Brian Kurtz and Joe Polish On How To Hire A Marketing Consultant - I Love Marketing Episode #202

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast.

Hello.

This is Joe Polish, and I'm sitting in my conference room in my office with my buddy Brian Kurtz, who is just a marketing genius. Although you probably won't call yourself that.

Seeing that with all these marketing books, I feel a lot Smarter.

There's over 2,400 books in here and a whole bunch of videos.

Yeah, we're going to talk about that. Reading books makes you really smart.

Yeah, I've read over a thousand books. Now, here's the point. Let me set up this video and this interview or this conversation. It's not even going to be an interview. Both of us are going to be talking here. The reason that I wanted to do this is because there's a lot of people that want to work with both me and Brian, and they want to work with us because we have helped make people lots of money. In some cases millions or tens of millions of dollars. And we know a lot about marketing. I've been doing it since 1994. I've had my marketing company. I first learned about direct response, which we'll define in 1992. Brian's been doing it for much longer than that. Now we have people come to us all the time that want marketing help, or they'll say things. I want to pick your brain, and I hate that term, pick your brain.

Pick your pocket.

Yeah, exactly. But we do want to help people, and the purpose of this is to give you an education on how to hire a marketing consultant, what to look for, what do they charge, how do you pay them, how do you incentivize them, why should you do it? And some things you just simply need to know about that whole particular area. Brian and I both do consulting, and in many cases, we only do consulting for people that we want to do consulting for, that that it's a right fit, and that we feel our skills and capabilities are best aligned with what they want. And if we can't help someone, we certainly know the people that can, because me and Brian have very expansive relationships. As a matter of fact, Brian, you have worked with some of the top copywriters in the world. So I'm going to ask you about your background in just a second. I want to do a little bit more setup. The setup, though, is anyone that's going to inquire to hire me or Brian for consulting, I'm going to ask that they actually watch this entire video all the way. Because by doing so, it's not only Going to educate you on what we're about and what we do, but also how to think about hiring someone and what are realistic expectations. So, that being said, my name is Joe Polish, if you don't already know. I own a company called Piranha Marketing. I founded the Genius Network, which is currently the highest level discussion group, Mastermind group, if you want to call it that, in the world for industry Transformers, with a real heavy emphasis on direct response marketing. But we talk about how to just alleviate suffering, how to multiply your business by subtracting crap out of your life and just hanging around other industry Transformers. So it's way beyond marketing all areas of life, including compulsivity and addictions and taking time off and hiring and firing and all that. But we really focus on marketing. So that's sort of my world. And I do have the top marketing podcast called Ilove Marketing.com. so there's all kinds of free information. So if someone can't hire me for my consulting fees, which are currently 50 grand a day or 25 grand for half a day, there's all kinds of stuff I put out there for free just to help people that aren't a right fit in this. And I do like helping and teaching people. So that's a little bit on me. Now, Brian, we've known each other for at least 20 years.

Absolutely.

Give your background. I mean, I can talk about you, but, you know, I'd like to. And I'll add to it if I don't think you've done a good enough job building yourself up, because you're awesome.

Thank you. And I just left my beloved company boardroom that I helped build with Marty Edelston, who an entrepreneur who we both he loved. You love me too. And so I just left after 34 years. Took the company in 1981 from about a $5 million business. And Marty and I, with a lot of help with a lot of other people, but we were the rainmakers for the company and we took it to a high of 150 million in the mid-2000s when we got into all media. So I guess the way I describe myself is that I'm a direct response marketer who never met a medium I didn't like. So I love. You know, I cut my teeth in direct mail. Direct mail is not dead, by the way. And we can talk about that.

And that's what you mean by medium. When you say medium, it's not a psychic. You mean a particular.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean direct mail, Internet, tv, radio, print advertising. Everything, because everything, as you and I both know, should be direct response marketing. We don't want to spend time in brand advertising. That's a different discussion for a different day. And just do stuff that's not measurable, not accountable.

Which is what, when you say brand, see a lot of people immediately like, well, I want to build my brand. I mean, I was on the phone yesterday with a genius network member and he's writing a book and he's an expert in how companies can get funding, and he was talking about building his brand. And so I sort of had to. Not to burst his bubble, but in a nice way, say, well, look, direct response versus, like, brand building. Brand building is about getting your name out there.

Right.

You know, direct response that could cost.

You millions and millions of dollars and not get any return.

And many people have gone bankrupt in the approach of trying to build a brand. Now direct response is getting your name out there and getting a response back. So you can still accomplish phenomenal branding, but have it be measurable and trackable. And that little insight alone, if a company doesn't understand that if they paid a million dollars to learn that and they're a big company, that would be worth a million dollars just to have, like, someone explain for five minutes what we're talking about right at this particular moment. Like, what type of marketing should you use? Well, if your ego wants to run the show, you want to always focus on brand building and things that look good but don't have any measurable, accountable results. But if you want to actually be able to measure the value of your marketing consultant, measure the value of your marketing.

So anyway, yeah, I mean, and that's, you know, the amount of money that you can get through, you will save by hiring the right marketing consultant, because they're not going to take you down a rabbit hole that is just going to. You're going to throw good money after bad. It's funny. You've decorated this entire office with these great demotivation posters, and one of them, the one for consulting, says if you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.

Exactly.

But the interesting thing is we make jokes about that, but actually we're solving problems by telling people where not to go at the same time telling them where to go.

And to that point, the reason those sort of signs get made, which are funny, I mean, I, you know, people go numb to, like, motivational. I know. So my office, anyone that's ever been.

Here, it's the Anti motivational posters. Which makes it more motivational.

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's just ridiculous and funny and all that. But the reason those jokes come into play is because there's so many people that charge money dispensing bad advice. And Gary Halbert, who I originally learned direct response marketing from, he was a great crazy copywriter, became a dear friend of mine. He passed away. The last photo I have is with us. The last time I was with at a Gary Bentziveng.

Gary Bentivanga.

Gary said the most expensive information in the world is bad information. And so for anyone considering hiring a consultant, you can spend 5,000 bucks, you can spend 100,000, you can get it for free. But even if you get a free consultant or free advice, if it's bad advice, that bad advice could cost you a fortune. And one thing I want to point out, most people hire someone because they want to grow. They want to grow their business, they want to grow sales, they want to get better clients, want to increase the conversion. Whatever you said. A really important point though, which is about avoiding mistakes. I mean, hiring the right person, that could take you off of a bad path or take if you're on a track that's doing really well and you're producing a lot of silver coins and you're working your butt off and you're really happy and everything seems awesome. But a consultant, or even the word consultant is kind of weird to say that. But an advice giver can give you advice that will put you on a track with the same effort that will produce gold coins. That one thing is dramatically useful now. In some cases, it could save you from bankruptcy, it could save your reputation, it could save a ton of stuff. So it's hard to sell that, though. A lot of people don't really get that.

They don't, because it feels preventative. It's like preventative medicine. You go to a doctor, you can't sell prevention in direct response marketing. Right. You have to sell cures.

Exactly.

But prevention is so important. I mean, we talk about this all the time. How many online marketers today? More so than anybody else. They're committed to one medium.

Again, like they call themselves an Internet marketer.

They call an Internet marketer. And 80% of their business is coming from Google. I know one guy, 90% of his business was now on Facebook. Well, what happens when Facebook shuts you down? I mean, Dan Kennedy talks about this all the time. And that's why he talks about direct mail, he talks about all these other things, media that you should be into. It's not for your. It's not just because you want to be diversified for the sake of being diversified. It's survival.

Right.

Because you're, as you said, you go bankrupt if you get shut down. And I know, I know people and we know the horror stories of people getting shut down because they're so committed to one thing because it's doing well. We're crushing it, right? Everybody says we're crushing it on the Internet. Well, yeah, the Internet's a cool medium. Look, I'm not a Luddite. I mean, I am not. I'm not the dinosaur, even though my email has T. Rex in it. But I believe in all you. Really. All boats rise when you look at all media. Your messaging can get out in so many different ways. And as far as a consultant goes that knows about all those things that you definitely don't know anything about that will enable you to diversify your business that's worth tens of millions, even if it's not. Doesn't start with a discussion that's all tactical. It can be very strategic. But it's so important to be to get people to think about those broader issues. And then you start diving deep into the specifics of the different types of marketing that you can do. But everybody thinks a consultant should come in, tell them exactly what to do, that we're going to do this kind of marketing with this sales letter, with this messaging, and then we're done. That's not what you really want. When you start with a consultant. You want that big picture stuff first because you got to make sure that the assessment of your business is in the right place. And you got to have people who have the kind of experience that you and I have.

