And again, this is just Holland. Like it's super small, but it's been super effective already. So I got some bonus tips for you. Bonus tip number one is you got Instagram posts. So in the timeline of somebody on Instagram, but you also have Instagram stories. And stories is where they can say swipe up and stories, they work much better than Instagram posts. We have much better results. If people promote on their stories and they oftentimes would like to promote on stories, they prefer to promote on stories as well. So that's a good thing. Bonus tip. So that's the difference between a post and a story. On the left you see a post, which is good, but on the right you see a story and then they can swipe up which is even better. Bonus tip number two is give influencers clear instructions but challenge them to be creative. So I have an audio you see at the right, you see I made a little audio of a couple of minutes where I explain to them what I like to see whenever they're promoting. And so I give them a three step thing. So step number one is that they're in screen and they're having my book in their hands. And then they, they talk a little bit about what, what impact I made on them or the book made on them. And then they talk about the reason why people can get the book now for free. It's because there's some spelling mistakes in the book. And then they need to say swipe up. So I got a simple three step plan and most of them, they follow it and converts very well. Bonus tip number three is give your who the permission to close deals. So I told my who. So I have two who's who are doing this. I told them like you decide on the deals. I mean if it's really large deals like a thousand euros and up, or 2 or 3 or €4,000 and up, just ask for permission from me. But anything up to a thousand bucks, you decide to close the deal and I'll get the invoice and I'll pay the invoice and afterwards we'll start, we will see if it worked, yes or no. So this is how you learn quickly. So I just trust but I verify afterwards if they are great deals. Bonus tip number four, very important. Something that a lot of people don't see and don't think about is you got micro influencers. So for example, people with 8 to 80,000 followers on Instagram, you also got like the bigger influencers, like 100 plus thousand followers on Instagram. We noticed that the micro influencers have way better engagement with their following. Very good results. They tend to want to work harder for you. So they have better promotions. They're more happy with a promotion because they're smaller and they're way, way cheaper. So let's say somebody with like 10,000 followers is not 10 times cheaper than somebody with 100,000 followers. It's oftentimes like, like 20 times cheaper. But the results are like way bigger compared to the amount of followers. Bonus tip number five, think outside of your target market. So this is a famous Dutch guy, he's a hip hop artist and this is crazy. Like he has a good amount of following like 50 or 60,000 people. And on the left, so on the right you see him with my book and on the left he says, and this is Dutch again because I didn't have the time to translate. But he says, I just smoked a big fat blunt and I've been thinking. And then he starts to pitch me, so which is very funny. This outside of my target market. My target market is not potheads, not people who smoke a lot of weed. But he has a big following and they really love him. He has good vibes and a lot of people based on his promotion started buying the book. And he already promoted twice for us. So he's a great partner. The crazy thing is again, he only charged 100 bucks. 100 bucks and he got like 50 or 60,000 followers. Bonus tip number seven, use a second Instagram account for your who. So you keep your personal Instagram account safe. So I don't want to communicate from my name when it's not from me personally. So we have a second account which is on the right, the Winston account. And so my who's on that account and they, they target people, they send them DMs and they talk about me, but it's not from my personal account. So, so they're not in my account, they don't see my DMs, all that stuff. And so that's, that's much better. So that's bonus tip number six. So in closing, why would you want to build an army of influencers and why could it be an amazing growth strategy for all of us? IT genius network. Well, if you build an army of influencers that are happy to get paid and happy to promote at any time for years to come, you will have amazing results. It cost literally zero hours of your time. If you have a who, there's almost no technical stuff. You will have consistent traction around your brand. It's not depending on algorithms or Facebook or Google policies or bands or all of that stuff. You will have consistent sales. No need to ask for a favor because you simply pay them. You'll have a lot of follower growth because they're mentioning your name. As you see here, there's growth on demand. So anytime you want to grow, you just have them promote your product or your offer. There's unlimited potential. And again, this is just Holland. Imagine going bigger. So there is so much gold out there, you just have to be willing to pick it up up or have some who's that can pick it up for you.

