Bob Serling Interview On Marketing Simplified And Multiplied - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #162

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and.

This is the I love marketing podcast. Hello, this is Joe Polish. I've got my good friend Bob Serling here. I'm staring at you, Bob, on Skype, but people listening to this are not able to see that. So how are you?

Well, I'm great, thanks. And that's too bad that they're not able to see us, but hopefully we'll deliver on the content end.

Well, I don't know. Bad. Depends on how you would define bad. But for people that don't know who you are, give the quick bio of who is Bob Serling.

All right. So I've been in marketing. Gosh, it's hard. Hard to believe. Well over 30 years now. Started off in the wild and woolly arena of direct response marketing doing. I started as a direct response copywriter, wrote for a lot of the bigger direct response mailers. I soon realized that I was far too lazy to write on a regular basis, so I decided to sell my advice instead. And I hung out a shingle as a consultant and created some training and it kind of took off from there. And then as a side, I'm kind of known as well for some things I've done with licensing and some licensing courses I created for companies that want to license their assets. But I don't do all that much with licensing anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're going to call this marketing simplified and multiplied. So you'd sent me an email based around different ways that I promote 25k and different things that you have seen and that you have done and are currently doing. I'd love to have you kind of tell the story about Bill Bain in the email that you had sent me, which prompted us doing this interview right now.

Sure. So basically, you want me to admit how I stole your idea and Bill Bain's and used it to enrich myself.

That would probably be okay, great.

So, no, I really have. I say that you and I play around with each other a lot and I hope people get that. But I have great admiration for what you've done with 25K. And I was reading this story about Bill Bain and it was so similar. So what Bain did was when he was. And for people who don't know who Bill Bain is, that's Bain Capital Group. A lot of people know of them, primarily because what's this guy? The guy, the guy who got defeated. Mitt Romney had worked for Bain for years, and that's how Bain kind of came in to be so well known in the Public. But Bain is one of the largest consulting companies in the world. So what happened real quickly is Bill Bain originally worked for the Boston Consulting Group, which at the time was the largest consulting firm in the world. And so there were four team leaders. They had it divided up, and Bill Bain was one of them. And his team dramatically outperformed all three of the other teams. And in fact, he was very frustrated with the progress of the other teams, and he offered multiple times to train them in his methods, and Boston shot him down each time. So he left and created Bain Capital and the Bain Consulting Group. But what he did was really simple. He targeted only the highest spending clients that Boston had, and he created these programs to deliver so much value to them that they wouldn't think of working with anybody else. Now, people have heard that concept, but very few people really do it. And simply by doing that, first of all, he dominated Boston, Boston Consulting Group, and then he created just a massive company, Bain Capital, when he left, just by using that single strategy alone. And you do something similar with 25k, you can't buy your way into 25k. You have to have a combination of a business that's making the money and the right attitude and the ability to both give and receive massively valuable knowledge. And that is really going to narrow the playing field as to who can get in and who can't. But by doing that, you've created a group that delivers so much value and is so highly respected that people clamor to get in. And it's just grown and grown. And a lot of people make the mistake of not defining their business that way. Let me just flip this for a second, too. You don't have to do it just on the high end. You can do it in any slice of any industry. So let's take the software company Basecamp. You're familiar with Basecamp?

I use Basecamp. I've interviewed Jason Fried, the founder, and.

Yeah, okay, so Jason and his partner used the exact same model, but on the other end, they said Basecamp is going to be a bare bones project management suite that anyone can use. It doesn't take a lot of training. We're not going to add fancy bells and whistles. We're never going to do that. So what happens is some people love Basecamp because of its simplicity and others hate it. And that's great because he's polarized that market into people who are just evangelists for Basecamp because of its simplicity. It's, you know, do you want to get work done or do you want to create a lot of meetings. Well, people who like really complicated stuff, like lots of meetings and that. So, you know, Basecamp is not the most expensive, and he doesn't go for that high end. He's really going for the lower end, but not low in value and not low in cost. His costs are very fair. They deliver tremendous value, and they've never wavered from that. Even when their user groups say, why don't you add this? Or wouldn't it be cool if we could do this? And they say, thank you very much. Thank you very much. No, we're not doing that. And they dominate that segment of the market by having clearly identified a characteristic that is so valuable to base the entire business on that nobody can compete with them. It can be done in various slices of the market. It doesn't have to be just high end.

No, you're absolutely right. What's great about selecting your specific target market and delivering upon that and staying consistent and congruent with it is critical. If you're going to fish, it's nice to know not only what sort of fish are you fishing for, but how are you baiting the hook. Because a lot of times people want to catch a particular type of fish, but they're using the wrong exact bait.

That's wild. Because I have a new ebook called how to Catch Fish with Strawberry Shortcake and it deals with that. Exactly.

Well, first off, since you just brought that up, explain the premise of that. What do you mean by that title?