Yeah. So let's talk. We'll get down to the nitty gritty. We're also going to make some book recommendations because we're in this big room with a lot of books.

Hundreds of books here I could recommend.

Yeah, there's actually 100 you could recommend.

Easy.

And so I've not read every single book in here, but I've read over a thousand books and we've got some of our favorites that we've found and some that are not in this particular.

Couldn't find them. But we know they're here somewhere.

They're in the building. This is a big building. I have an 11,000 square foot building. So basically we're going to talk about that stuff. We're going to give people suggestions so that by the time you're done Listening to us, I'll use some Dan Sullivan words. You're going to have more direction, more confidence, more capability, and more clarity on how to approach hiring someone or seeking outside help. And I'm a big fan of paying people money. Like Dan Sullivan says, you know, if you have enough money to solve the problem, you don't have a problem. And if you have a marketing problem and you can cut a check and you can solve that problem, or at least you can start the path of solving that problem or reaching that opportunity. You know, if you have enough money to reach the opportunity, you can get the opportunity. That's another way of saying it. And so that's what me and Brian are actually going to talk about. We're going to share some examples of actual clients that we've worked with, different copywriters that you've worked with, how they've gotten paid for that. Because I recommend a lot of consultants. And so in certain situations, if it's in the health field, I will recommend someone like you or someone like a Michael Fishman. I was just talking to a guy who runs one of the largest supplement companies in the world. A couple days ago, my buddy Dave Kecich arranged a phone call and he's interested in my Genius Network group. So I was talking to him. And I'm interested in this company because I've actually been a client of this company. But I recommended Mary Ellen Tribbe, who's one of our friends, and she's, you know, I think she's currently like 25,000 bucks a day to do consulting. And so I hire people all the time myself. I have personally spent over a million dollars a year on education, consultants, newsletters, courses, seminars for the last 15 years straight. In my whole marketing education, conservatively, I've probably spent $2 million just learning marketing. So when I charge someone what I charge and that fee may go up. I mean, currently, at the time we're doing this video, it's 25 grand for half a day. You can see the whole way I presented@hirejoepolish.com you can find about how Brian does his at BrianKurtz, K U R T Z me. And click on the Hire Brian or whatever your thing is there on your website so you can see how we actually promote it. But this whole thing isn't about like, you need to hire me or Brian. Actually. This is to sift, sort and screen people that are pain in the ass. This is to sift, sort and screen people that are like, I want to work with Joe. And this is kind of like I want to blow off people that I'm not a right fit. Because again, Dan Sullivan is one of my dearest friends. I do a podcast with him and so we talk about a lot of stuff. So he's always present in my mind. He says, I only want to sell things to people that want it, not people that need it. So trying to talk someone in when you're a high price, very skilled, you know, in any area, consultant or whatever, trying to sell stuff to people that really need it is my, you know, I'm past that. I would, you know, in the beginning of my career, but I don't want that anymore. I just want people that I'm a right fit for.

Yeah. And I think that. And this will sound kind of weir, it's not like you don't want consulting clients, but there's almost. It's just not worth it, I mean, considering the kind of difference that you're making with your genius network group. One phone call, you put these two people together and all of a sudden it's like game changing for these two multimillion dollar companies, that's a phone call. As opposed to spending a half a day or a day with one client. If you're going to spend a half a day or a day with one client, it's got to be not only worth it to you monetarily, but it's got to be something that. Your talks with Dan Sullivan are called 10x talks. Right? And it's not just about 10xing money, it's about 10xing impact. It's about 10xing everything in your life. And I know you're all about that. We had a discussion earlier today about that. If you're just about passion, forget it. It's just not about being passionate. But we've developed these skills over 20, 30 years and it's not like we forced that into our. We didn't force a passion to ourselves. But we're so good at this and we love it so much because we live it every day now. It's become the passion and we want to share it. But I'll tell you, sharing it one on one, that's special. And you're going to have to like really just want to be with somebody at that high level. The sift sort and screen thing is so powerful. And you know, having been, you know, building one business and you know, being more intrapreneurial than entrepreneurial, I mean, you know, I was a partner in the business so you know, I was an owner of a nine figure business. So it was great. But when I talk about boardroom and I talk about how we built the business, I was basically a free consultant for 34 years. Like people. And I rarely said no to people. I mean, you used to give me a really hard time. It's like, brian, what are you doing? It's like you're giving away all this, you know, valuable. But it was okay because I, it was part of, I'll say, my own education of what I'm going to do for those 34 years. How I built up all that knowledge, how I built up all that experience. Now's the time to say, how do I share that? And I'm only going to share it very selectively. And that, and I think selectivity is what you were getting at. And you and Dan are just drilling that into me. And I've listened to it for a long time because I've watched the way you've run your life and I love it. I want to be like you when I grow up.

I would hope so. That's what I aspire to. Have you actually be like me grow up. That would be awesome. No, here's the point. It's about enhancement, okay? Like you, I only want to work with people that are aligned with me. I only want to align myself with people that are aligned with me. And whoever's watching this, I mean, have you ever hired someone that you work with and they're just. You just don't click? I mean, that's a pain in the ass. It's hard to get things done. Not that you can't make progress, but it's the psychological satiation. The joy is not there. And I don't like working with people that are a total pain in the ass. Now I do like people that will call me on my crap. I do like people that I can actually argue and debate because it results in a better goal. I mean, there's rarely any professional sports teams where everyone like they're winning whatever the game is and they're out holding hands and singing Kumbaya. It can be bloody and stuff. So I'm not talking about the difficulties in that area because in order to have a breakthrough, you typically got to break something. I'm talking about open mindedness and being able to dance together. Those are the types of clients I want if I'm going to do one on one consulting, which I try to talk everyone out of unless they really need that specific stuff. Because frankly, if someone joins Genius Network, they're going to spend a Lot more time with a lot more people than if they're going to hire me one on one. But certain situations people actually want that. But I do charge a lot of money for it. It's not just the $25,000 a day or 25,000 for half a day or 50,000 for a full day. And again you can see all this@hirejopage.com One of the things I'm doing now is I realize, you know, even all the years of consulting and giving advice away for free, which I still do every day, I do it in the form of ilovemarketing.com I have people that have become millionaires listening to my podcast that have never paid me a penny, that will probably never pay me a penny. Some people in other parts of the world where the travel or doing it over the phone would just be logistically more of a pain, listen to my podcast. But the thing with it is people don't pay. They don't pay attention. And people that give us money, it's not even about paying us for our time. It's about making the commitment to themselves, to where they're going to take something seriously.

You once told me that anybody who gave started you had to chase down for the 25,000 for 25K for Genius Network. It was actually a sign almost that they weren't committed to the group. And you don't even want somebody like that in a room. I mean one person like that could ruin a mastermind theoretically. Right. And so I'm going to have my own mastermind soon. I'm not going to compete with yours. Mine's going to be very specific, you know, multi channel marketing. It's going to be exactly in my.

Sweet spot and I encourage anyone to have the skill to do that.

Right. And all I want to do is have people around me that are going to make me better, but they're going to pay because that's the way you know that. And the thing is I put my money where my mouth is, right? I've been in your group for many, many years. I always lament that I wasn't one of the first, I was too cheap those first couple years. I've been in since like 2010 or so. So 2011. Yeah, so I've been in for a long time and I'm in a couple of the groups similar price and it's like it's my tuition, you know, for life in a way. And you know, I spent all that money on my kids college and now they're out. So now it's my turn, right?

Exactly.

But I've been doing that my whole life, too. I don't know if I've spent the kind of money that you've spent, but I guess I have. If you start taking into account the copywriters that I've paid and the consultants that I have paid. And back in the 80s and 90s, I don't think even consultants had this big view. There were certain consultants that everybody wanted to work with. Like Dick Benson was the direct mail guy, and Gordon Grossman was a huge direct mail guy who built the Reader's digestion in the 1960s. I had both those guys on retainer. Now. What did they charge? You know, between two and $5,000 a month. They didn't get a piece of the action when they produced something great for me. I mean, all Dick Benson had to do was say, test this this way. And that was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars immediately. And yet all I had to do was pay him. Like, for a while, I was paying him 2,000 bucks a month, and I had free access to him on the phone. But that's what Dick wanted. I mean, Dick, you know, sat in his perch in the ivory tower, answered the phone all day. He probably had 25 clients at 2,000amonth. So for $50,000 a month, all he had to do was answer the phone. That's a model that he was okay with, but he never took a piece of the action of anybody because that wasn't part of the mindset.