As I mentioned to you yesterday, in a few weeks I'll be 82 years old. I literally go 12, 14 hours a day, five and a half days a week. Do not know the name of anybody that keeps up with me at any age. Plus I enjoy every minute of it. Our company is 50 years old this year. We'll mail between now and election day next year, November, about 150 million postal letters, 2,300 million emails. We have 75 employees. Most of them are really high powered direct marketers operating at a very high level. 1961, I get the opportunity to go to New York to become executive secretary of a political youth organization that had been founded a few months earlier, earlier on Bill Buckley's family estate. So I run this organization. I'm in charge of everything, including fundraising. And I found out real quick like I didn't like asking people for money. I asked some very famous people for contributions. Charles Edison, youngest son of the inventor J. Howard Pugh of Sun Oil Company, Captain Eddie Rickenback of Eastern Airlines. And they were generous, gave me nice contributions, but I didn't like that. So I started writing letters that seemed to work. I got something called a mimeograph machine. Started turning them out with a mimeograph machine. Hired secretaries, a few here and there. And after a year and a half, I said, hey, I want to be relieved of all duties in the organization except fundraising through direct mail. I want to focus on that. Did that for a year and a half, and by then I had a wife and two babies. And I said, I'm out of here. I'm going to start my company. And I thought I knew everything there ever was to know about marketing. Of course, I knew nothing. I didn't know a fraction of 1% of what I know now, but I thought I did. But what I was, I was blind in one eye and had blurred vision in the other. But everybody else was totally, you know, blind in terms of direct marketing. So I looked pretty good. But though I knew, I thought I knew much more than I did. Of course, there was one thing I knew I didn't have I needed, and that was names and addresses, people to communicate with. And in the summer of 64, I discovered that if you were running for president, you had to file with the clerk of the House of Representatives all of your $50 plus donors. I went down there for a couple of days with the legal pad and started writing Barry Goldwater's $50 plus donors. And I did that for a couple days to say, hey, Richard, you're not making a lot of progress here. So I hired five or six women, and after a couple months, I had 12,500. That gave me the courage, the confidence to quit a good job with a wife and two babies and to go where no one had gone before. No one had literally done political fundraising through postal mail before. And that's one of the most important things you can do in life. We'll talk about that here in a little bit about branding. If you can at all you want to be first, can you be first? And if you can't be first in some category, find a category where you can be first and where you can own that category. I've been in multiple groups of different times. People were talking about me not knowing that I was in the group there, and they were talking about me because I was first. You know, who knows the Name of the second pope who was the second person to fly solo across the Atlantic. You know, nobody knows. Okay, it's the first. So whatever, you know, find a category that you can own that you can be first in, and that's how you build your brand. So anyway, I did that for the next 15 years and had no competitors, basically. And by the way, I caught a lot of criticism because I was doing something no one had ever done before. And I was regularly, literally regularly attacked on cbs, abc, NBC, cnn, New York Times, Time magazine, and Republicans and Democrats. The establishment was coming really hard at me. But all of the criticism stopped within a few hours. And a few hours was election night, November 1980. Aha. That's what Vigory has been up to, okay? And so the left had been relying mostly for their campaign funds on involuntary sources, the union, views, corporation, foundations, et cetera. And so they ran out there real quick like, and tried to replicate, duplicate what we had been doing. And I told my conservative friends, don't worry, you know, it's taken me 15 years to do what I'm doing here. And besides, I'm smarter than they are. So it's going to take them 20 years to catch up with us. Not so. And within three or four years, in my opinion, the left caught up with the conservatives. And to this day, they do a far better job, the left does, than the right does in marketing. Think of the 2008 campaign. Obama had 3 million donors to his campaign. I haven't been able to see numbers for 2012, but it's something north of 3 million donors plus 10 million additional names of his supporters on email. Huge. Republicans had nothing like that. And so as a general rule, to this day, the Republicans are not doing the job they need to do to be competitive with the Democrats. So one of the things that I do to this day, at age be 82 in a few weeks, as I said, I spend two to three hours every day studying marketing. I don't need to do that, but I do two to three hours, six days a week studying marketing. And one thing I can leave with you more than anything else. Study, study, study marketing. I don't know of a competitor that I have on the right that spends two or three hours a month studying marketing. Okay? I've developed something that I call Vigory's Four Horsemen of Marketing. You've got to get these four things right and get them right. Life is downhill, the wind to your back, pretty easy. Get any of them wrong, you're going uphill, the wind in your face. Highly unlikely you're going to succeed. And I'll explain each one, but just the four things briefly are position, differentiation, benefit and brand. Position is nothing more than a hole, H O L E in the marketplace. What hole in the marketplace can you occupy that no one else is, is occupying there? And you do that, by the way, privately. That's something you just, and I like to use the example say of Rupert Murdoch, so, and Roger Ailes 20 years ago. They're thinking about setting, building a national cable television news network. They don't sit there and say, well, CBS does this, we'll do this, ABC does this, cnn. They don't care what they do because they're going to occupy a hole in the marketplace right of center. 50% of the country is not being served by television news. Life gets pretty simple at that point. Okay, then differentiation is what you do publicly. So publicly they differentiated themselves from all the other television Networks with Bill O'Reilly, Megyn Kelly Hannity, Glenn Beck for a while, okay? That's how they differentiated themselves from the others. Third benefit, obvious. You get news and information on Fox, you don't get anywhere else, okay? Fourth brand. Brand is the ball game, okay? That's products these days are seldomly sold. They are bought, okay? I bought this week a new car. Well, a new car to me it's a few years old, but they didn't sell me the car, I bought the car, okay? They could have had hundred different types of cars out there. I was looking at my daughter's strong and wife's strong recommendation for a Lexus, okay? I wanted a Lexus and that was it. I didn't have to be sold. I bought that car. You go into the supermarket now, 40, 50,000 items to be sold. Not one salesperson in the store. They will check you out, but Nobody's saying no, Mr. Vigry, you shouldn't buy this brand of paper towels. Buy this one over here. I'm a Viva man, I like Viva paper towels. That's what I'm going to buy. I'm sure Bounty makes a good paper towel. But I've been sold before I walk into that store. And so brand is so important for success in your marketing. So position is what you do privately. Differentiation. You differentiate yourself from your competitors by, you know, whatever you do to differentiate yourself. Benefit is number three and then fourth is brand, okay? And by the way, I do almost nothing in my life of any consequence, any importance without a writ four part plan. We used to get off a lot, lot of us in the late 70s early 80s, 2025, for a long weekend, Friday, Saturday, and we'd plot and plan for the try to bring conservatives to power. And we'd come up with a problem. There was a young congressman from Georgia, part of our group of 2025, Newt Gingrich. He'd invariably, when we came up with a problem, go to the blackboard. We didn't have white boards in those days. And he'd write four words on there, vision, goal, strategy and tactics. An hour later, we filled in those four words and we saw a clear path forward of how we should proceed. And that's not the only way to do a plan. But that's a good way to do a plan. It's simple, doesn't take very long. And by the way, the number one benefit of a plan is not working. The plan, that's important, but that's secondary. The number one benefit of writing a plan is writing the plan. Because as you write the plan, it clarifies your thinking, it crystallizes you. Thought you wanted to go over here, but as you write it down, you say, no, I think I need to go over here. More of this, less of that. So the exercise of writing the plan is so, so important. Joe said yesterday that Dan Sullivan gives me a lot of credit for Reagan's election. Quite frankly, I appreciate the compliment, but it's nonsense. And I've seen different people at different times take excessive credit for Reagan's election and victories and whatever. And it reminds me of a slow moving freight train and somebody running alongside it pushing that freight train. Look at me, look at me, what I'm doing. Reagan with a freight train. And the rest of us had very little to do. The one thing, though, that was very, very helpful to Reagan was what was something called the new right that came into being in the mid-70s. And the entire conservative movement began to come together in the 60s and the 70s with hundreds and hundreds of new organizations. And almost every single single one of these organizations was funded. They got their membership, they sold their books, they sold their subscriptions through direct mail. And Reagan, when he ran and lost in 76 and ran and won in 80, was running against the entire Republican establishment, for the most part. Bob Dole, of course, Jerry Ford, George Bush, John Connally, Howard Baker. And they were getting the thousand dollar gifts. Reagan depended upon the $10, 15, 25, $50. And he had 250,000 of those people. And so the small givers through direct mail just changed American history. March of 1976. Reagan is literally out of money. Riding commercial Airlines and his aide Len Knofsinger goes on and buys $90,000 worth of time on NBC. Reagan sits on a stool much like this, I guess for 25 minutes, March 30, 1976, and makes a 25 minute stump speech. The last five minutes he asked for contributions. About $1,600,000 came in and that was huge back in 1976, turned his campaign around, allowed him to go to Kansas City that summer and get 49% of the vote against the sitting President and propelled him onward in 1980 for success. And if he hadn't been able to do that In March of 76, he would have never been the candidate that he was in 1980. There's a number of odds and ends here, but I know Joe wants to get to some Q and A here, but let me just mention a few things here. I know a lot of you are focused on marketing through the Internet and that's important. You need to do that. Obviously, we certainly do it at our company. But the workhorse of marketing today in my opinion is still direct mail. And when I started in 1961 in New York City, direct mail was the second largest form of advertising in the country. Today in 2012, 2015 is the second largest form of advertising in the country. And by the way, I understood that most people in the nonprofit community to this day and in commercial world as well, do not understand, do not comprehend that direct mail is advertising. Okay, so in late 70s, David Broder, the preeminent political correspondent in Washington D.C. at that time, since passed on just a giant at his time, came to see me and he sat down in my office and we had a casual conversation for an hour or two. And this is late 1970s. And he said, Richard, I'm perplexed. I've been all over Capitol Hill, the White House, et cetera. The Democrats have almost a two thirds majority in the House. In the Senate, got the White House, nothing is happening for the Democrats. They're not able to pass their legislation. And said, I've been to Walter Mondale's office. The Vice President, he can't help me. Nobody knows what do you know what's happening out there? Well, I don't know David, if this will be of help. But I began to explain to him what we were doing. Mailing 100 million postal letters a year, doing this and that, all under the radar. And when we were mailing those 100 million letters, we were very full focused on passing legislation. Mostly in those days trying to defeat the Democrats proposed legislation. Jimmy Carter saw him in an interview just this week complaining about he had. He announced in March, April 1977, that he wanted to change the election laws in four ways. Been devastating to the Republicans, like instant voter registration. Just show up on election day and say, I live down the street, I want to vote, federal financing of elections, et cetera. And so anyway, a friend of mine calls at night, woke me up at 10:30 and I said, paul, you know, we can, we can beat this. He had just come from a meeting of Republican senators saying, we can't stop this. It's a bad idea. But it's a time has come, and so it's going to pass. I said, we can defeat this. Let's talk in the morning. I'm going back to bed. So we did. We got together for four or five months at my home, my office, et cetera, and we designed the strategy through direct mail, using it as advertising. And we defeated all four pieces of legislation. And to this day, Democrats are still complaining that it didn't get passed. But it was the power of direct mail. Just briefly, a few high points. There were some very good questions submitted to Joe here, but most of them weren't dealing with a lot of the weeds of direct mail. So. So I may get these questions here, but I'll just briefly say long letters output, short letters. Counterintuitive. And by the way, most of what we know about direct mail is counterintuitive. You don't want to go to a doctor with an appendicitis attack and say, doctor said, let's go into surgery right away. Great, doc, whatever you say. By the way, where'd you go to school? Medical school? Oh, I didn't. I'm just. I natural appendix puller. It just comes to me and funny, my father was a natural appendix puller and his father said, no, you're looking for a deviant at that time. Okay? It is deviant behavior to lay somebody on a table and cut them up and do what doctors do. Okay? So this, what we do is learn behavior. Most people, and you have to be careful about direct mail. It's very expensive. It does great and wonderful things, but it can also be very, very expensive. And you can lose a lot of money because people say, well, I learned to write in first grade. I know where they sell postage stamps. What's the big deal? It is a big deal. That's why I spend two or three hours every day studying marketing. So if you're going to do a big marketing campaign, get a professional involved, it'll reap great benefits for you. So long letters. I pull short letters. Short, short paragraphs are better than long paragraphs. Use one or two syllable words. Don't use big words that stop people in their reading. It was a wonderful book called the Man Nobody Knows, written back in the 1920s by a congressman. At the time he was a major advertising executive and the man nobody knows was Jesus Christ. And he described how he communicated with one individual. Two syllable words. Christ didn't use a lot of 3 and 45 syllable words. Write to one person, you may be sending it to a million people. Write to one person who is a likely prospect. Summarize your whole mailing if you can in a PS Test, test, test test headlines, test offers, test price. A lot of you have names of your organization mean anything. So sometimes you need what we call a tagline, a sub headline. Joe, I like these coffee cups and these glasses, but Genius Network doesn't say anything. If it says something like the world's largest gathering of marketing professionals or something like that, what's the genius? Is it, you know, men's society? Is it, you know, know, PhDs, whatever it is. So just a little tagline on there indicating that this is a collection of the world's largest, you know, high powered market or something like that. So anyway, taglines, sometimes your name, it just doesn't, doesn't say anything. So you need to tell people what, what it says there. And so Joe, that could go on for a long time. But that covers the highlights. I wanted to say.

No, that's great, that's great. Lee, how would you deliver, define marketing and why do you love marketing?