Well, it comes from an old Dale Carnegie story that he told about. He decided to go fish, and he'd never been fishing before. And since he loves Strawberry Shortcake more than anything, he put some on the hook and cast it out. He sat there all day and didn't catch a single fish. And then he saw some other fishermen, they had, you know, buckets full. He said, how the heck did you do that? He said, oh, simple. We used worms. And he realized, well, if you want to catch fish, you have to use the right bait. Not what you like, what the fish like.

Yeah, you know, that is a big error that any of us that have been in marketing and that. Well, I shouldn't even just say have been in marketing because I guess you can argue anyone is in marketing. People that are effective at it, people that have had produced results and people that have been willing to go through all the iterations of knowing. The sheer difficulty of the task of influencing and persuading people is how you respond to things. And what you would respond to has no bearing on what other people would respond to. Unless you are so clear that everyone that you're communicating to and creating offerings for is exactly like you, thinks like you, responds like you, that sort of stuff. And one of the challenges that people listening to this will have is, well, they're not getting the right type of clients. They're not getting the right type of response and being able to stop and say, what the heck am I doing wrong? What am I not saying? I always say, from a simplistic standpoint, although there's a lot more to it than this, that marketing is what you say and who you say it to, that's pretty much, that's the deal. And so when it, when it comes to. Let's. Let's go back to this original message that you sent me. Okay. Because you, you wrote. So what I did was join that piece of. Well, let me. Let me back up and do you mind if I read the.

No, no, go ahead.

Okay. You wrote about Bain Capital. His process was actually very simple. He identified a reasonably small group of clients and, you know, potential clients with huge budgets. But everything was based on providing much greater value and developing deep relationships that truly helped his clients and ensured that they couldn't be poached by his rival. Sounds pretty familiar, right? What I observed you doing with 25k is a focus only on those prospects who can truly afford and appreciate what you do and will be highly likely to refer others like themselves to join 25k. And of course, 25k for people that don't know, is also my genius network group. And then you wrote the simplicity. This is brilliant. Although we joke a lot with each other, I mean this with complete sincerity. So what I did was join that piece of your approach in Bain's approach to do the following. And I want to go through these, Bob, because I think it's important to go deep. One, identify those clients of mine involved in licensing their assets and helping other companies license assets who have huge marketing budgets. Create a program with proof that focuses just on a couple areas where they'll get exponential results for their least amount of time and effort. And again, the proof of actually working is so critical since there are so many lame, empty claims these days. And then three, offer the program to them that purposely excludes other companies that don't meet those qualifications and include a guarantee that makes it very easy to make that decision. And then you talked about how you. I won't give out the numbers. You can do that if you want. But you emailed the offer. You actually Got a result. And then the last thing you.

Yeah, well, let's cover that rose. So let me throw in one other thing about that. After I used those three criteria that you just described. The price of the program was $50,000, and so that alone disqualified a lot of people. I then identified about 40 people who I've trained in licensing who would qualify for this. I lopped off the bott 25% and left it at 30 because I realized I was stretching to try to make it work. And that's a big mistake. You can't stretch and add in and fudge and add in some people who may qualify but may not. So I had 30. But at the time when I first put it together, I sent the offer out to 11 people, what I thought was my top 10, but I had one more of those 11. Two people signed up right away at 50k. I then sent it to the rest of the people. So that would be what, 20 or 19. And two more signed up. So out of 30 people, four signed up at $50,000 each. But it was through very, very critical layers of qualifying and disqualifying that I was able to do that. And it's. And I think that's factor. It's really important to disqualify people. Not that they're bad, but as to what market you're going to serve. Because if you don't and if you cheat, you're going to end up with some people who are a mismatch. They aren't going to be happy. You aren't going to be happy. And that, particularly if you're doing anything with training that's live, that's going to ripple through everybody. So. And it's difficult to do. It's difficult to say, God, I'm gonna cut off that bottom 25%. You know, I came up with 40 and I cut off 10. And it's go, oh, am I throwing away money? But you're not. You're really multiplying your efforts when you do that.

Yeah. And what you're doing is you're psychologically freeing yourself from the future angst that will come from targeting the wrong person and influencing them or persuading them or trying to sell them too hard or offering something to somebody that one doesn't have the money isn't a right fit, isn't aligned with you. I mean, the worst type of situation is selling something absolutely fabulous and valuable to someone that's not aligned with it, or vice versa. Someone persuading you into something that really just isn't the right fit, it ends up not being a good relationship for either person and both people end up being unhappy and wondering well what the hell went wrong? And people do it all day long. It doesn't even cross their mind to be very the more selective you are, the better selection that you have.