That wasn't a model back then.

Wasn't a model back then. But you know what? And I'm not saying that Dick left all that money on the table. I don't think he ever lamented about how much money he left on the table, but I think he did lament about having clients that he wasn't crazy about. I mean, he was a guy that was known for firing clients. And back then, you never would fire somebody who's paying you money. And now it's done all the time.

Well, now I try to avoid anyone paying me money unless they totally resonate with me.

Right.

And I feel I can help them. So. And plus, I'm in a great position, as are you, where supply and demand is more in my face. There's more demand for my time than there is supply, so. And plus, I have things like Genius Network. I have things like 10x.

As I said, people can get a lot of Joe without getting the one on one. Exactly.

And if they do come to me, I want them to come to me, see, because I always say the difference between selling and marketing is selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody. And anyone that would hire us wants to improve their selling and marketing, you would think. And marketing is what you do to get someone on the phone or face to face with you properly positioned so that by the time they work with you, they're pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified, and pre certified predisposed. So I would want someone that would be interested in hiring us for consulting to watch this video and say, oh, I resonate with you, I resonate with Brian or whatever. And they're pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified, predisposed. Now if you can take that in your own existing company. Because there's a lot of great sales organizations that have hired me for marketing consultant because they do good at selling, but they don't do a good job at marketing. And so they're able to sell people, but they don't have enough people to sell to or they're spending too much effort trying to convince people because they don't compel them. You know, and like my friend Dean Jackson says, you know, a compelling offer is 10 times more valuable than a convincing argument where you're trying to convince somebody. And so with marketing, you know, selling is influence, marketing is storytelling. And so we help people tell a better story. We help people come up with the right model. We help people to think through the margins. We have people think through how to automate things, how to get stuff sold and positioned without having to rely so much on human beings to do it. That's why you said I never found a medium that I didn't love.

Right.

You know, my greatest sales people, in the very beginning of my business in a carpet cleaning company, I mean, I even brought some props. I've got, I don't know if they can be seen from the, from the video here, but we've got stuff on the side of us that I'll grab. Like this one I really thought was good. Like if you want to expand your business. Yeah, here we go. I think I'll do a little setup video for this later. I'll put it on my different website.

I'll tell you, it's freaking me out.

Yeah. What do you think of that little toy? Little toy. But anyway. But this is my very first business card, which was certainly a terrible business card. Superior Carpet Care serving the East Valley. Specialized in upholstery, car interior, soul extraction. When I was a Devereaux carpet cleaner, I didn't know anything about words. And what I learned is that you can influence human behavior by words on a piece of paper. The difference between a $1bill and $100bill is the message on the paper. But that was my very first. Only one in existence. One. But, you know, so you can either have, like, kind of a slinky business that goes back and forth. These are some of the props you can make, you know, all kinds of big mistakes, but we're here to help you erase them and expand your business. I could have done a better job with the props.

No, they're beautiful.

Yeah, no, they are beautiful. But here's what I'd like to do, because you have some great examples of the way copywriters have gotten paid. One thing that I didn't finish mentioning is that when I'm hiring people, when I'm hiring people, when people hire me for consulting these days, I don't want them to even think about the fee they're paying me. What I want them to focus on is the objective of the result. And so if someone hires me for half a day for 25 grand, I want that person, what's 5% of half a million dollars? It's $25,000. So I'm like, okay, how am I going to add half a million dollars? They're paying me 25 grand for an advance towards the first half a million they make. If the person makes a million, I want them to pay me another 25 grand. If they make 5 million, I want them to pay me a percentage of that. So when someone hires me for consulting, I don't want it to stop. If I can give you a breakthrough, elegant idea, I expect to continue to get paid for that. Why? Because if they're paying me royalties, I will continue to hone the ideas. I will continue to help them. I will continue to give them connections. And so that is the best way to hire a marketing consultant. And when I interviewed you and Marty Edelston years ago, one of the things you guys said is, we love paying copywriters royalties. Not like we do it because we're supposed to, but you actually really understand that. Why wouldn't you incentivize someone that is bringing a dollar that never would come into your company? Why would you not incentivize someone for that? Because if you reinforce and reward behavior, you're going to get more of it. So to hire someone to go and help you have a breakthrough and bring you tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, why do you want.

To get them for cheap, right?

I mean, like, pay the price.

The old story was any. Any copywriter working in an agency was probably not worth hiring because they, you know, they. They weren't writing copy that was. Was. Was exponentially great. And I guess it's the great Gary Halbert quote. You know, every business. Every business problem can be solved with a great sales letter, right? So Marty and I understood very early on that any. Just a sales letter can just change your business. So there are people that are just really good at that. I mean, I always call myself a copywriter wannabe, but I just did a blog post last week, and, you know, after watching the best copy over the last 34 years and working with the best copywriters, I probably couldn't write a package soup to nuts myself. But I know good copy from bad. I know headlines, I know copy platforms, and I also know which copywriters to put you in touch with if I'm working with you as to cause people say, you know how I get two or three calls a week, Brian, I need to find a good copywriter. It is so much bigger than that. You have to look at everything about your business, everything that you're doing. So I don't want to get too specific about copywriting, but copywriting was one of those areas where the idea of getting paid to play was so obvious to me and to Marty and to a lot of other big mailers at the time that it didn't make sense to just pay a flat fee for copy. And especially when you. So, I mean, the guys who were the pioneers in this were two of the greatest copywriters who ever lived, you know, Gary Bensivenga and Jim Rutz. Jim Rutz just passed away recently. I wrote a blog post on him, the copywriter closest to God, because he was very religious, but he also was somehow, I think he had a pact with God to write great copy. I don't know. I don't want to be sacrilegious here, but. So anyway, Bensivenga and Ruts, early on in their careers, they knew how good they were, and so they would actually give you this incredible piece of copy and they wouldn't charge you a dime, and they would actually bet on that it would do well and that you would pay them royalties. Of course, they learned very quickly that, again, the demand for them was so high because they were so good that then they could charge 30,000 or $40,000 up front against that royalty.

And when did that start? What year? Just to give some perspective on this.

You know, the first time we hired it was definitely in the 80s, I'm trying to think maybe late 80s, early 90s, but it was already happening before that a little bit. And they set the stage for great copywriters forever. And to find a copywriter today, even an online guy, you know, they're always going to look for a percentage of sales. So everybody, I mean, you got to be good to do it, otherwise you're not going to get hired and who's going to pay you? And I think when you get it, and this is something again, saving a client a lot of money. If I go to a client and I'm consulting with them and they're telling me, you know, I found this copywriter, he's only going to charge me 3500 bucks to do like a squeeze page and I and a landing page, you know, and a sales letter and he's going to do an email sequence and it's only 3500 bucks. Isn't that a great deal, Brian? And my first reaction is, you're probably going to get what you pay for, but let me see the guy. And then I have a whole process. I mean, I just did, I think I did a 10 minute talk on it for Genius Network about, it's an hour and a half speech about what to look for in a copywriter. Like what? It's the same with a consultant. I mean, all of those things that I talked about, you know, someone who's really hungry, someone who's got insatiable curiosity, someone who will dive deep into a subject area because they've been there and done it for a really long time. Copywriter, consultant, same thing. Dan Kennedy talks about this. To be a copywriter, you should be a consultant and a copywriter. He has a whole course on how you get into a business, even if you just want to be a copywriter, but you really have to look at the whole picture because you're not just writing copy, you're looking at the entire business structure. So we owe a lot a debt of gratitude to these royalty copywriters because I think they did set the stage. Even though there's a lot of people charging today getting paid for performance that probably don't even know that Gary Bensivanga and Jim Rutz ever existed.

Absolutely.

But this has been an ongoing thing and we've seen the evolution of it. I mean, we've lived through that. It's like, you know, we live through the Model T to, you know, to the cars.

It's actually, it's very interesting that we're going to be probably the, you know, the generation that actually went from, you know, at the time we're doing this, this video, I, you know, I just turned 47 years old a couple weeks ago.