Well, marketing connects people and for my companies, I'm always looking for a way to allow people to see what do we do, how do we do it and how we can serve them. So like in veterinary industry, in the veterinary industry we have a holistic hospital. So we're looking for that top 5% of people who love their pet so much they will do anything and they come to us and we teach them proactive care and we teach them how to have a longer, healthier life with their pet and people who want to do better in the world. I just absolutely love supporting them on their journey.

Yep.

So Dean, we're going to talk about mindset. So wanted to ask Lee, what is your perspective on the entrepreneurial mindset? I mean, what does that actually mean to you and how do you think about mindset? Because, you know, we can give people all the different strategies and ideas all day long, but their ability to do something with it, I think has a lot to do with their mindset.

100% starts in mindset. And we actually just did a five day auction online, a five day challenge online. And one of the things that we learned is the very first day, we brought in a mindset expert to help the entire community have the same frame of reference around how to approach things. And the first thing is, you know, I start every single day in a gratitude circle, sometimes with my team, sometimes with my family. But every single day, I'm looking for the good. I'm looking for the things to celebrate. And I realized that in anything, you could look at a perspective one way or another. You could look at it that it's empowering you and helping you have a better life, or you can look at it that it's hard and a struggle and everyone's going to have things that are difficult and struggles. But how do you convert it to something that's more empowering in your life? Right. A friend of mine, Brandy Gilmore, taught me years ago to look at my stories, whether it's in work or personal, look at my stories. And as I'm telling a story, looking for the piece that's most powerful and most amount of love for myself and stop the story there. Don't continue the story to when something went wrong or something didn't show up or somebody disappointed me. She says, why are stories in your brain? So that it's the most empowering, filled with the most love, so that you're carrying those stories forward with you.

Yeah.

Great.

All right. So with that, let's talk about something that me and Dean have spent hundreds of hours discussing on I love marketing, which is how to get more customers. So what are some of the best ways that you've discovered in your, you know, careers, your businesses, to get more clients?

20 years ago, I bought a veterinary hospital that had already been around for 40 years. Right? So it was 2001, it started in 1961. When I bought the hospital, it had 3,500 current clients. In the following 10 years, I took that 3,500 and turned it into 25,000 clients who literally came and saw us in person, one at a time. And what I learned is it really is consistent action every day, every single day, we had different ways that we reached out. And in the center of my mind map, it says attracting new clients. And then we had 13 different ways they could find us. Right? We had a mind map 13 days, 13 ways. And the reason it is 13 ways is because there is 13 weeks and a quarter. And every we deep dive on one of them. One might be networking, one might be JVs, one might be social media. Doesn't mean we ignore the other ones. But each week we deep dive on one and get really crystal clear on our plan for that quarter and then we repeat it the next quarter. But it started with the mind map I wrote maybe 20, 25 years ago and I still use that foundation. But in 2008, when the market crashed and veterinary hospitals were empty, they had hallowed halls. They were taking clients and making them part time employees. We were bursting at the seams and the group was wondering, like how did we always have more clients coming in, even in a down market? And it was because consistently every single day, we were doing marketing things. Every day, no matter what. Something I would test might be Facebook ads in another city and then count how many new clients we got from that city. But I made it fun for the team too. I will give them ways that they can participate, kind of gamify it at the front desk. How many calls did they close and turn into appointments for the team? How many people came to us from Yelp and counting it and seeing how they converted it. And the more we gamify it, make it fun for the team and they get to win as well, the more fun it is for me.

Love it. Well, you know, you're quite familiar with elf. Go ahead, Dean, what are you saying?

I was going to say there's a lot like ipower. Like what? Getting your team members involved in. In the process because everybody's got great ideas. You just need good direction by framing the question that's going to elicit the great response. I remember reading there's a great book about Albert Lasker who was one of the old original advertising men and when they were selling refrigerators back when refrigeration was brand new, one of the things that people were afraid of is that they didn't want to have something that was plugged in all the time and sucking electricity because they were new to the whole. You had this meter outside your house that you could see it moving and when that's moving, it's costing you money. So people were weighing the benefits of having refrigeration versus their fear of this bottomless pit of electricity spent. And they said he tasked the entire company. He said we need some phrase that makes people comfortable with the. With Frigidaire as the brand that they can trust for refrigeration. And somebody who was like the equivalent of in the mail room came up with the idea of that every Frigidaire is equipped with Meter Miser technology. And just those words, meter miser said exactly what you need words to say. To say it's watching your back. It's not going to take any more electricity than it absolutely needs to. And that was really the thing that made people comfortable choosing Frigidaire over all the others. Because all the others are just money pits. But you better get that Meter Miser cause that one will save us the most money.

Really big key you said in there. Dean too. And it's Genius, which is coming up with the right phrase that allows your customer to feel comfortable with their decision. They want evidence. They made a great decision. Right. And one of the things I taught my front desk, Joe, which was really important in the shift in closing, clients at the front desk is no matter what the client asks them, the first thing to say is, yes, I can help you with that.

Absolutely.

Because then it puts their mind at ease that they have the right person and the right person who really cares about helping them. And just by using that one phrase, even if they have to say, you know what, I have to check on the answer and call you back, it's okay. Because they set up the relationship of I do want to help you. And I think that that's just been really key in my business is that my clients feel like the team sees them and listens and cares.

Hey Joe, I just saw Evan Carmichael's here too.

Yes. We need to do a shout out for Evan and we Evan is just a master at YouTube videos. If you don't follow him, follow him on YouTube. He's got 2.6 million subscrib subscribers. Over 385 million views. I know that because he was just a guest on the Genius Network meeting we just had. And we're going to be doing a jam session with him at the Genius Network annual event November 6th, 7th and 8th because it was such a big hit.

But interview on his on his channel right now with Kevin O' Leary from Shark Tank. He brilliantly did a two parter with him where it's 1/2 of the interview on his channel, 1/2 on Kevin O' Leary's channel. So what is a great model for collaboration there?

Well, Evan, why don't you pop on and explain what that is and then post it in in the link so people can watch those interviews. And if there's anything that you want to say to either make fun of Dean or to ask Lee a or mention anything, feel free wherever you're at at there bouncing on his trampoline, I'm sure. Where you at right. Right now I am on my trampoline and I just discovered Dean is a fellow Torontonian, so we can't make fun of him. We gotta only show love. Shout out to Lee and her website too, because I was on and she's got this. If you haven't seen Lee's website, I popped it in the chat and it's this epic video across the top of her coaching and speaking and with Oprah and high fiving and it's like, wow, how did you do that? I want to. I got to get leaves website people on board, but I think that's a great. Joe's on there too. Joe, you made your appearance. You're like right after Oprah on there. The link, I don't know where the link is. I'm sure it's somewhere off my YouTube channel. But Kevin O' Leary is trying to grow on his YouTube channel and he wanted to do something. He wanted to do more collabs. And he happens to be in Toronto as well. He wants to do something in person because all of his stuff has now been, you know, remote and, you know, Covid era. And so we connected and we did a two part series. We had two hours or so of time to talk. And what we did was we took questions from both of our audiences. What do you want us to answer? And then we went through about 11 or 12 questions and we put half on my channel and half on his channel. And since I edited it or my team was editing and filming it, we took the favorite, our favorite questions and then gave him the rest. But they're still good on both channels. And one of the great things you can do on YouTube is there's a thing called an end card, which in the last 20 seconds of every video, you can call things out and it's clickable. So that could be your PDF download, that could be your lead magnet, that could be sign up for your email, that could be your website, that could be your offer that you want to send people to. And so what we did was we did a thing at the end where said, hey, if you want to see part two of this interview, go check it out on Kevin's channel or on Evan's channel. And we called it the Kevin and Evan show for that day. And it's just great to do collaboration. So anybody who's doing YouTube, I always love Genius network events. They're great, amazing people. Huge warm hearts here. And so I'm Looking forward to the annual event and jamming out with all you guys.

Awesome.

Yeah. And there's a bunch of genius network members that are here too. So Evan's going to do a whole session on just how to really build and grow a sustainable, you know, YouTube channel, so. Which is awesome. So, Lee, you know a lot about elf. Easy, lucrative and fun. Running an ELF business versus a half business, which I refer to as hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. What does an ELF business mean to you? Because you tend to have a lot of fun in what you do.

It's true. And that is the actual criteria when I'm taking on a project. Is it easy? Is it lucrative? Is it fun? MIT knows it as well. They run it through the same filter. I actually spoke to 8,500 event planners last month and I drilled this home so much that one of them sent me a gift with Lee Richter. Easy, lucrative and fun. I'm like, well, it's actually Joe Polish. But I just have heard it so much because I think, why make it anything else than easy, lucrative and fun? Especially at this time in my life when I have so many choices. And that is literally the filter I go through first for every project, it has to meet those three criteria. Seems so simple. But there's things that don't meet that criteria. And I cut it out.