Right? So the question becomes to me, and this is something I've spent a long time studying, thinking about, not studying formally, but thinking about is why is it that people don't think through this issue and why do they end up in this situation where they aren't targeting the right people? And to me, I'm going to volunteer the answer if you don't mind. To me the answer is that it's really a function of the times we live in where online marketing has given everything the appearance of being free. And you can certainly reach people inexpensively and often for free. But you and I come from the pre Internet days of direct response marketing where you paid through the nose for everything. And you realize that for example, in renting lifts, the more you paid for a list that is by taking selects that were really relevant and trimmed your market down to be really tightly focused, the more successful you'd be. But also when you paid for everything, you were much more careful. And much more careful isn't the word. You were much more thoughtful about what you did before you did it.

Exactly.

And, and what you learned to do was just rigorously eliminate things that didn't work as soon as they didn't work. Then look at a second category of this. Well, this kind of worked. Can it be tweaked to work better or should I kill it? And then you really focused on those things that really worked, which was both, you know, your marketing piece, your list, the market you targeted. And even though it was more expensive to market that way, it had almost a built demand that you carefully think through what you're doing or you are going to lose your shirt. And you and I, we got through with our shirts, we just lost our hair.

Yeah, exactly. You know, what you're saying is such is so critical. If I had the choice with all of the people that I have helped and do help with marketing because you know, we have the top marketing know podcast on itunes and you know, hundreds of thousands of people listen to our, you know, free training that we just give out to the world, you know, I've like two worlds. One a very high level, expensive, you know, compared to, you know, what most other offerings are. And then I put out a lot of, you know, free stuff out into the world just to simply help entrepreneurs through the, through genius network and do 10x talk. And I love marketing and all the different stuff that is out there. And if I had the choice, I would someone that really wanted to learn marketing, I would have them pretend they're back 20 years ago. There is no Internet. All they have is the ability to write a compelling letter, select a purchase, negotiate a list and spend their own money putting a stamp on an envelope, printing the letter and mailing it and get people to send them money. Because what it would do is it would force them to look at all of the future offerings they make online. Like you mentioned, that people actually think are free and realize that on a scale of 1 to 10, you can send an email that is a 3 level of persuasion or selection in who you're sending it to at the same exact cost as if you put an effort of 10. But if you put that extra effort in, the return is going to be infinitely greater. You can be promiscuous when you're sending out free emails. When you're having to spend your own money on advertising or direct mail. You can't because you'll be broke very quickly.

Absolutely.

And going through that process of having to truly select and think it through and prune what it is that you're doing just is going to produce a far more stealth effective person. I mean it's almost, it's a difference between being a pro and being an amateur. It's just a lot easier for amateur marketers to go out and actually think they're doing, you know, marketing when they're just playing around because they think this shit is free.

Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about a formula that I think anybody can use. And it's, it's kind of borrowing a formula from the old days and bringing it forward into the future. And I call it rfm, which means recency frequency, monetary value exponentialized. And what that means is that one of the things that anybody can do today is look at every customer group they have in their customer base. I guarantee you see, most people think, well, customers are customers. And that's not true. I mean, if nothing else, you have multi buyers who are pure gold and then people who buy just one thing and then people who just take your free stuff and never buy anything. You can actually define it much more clearly than that. But we don't have time to go into all those definitions now. If you look at your customers and your marketing and the products or service you sell and you apply recency, frequency and Monetary value to each of those categories. Which products are selling the best right now? Which products have made the most money over the last 10 years? That's monetary value. One's recency, the other's monetary value. Which customers buy the most the most often. That's frequency. Well, when you can start to find intersections between those, you can find two of those characteristics in your customers or between your customers and your products. And it takes time to be thoughtful about this and look at it. But when you can do that, you can then cater just to that segment of the market or just to the couple products that work best and eliminate the others. So let's come back to a practical example. At Basecamp, again, they had about 30 different products that they offered. I think they're trimming that down to six because they realized that the bulk of their income came from these six products. And the other, let's say 24. And I'm using round numbers. It may be a little different. But the other 24 were just kind of holding on. They weren't losing money, but they weren't making money. But they drained time away that you have to spend supporting products that aren't really contributing that much to your profits. So they mercilessly eliminated something like 75% of their products. And most people don't have the courage to do that because they're afraid. And they also look at every dollar as being equal, but they're not. Some dollars, whether it's based on a product or a customer type or a marketing piece, some are just far more productive than other dollars.