Oh, you're such an old man.

I know, Young compared to you. But it's like I got more hair, you know. That's true. You do. But I mean, do you want to go.

No. Consultant and you don't want to, you know, what is picking consultant based on chair they have no.

Did you say I want to talk about insulting or consulting?

Let's talk about consulting. We'll do insulting later.

We should have people hire us to insult them.

We'd be good at it.

Do you know, back in the day, like, other than the sex lines, one of the most profitable 900 numbers, when they used to have the numbers was insult lines where people would pay something like a couple bucks a minute to call and get insulted. And that was one of the most profitable lines. You got to think about, like you.

Build rapport through insulting people. I think, yeah, as long as they can take it.

You gotta have thick skin.

I mean, for somebody who's not from New York, you know.

Right.

You know, I'm pretty good. You're pretty good. You got pretty thick skin.

Totally.

You know, I do.

Exactly. All right. So I can't even consult it. So.

Yeah, so, so the, the, you know, the, the idea that the evolution.

Yes.

Like pay for play.

First off, what I was going to say is that when I learned marketing, there was no Internet. You know, I had to send things via stamps in direct mail. And you take 20 years prior to that, if someone wanted to lay out a full page ad, they're using an exact and they're using whiteout. And so the way things have changed. But see what the great, the great respect I have for marketing came from having to take words. So you're talking about copy. We're sitting there talking about copy because we both live, eat and breathe it and understand. But there may be people watch this that really don't understand the value of copy. And they're like, well, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna pay someone $40,000 to write a letter. You know, I can write a letter, you know, in, you know, the difference between a world class marketer versus an amateur versus someone that's never even read a book on it, but they all have opinions on it. That's a funny thing about our business. You would never have if there were two brain surgeons here and someone was like, oh, no, I'm thinking about hiring a brain surgeon. We're talking about. They would be glued to this video. They wouldn't be checking their. I mean, if they needed brain surgery, they would be, like, taking this very seriously. But we have done just as much education to learn marketing as a brain surgeon has to do. And I'm personal friends with. With a brain surgeon, you know, I mean, I know. You know, I've had conversations with him about, what did it take for you to actually learn this stuff?

Right.

And we have put a lot of time in. But the funny thing is, when people look at, like, marketing people, everyone has an opinion on marketing. You know, you ask your family members, you ask one of your employees, you ask one of your friends, they will typically try to talk you out of doing stuff or say, oh, you need to do this, you need to do that. And it's like, well, where did. Where did you learn?

Where'd you learn that?

Oh, you know, I have an opinion. So it's kind of like everyone has an opinion, and you have to be very careful of people that don't have the chops. The chops that have it done there.

You know, you think about Dan Kennedy. You know, he's just an interesting study, obviously, in everything that he's done and that he's kind of flipped. Just like you flipped the carpet cleaning business. You know, Dan Kennedy took the whole brick and mortar business in the entire world, in a way, and just flipped that on its ear and said, you're a dentist, and you don't understand marketing. You know, you're a lawyer, don't understand marketing. You know, the idea of any kind of service business. I mean, he just changed the world for those people. And the ones that chose to invest in Dan Kennedy, just like the carpet cleaners that chose to invest in you. I mean, you used to charge. I think your platinum group was like a thousand a month. It was like 12,000. It's a lot of money for a carpet cleaner in Iowa who's, you know, maybe making, what, a hundred thousand bucks a year in carpet cleaning? He's paying $12,000 to be in Piranha Marketing. And I always used to go to your carpet cleaning conferences, and those are the people I used to spend time talking to them. It's like, what made you come to this besides Joe's good looks? And they would and took chance to win a car.

Used to give away a car.

The guy would say, I'm gonna be so far ahead of everybody else, because all my other carpet cleaner friends are Getting advice from people who have no experience, no knowledge, no nothing. And there's Joe, who's read a thousand books on marketing. Gary Halbert is his mentor. He knows how to write a sales letter. He just gave us a book that's this thick. I've talked about that forever because I used to love your book. Sample sales letters, swipe files. You know, we talk about swipe files all the time. You have to have a swipe file of other people's work and then read them and then see what the methodology is and what the mindset is. You need to read books like Breakthrough Advertising, you know, the best book ever written. Not just on copy and creative, but on human behavior. So how are you gonna learn that if you, if you don't even know that that exists?

Right?

And so, you know, I've watched this evolution and I think what's happened with the Internet in particular, I don't want to sound like, you know, grandpa dinosaur here, but you know, it's so easy to get into the business. You know, the barrier to entry is so low to go market something on the Internet, but it just, it just to do it right and to do it at the highest level and to do it like you really want to not just make the most money, but do it at the highest level. That's why you hire people like me and you. And I'm not. I'm not. This is an advertisement for me and you. It's people like me and you. Yes, because that's where you're going to make the exponential growth. That's what you talk about in your 10 time talk all the time with Dan.

Well, Jay Abraham is a good friend of both of ours. And Jay always talks about hidden opportunities or finding things that exist.

My favorite Jay Abraham book is how to get everything you can out of everything you've got. And it's basically, these are your assets. Now what are you going to do? And you're going to leave it to yourself to do that. Like, why wouldn't you, you know, look for the expert in every area? That's the other thing about hiring a great consultant. You know, some people would say, you know, I hired, you know, Joe or Brian. It's $25,000 for a half a day. How can I ever get that money back? You know, so like, how could I ever get the money back from. From, from $25,000 of being at. In your. In your mastermind, or 20,000 if they join my mastermind. And the interesting thing is, and I'll tell this story I was sitting at one of the, your events. I was sitting at one of your genius network masterminds. Guy, great copywriter. We both know who's in the group. Comes up to me at one of the breaks. Brian, we should be doing something together. And we start talking about what our assets are and what we've got and one thing led to another and it led to a hundred thousand dollar one day event. Yeah, right. And that wasn't magic. It wasn't like, you know, an easy button on the one hand because we had to do a lot of work once we thought of it, but it was taking the assets, you know, putting them together. And all of that experience that we talk about, and also you always talk about this too, is that when you go in and consult with somebody, it's not the tactics I'm going to give you, it's that strategy that I mentioned before. But then it's also our. I hate the word network. But it is the genius network. But it is that we've contributed to so many people in so many lives and so many businesses and we're always one phone call away from almost anything. You were telling me stories this morning about these world class people. Like, I don't want to mention names, but these are like, you know, it's, it's like people that you say I, you'd never be able to get to them. And you can get to anybody with one phone call.

Oh, no, I'll mention them here.

Yeah, yeah.

It was a great story. Yeah. So the gal that runs conscious capitalism for John Mackey, you know, contacted me.

Saying the guy who started Whole Foods.

Founder, Whole Foods is interested in meeting Richard Branson. And I'm, you know, Richard Branson's largest fundraiser. And I've interviewed Richard quite a few times and had him. Yeah. I even had Richard Branson speak at a conference for carpet clean cleaners back in 2007. If you. I think I wasn't at that one.

You've had amazing, you've had the most amazing people speak. The carpet cleaners.

No, I know, it's funny. It's funny, but it's like, you know, they're contacting me in order to make a connection. Although I, I did actually send a personal email to both Richard and John in the past, but they now.

Right.

Maybe it's just like the feeling of the relationship was not solid enough.

So let's act in mind.

Right. It's another Doral opener.

Right, Exactly.

And so paying the role here. So like, because there are.

That's what you're paying for. When you're paying for a consultant.

Yeah.

You're paying for their relationship capital. Yeah, I love that term.

Let me, let me read one thing too, that, that I actually went to.

That's a J abra thing.