Yeah, I love it. And that actually that term was given to me by my friend Mark Schneider, who recently passed away. And it has been a great criteria on not just marketing because I've actually trademarked ELF marketing. Right. And so if you do use it, you have to give me credit. Cause or else we're gonna just sue you.

Really?

No, I'm kidding. Well, it depends. We may see you. It depends if you totally plagiarize my shit. But I love the term elf and I recommend using it as a criteria. Use it as a process. And it's helped me. I used to think of it just as marketing, doing automated robotic types of marketing methodologies. But I now apply ELF to people, projects, anything. Because if it's not money, is it easy, liberating and fun? I even applied into my personal life. So I'm going to take next year as a sabbatical. And so there's going to be a lot of things that need to be just ELF for me that aren't money related, but they're, you know, it has to be liberating. So I highly encourage it as a filter because the genius network members that we have a tool called ELF versus Half, where they list what are the people and the projects and things in their life that are elf, and what are the things that are hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating? And really take a look at how do you eliminate the half and how do you get to the elf? So, one thing I want to. I have this question I wrote down here, and then I'm going to ask Jeff Madoff to ask you a question about pr. How can people utilize tough times? As many people in the world have been going through incredibly difficult times with the pandemic, how can people utilize tough times as a springboard for greater success? And what does that word that gets thrown around a lot success mean to you?

Well, success is that I have freedom of time and I can make choices on how to spend that time. That's what money buys me, is freedom of choice, period. That's how I see it the way right now. You know what, looking at tough times, the first thing I did, I remember on March 16, I sat down with my manager and I'm like, what has changed in our world right now? We wrote a list of 25 things that have changed based on Covid and the pandemic, but immediately turned it into what can we do About It? And then a week later on Slack, they were celebrating how things were actually getting better. But it was because we were identifying the challenge and overcoming it together that they were excited about it. Right? It wasn't. They weren't afraid anymore. And they also knew if any changes happen, they'd find it on Slack, so they didn't have to worry about us making different changes and doing things in the company unless they were included. But I tell you, we have had so many more opportunities come out of this pandemic. Our company's up 31% this year. The team feels essential. They feel excited. They feel like people really need them and want them. And so what I do is I highlight that every Friday I write, here's 10 things we're celebrating right now. And one of the things I've learned is to share that list with our clients coming in too, so that they could see the value of the team. And by sharing it not only with the team, but with the clients, they could see we're celebrating the team, but also what we have to overcome as well, because the clients are coming with their perspective of what they have to overcome, but they're not thinking about all the things we have to do to be there, ready for them. And so I think by highlighting that it's now elevated on both sides, the appreciation, the clients appreciate the team more and the team appreciates their position more. They have seen so many people lose jobs, lose opportunities. And even last Friday was bosses day. And they came in and they wrote me this beautiful card. And each one of them is like, thank you for being a leader and helping us be happy rather than scared. And I think a lot of that is just being consistent, sharing what is the challenge and then overcoming it together.

Truth be told, how hardcore of a world is this? I mean, are these. I mean, it doesn't sound like these are like the nicest angels that are floating around wanting to do good deals. I mean, what level of. I mean, look, in every industry, there's con artists and there's people that are ethical. So I mean, what sort of game are we playing here?

Well, it's a game where I just came from watching a video of somebody that did not get paid for their business and it went bankrupt because they went into a process with no advisors and they took the wrong advice and unfortunately, they're now bankrupt and they. Because a private equity group. Well, let me take a step back. So if you run a strategic process like we just described, and you have more than one player as a strategic buyer, and in John Ratliff's case, we had a buyer out of the Philippines because the strategic buyer in John's case, who is out of the United States, told us, and they shouldn't have, but they told us they were very afraid of a strategic buyer coming in from the the Philippines. So we contacted a friend in the industry in the Philippines, said, spread the word you're coming in so that a competitive view would be taken by the strategic that we wanted to work with. The art of the deal. I'm going to go positive first. The art of the deal is getting the strategic buyers to fall in love with the business to understand the integrated value, to open the kimono on what the integrated value is so that you can leverage up your value in their eyes. And they're willing to pay it because they're going to make more money owning it. And we've done deals at what people consider crazy multiples. 60 times EBITDA and give you the whole story, 56 times EBITDA of profit. But the way we get there is making sure it's a win for the buyer, but then keeping them honest by having a competitive soft auction between several of them. That is a healthy, positive process. A negative process where you will have all these negative things come out. Can be a financial buyer, and there's all different types of financial buyers. But the way you know, this is a financial buyer is they're using other people's money, they're motivated. They'll call it a 2 in 20 model, which I can get into if you like. But the bottom line is they're motivated by any money, any dollars they don't pay you. They get in that model if it's at the right level. 20 cents of that's a huge motivation. And their interest is in maximizing dollar dollars as an outcome, not a strategic fit. And right now the leadership of that group is private equity and they make great money for their investors. And the people working it make great money. And so if you're an investor, you want to invest there potentially. But if you're a seller, selling to them is an opposite objective. They want to maximize profit by buying low to sell high to a strategic. And you as a seller, you as a seller want to maximize value by selling high. So they want to buy low and you want to sell high. That creates tension and a whole playbook of private equity on how to achieve a lower purchase price from a seller. When the seller wants to sell high.

Yeah, yeah. So when are the times that someone would sell to private equity that there's either no. Is it because they have no other alternative or there are some situations of private equity and I say all this out of ignorance.

No, no, they're great questions.

Yeah, I'm not in any means.

So we have sold to private equity when the strategics are either not understanding the value proposition or through a soft auction are creating such a high level price that the private equity guys, depending on their motivation, feel like they need to match that because they're. Because they really feel like they. But without a competitive process with strategics involved, you can't get private equity to make a high offer.

Interesting.

This year we just closed with a private equity group after running a process just like that with a whole bunch of chiefs. And the clients came to. I'll give you the numbers and not the names. They came to us, they said we don't. Well, I met them through referral. We don't need you. We have a $40 million offer. So. Okay, who's it from? Well, this private equity firm, I said, look, I'll give you my right hand if that's the value of your business, because it's not. Think about the private equity guy's motivation. And I'm not disrespecting private equity. It's their place in the market. But they want to buy low, add value where they can and sell high and they want you to continue to run the business for 20% of the second bite of the apple. What we're suggesting is people should keep their whole apple and not just a second bit bite of the apple and sell that whole beautiful apple to somebody that will appreciate that and will pay a high price for that. Now, that private equity firm who offered the 40 million, the client, there were two brothers. We have a video happy to show our listeners if they're interested. And they got 108 million from that same private equity firm, 100% cash upfront. So the way. And their very happy and the way that that worked was. And I won't name the firms because it's confidential. And by the way, strategic selling process is you can keep everything confidential. If you sell a private equity, it's their job to get out in the marketplace and check whether what the future of your business is going to be so it can get back to your employees and it can get back to your customers. And that's one of the other benefits of selling to strategics and having an advisor that will help you sell to your strategy is it's more confidential because it can really hurt your business if your employees find out about it in the middle of the process and you haven't involved them in it. And we can talk about that. Or if your competitors find out about that and tell your clients what are.

Some strategies and tactics business owners should be thinking about using to bring in cash, like right now?

Well, there's a lot of different ways. One of them is most people don't think about barter. I've set up lots of things for people, but if you have something you can create or you own that you have margin in, or it's sunk cost and it has value to anybody and you can exchange it for anything that can either be cash converted, used in lieu of what you buy, or there's another word I don't get too sophisticated, triangulated. You can. We've done, geez, I've done 50, $60 billion, excuse me, of barter. And I could tell you some great barter stories the other.

I've been to your house. You have a lot of art and shit there that you've bartered over the years.