Right. You know, what you just said reminds me years ago when I was a consultant for Bill Phillips, back in his heyday, when he had a Muscle Media magazine and a book, Body for Life, just literally within two years of him purchasing eas, which he ended up building into the largest sports supplement company in the world at the time. And he had sold that company for $300 million, probably about a year after he had sent me a fax, because that's how we communicated back in those days. Yeah, that was the preferred method of communication. And he. I remember this fax he had sent me. I still actually have it in my files where he said, you know, Twin Lab, which was one of his big competitors at the time, and he was smoking pretty much everybody. I mean, he was doing really well. He said, you know, he sent me this fax that said Twin Lab currently has something like 212 different, you know, products that they're marketing. He's like, I'm focusing on Six. The reason is because he kind of got that the lion's share of what I'm making money from is going to come from these. And if I try to disperse my efforts with over hundreds of different supplements or products, how on earth is he going to put any attention? It's the difference between taking care of one rabbit or having 200 rabbits.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's Joe. I think we just hit on something that's kind of interesting. It's that group of five or six, because he said six. I believe the number that base camp is focusing on is six. And then I remember reading this study that was done, I mean, a test, a marketing test that was done in thousands of supermarkets just a few years ago by Smucker's Jelly. And they had a table that had 30 different flavors of jelly. And. And then maybe a few aisles down, they had another table that had just six flavors. And the table with the six flavors outsold the table with the 30 or 40 flavors by four to one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what? We are actually onto something. Let me point out a couple of things, too, that relate to that. I have a friend named Richard Rossi who said to me, if you have 1,000 options, you don't have any options. That's not how psychologically people interpret way too many options. As. You know, my first endeavor into direct response marketing was I was a Deborah carpet cleaner, living off credit cards. And I learned marketing because I needed to eat, I needed to survive. I didn't think I would ever be selling training or marketing advice to people. And that was coming my career that I fell in love with. I was just figuring out how to make this small company work. And so necessity, what is it? Yeah, necessity is the mother of invention or what?

Right.

So once I learned marketing and turned my small carpet cleaning company around, I started, you know, sharing it with carpet cleaners all over the world. Over 7,000 small, you know, business owners and many actually very large, have become, you know, members of that division of my organization many, many years ago. What I started doing, though, there was a lot of distributors all throughout the country that would sell chemicals and equipment to other carpet cleaners. And some of these individuals would actually promote my marketing materials to their clients because it just made sense. If I taught their clients how to get more business, they would buy more chemicals.

Yeah, absolutely.

One of them, who was a local guy, he actually had a catalog that was sent out every month, and it had all these different things, from carpet wands to different chemicals to equipment and sprayers. All kinds of various stuff, hose reels, you name it. Things that no one listening would ever in a million years think they would purchase in the cleaning industry. And I explained to him, I said, you know, the problem with the catalog if you don't really point out anything is it all gets equal space. And so if you're going to have 100 items in here, people are flipping along. I go, let's write a cover letter just saying, hey, here's this month's issue and I really want to point out four items that I think are really valuable that you need to take a look at. So all I did was I wrote a two page cover cover letter that was folded up in this half page insert sent by direct mail. He knew how much he made every month he sent out a catalog. It was very similar. There were sometimes some seasonal differences, but it was pretty much the same sort of stuff. And he quadrupled the response by adding the two page cover letter to any other, simply because I identified those four items. And we picked the four items that he first off made really good margins on that people really bought love and were the most likely to buy. But what he did is he brought them front and center instead of having them buried within all these other options. And then people decide. So it's the same thing that happened with the smuckers, the 24 versus the.

It is. And you know what, what's interesting, it's even deeper than that. And I don't know how much time we have to go into this, but a lot of it has to do when you back off. When you're offering fewer products and you're defin customer segments, better you have more time to be thoughtful. And when you're thoughtful and you make a decision to add that letter wasn't that huge a decision. It didn't take that long to do it. But it was an elegant decision. And that type of decision is what leads to exponential growth in most businesses. And if you don't have the time to be thoughtful about what you're doing with your marketing, your product offerings and your customers, then you can't make those type of really massively critical decisions. And most of those decisions are just small things. They're not major things. You're not sending a rocket to Mars. You're just making a strategic decision that's going to have tremendous impact on the business right now and for many, many years.

You're completely right. I like what you said there. And I actually wrote down, you know, the quote that I've always loved because it is true. Little hinges swing big doors. I mean that a million times.

Who said that? I've seen it a million times.

I've heard it everywhere. I think the very first person that ever said it to me, I don't think he came up with it. Is Dan Kennedy.

Okay.

I probably heard Dan say that when I was having lunch with him. Gosh, close to maybe 20 years ago, because I've known Dan forever, but that's when I first heard it. But your whole thing about being thoughtful, that is such a simple word. And I just want to highlight it and pause because that really is it. People aren't very thoughtful about their marketing. They're not very thoughtful about a lot of things. It's like the Joe Carbo famous ad for the Lazy Man's way to Riches, which are you so busy earning a living to make any real money? Are you so busy not thinking that you don't stop and be thoughtful so you actually can do the little things that will make all the difference in the world?

Yeah. And it isn't that people don't want to be thoughtful. They're just overwhelmed. And I really think. I mean, I advise my clients to go on a marketing diet, to go on a time diet, to go on an information diet. And I mean, just think about how much you read. Like, I hear people say, I read four books a week, and my first thought is, great, you just wasted a ton of time that you could have put into getting real results with your business. Because it isn't how much you read. It's what is critical that you read. And I hear people say, well, I read this book, and it was 260 pages, but it's worth it because I got one good idea. No, you wasted your time. Find the stuff where 90% of it's relevant, not 1% sat, and throw the rest of it out.