Look on the Internet here. So here's this thing I looked up on the. I was trying to find the original story, but this is a, this is a good lesson and I'll just read parts of it because who. I've heard this story told a million different ways, but I love it. The claim is the bill presented by a famed Fix it man details the difference between a value of work done and the value of knowledge behind it. And so legend, example, okay, and this is supposedly around 1945, Nikola Tesla visited Henry Ford at his factory, which was having some kind of difficulty. Ford asked Tesla if he could help identify the problem area. Tesla walked up to a wall of boilerplate and made a small X chalk on one of the plates. Ford was thrilled and told him to send an invoice. The Bill arrived for $10,000. Ford was asked for a breakdown. Tesla sent another Invoice indicating a $1 charge for marking the wall with an X and $9,999 for knowing where to put it. And so basically it goes on to say variations. Practically anyone famous for his knowledge can be offered up as a virtuoso in this tale. Nikola Tesla, Edison, George Washington. It goes on and on. Unnamed mechanics, electricians. And it goes on to say what the toll wielding specialist does to earn his fee varies depending upon his area of expertise. Masters of all things mechanical sagely put an ear up to the malfunctioning machine where then casually chalk an X over where the problem lurks. Plumbing mavens correct a problem by banging the right pipe with a wrench. Here's the story I heard now is like this factory is operating and, and it's bringing in $100,000 an hour for every hour that's operating. And one day everything comes to a screeching halt and it just stops. And so the president of the company's freaking out. We got to call the expert. We got to get these machines back on. We're losing $100,000 every hour that this machinery isn't running. So the consultant, they get over there real quickly. He brings a briefcase. He opens it up. There's nothing in the briefcase but a hammer and some paperwork. And so he pulls out a hammer. He looks at a big pipe. He just kind of looks and analyzes it and hits the pipe three times in one particular area and the machinery turns back on and everything's working again. And so the president's like, oh my, thank God. And so the expert gives him an invoice for $10,010. That's how I heard it, right? And so the president's like looking at this, going, what the hell is $10,010? I mean, you hit a pipe three times with a hammer. He's like, what's the $10,010 for? And the expert says, well, the $10 is for hitting the pipe with a hammer or the $10 is for hitting the pipe with a hammer. And the 10,000 is for knowing where to hit it. And that just says everything about like, I can come into a company and if they're the right fit company for me. I mean, they're, you know, which is typically a million dollar plus company that has an emphasis on using, you know, marketing. Now it's not very hard for me to identify many things in the form of a half a day consultant that they're going to pay 25 grand for that will lead to, in many cases, millions of dollars. I mean, Bill Phillips is one of my, you know, good examples because I just happened to grab some sales letters, like, I just want to tell this story real quick.

That's the EAS stuff, right?

Yeah, yeah. Back way back when he, he wrote a book called Body for Life EAS and he had a magazine.

He spoke to your carpet cleaners.

Oh, yeah. I was his marketing consultant on and off for like 13 years. Years. He wrote the book Body for Life.

Which I gave it away at the time.

Don't know if this book would have existed without the consulting I did with him because I gave him an idea for him to donate money to Make a Wish foundation for a documentary. This is the VHS version, which is, you know, called Body of Work, which was way. This was before Body for Life. And I gave him an idea to donate money to Make a wish for the distribution of this video. So if people like the video, they would make a donation to Make a Wish so they would value the information. But it allowed him to become the single largest individual contributor in the history of the world to the Make a Wish Foundation. That was a marketing idea. But my very first consultation with him, I was charging $3,850 a day. And I met him at this thing in 1995 he was holding at the Bali hotel in Vegas called the no Holds Barred Bodybuilding Seminar. And he was launching a supplement called Myoplex in his EAS company, which he bought the company EAS from a guy named Anthony Almada. And then he built it into the largest sports assembly company in the world in the late 90s. And so he, I met him by saying, do you know Gary Halbert? I walked up to me, he goes, you know Gary Halbert? And I'm like, yeah. He goes, do you write copy? And I go, well, you know, I mean, I hire copywriters, but I write some. He's like, you know, I need someone that can help me, you know, with writing copy. And so he's like, can you send me, you know, can you follow up with me? And I was like, yeah, give me your contact info. So he gave me a fax number and a phone number. And back then that's how we communicated was fax, no emails, right? And so I sent him a proposal that, you know, I know your business, I've been reading your magazine, Muscle Media. It used to be called Muscle Media 2000. Back at the time I said, yeah, you know, I'm happy to come out and consult with you for, you know, a day of consulting. I charge 3850 a day plus first class travel. And he sends back a page and a half fax, which I still have it. I mean, I collected everything that I, you know, did with him.

The origins of an amazing consulting business.

Oh yeah, a big swipe file. Swipe file is a collection. So if you don't throw away that stuff.

No.

So basically it was a blistering facts, like bitching at me about, you know, I made $60 million last year. I paid something like 10 or 12 million in taxes. Like I have people standing in line willing to write copy for me for free. What makes you think I'm gonna, you know, pay you $4,000 to teach me how to run my company? You know, and it was like this insulting letter, but I sat and thought, you know, I know what this guy could do that could be really helpful to him because, you know, I've been studying marketing for a few years and, and basically I thought to myself, well, if he's going to take that time to write this letter to me bitching at me, I'm going to fight fire with fire. So I wrote back another blissing fact saying, well, congratulations on all your business success and if you made $60 million a year in business, then paying me for a day of consulting is like nothing. Secondly, if you have people that are standing in line willing to work for free, then they obviously don't know very much about selling or marketing themselves. So Feel free to hire them. And I go, do you go to McDonald's and say, I made $60 million last year? You know, I want, you know, free fries with my, you know, Big Mac? Yeah. I go, they would laugh at you. And so I wrote kind of an insulting letter back. And he wrote back, I like you, you're feisty, you know, blah, blah, blah, like really weird.

Yeah.

But he hand wrote and said, and I still have this original letter.

I don't think, I don't know today you would put up with that. You might not, depending on who it is.

But I was very young back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you wanted the business, right? Right.

Well, no. And plus, I knew I could help you. I was interested in fitness. I was interested in fitness. And he was like, well, of the top in the world. Right? So. But it was just funny. It was kind of a game, you know, I mean, you're talking young guys just freaking bantering back and forth over and that, you know, look, I mean, when you're dealing with meatheads all day long, you know, and you're in that world, I mean, right? These guys are strange. And so although I'm still friends with many of them. And so basically he wrote, he sent me a. He overnighted me a check for four grand in first class travel, you know, which was more than what I was even charging for. It was 3850. So I fly up there, in the first hour of consulting with him, he shows me a letter. Mammoth clearance, Mammoth savings. Urgent inventory sale for a limited time of slashing up to 40% off of regular price of top EAS supplements. And basically what ended up the letter said, dear friend, if you've got money to burn, please throw this letter away right now. To continue reading would only be a waste of your time. However, if you like to save big money on the highest quality scientifically designed supplements in America, I urge you to take a few minutes of your valuable time. And it says, here's the deal. I screwed up big time. We recently added several new supplements to the EAS line. And knowing these products are going to be big sellers, I ordered three truckloads of them from our manufacturing plant in Southern California. Unfortunately, I overlooked the fact that we're already running at full capacity in our warehouse. A fact my warehouse manager, Rusty Anderson, just let me in on. When these three trucks pulled up to the door this morning, well, he was, well, surprised. Billy, you crazy? Where the hell do you think we're going to put this stuff? Blah, blah, blah. And then. And Then it, you know, has a picture of the three semi trucks, right, backed up to the EAS thing. And so that's a reason for 40% off. So he tells me, he's like, joe, We've brought in $2 million from this letter so far, and I need more copy like that, and I don't have enough people. He goes, I'm the marketing department in this company. Although I think he had like, you know, a couple hundred employees. And so I said, you ever done three letter sequences? And he's like, no. I go, do you know what multi sequence mailings are? He's like, yeah, but I've never done them. I go, do you mind if I write on that letter? So he handed me the letter and I hand wrote on it and I started scribbling. You know, I go, well, here's the deal. I go, you're going to take everyone that you mailed the letter to except the people that have ordered. You're going to mail them the letter a second time. And if that letter works, you're going to then mail the same letter a third time to the same list. Because the time to quit going back to the well is when you put the bucket in the well and you pull it up and there's no water. So I explained sequential mailings, which is something I was doing with Dan Kennedy all the time and teaching the carpet cleaners, right? So here I got a guy who's running a big multimillion dollar supplement company who has a big list, and he's like, I need a new letter. It's like, no, you don't need to go back to the same people with the same letter. Now this is a direct, this one strategy alone. If people are thinking, well, I don't do direct mail. Well, if you do Internet, if you do email, if you have social media, if you have any form, actually, if.

You have a list.