I mean, this is. I mean, truthfully, I drive a gt. I got a GTS Mercedes I traded a day for. I got a. And I'm saying this just to demonstrate not to be arrogant. I've got a G Wagon 63AMG. I traded two days for. Christy has a Porsche. We traded for my whole backyard I traded for. But it's understanding value perception. If you have something that you have in oversupply expertise, for example, and that expertise has high perceived value and you can exchange it to somebody, you can demonstrate needs it or needs the not yet because you're not really selling the expertise. You're selling the result, the saving, the money, the productivity, whatever it's going to be worth. And you can get anything we used to do with car dealership just as an example, we would create barter profit centers. And I'll go through real quick because it's pretty cool. We would basically look at those. People don't know it. If you have car dealers there, they know it there. It's a very huge amount of volume that goes through not just volume of cars, but just buying, purchasing tens, hundreds of millions of dollars. We would go through everything they were buying. Got to keep my eyes focused on the camera. And then we would see what we could trade for instead of purchasing. But when you're trading, you can trade software for hard on different multiples. And I don't want to get too sophisticated, but we would trade a car for two or three times the value in something else that we would normally pay cash for. So let's say we were going to buy chemicals and we needed cleaning chemicals or lubricating chemicals, we would go to that company and we trade them either automobiles that normally would have, let's call it a 15% margin or less, but we would trade it 2 or 3 to 1. So we would get margins of something like literally 60, 70% to our advantage for something we would normally write a check for. We would also trade for things I could liquidate on the open market for a multiple, excuse me, for a higher margin you can trade. I don't want to get too sophisticated. You can JV with people. Again, if you have anything that you sell, you should ask what else do people buy right now? Before, during, after, instead, if it's still being purchased, then the next level is what else are my buyers buying? And if they're buying it from people they don't know and they're just basically trying to find them anyhow. This goes back to relationships, Joe. You have the ability, with the trust, the credibility that has been very hard won by the years you've served your clients or the value you brought your clients, if it wasn't yours to say, look, this is. And by the way, I have a concept that's called the Aikido school of marketing. And the essence, anybody that knows what Aikido is it's the martial arts methodology that uses the power of the enemy against the enemy. If you use the problem to your advantage, you could say, look, it's a little unusual for me to be introducing you to blank, but I know that you're going to be purchasing or using these services or products now. And you probably don't know who to trust. We've built a very strong relationship where hopefully you trust us and our judgment. We've done a very, very comprehensive job and we found what we think are the best providers. We've negotiated the in behalf of all of our clients, a preferential price, extra terms, guarantees, bonuses. And if you don't know who to trust, we would like to very strongly recommend this. You can choose anybody you want, but we're also ombudsman. You can do things like that all day long. And I hope I'm not getting too rogue on you.

No. You know what I like about what you just said? When I was a carpet cleaner back in 1990, one of the ways I came up with a free room of carpet cleaning was I heard a one of your I don't know how many thousands of dollars. You were the most expensive seminar guy in the world back in the 90s when I first started listening to your stuff. I remember listening to one of your first set of J. Abraham tapes in 1992 was the first time. And you had some carpet cleaners and I think back then you were charging like three grand an hour or something and they could not afford you, these two guys that owned the carpet cleaning business. And so they scraped up $2,000 to hire you. And I think you gave them 45 minutes for two grand. And what you told them is you explain lifetime value of a customer and you are great at explaining the whole J. Abraham. You don't know how much you can afford to spend until and unless you know how much a client is actually worth to you. And so you would explain to them lifetime value of a customer and go out and spend a month giving away carpet cleaning for free. Because what will happen is you will develop reciprocity and then they will refer you and they'll do business with you again. And so what happened is they went to churches and trade shows and neighborhoods and just offered like an entire houses of carpet cleaning. And people would tip them and they'd refer them and things like that. And I was like, huh? So I was like, what if I just gave away a free room of carpet cleaning? And so I started doing that and then I created A thing called a carpet on it. Because I didn't want to do a free quote. I wanted to do something different. And I developed this system for myself. And then I went to a dry cleaner of clothing was my first joint venture, who was already had developed a relationship with people that were bringing their clothing. And I said, can I clean the carpets in your house or your. Or your dry cleaner here to show you the services I do, and if you like it, then can we talk about offering services to your clients? Because I wanted him to see my, you know, my services. And so he agreed to let me do his. The store. And so I cleaned the front entrance. It wasn't a ton of carpet, but it was the front entrance to this dry cleaner. Now, what happened is I instilled reciprocity. But then over, like the first year, he referred me, and I gave him 10% commission of every job that I did. And he referred $25,000 worth of business to me that year. And what my offer was was a free room of carpet cleaner to all his clients. And another thing that I learned through you is that if you offer someone a gift, even if they do not avail themselves of it, you still get the benefit, the reciprocity by getting. And you genuinely do it. You don't want to do it as a gimmick. I mean, if you are offering something to someone, you give it to them, right? And so what ended up happening was all of these people that stopped going to this dry cleaner. I asked after I did a few jobs and people reported back, I was like, can I have your list? And I will call them. I will. Physically, there was no Internet back then. This is like literally manual marketing, right? And putting postcards and signs on his store. I even got him to put little door hangers over the clothing that said, you know, ask us about our free carpet cleaning. But here's the point as it relates to everybody is I then started teaching carpet cleaners to go out and say they're going to hire a landscaper, a pool cleaner, an electrician, a painter, a pest control company, all of these, you know, asphalt, like, everything, you know, and they're going to. You have a relationship with them and, you know, different service businesses. And the fact is, like, why is your interior designer writing to you about a carpet cleaner? Why is your carpet cleaning writing to you about a real estate agent? And all of a sudden, it became this whole joint venture thing. And so every time one of my carpet cleaners wanted to add another hundred grand to their business, I would say, who is the joint venture or refer that you can develop and establish a relationship with, they can refer that business to you. And, and right now, that opportunity, I think, exists in greater levels than ever before because, you know, there's this anxiety and there's all these people trying to figure out and many of the comments that people have posted here with these ideas, I mean, I think that's just a way to look at it. And I only bring this up because I was a Deborah carpet cleaner that was just trying to figure out how to learn marketing. Still doing the carpet cleaning myself, and I still manage to build and grow my business doing all this sort of stuff. And now with that level of knowledge and how easy it is with the Internet in the, in the spreading of messages, there's just such a great. And the need of it is such a great opportunity. You know, you do some really effective marketing in wild things seafood, but you also do some unique things. You go in and you actually train your vendors. You, you know, you do all kinds of stuff. And I don't want to, I mean, you can name names if you want, but I don't want to, you know, speak. But I'd like you to, to kind of walk people through what you do and how you do it. What have you done that has been a game changer that has made you money, that has created bonding and relationship and engagement with your clients? And what are some mistakes that you've done?

I'd love to cover both of those.

In our conversation today. Just, you know, let's talk about some best practices, some best strategies, and let's talk about some lessons.

Well, first and foremost, the money making thing. There's things that have made us money in the past. To me, completely unsatisfactory to my level of expectation as far as what I've learned, what I've implemented, what I've done. I, first and foremost, I don't know if I just grew up with this, but I sincerely have, and you know, this too, a genuine, authentic love for people and the energy, like a positive energy thing. And I love to make people feel that they can achieve new things. I like to be out of the box. I'm an out of the box thinker, but I like to be. That intimacy thing goes back. I think that one of the first kind of engagements that we had was I was sending you over some seafood so I can introduce my company. And instead of just sending you over seafood and go, hey, check this stuff out. You know, Jeff Moore, whatever. I went into a conference room and I, I Knew what all of your. Your team, what their favorite type of seafood was. And I went in, put a flip cam up on a deal and started talking to that camera. It's about 11 minute video. Talked about the seafood, where it came from, made fun of you, which is always a lot of fun to do and. But just gave everything. And I remember the response that you have was like, you could do this as, you know, like a consumer awareness guide. And it's like, right, I do this all the time anyway. And so that really kind of hit for me. And when we did this gourmet giveaway, which is a completely untargeted and not, you know, the way I want it to go as far as wild things. But everybody that ordered in wild things. When we built this list of 2,000 people over the last few months of people that have ordered our seafood, everybody got a video from me. And at first it was me like, hey, Rakim, man, thanks. You know, I saw that you ordered this. I absolutely love what you ordered. You ordered the wild king salmon. I want you to know that this is caught hook and line off the boats of southeast Alaska. And. And, you know, and I would explain it, and I'd explain what's going on and how we believe that the best way for us to share our experience is to give it away for free. And that's exactly what we're doing. I mean, there was a thing, but I used their name and it was like, whoa. But then that became. And as I'm sharing it and talking to Dean about it, he's like, when. When does this become a thing? When you get 2,000 orders in a day. And I'm like, so then I started to do. Not with the name, but make it still very personable and look in the camera and things. And that was convertible, but not nearly as exciting as when you use somebody's name in it. So I learned that, you know, to be able to do that. And then everybody's. I'm starting to get people in these in the Breakthrough Mastermind deal, saying, you know, have just record a bunch of names and stick it in there. That's just so not me. You know, it's the connection, it's the energy. It's the thing. On Thanksgiving Day, when I look at my text and it's you and Renee hiking, and you're saying, I don't even know what you eat on Thanksgiving. You know, okay, is it seafood? Is it what? You know, what is it? That meant the world to me. And if I know that, that means the World, to me, I'm sure that's special to everybody. And I know that, you know, as far as a network, as far as as you're not building a network of people because you have this thing in your mind going, network, network is good. Network good. No, you love people. You like connecting people, you like helping people. And to me, I think that that is the ultimate. To become somebody's trusted advisor, to become their friend and trusted advisor to me is the ultimate position that I can have. Whether it's with my business, whether it's my family, you know, my friends, anything is something that really gets me going. I started my mastermind group Thursday night boardroom because I had all this video and I just wanted to share it. And then it just all of a sudden is built into this group that's got 90 members in it, you know, and they all come every other Thursday. And they don't. 90 don't come, thank God. But, you know, it's that love of people, that energy that we get from people. But seeing the stuff that you've done, seeing the power of the mastermind, I'm.