No, you're totally right. That's so funny. Like we mentioned before, we started recording, my friend Jay Abraham, who we both have known for many years. Jay, God bless him, the guy has spent about three days in the last week without me even asking him, writing me an ad and copy for my Genius Network annual event. He attended last year's annual event and just absolutely loved it. He's become so such a raving fan and supporter and brainstormer with it. And so I've spent, you know, close to five hours with Jay over the last four days on the phone, which is amazing.

And because Jay didn't charge you, Jay volunteered to do it. And for those of you Anyone who may not be familiar with Jay, I don't know who that would be, but Jay, I believe his going rate is about 50,000 a day.

Yeah, no, he is.

So for him to contribute that much to you on his own is a real testament to what you've done with Genius Network and also just how giving you are.

Joe, no, thank you. Thank you. And I really appreciate that. And I've thanked Jay profusely because I was so taken back by it. And he's offered such incredible insight. And he says this is just the start. We're going to spend a couple days together just for really articulating this, because he just really wants to get the messaging down for the right people, which kind of prompted even what we're talking about today. And the reason I bring all that up is Jay made this comment where people are better off instead of reading a bunch of books, mastering things, finding one that really, like you said, is just incredibly useful, incredibly valuable. And not reading it, but mastering it, really utilizing it, and coming back to it on a regular basis. Because as you evolve in your thinking, I mean, I've read a handful of books more than once. There's a couple books that I've read several times. You know, I mean, ones that I could, you know, name always, which isn't even really a book. It's a compilation of newsletters. Gary Halpert's how to Make Maximum Money in Minimum Time, you know, Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising, you know, Steven Pressfield's the War of Art, Robert Ringer's you know, original Winning Through Intimidation. I mean, you know, there's certain things, books where I can read them over and over, but I am not the same person when I read them the next time. I've learned things, I hear things differently. And I just think that's one way to interact with information. I don't think you should get a reward just because you mass consume buffets of content. I think it's how you assimilate it. That being said, let's talk and then we'll wrap up. Bob. Because you actually have a great way of what you call the principle of the unequal dollar, and that most business owners and entrepreneurs treat every dollar in sales as equal. And you say they operate out of the misunderstanding that any dollar is a good dollar. But the truth is there's four categories of sales. And unless you understand it, you can waste a lot of time on sales that are actually damaging to your business while neglecting other sales that make your business much more profitable. So I'd like you to go through the four categories starting with, you know, hyper productive dollars or any setup you need to.

Okay, so let, and let me just preface it and I'm happy to do that. It isn't just the unequal dollar. There's also unequal information which we just talked about and there's unequal time, what you put your time into. And we're not going to have time to cover them all. But so let's talk about what I call the principle of the unequal dollar and that, that there are like we touched on it before that a lot of businesses and entrepreneurs, and not just new businesses, but businesses that have been around for a long time, look at every sale or every dollar as being equal. And that's not true at all. There are really, I've defined four categories. There may be more, but there's four that I use in my business and one one is what I call hyper productive dollars. And I'm going to read this too from the email I sent you. Hyper productive dollars are the sales from people who love you. They love what you offer. They rarely complain, they buy often. Some of them buy everything you put out and they look forward to whatever you're offering next. And they rave to other people about you. That's hyper productive. And there's a segment of those customers within any business. You just have to identify them. Then the second category is called productive dollars. These are people who buy but not as frequently as the first category. And some of them will become multi buyers and kind of raving fans. Most won't, but they also aren't a pain in the neck to service and they don't create problems. So they're very good, they're productive. Then the third category is neutral dollars. And these are people who buy from you usually just once. And they rarely do much more business with those type of people. You're going to have more returns and refunds at that level too. Not horribly, but there will be more. So it requires interestingly more support to care for them than it does for the people who buy everything and never complain. So right there those dollars start to lose their equality significantly. And finally, the fourth category is what I call damaging dollars. These are people who are just jerks, you know, they're rude to your staff. And that's how I really measure a jerk more than anything else. I don't care if somebody has an abrasive personality. Nobody likes everybody. I'm sure there's plenty of people who don't like me. Being a jerk isn't what I can.

Vouch for that, Bob.

Yes, thank you. I appreciate it. I was fishing for that, Joe. Thank you. But people who are rude to your staff, that's what I call a jerk, who are just nasty because they feel, well, I'm spending a couple bucks, I can be mean. So anyways, these people, they also demand massive levels of special treatment just for the tiniest of purchases. They complain far more frequently than everyone else. Then they don't apply your product properly or your service, whatever it is, and they're bitter that it doesn't work. You know, they want some special treatment. And these type of sales are just poisonous. They cost you so much more than they make for you. I mean, just, I don't know if you've ever had somebody on your team really upset or offended by a customer who would just took advantage of their position as a customer and just really browbeat someone on your team, it ruins that person's day and that costs your business that day and it's really unfair to your person. So those damaging dollars, they just need to be eliminated.