Exactly. And if you don't have a list, you build a list. You build a list, which is what another, you know, that's what an advisor will teach you how to do. So I basically. So I wrote a bunch of handwritten things, handwritten in the margin, circle stuff made stars. And I said, you know, I get. So I wrote second notice, sent this to you two weeks ago, still haven't heard from you. Third and final notice, we sent you this letter twice. So I was giving him examples of things to write. So he ended up mailing the letter two more times to the same list. He basically circled this very limited time. I'm sending you this again, in case you missed it the first time. I've got three trucks now. It says one product sitting here. This sale will be over any day now. All throughout the whole thing, of course, it had the same order form.

He never had urgency. He never had. He had some urgency. He never had scarcity. He never.

Right.

You took it to the next level, which is just basic direct response that he hadn't been doing. Because you had seen it work.

Exactly. And we're talking. This is already with a very sharp marketer.

Right. And he's already making a lot of money. Who didn't want to spend 4,000 bucks on you.

Exactly. So what ended up happening was I thought he brought in an additional $3 million from mailing the letter two more times. But I found transcripts of us talking, because I spoke at JJ Virgin, who's one of my genius network members. I spoke at her event, and I dug up some of this stuff to share some of the strategies on how to sell exercise, nutrition supplementation, that sort of stuff. And he actually brought in $6.5 million from that campaign because of sequencing.

And that taught you that it's time to do 4,000 against royalty.

Well, so what he started. What he started doing for then is he started paying me ten grand a day for consulting and, you know, any. You know. But here's what I didn't do is I never tied it into royalties. He sold the company for $300 million. And, like, one of the ideas I gave him when I was speaking in Australia, I saw a magazine in Australia where it had, like, some guy that had been dieting in, like, kind of like the equivalent of Time magazine's version in Australia magazine. And I ripped the. Out the thing and I told Bill, I said, you should basically, you should have one of your bodybuilders, like, diet and, you know, do this as an ad. So he created this ad. He actually took the idea and he implemented it. And so this was running on billboards. This is in, you know, all kinds of big magazines. You know, in the late 90s, the theory of Evolution. And, you know, this is like, you.

Know, in a way, it's almost like off the top of your head. And it's not. Because. Because I think a lot of clients, when they're hiring a consultant, they think because the consultant makes it look easy. There's actually an expression. I think it's Gary Halbert or John Carlton, the whole clicks on a dial, Right?

Yeah, Halbert talks about that. I mean, Kennedy.

Kennedy. I mean, they all talk about it. So you're in with a client, they start talking about something, and boom. Because you put in your 10,000 hours plus, or I put in my 10,000 hours plus in direct response marketing. Boom. You're doing that. I remember this. Boom. That's how it was with Dick Benson. You know, he. Every test that I did at boardroom, it's like, dick, I'm doing this test. I want to do price, but I also want to do this premium thing. Oh, National Geographic, 1954. We did this boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I think this is the way you should apply that. And so the click on the dial goes off, but you're paying for the experience that they've had for the 30 years. One of the things that I did, you know, because I told you I was giving away free Consulting for 34 years because they didn't have to charge for it. I was well compensated. I, you know, I had. I was in an equity position. I just love helping people. It's just the way I am. And I still do. I have to be careful now, because now I really do have to be careful with my time as well as the money. So my first couple of consulting calls, I said, you know, I don't want to jump into this consultant consulting operation. Right. This as a. As an assignment, right away. But let's get on the phone, Pay me a thousand bucks, and we'll get on the phone for an hour. I know that you'll say that's way too little to charge for an hour, but I was just trying to see what this would be like. I have to tell you, this is not bragging. I set up an hour phone call within 10 minutes of that hour phone call, similar to, like the first time you walked into Bill Phillips and talked about sequential mailings. Something is going to happen, especially in those first 10 minutes, because we prepared a little bit, and it's interesting. I use something that Marty Edelston taught me that you've actually adapted beautifully in Genius Network. Where were. I always say, where were you? Where are you now? Where do you want to go? And I talk about those.

Yeah. Which I first heard from Ken Glickman.

Right. And Glickman got it from Marty.

So this is a.

That original. That Genius Network sheet, which I fill out. Hopefully I'll get to fill it out in the next couple of days again, because it changes all the time. It's like. And it's like Dan Sullivan's, you know, last 90 days, present next 90 days. Right. So the momentum thing. So there's all Kinds of exercises to do that. But you ask that. All I had to do is ask this one client to write that up. Where they've been, where are they now, where they want to go. Thousand dollars an hour. They had 10 times their value, probably more in the first 10 minutes because they asked me a question. In this case it was happened to be about list and segmentation. They had no segmentation on their house list. They were sending emails that were identical to their entire list all the time. I'm like, well you got 10,000 names and you know that certain people have spent this amount of money with you versus that amount of money. You know, these many people have bought two products versus one or maybe nine products versus two. We want different messaging to those people online. This is easy. To me that was a click on a dial for them. It was like, really? You don't have to send the same message to all the people. Now I'm sure a lot of people listening to this are saying, well that's a stupid thing, Brian, I wouldn't want you for that. But you know what, you may ask me another question based on where you are now. My click on a dial from my 10,000 plus hours in direct response marketing is going to come up with something. And that's the beauty of hot seats. You know, in your mastermind group and in my mastermind group, I'm going to really focus on hot seats. You spent the whole day with me. You finally saw me do hot seats. You never saw me do them before. But at Titans I did a full day. We did 28 hot seats in 10 and a half hours. 15 minute hot seats, boom. Rapid fire in the room. Here's the business problem. And that was exponential because now I'm not paying for one on one consulting. But in that room, what we have like 40 people in the room, 35 people. And basically they lay out the problem in a minute and a half. And then for 13 and a half minutes it was like rapid fire. Basically everybody's 10,000 hours of whatever they're expert in in the room. All marketers coming into play to give this one person ideas. That's consulting on steroids. Yeah, exactly. Now some of those people, after that event, they came to me and said, I heard from a certain person in the room about radio. I don't know anything about radio. I want to take a deeper dive into radio. Now that radio person should become a one on one consultant with that person. In one case, it was for me. They came to me and said, Brian, I didn't Realize you knew so much about how to craft specific messaging because I didn't see you as a copywriter, but messaging to particular lists or particular list segments. I mean, I'm a list expert. I grew up in the list business, so list segmentation is my thing. Love segmenting the list. And I'm not a math guy either. I'm just a. I just like, I'm a behavior guy.

Right.

Breakthrough advertising, baby. So I want to understand each segment of my list and how I'm going to communicate with each one. So one of the people at that event, because they heard me speak about that now, wanted to take the deeper dive off my click on that dial. And that's how you. As far going back to what we were trying to. One of the things we wanted to accomplish today is how do you find a consultant? Sometimes you find them in a bigger group while we're kind of exploring a lot of different things. And then you see who's the person that I need to take the deep dive with.

Exactly that.

And the deep dive is where, you know, 25,000 for a half a day. It'll be a bargain, you know, in that respect. But you might not know it right off the bat. And that's why I think some people. I'm not saying people shouldn't be reluctant to spend the money, but that you should not be reluctant to do the correct research to find the right consultant for the right job. You wouldn't have hired, you know, a lawyer to hit that pipe with the wrench. Right.

Well, first off, there are questions that before someone hires me, I give them in advance because I want them to show up already having done the thinking.

That's exactly what I want.

And I structure the level of thinking that is done in advance, that alone to be worth what they're actually.

What do you do compared to, like. So I. I did what. Where are you. Where you. Where you want to go?

I do something very similar to that. If you could wave a magic wand, what would you want to have?

That's great.

Okay. And so I asked him a question like that. And then I have a whole series of. Of questions. Many I got from a guy named. From way back when, named Marty Schnard, who actually had these. These power, you know, marketing analyzer questions. And so they're everything about kind of where you're at, what are threats to your competition. So every possible thing you do.

I call it a SWOT analysis. But you don't want to do like that. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, traps, I guess, but. Or threats I think to use. So yeah, but I think that you don't want to get too strategic planning ish with them. But it sounds like I love the wave, the magic wand because I'll bet you more times than not their magic wand is waived. And the thing that they want to do, you can quickly look at that and go, why do you want to do that When I'm looking at your assets? Why would you want to do this?

Well, see, part of it too is helping people. The two worlds that I'm existing in right now are helping high level entrepreneurs and helping people with addiction. You know, directing people to things.

I know that's a big thing for you.

And although I've made my living in promotions, marketing, advertising. One of the biggest groups, if you want to call it that, are organizations, which really isn't very loosely an organization is 12 step groups and they have created all of their membership through attraction, not promotion. They don't want to do any promotion. They shy away from any sort of TV media. It's written in their principles. But I very much admire that and in the world.