Just gonna fumble around with the spin here while you talk that you.

The power of the mastermind that you taught me. And that was the thing that we did last year was I worked with a major Broadline distributor. And I'm a tiny, tiny bit of this broadline distributor. I'm $25 million. They are a $42 billion corporation. So I mean, they're doing $2.2 billion worth of seafood. I can't even, you know, they can't get the janitor open the back door for me. But as I started to look at the power of the mastermind and bringing a group together that has, you know, similar thoughts and similar passions, I put a mastermind group together of six suppliers we call the gang of six. And we put this group together. We met at this distributor's home office with all their executives going, what are these guys doing? And all of a sudden I was able to put this mastermind group together of suppliers, suppliers, and some of them competitive suppliers where I had to kind of keep the glue. I was the glue that kept it together. And it was a two day mastermind. And now I'm running a mastermind group of suppliers that act as one. And it's a $650 million group, not just a 25 million dollar group. And so I learned that at Platinum. I learned that bringing like minds together is just as powerful as things can be. But just the engagement part really Being sensitive. I think Wyatt Woodsmall was the guy that said, when you can articulate the needs, desires, challenges, fears and aspirations of the other person, not better than they can to themselves, but better than. Not better than they can to you, but better they can to themselves, you have passed the tipping point of becoming that person's trusted advisor for life. And then all you have to do is continue to add value to the relationship and they will eagerly receive it for life. And I was like, you know, that's my motto. You know, I have another one that's learn to teach. Teach to know, Know and share and share with passion. And that one's like a bumper sticker over my door. But it's every breath I take. You know, it's stuff just. And I think that you're probably. I would. I know you're this person. You're learning something not for the consumption of Joe Polish, but you're literally.

You. You can't.

As a guy with add, you can't learn stuff for the consumption of Joe Polish. You are literally listening to this saying, I'm going to share this with Peter. I'm going to share this with Dean. I'm going to share this with Jeff. I'm going to share this with somebody. You're learning it, and you're obligated to learn it on behalf of somebody else. And I think that that, to me, has always been a big driver for me. Again, making money on this stuff. I think that you can get so big and grandiose. I was telling these stories to Jay Abraham and he's like, man, these are all great ideas, but can you assign a dollar figure to it? Well, no, no, no, no. And he stopped me. He goes, this is gonna sound really weird coming from me. And I said, what? He goes, if you can't assign a dollar figure to your activities and these. These really cool plans and this way to bring people together, he goes, you have a business plan based in arrogance because this is now about you, and it's not about what you're driving. And so at that very lunch, I learned that all business, since the beginning of business, ever has one overriding purpose. Take away all the fancy stuff and all that kind of stuff. Every business has one overriding purpose, and that is to drive new, increased and or more profitable consumption of our product or service. And if that is irrefutable and we understand that that is it, then at the core, we all share a basic common language. And so I had a meeting today down the street here with a big time VP at this place. And we talked about that, and then we were able to talk about the three chapters, challenges. And then I was able to even pull out the R question, you know, and use that. And this meeting, I left, and my VP was with me that I took to the airport before I came back here. He goes, man, he goes, I'm your biggest fan. And he goes, that was the best I've ever seen. And I'm like, literally, as a lifelong learner, I'm able, in my mind to go, that was. I love marketing. Episode 111. That was. That was the 10x talk deal from this one.

This was this.

And I'm able to catalog this stuff, but I learned it to share it.

That's great.

And that's been. That's been. Probably the best thing is to learn it, to share it.

Yeah.

You know, and I mean, part of it, too, is, I think, which is hard for some people, is you always focus on the mindset of the person that you're selling and what the hell is it that they want. I mean, you're not, you know, I don't. I don't hear you constantly talking about, you know, your seafood and where it comes from or, I mean, you know, all that stuff. Those are features. But, I mean, you're. You're always thinking about what's in it for them. And as much as a skilled marketer kind of gets that and understands that a lot of people, they. They got things to sell, and they're constantly thinking about what. Why they need to sell it for themselves. Not, you know, what value, you know, can people give them, not what value can they give other people.

Well, yeah, and I think that from. From that point. And. And again, this is something that I learned from you. I learned it from Eben. I learned it from core influence from Frank. On the back of my car, I was talking. There's five questions. And these questions, everybody's like, oh, there's C questions. This is a different card. These are seafood questions. And I said, no, there are five questions that when we ask these questions from every single customer we meet is we find out that 75% of the time, the customer is not using the best available option in their restaurant, no matter how accomplished the chef is. And over the last six years, we've saved the restaurant operator three and a half million dollars in annual food costs just by asking these questions. These questions have nothing to do with seafood and everything to do with the customer. It's funny. There's a story back in 2011, I'm at experts Academy. And I'm talking to David Bach, who I'm a big fan of, and the guy that encouraged you to buy this building. You know, all that stuff.

He tries to take credit for that.

He does.

We did it in the genius interview, too, but. And. Oh, God, you know what? I just remembered how I connected with you. And I'll. I just remembered it now. Good. Fantastic.

We had a conversation prior to this recording saying, how the hell did you come into my world?

Yeah, it was. It's still. But it's a good story, though, and it's about walking your talk, too, by the way.

It's fabulous.

So I. I give my card to David. David. Jeez, give me a card to David Bach. You know, it's hard to remember, remember his name. He's only got 12 New York Times bestsellers. And I hand him my card, and he goes, what are these questions on the back? And I go, those are the questions I ask every single customer when I meet him. And he goes, this is genius. Well, you know, I don't see. Like, genius to me is like the great kazoo on the Flintstones with the big head and all that kind of stuff. I'm like, dude, I sound genius. Just so I don't forget the questions, you know? And he goes, I have seven questions I ask every prospective client. He goes, well, why aren't those on the back of my card?

I go, I don't know.

He goes, is it okay if I put my questions on the back of my card?

And I'm like, yes, for a license.

Yeah.

It's like, it's not prior art, buddy. He's just like. And we had a great conversation, and we talked about the stickiness of coaching, and you were just talking about. And he goes, yeah, what would you suggest? He goes, I'm going through a change in my coaching. And I said, you know, you hire somebody and you've got this program that works, works for people that do it. And he goes, right. I go, so, you know, it works. He goes, right. I go, where are the people when you give them that program? And he goes, what do you mean? I go, where are they mentally? I go, you could explain this, this great program and what it's going to do for them, you know, P90X what it's going to do for you, right? Losing weight. It's not about losing weight. It's not about anything of this stuff. It's about the things you have to do. And I go, david, when you hand them this program and this coaching program and Stuff, they might not be ready for it. And so they might be thinking, you're building this big, you know, entertainment center, cool thing that's gonna have my TVs and like, whatever in there and all this kind of stuff. But all of a sudden you show up and you give them a box from Ikea that they have to build themselves. They're not there yet. It's gonna stay there. And so it's meeting the customer where they are no matter what you've got.

Very good point.

Boom. Get them there and say, oh, hey, look, see that brown thing? Don't step on it. It's gonna make your shoe smell. And then you keep going. And so it's a meeting customers where they are is without a doubt the greatest marketing strategy. But again, you can't fake that. You can't walk in there and you can't. I'm here to meet you. I can't about you. It's like, say that.

Right?

Right.

Well, in the beauty of technology, I think one of the advantages, there's many disadvantages of over communication. You know, I think most people don't admit just how much of a complexity keeping up with email and all of the different eye candy that's available, you know, from a million different sources. Oh, yeah, there's so much interesting stuff out there. The one thing is like, it's harder these days to be a fraud. It's harder to deliver crappy service and not get found out quickly because of reviews, because of how people talk. So I think keeping things in check. And I was just in Costa Rica. I've got quite a few mosquito bites.

On me right now.

And it was interesting because we would go out to. A couple times we went out to a restaurant so that we had a full staff of people waiting on us hand and foot. And they were amazing people and the food they were making was awesome. Anyway, we went out in this little.

Town.

And most people are on island time. I mean, they're just taking forever to greet you, taking forever to bring new menus, taking forever to, you know, everything. Like, they're very slow.

This is Joe on free days going, tick tock.

No, but I'm saying, like, it would be like free weeks if you waited. It like took a long time. And I made this comment to Renee, I said, you know, I go.

How many?

There are like four different places that like supposedly had credit card machines, but they were broken. I'm like, you all have smartphones. Get square. I mean, how hard is it, right? The thing I was like going, you know, so there are places where it doesn't matter. You can still have to be like, fabulous. But the analogy I came out of it is like, if there was anyone, and I'm sure they're there, but we didn't experience any of this where they literally just served people quickly, like they were great, greet them, they had their act together. They had like anywhere near like just a four season service attitude. How they would just dominate.