Yeah, no, it's a great summary of what you just explained. And so to touch on a couple of points, I completely agree that not all, not all customers and clients and money is equal by a long shot. Secondly, the number one thing that has caused us to fire, eliminate, get rid of sometimes, you know, kindly ask people to go elsewhere, give refunds. The number one thing is when someone is rude to one of my staff or one of my team members because I can have, I've had experiences where the same exact people are so pleasant and so nice to me, but then when they talk to one of my team members, it's like a Jekyll and Hyde. They become completely different. And it's known in my company that that is absolutely unacceptable behavior. If we screw up, we will take responsibility for it. We do everything we can to make sure the front stage experience with anyone that gives us money is glowing. I mean, that's why we have an impeccable reputation. I mean, I, you know, people are hard pressed to ever find anything bad about me or my company on the Internet. I mean, it just, we've always handled that well. And I think one of the reasons that exists is we also don't tolerate crap from abusive individuals. I mean, if someone is a jerk, you know, take your money back, take your business elsewhere. I mean, there's this conversation I've had with Dan Sullivan, who's you, one of my dearest friends and just such a brilliant guy and that saying that the customer is always right. You've seen that sign where it says right. And rule number one, rule number two, if you think the customer is wrong, go back to rule number one, which has got to be some of the most idiotic advice on the planet.

It is.

Some customers are total jerks and abusive. And, like, what on earth are you doing letting these people abuse you and abuse your staff? And especially. Especially if what you're creating is valuable and helpful. So the question becomes, is it their fault or is it yours? And sometimes if someone has real disdain for their clients and customers, and we've all met people that. I mean, you meet them and they bitch about people that buy stuff from them and give them money. And it's like, you're the one that's fishing and finding these people, and if they're on the hook, you're reeling them in. You know, I mean, if you didn't want to catch a bear on a fishing pole and you're reeling in the bear, like, is it the bear's fault or is it yours? So, you know, once the. Once the complaining person identifies themselves as being abusive in a drain, you have to make a decision, which. You used the word earlier about courage. You know, some. The reason a lot of people don't select is it takes courage. Well, it also takes courage here. Courage is something that needs to exist in a lot of areas of business, especially starting out to say Dan Sulliv. And I remember he said, there's two things you need when starting out as an entrepreneur in order to start down the path of being successful. The first one is ignorance, and the second one is courage. Because it's like this quote that I used in a speech I gave at one of Brendan Bouchard's events to experts that Jack Canfield loved it. He was sitting in the audience listening to my speech, and I said, I don't know where I first heard this, but it's like, if I would have known being successful was this hard, I would have stuck with being loser.

That's great.

It's one of those things. So you got to be really courageous. But what you laid out here, really, I mean, so let's go. So hyper productive dollars is the first category. Productive dollars is the second, Neutral dollars is the third, and damaging dollars is the fourth. Now, using like an 8020 principle applied to dollars, time, and clients, what would you recommend? Given what we've talked about, which me and you could spend three days talking about all of these things, how would you recommend people go about getting their head in the right place in order to. Because you can transform your business, your time, your relationships, your clients, just on what we've talked about in this Skype interview with. Not, you know, and not only that.

But you also transform the pleasure that you get out of your business. If you're dealing with a lot of rude people or a lot of people who don't care much about what you've done for them, that's not fun to work with those people on a regular basis. And when you can eliminate them, the joy and the pleasure of running your business, both for your team and for you, go way up. But your question was, how can. How can people do it? And it comes back to what I think what we're talking about is really the same. Whether you're looking at customers, customers or products or marketing pieces or how you use your time, it's all the same. Where do you get the most value for the least effort? So which customers return the most value for the least effort on your part? Then you should focus on providing more value to them. Which marketing pieces? I always tell people, go back over the last 18 months and find those two or three stars, those star marketing pieces that outperformed everything else. Don't start testing the other ones. Get rid of them. Use those three and test variations of those three against themselves. That's how you do it with your marketing. Same thing with your product. And we talked about it with Basecamp and with Smucker's Business Jelly and with Bill Phillips. Find those things, those star products or services, and have the courage to get rid of the others. And then the final category that to me is just so important and people don't look at is your time. What do you put your time into every day? And I mean, everybody knows after you hire an assistant or a virtual assistant and you offer tasks that don't require your attention, that frees up some of your time. And that's great, but you have to look at it beyond that. I'm doing an experiment now that's really interesting, and that is I'm working four hours a day, and I quit after four hours. I'm doing this for a month. I'm two weeks into it. And what I do is each day I write down the two most critical tasks that would make a massive difference in my business, and I do just those. And here's the thing. If I finish them in fewer than four hours, I quit. I don't go on. And I'm not saying everybody should do this, but if you can do it for even One week, you'll start seeing, first of all, how much more you can get done in a shorter period of time when you're focused. And second of all, how much time you, you waste on tasks that are important but not critical.