I didn't know what Friends of Bill W. Was, you know, when I was on a cruise.

Oh, really? Yeah.

So they are there. They're like, they hide them. Right? That's part of that, right? The, the.

Well, you know, it's anonymous. That's why it's, you know. Yeah, exactly.

We're not gonna like, you know, but we. How do you help people the most?

But, but the thing that helps people with addiction is not what they have to learn. It's not about learning. It's about unlearning.

Right.

It's, it's, it's not about, you know, thinking your way into new actions. It's about acting your way into new thinking. And they'll say that your best thinking got you here and you can sit down with an entrepreneur. You know, I, I make, make a lot of comparisons to addiction and successful businesses because like workaholism is the respectable.

Tiny objects everywhere, right?

So I mean tons of very successful people are obsessively and compulsive and so they, they think they want to grow more sales. And sometimes they'll be sitting there going, you know, what the fuck are you even doing?

Yeah, exactly.

You have a lot of money. You don't have any time. Like, do you want freedom or do you want more sales? You know, it's like Gary Halbert would tell this story. John Carlton too is some guy that came to win of their seminars, had something like 56 hardware stores. He was, you know, 60 pounds overweight, his cholesterol was through the roof. He was smoking, he was eating crappy food, he was, you know, terrible energy, you know, distant relationship from his children, constant fighting with his wife. You know, just like everything in his personal life was a disaster. He had 56 hardware stores and his biggest goal was to open up his 57th hardware store. And see, that's not, you know, that's not success. That is driven. This, that is driving you into the wall. And so part of the time is like, you know, most of the time I'm going to help people with marketing strategy, but a lot of time if I'm like, you know, getting to going like, what the hell are you doing? Yeah, you know what? Like, is this really the model you want to exist in? And so in a lot of ways, I've helped a lot of speakers that the biggest complaint is I'm on the road too much, I'm traveling too much. But they don't have any other way to monetize their skill except speaking. And so you teach them how to package that uniquely into demonstration stuff on the Internet.

Our buddy Jeff Walker. I mean, the idea that you could create a product and then just launch it online and exponentially take your speaking into a product. Yeah, stop complaining about the travel, you know, do something about it. Well, you still have the skill, you still have the knowledge.

I want to give an example of that too. Like my Genius network member, Peter Diamandis, like when he wrote the book Abundance in Genius Network, a team of us launched.

I was there that day. That was amazing.

Yeah, it was powerful. So it hit New York Times. That was his first book, amazing book. And I talked him in to joining strategic coach because Peter is a driven dude, smart as hell, knows all these billionaires. I mean, just a really brilliant guy. But he was just, you know, he's just a crushing schedule, which he still has. He has a crushing schedule because Peter just like takes on the world sort of thing. It's that sort of personality. But I was like, you know, I got him to double his speaking fees and now what he's getting paid is even four times what he was getting paid back then today because his new book Bold came out fantastically. Book, you know, hit New York Times again working with all of these genius, but introduced him to Dan Sullivan. He wanted to shoot some videos because we needed a back end product for his book. So he had a book and he was getting paid to speak. And then all this other stuff he's doing like Co founder of Singularity University X Prize foundation, which he founded. He's got all these things that he's doing, but he's literally on the plane speaking at all these speaking gigs, doing corporate things, but they're one offs. And so introduced him to Dan. So. And literally he didn't want to join Strategic Coach. I literally talked him into. I'm like, dude, it will change.

This was a partnership that was unbelievable. This is one of the great partnerships of all time.

Exactly. And so join Strategic Coach. So he does. Dan and him become, you know, good friends. Dan sees, you know, what he has.

Is Dan looks for game changer. Peter's a game changer.

Exactly. So, you know, so this whole multiplier thing. And so what Peter ends up doing is he needed a back end product. So he was originally going to shoot a video with Ray Kurzweil and him. I was like, you know, like, let's get an audience and charge $5,000 for it. And then you get paid to create the product.

Right.

So he does that at Singularity University. The first one gets 50 people there at five grand a pop realizes, wow, this is pretty powerful. Last year does his first Abundance360 event and has like 130 something people. Most of them there because of Dan Sullivan. And me refer to our own existing clients because we don't look at this as competitive. We recommend things to people who feel it's going to produce a better job.

No, it works perfectly with what you're doing in your mastermind and what Dan does in Strategic Coach.

Exactly. So it's this all great symbiotic relationship.

Totally.

And so this year, you know, he does it again. Now he's committed to do this for 25 years because that's what Dan Sullivan talked him into. He has 250 people there at 10,000 a person. And so all of a sudden in a two day period, you bring in over $2 million in revenue when in the past you were getting paid 50 grand or 25 grand or whatever. And now he does this every year and he'll eventually turn this into a digitized sort of version. But see that one idea of doing that, it wasn't just like 10 minutes and it's done. It required a lot of work, it required a lot of setup. But in one fell swoop, he brings in more money in two days than most people in his world will bring in an entire year traveling everywhere. Like, so how much is an idea like that that worth? Yeah, you know, how much is a.

Direction of that starts with and again, we go back to, you know, how do you assess hiring a consultant? Who do you want in your life to help you give this kind of advice to you? And it really is about assessing your assets. It does go back to Jay Abraham getting everything you can of everything you got. So in a way, whether the question was asked, Peter, if you could wave a magic wand, Peter, where are you? Where you. Where are. Where were you? Where are you? Where do you want to go? So he probably wasn't even that sure, because I remember that day when he was doing the Abundance book launch. He was doing a book, and he had Singularity University. The guy is just a total rock star of a human being. The guy wants to corral a meteor with a. I always say a meteor with like a fishnet, you know?

Well, I'm part investor in his planetary resources. I'm wanting to see this, too.

Yeah, $5.3 trillion worth of resources, plus, you know, he wants to end world illiteracy. Small projects, you know, Small projects.

You know, Peter doesn't have a small thinker.

Yeah, very small thinker. But the interesting thing is, I think this whole thing started with you, as I'm going to call you, the consultant here. Whether you were a paid consultant or not, you were worth, you know, hundreds of thousands to Peter. And however that got compensated, who cares, right? Yeah, we're not talking about that right this minute. But you would have been worth that because basically you were able to assess all of the assets Peter had that he was not doing what he needed to do with them. That's something that a great marketing consultant should do, first and foremost. So when I do my thing. Well, you do the magic wand thing, or I do, you know, where were you? Where are you? Where do you want to go? It really is. The thing that I always put in there is like, I want to hear all of the assets that you have available at your fingertips. How big is your list? What customers have you had? Have you written a book? Whatever. Let's just get all your assets on the table. Just like we put all this junk around the table, around us, because it stimulates us. And then because we've got the hours put into all of these different marketing techniques, we're going to look and we're going to see things in those assets. There's no way that the person who's close to their own assets, they think, oh, I should write another book. I mean, we have a good friend. Again, I don't want to mention names, but we have a really good friend who is an incredible. One of the best coaches for speakers at the CEO level. You attended one of her events. And I remember sitting in her apartment. It was not a consulting gig per se, just a really good friend of mine. She's brilliant. In fact, we're gonna see her in a couple of days. Yeah. And she's awesome. So she says to me, I gotta write a book. I gotta write a book. And she's like so hyped up about this book. And we're talking and I said, well, you know, do you really. What do you want to write a book for? You know, I just ask questions.

Right. I'm not her consultant, but I kind.

Of was working that way because I love the school woman. She's amazing. And she goes, well, you know how I know how people are launching books. We know our buddy Brendon Burchard. And I said, you know, J.J. virgin, who you mentioned before, is a buddy who has launched books online. She got coached by Brendan. Why don't you talk to her first before you just are sold on this fact that you have to write a book. That partnership. And I guess, you know, I'm gonna say it's Victoria. Her name is Victoria combined with jj. The stuff that they've done together was all based on that conversation, by the way.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, her name's Victoria labaume. And if you want to be. If you want to learn how to, how to basically be a world class taker and performer because she's done.

And she's a performance artist too.

Yeah, yeah, she's phenomenal. And so I literally paid. She's one of my genius sellers. You went to her event, you referred her.

Exactly.

And, and I, I paid to go to her event because I like paying for suffer skill. And I'll take it more seriously because believe me, in my world, everybody sends me shit for free.