I think, you know, they'd be called a foreigner. You're not here, get out.

Yeah, but, you know, it was also. But the point I made is like, you know, in business you don't have to be like the best in the world. You simply sometimes just have to show up. You just have to be a little bit better than your competitors. And what I'm always surprised by is that a lot of people in business, they act as if it's so damn difficult to deliver a good service. It really isn't. I mean, most people suck.

I mean, you know, it's so funny, you talk about being just a little bit better than the next guy. I have a friend that's in our mastermind group and he is a hugely successful attorney. I mean, seven figure guy, he's never worked more than 25 hours a week. So we've got names for him. And they're not, they're not happy names.

Right.

But his whole thing ever since he was in college was I'm just gonna be 10% better than the average guy. And it's like, right. And in that he became the best in the world what he does. But it was just that. And you're right, it's just, it's, it's. This is. You want to be served the way you want to be served. I want to be communicated in a way that it's compelling as Dean will use. And I think that they're all prepositions, but it's at to or with. And it's like, are you talking at them, to them or with them? And at them gets clicked deleted. Two is like, if this is important. Yeah, I'll probably read it with. It's like, oh man, I got an email from Joe. Cool, man.

What's going on?

Okay, cool, you know, or hey, this didn't come from Joe, but it came from Rochelle. But you know what, I like what he's doing here.

Yeah.

And so it's at to or with. And it's like reviewing your copy and saying, is this at to or with? Now the thing that drives me crazy is when people send an Email to somebody and say everyone. And they use this big third person crowd thing. Those emails. You might send a million emails. Emails out. But those are all one at a time conversations. Don't treat them like you're standing on a stage.

Yeah.

At two. Or with. Where is this communication? Yeah. So.

Yeah, no, that's awesome.

Do things. I'm sure there's lots of examples of that we don't know about the same product in. I have a couple versions.

You do? I knew it.

Tell me.

Morton salt is literally the exact same product as generic salt. If you send it to a lab, they can't tell the difference.

But.

But Morton's able to charge 187% more.

I love it.

I did an experiment to try to understand what is a commodity. When somebody buys a commodity product, are they paying more? When two things that are exactly the same and they're willing to pay more for one, are they paying for the brand? Are they paying for their perception of the product? So to test this, I gave people two pairs of sunglasses that were exactly the same. I said, okay, one pair had no logo and the other pair had a Chanel logo. And I said, how much would you be willing to pay for these two glasses? And they were willing to pay 400% more for the pair with Chanel logo, which means they were buying sunglasses, but they were paying for their perception of the product or more importantly, how other people would perceive them. So the way this relates to entrepreneurs, to. To small business owners, to leaders, is it's about the perception that you're creating on your differentiation. And there's no one right way to differentiate in the speaking world. When I started, I couldn't figure out what's the correlation between a speaking fee and how much that speaker is willing to charge. Is it reputation? Is it reviews? Is it connections, status? And so I looked at top speakers and on speaking sites, there's a dropdown menu just like Amazon. Which category are you looking for? Right in speaking, the category is economics, politics, comedy. And what I found was that speakers who used the word innovation to describe their topic made on average $5,000 more per keynote. And speakers who used the category creativity.

Oh, wow.

Innovation and creativity. You could take the same speech and simply change the word, but innovation had a much higher perception because innovation is a means to an end, whereas creativity is perceived as a process that doesn't necessarily have a benefit.

Boy, that's really. That is interesting.

And so that's. It's an example of different. How to make your product by a very Subtle nuance, the product becomes different, which thereby makes it be perceived as better through marketing.

I love it. I love it. I want to see what kind of questions maybe people.

Hey, Dean, can I get in this conversation real briefly or. Hi, Sally. It's so funny.

Is that really you or are we being catfished right now?

So, first of all, Sally, I was going to introduce you on this, and I got delayed flying. And I'm such a huge fan of everything you do. You know, it's probably. What was it, Sally? Three or four years ago at a Genius Network annual event, you were on the stage with a panel of female spectacular entrepreneurs. You, J.J. virgin and Kelly.

Robin Roberts. Lisa Sassevich.

Robin.

That's right. But I heard you say, and your book title is a little different than I remember, but you said, it's better to be different than it is to be better. And that was like the highlight for me for that annual event. I wrote it down. I've quoted you so many times since that time. But here's one that kind of a case study, Sally, I'd love for you to comment about. So back in the 20th century, I worked.

That's kind of funny to put it that way.

Yeah, I worked for Hair Club for Men. I was actually. I became vice president of Hair Club for Men. And when I joined them, they were doing about 8 billion a year. Then we took it to $120 million a year. So we did well. But Cy Sperling, 1976, he says, I want to get into the hairpiece business. Hairpiece business. And it was a commodity. Dean's Hairpieces, Schwa's Wigs, Russ's Toupees, it was all the same. And Cy Sperling comes along and he says he was selling the exact same thing, but he called his company Hair Club for Men. So that was the first thing. That was the first thing.

Hair Club for Men.

And Cy didn't call it Schwa's Wigs or Dean's Toupees or Russell hair pieces. He called it the Strand by strand method. It was the same thing, but he called it. He named it he Unique Pack. Let's see, what does Dan Sullivan say? Unique naming process. And then Schwa's Wigs and Dean's Toupees and Russ's Hairpieces, they sell for $500 size strand by strand system. He sold for between 2,500 and $4,000. So. And people flocked to it. Oh, my goodness. They would go from states away, they would come to get the Strand by Strand Method. Now, by the time I joined the company, they were different and better. They used a lot of that money and research and development and made something that was better than a hairpiece. But when I think of what you're talking about, and I think of this case study, he entered a commodity, but he named his company really well. I think you can comment. He called it something different, gave it a unique trademark name, and he priced it on a high level and it became an incredibly successful company.

That's a great example, if you think of Certs with Retsen. There's no such thing as Retsen. The Pons Institute. There's no Pons Institute. There's women in lab coats. We did.

Wait a second, Wait a second.

Blew my mind.

I thought there was a Pons Institute.

Yeah, let's Google the address and go visit. It was going to be on Madison Avenue.

So they do tours.

Yeah, yeah. Within. Within. Within my company. How to Fascinate. We had a lot of people who wanted to be affiliates, to be able to, to train and to coach and. And when we thought of them as affiliates, it was sort of like they were. They were customers. They were. And so we created the Fascinate Certified Advisor program with certification. And now, because we made it a thing with a program and with steps.

Now.

We'Ve certified over 200 people. It's been required in Singapore. The government pays for it. There are dozens of them in Germany and in countries all over the world. And what that comes back to is that when you take something, it's an abstract process, or you take something that doesn't have a. A clear benefit and with subtle changes, you can make it ownable. You can make it not only trademarkable, but we just got our International Coaching Federation approval, which is incredibly exciting for us because now it means that. Yeah, so now our trainers and coaches are coming from that pool. So, yeah, I encourage all of us to be thinking about what is something that you're already doing, right, that you're not getting credit for, because you either haven't, you haven't named it, but you haven't done what Tim said. Strand by strand is a way of taking a look at something that's happening as part of a process that's a commoditized process, but looking at it through, through the eyes of the consumer, and that consumer wants a strand by strand process. They just, they don't know. They wouldn't know how they're. They wouldn't be able to understand the benefit to them through, through what other people were doing in that category. So that's a great example, Tim.

That's awesome.

Thank you.

You know, I always say that's. That.

That was.

If you remember how he sold, that was a different strategy too, that I remember seeing. Because that's right around the time I met you. Tim was 1997. Ish. 98 maybe. Yeah. And at the time he was running infomercials and saying how he got the idea from the cell phone industry where they give people the cell phone when you buy the plan, the, the. The ongoing plan. And it was the same for them. They would give you the hair which has the value and you sign up for. Because every month you have to go and get it adjusted or tightened. Is that what they would call it, say adjusted? Adjusted, not tightened, but they. Your hair. And as your hair grows, it gets. It loosens and you've got to batten down the hatches. I guess.

That'S the terminology consumers are.

Thinking of, I'm sure.

Dude.

Immediately in my mind, I immediately conceived of it. I'm going to share it here, world premiere. I've carried this around. I've told a select group of people individually in private conversations about my movie idea that that inspired. And I'm going to reveal it here in case anybody has the ability to help us get this movie made. So in my mind, as he's explaining this, I thought, that's brilliant, because once people get the hair, they're going to want to keep the hair. So I bet that their hair payment, they make the payment, they continue on with the process. I bet the lifetime value of a client is very high. And then I thought, but what if they don't pay? What happens then? Do they come and pull the plugs? Do they come and like, repossess the hair? How does that happen? And that immediately led me to this culture and underworld of these hair repossessors that work out of back of the barbershop kind of thing like straight out of Quentin Tarantino movie like Repo and that. I thought about doing a part documentary mockumentary of this world of these people. But then it evolved into tying it into sort of a Weekend at Bernie's kind of this political candidate who's running for office, but he didn't make his hair payments. And they're going to pull the plugs on him while he's on the.