Right.

So you have to start, everybody knows, to get rid of the trivial tasks, but you also want to aim to get rid of as many of the important tasks as you can. Offload those to somebody else and focus your time only on the critical. And it comes back to that two page letter you wrote that was the critical task that made the difference in quadrupling that CAP catalog's sales. It wasn't everything else they did. It wasn't hours of redesigning their order button or this or that. It was that one critical decision you made to add that two page letter that jacked those sales way up. So anybody can do any of those things, but they all require that quality we've talked about that's very elusive or at least very hard to pin down. And that's the courage to act. Do them.

No, that's great, Bob. You know, it reminds me of the saying, you know, the critical few versus the trivial many.

Yeah.

And I have a friend named Tracy Parks who's an organization expert that I recently interviewed. And she, you know, years ago I had hired her and Barbara Hemphill, who's a dear friend of mine and an organizational expert, to come into the office and help us with just literally redesigning a lot of the stuff. And she made this statement when I was sitting bewildered, staring at a pile of paper of do I keep it? Do I throw it away? What do I do with it? You know, the sort of hoarder mentality that I have because I have a gigantic swipe file and I see the opportunities and everything. And she said to me, because she could see I was confused on being stuck on how to make a decision, what do I do with this? Should I do anything with this? And she said, is the juice worth the squeeze? And I said, what a great, what a great saying. Yeah. I was like, what a great. I go, I'm going to apply that to everything. I'm going to apply that to relationships and stuff. So what you just, you know, the time you said, I mean, I, you know, I created my Nightingale Conant marketing program built around having an elf business, which is easy, lucrative and fun, how I define it, versus a half business, which is hard, annoying, lame and frustrating, or sometimes hard, annoying, lucrative and frustrating. And your whole thing about not all dollars are created equal, some dollars are elf. They're easy, they're fun, and some are hard, annoying and frustrating, but they're lucrative. And it's hard, hard to just right out of the gate, you know, if you're a startup entrepreneur, to have an elf business, unless you simply just go into the right thing at the right time in the right way, or you're just extraordinarily lucky or just gifted and smart and talented and most people. That's not the case. So.

Yeah, and it isn't. I mean you. Very few people pick up a guitar and play jazz. You have to take lessons and practice and learn chords and notes but before you get to be a jazz player. So sure, the earlier in the business life a company is, the more difficult it is to do many of these things. But you can carefully choose your market and you can test your marketing pieces and carefully choose which ones you keep. Same with products and services. I'm sorry, but I interrupted you. I think there was a little more you wanted to say with that.

No, no, you're right. What I was going to say was courage. To come back to that word is what you'll need in order to do this. And especially if you are revved up in a certain way, if you are a workaholic, if you are used to doing 10 hours a day, if you're incredibly driven and you pride yourself in working long hard hours or doing a lot of stuff versus produc, just the best results in the least amount of time to go to your four hour test that you're doing. When people hear things like that, it becomes incredibly appealing. But then getting your mind and your mouth and your voice to actually behave with what you're thinking, saying and intending to do are two completely different things. It requires sort of habit. I always tell people. Creating an elf business, is that doable? Absolutely. Can you have an elf business? Absolutely. Is it going to happen in the beginning? Probably not. You're probably going to have to work really hard in order to have an elf business. Right. It's like my buddy Dave Kekich, who's been paralyzed from the chest down for over 35 years. He's 70 years old. He has a credo that said life's easy when you live it the hard way and hard if you live it the easy way. He's a guy that can't walk, can't have sex, takes an hour to do something like use the bathroom that another person can in a minute. And he has had to figure out how to do things that most people would never even fathom. They would ever have to do. But in spite of that, he is still exercised every day, almost daily. He still built a multimillion dollar business and times in his life he's contributed so much to life extension. He runs MaxLife.org all in a wheelchair with all of these things. But it's this mindset, you know, let me just do the things that need to be done in order to get results. Because my favorite Peter Drucker quote is there's nothing more useless than doing really well that which need not be done at all.

What a great point. You know, I inelegantly said get rid of the important tasks, but really people look at things that are important that don't need to be done or at least not by you. And so Drucker said it far more elegantly that I could.

No, but this is all great. First off, I want to just acknowledge you for Here's a couple of ways of how I want to describe how a guy like me and you have worked and want to go deep with something. We had an exchange in an email because we're friends and you noticed something I was doing with positioning Genius Network and how I was targeting the right type of clients. And one of the reasons why I have this very, very high level group of amazing people, many that are I consider far smarter than me, but they're paying clients in my group because I facilitate that. And then of course you share with me what you're doing to very stealth like target and offer what it is you're selling. And you sent me an email about it. We got into an email exchange because it's really freaking elegant ideas here. And then we said, let's just do an interview on it. And here we are creating a recording that can now be shared and we could take the same sort of mindset and actions that have benefited us and are benefiting us in our business. And we're recording them and sharing them with other people so they can do it too. And as far as I'm concerned, that's how you are useful to the world. That's how you create leverage. You'll even have some of your clients that have given you money for some of this, including my own. I'm going to send this to my Genius Network.

Absolutely.

They're going to hear about, oh, how do you actually think about recruiting people into your high level stuff? How do you go on media, the social selecting? Because that's how, you know, my philosophy is don't just look at increasing your slice of the pie, look at increasing the size of the pie. And if you do that, your slice gets a lot bigger. So that's what I hope we've accomplished today. Bob, if people want to find out, I'll talk about how they can find out more about me if they happen to be one of those people that stumbled across this interview and they've not heard of us before. But how do people find out more about you?

Okay, so basically what I do is through ideas like this and strategies and tactics, I help businesses increase their profits by at least 30% by reducing their marketing and other related tasks by at least 50%. So if people want to get more ideas like what we talked about today, they can get that ebook I mentioned earlier, which is called how to Catch Fish with Strawberry Shortcake and Other Marketing Myths, Truths and Million Dollar Secrets. And that's free. It's probably the favorite piece of my own that I've ever written. I really like it. I sometimes look at it and go, oh my God, I should be doing that. You know, and so it's almost like a checklist for myself of those things I can do that will really keep me on track to getting massive value from the least amount of effort. So they can get that for free. And by going to my site, which is Profit Alchemy. P R O F I T A l c h e m-y.com Strawberry.

That is actually funny. I should do something like I should knock off a version of that with cheesecake or whatever.

Yeah. Hey, and if nothing else, you should get it just for the COVID that guys who did the COVID It is so great. I wish I. And that's it. They just think so elegantly. It was like one idea that they put on. It made it so cool, but also not just cool, but it just conveys the message and is so cool at the same time. And that's the type of thinking that I always look for. So yeah, tell people about you too, because I'm definitely going to be sharing this with some of my better clients and I want them to know directly how to get more from you.

Wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, My name is Joe Polish. Like nail polish. P O L I S H so of course I have a website. Joe polish.com My main thing that I focus on and when I say main thing where my. I have a lot of different divisions in my company and we still service the professional cleaning and restoration market. We're the largest training organization in the world with where we started, but I don't know, run that division fully myself. I have a team that does that Genius Network is my favorite thing. It is a group of the highest level industry. Transformers, direct response marketers. Lots of authors, speakers, coaches, people like Dan Sullivan are in the group and Peter Diamandis and Dean Graziosi and Jeff Walker and Dr. Daniel Amen and David Bock. Just a whole variety. The largest private held contract cleaning company in the US As a member, just a lot of very unique individuals. We gather three times a year and we have meetings and once a year I do an annual event geniusnetwork.com and the annual event is geniusnetworkevents.com they're high priced compared to most things, 10,000 to $25,000. And I'm actually starting a $100,000 group because we my clients, I have four people now that said the moment I started they are signing up. So that's a good thing. But it's positioning and it's also what we talk. It's about creating value and it's selecting the right people. So that's what I do for money. And then the stuff that I do that leads to some money but really is a lot about just because I enjoy it and it's a great place to send people that aren't a right fit for my highest level stuff is my podcast. This is what going to go on ilove marketing.com as an example. I also have 10x talk.com for affluent entrepreneurs that I do with Dan Sullivan. So if someone was to go online to just google my name, they'll find a million stuff. But I would direct people to, you know, the 25k group is geniusnetwork.com or 25k group.com and then Ilove marketing.com or 10 the number 10x talk.com you can find it online or on it. And I'll mention one last thing Bob, that this could be an example of giving people way too many options. I'm sitting there listening.

Well that's funny because I was going to narrow it down for you. First of all check out all of them and just listen to what Joe said. Whichever one resonates most with you, go check that out. But if you're going to start with just one, my advice is to go to ilove marketing.com because ilove marketing.com is packed with conversations just like this one today where the value for each of the approximately 60 minute talks, I mean you'd have to pay thousands to get it at a live event. And so I mean there and I say this and it may sound like hype but it unequivocally is not. There are literally millions of dollars worth, worth of value in the I Love Marketing podcast. So I would tell people, if you want a place to start, go there. It costs you nothing and you'll be blown away.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Bob. And as usual, always a pleasure talking with you. Can't wait to hear the feedback of how people are going to apply to build a much bigger future and much better, more satisfying and profitable business for themselves by listening to our conversation today. And I want to go get. I'm going to actually get your book right now because I didn't even know about it.

You know I have it. Released it yet.

Oh, well, good.

Yeah, I'm just releasing it to my own list next week, but I thought I'd tell your folks about it today.

I love it. I love it. Well, thank you, Bob, as always, a pleasure. And so everyone, please make your comments wherever you happen to hear this interview. And good luck with everything you do. Thank you.

And ditto. Thank you, Joe. I really enjoyed it.