Literally pull the plugs, tracking him down.

And they're going to pull the plugs like the hair repo men. So there's my 30 seconds elevator pitch for the movie. If Anybody would like to collaborate and make that happen. Oh, I thought you were going to show it.

I thought you're going to show us like a teaser.

But that is the teaser.

Oh, okay.

That is a year ago or so. Hardly anyone had even heard of Periscope or Meerkat or Blab or Facebook mentions. And right now we all have this portable television studio in our pockets and we could broadcast to the entire connected planet for free and build an audience. And what we're going to talk about today is about owning time, which is really the most valuable asset that we have in our lives. And it starts with a little story. About 15 years ago, I was in Palm Desert with my then pregnant wife, Vivian. She walked into a little, little shop. I called a friend of mine. His name is Merlin Quigle, I kid you not, that poor man. And Merlin is a producer. He produces all sorts of events and he's been doing marketing for about 30 years. I said, hey, Merlin, what are you doing? He says, I'm out buying Rolex watches. Three of them for people who are responsible for giving me all the business I've had for my 25 year career. I said, that's a really nice gift. Why are you giving them a Rolex watch? He said, who do you think they're gonna think of every time they check the time I slapped my head and I thought that was one of the smartest things I've ever heard. I don't know if you know this, but do you know how many times the average person checks their phone every day? Okay, the average is 150 times. And if you think about it, if you add up the number of times that people check their phones, their watches, their desktop, laptop computers, tablets, or watch their interactive televisions, it's incredible. They are trading and giving their time. And more importantly, Apple won. They're almost worth a trillion dollars right now, right? It's because they own your time, they own your mind, they own your wrist, they own your bathroom, bedroom experience, your car experience. So what we're talking about today is how to be seen, heard, viewed, listened to, anytime, anywhere, on demand, on any device. Because that's the business we're all in. And I like to think of it as if you can own someone's pocket in their bedroom and bathroom. Something is happening. It's very, very powerful. So right now there's roughly 300 million interactive televisions in use. If you add up Apple TVs and all the doodads and gadgets that are connecting TVs these days, roughly 2 billion tablet devices, 3 billion Internet connected laptop and desktop computers and we're at about 7 billion or more, growing very, very quickly. The number of Internet connected accounts, most of us have 6 to 25 Internet connected devices in our homes today. Okay, that's after just doing a lot of surveying. So the next thing, oh, and there's about 4 billion smartphones that are being sold every two years. That's actually according to Peter. So if you think about the level of access we have to multi trillion dollar infrastructures and brands that are willing to broadcast your message across multiple channels to any device, anytime on demand, the question is what do you need to do to stand out and be in front of all those people? So again, look at all these brands you got. The most valuable brands in the world are willing to broadcast and distribute your content free of charge, giving you access to their customers. So if you think about it, and this is the way I think about it, right now we are all in the education and entertainment business and those who take advantage of disruptive technologies first are the winners. Historically and you look at some of our entertainers up here, all of them have figured out how to own time. So the question is, how are we going to take advantage of that as marketers or business owners or people want to change the world. One of my goals is to create a million entrepreneurs before I passed. And as of almost three years ago to this day, I finished my very last cancer treatment. So I'm lucky to be alive. And I came back with a new vision, a very, very, I just wanted to do this. This is what charges me up. And I think there's a renaissance going on. Right now we have the ability to broadcast a message. Why not do great things? Why not create immense wealth using, using entrepreneurship as the model? So if you think about the evolution of marketing feedback, the challenge is how do you get as much feedback as possible so you can change and refine your message. If you think about direct marketing, direct mail, it used to take a couple of weeks or months because you'd have to write your letters, send them out and wait and see what the response was. Now if you just advance your radio and commercials, social media, ads, etc, etc, we can do it quickly but now it's possible to do it in seconds and that the big idea is feedback driven intimacy. The faster you speed the process of gaining trust, the more time you own. It's just a matter of time before someone will want to buy from you to say, I like this person, I think they can help me and I want to Connect with them. I know they've got a tool or a resource. I got that from Bill Harris originally. I can kind of messed it up right now. I like this person. They really know what they're talking about, and I think they can help me. There you go. So what's the solution? Well, it's webcasts. Now. A few years ago, in about 2009, we started experimenting with these. These are live online interactive broadcasts. The opportunity to broadcast video, interact with an audience through chat, be able to say, hey, share this online and click a button to buy. Or we could actually create products these ways. Back then, it cost 20 to $30,000 to do a show. Now you can do it with Google Hangouts for free or Blab or any of these other tools and create a very, very rapidly engaged audience just by talking to them. And whether you're talking to one or five or 50 or 500 or 5,000 or 500,000 people, which you can do for free, you can create this feedback loop through chat and actually read the minds of your audience in real time. So the way we've been using it and teaching a lot of other entrepreneurs how to do it, and just think about this again, I think a renaissance is about to occur. Television production is going to change dramatically because of this technology. It's going to radically change education, too. So what we started doing is this notion of something called you everywhere now. So if you can create content once and distribute it in real time to as many devices as possible, the notion is you could perform your content as an educator or as an entertainer. You could convert it very quickly into a video and distribute it on the major video sites, chop it up into chunks. You could also turn it into a podcast. You could save it as an audio, you could save it as a video. We've also started converting that content into books, putting them on Amazon and taking advantage of that channel. What we find is that someone that watches a live video is going to be different than someone who watches a podcast or listens to a podcast or reads a book or a paperback book. Same content created over and over again. Then we can put it and create podcasts or products. Rather, one of the strategies we've used is we will perform a product live, interactively, getting feedback and adjusting our approach and saving that in a membership site in real time. We're able to create a documentary in real time as well. And we've seen other people start using the strategy over and over again. Then you distribute to social sites, same content repurposed reused to blogs. And also it helps you get attention in the traditional media as well. So again, create once, distribute everywhere, any device on demand. We've been calling this the you everywhere now strategy or approach. So I want to show you something I call the Intimacy Dashboard. Because the, the question is, what do you need so you can read the minds and build an intimate relationship as quickly as possible with this engaged audience. So this is one of my studios. It's a whole bunch of monitors. The good news is you don't have to have all this fancy equipment to make this work yourself if you're using something like Google Hangouts. But we've broken it down into what tools you need to read this information quickly. So we have a timer, make sure we're on track, a presentation prompter, cameras above it so we can look at the screen and see what we're about to present. Maybe you've got a keynote presentation, you've got some notes, your next and previous slide, a monitor so you can see what the audience sees. But here's where things get interesting. Using a Google Doc, I have a producer who's typing notes and telling me what people are saying in real time, keeping me on track. So you only need one assistant to do this. Sometimes I have team chat, my technical team saying, here's what's going on. The shopping cart's down. Wait for a little while delay. All right, then the stats. So I know how many people are watching, how many people are in checkout. When I say click the orange buy button, how many people are buying so I can acknowledge the people who are investing in real time. And finally the viewer chat. This is the hub of everything because I can ask a question, get feedback immediately, adjust the the presentation, adjust the approach. So quick study JJ Virgin got to talk about her. She's my sister from another mother. We started doing podcasts together, or rather webcasts. She's had multiple six figure days, New York Times best seller status. We're converting on shows that last seven to eight and a half hours. Most people say that's impossible. They stay, they watch and they buy. Converting 38 to 52% of the average viewers into buyers because they're engaging intimate conversations. And the most important thing that JJ said to me is, look, I learned more about my audience in two hours than I have in 10 years doing surveys as a result of doing webcasts. We've also put this together, a combination of a PBS special with a TED Talk. Nine presenters all together. Dave Asprey, Elizabeth Lamori Lombardo, performing, cooking, bringing on guests. And the results. 30,000 opt ins 9,000 viewers peak an average of 5,400. But here's where things got interesting. Almost half the viewers bought the product because they felt like they had an intimate relationship with J.J. virgin.

Okay.

And the other viewers. And in a replay with live chat, people think and feel. And this is done completely translated transparently. No shenanigans going on. They are still interacting with the host because someone is interacting with them live with chat. Able to replay that over and over again. The long format, eight and a half hour shows. People said, this is crazy. Who's going to stick around? Almost 40% of the average viewers stick around to the end. And we started a health network as a result of this. John Assaraf's also used the same thing. Recording weekly evergreen webcasts that play over and over again. He's producing a million to 2 million in sales with a cold audience.

Okay, I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead, you're over here. Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you.

Watch them.