Oh, you could do tons. You could do everything for free.

Yeah, right. But the thing is like, people should get paid for their knowledge.

But the beauty here was that, you know, right in front of her, I mean, that started with a conversation of I want to do a book. Brian in a consulting role there will say, I don't know if Victoria will give me credit for being her consultant. I'm just her friend. But I said, why do you want to do a book? We started asking questions and then the value led to this, this and that. I mean, her business has exploded, not because of me, but because of all the other things that she did. Because she got the book off the plate. Because it wasn't the most important thing to do. And then the stuff that she's been doing with jj and then JJ ended up using her as a coach. JJ's become much more of a world class speaker. She's great. She was great to begin with. She's gotten so much better because now she's paying Victoria to be coached there. I didn't expect that to be part of that relationship. But you and I connect people like that all the time. We're not getting a royalty on it. We're not doing it. But the fact that that's available from people like us, not just us, but like us who have the 10,000 hours plus in a skill set, who have the connections, who are willing to help and you know, in most cases you'll have to pay for it.

Yeah, exactly.

But you know, using these examples are good because, you know, Victoria wasn't paying me and Peter wasn't paying you. But it led to so many other things. I mean our lives are so much richer because of it. And we did get paid in variety of ways because of those things.

Well, they're paying me at least. Yeah, see, they shouldn't pay you.

They shouldn't pay me. I'm not worth it.

Yeah, you just need. You just, you just need to basically.

I know.

I'm gonna get you some of those brass balls things.

Exactly, exactly. Well, actually at Titans you got on stage and said Brian is the director of Sales Prevention.

Right, Sales Prevention department.

Self presumption. Yeah, but no more. You know, it's not because I want to. I want to fleece people out of their money. You know, it's that.

Well, no, part of it. Part of it. I will. Seriously. I mean, part of your thing is you're just a genuinely nice person. That. And so part of it is the reason that you charge people is like I said earlier, you know, if they don't pay, they don't pay attention. And, and my very best clients that have made the most money and I have a lot of great friends that I've made a lot of money that are colleagues in the marketing business that wouldn't think, oh pay Joe Polish money. They think it's when their ego gets in the way. I have dozens and dozens of members in genius network that make far more revenue than I do that are running 100 million. I even have a billionaire in the group that make far more money than me. Some, they're incredibly more talented. But where I'm talented, I'm able to help them. A lot of these people would never Facilitate bringing all these other and the.

Ones that self select themselves out of the group. And I knew a few, I've been in the group long enough to know why should I Pay Joe Pollard $25,000? Well, if you don't see this value, goodbye. You know, it's like, and yeah, it's sort of like this is the self selecting process that even in the one on one consulting that we talked about that we really have to be selective. You know, I don't think you've kicked out too many people out of 25k but at a genius network. But you know, I think you've actually thought about it. I know you have discussed it and.

Over the years I've actually got, we've gotten far better with the application process because in the beginning you don't really know. I mean like with anything like Dan Sullivan says, you make it up and then you make it real. And so in the process of doing it, you actually learn what works. And we have a really good selection process because we don't want people coming in that are not a right fit for the group and we don't want people coming in that we're not a right fit for them. We want it to be a very beneficial thing. Okay, so what I want to do is I want to close up our conversation here by a couple of things, giving some recommendations for books. Very quickly though, because I don't want to take a lot of time on this. The main thing that I, I want to convey here is that any marketing consultant that you're going to hire when it comes to an expectation, the expectation I have when I hire somebody and I give them money is that they're going to make me multiples of what I'm paying them now. They're not going to give it to me in terms of they're going to do the work. You know, there are certain people you hire to execute things. There are certain people you hire just for ideas. I am not an agency, so I don't implement things for people. Although like right now I'm helping Tony Robbins implement a contest as an example with his team. But we've brought someone on to help do that. I'm helping Arianna Huffington with a whole series of videos that I've done with her with some of the implementation process and that I'll do that for certain long term relationships that I know are going to lead to many big things and that I'm genuinely interested in. Like the Subject of Thrive, which is Ariana's book that we did a Whole video series on. I do that with Tony Robbins, with what he's doing with his business mastery. I'm genuinely interested. So it's one of those things where, you know, getting paid for things that you're learning from. So I'm big on getting clients that in the process of helping them, that's going to enhance.

You're teaching and learning at the same time.

Exactly. So the thing, though, is that when I hire someone, I want them to either make me money, save me money, or reduce stress. It's the same way that I look at an employee. And I'll say this to all my team members, not in a derogatory. Derogatory way. It's just kind of a funny term. An employee is a behavior rental agreement. A consultant is a behavior rental agreement. You're renting their behavior. Some people you're going to rent their behavior for 10 bucks an hour. Other people, you're going to rent their behavior for, like, you know, a lot. So it totally depends. So it's. It's like what they actually, what is produced by that particular behavior is what it is that I'm looking for. So if, if you can. If you can hire somebody as a marketing consultant and you execute upon what it is, they are either advising or if you're hiring a copywriter, you're actually mailing the copy, using the copy, sending the copy. You know, social media, the copy. You know, whatever form of distribution you're using, they're never going to cost you anything. A great marketer is free. It's always free, and it will pay you multiples. And if they're not free, then there's either something wrong with the strategy, there's something wrong with person, or there's something wrong with you. We need to wrap up here. So here's the thing.

Some of your favorites, grab some of.

Your books, and you got breakthrough advertising. Let's talk about that and we'll do this real quickly. And by the way, this is. Here's something to think about as we recommend books to read. All of these books, if you haven't already, is going to take you hours, probably. I mean, just on the books we're seeing here, it could take 100 hours, if you're a slow reader, just to read a couple of the books that we're going to recommend. It's. It's time that's worth doing, by all means. I mean, I highly recommend, you know, reading because I've done it a lot. But see, in a lot of ways, that's what you actually hire someone for because they've already done that stuff. And so you're either going to take the time to learn it on your own or you're going to pay for a shortcut you're going to pay for. And that's not to say you should not avail yourselves of this knowledge because this knowledge is brilliant. But I'm going to share some of the things that made the most impact to me. So I'll let you.

Yeah, this was this. This was. This is where I put my money, where my mouth is. So Breakthrough Advertising written by Eugene Schwartz, probably one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived. This book was written in 1966. Not one word has been changed from the original. Because it's not just a book about creative and copy. This is a book about human nature. So just, I mean I love swipe file type books. So Denny Hatch is one of the great authors in direct response and he just has all these great secret books, these million dollar mailings and direct marketing success. Love all his stuff. You know, the stuff that. Anything by Dan Kennedy. I mean, I think the Ultimate Sales Letter.

The Ultimate Sales Letter was one of the very first marketing books that I read. This is one of the older versions. But this is definitely worth reading. All of Dan's books.

Yeah, all his books are worth reading. And you know, I just think that, you know, I think, I think Claude Hopkins, which we don't have in front of us. Scientific advertising is another one.

Must read, must read.

You and I probably could make a list of 100.

You know what, you should probably post it. Yeah. On Joe Polish. Joe Polish recommends I actually.

Oh, you have that.

I have that.

But maybe with this video we could have, you know, Brian's top 10, Joe's top 10.

Yeah, we'll do that. So ones I will say real quickly. Ogilvy on advertising by David Ogilvy. Must read. Winning through Intimidation, although not a marketing book, is one of the best books by Robert.

Amazing book.

Yeah. Love this book.

Anything by Sugarman.

My dear friend Joe Sugarman. The ad right Copy copywriter's Handbook. These really great book. And of course, you know, I love marketing where we summarize and talk about stuff. You know, here's a couple of our I love marketing best of books and we just take the best of. You know, we've now we're almost at 200 episodes at the time. We're actually doing this video of 200 hours of free marketing with some of.

The best podcasts for marketing. And how much do you learn when you Interview somebody. I mean, tons. I'm, like, always so jealous.

It's like.

Like, Joe, you got to interview, and you're interviewing doctors, and you're interviewing scientists, and. And then you're interviewing, you know, schlub marketers like me.

Like, people like me. Yeah.

People like me.

Well, you know, we have to throw in, like.

Throw in the. Like, the drugs. Yeah, yeah. So.

So anyway. So what? So final. Any pieces of advice, words of wisdom, and if people, after listening to this, if we have not warded off all of the people that we don't think would be right, fits, and people actually still like us and want to seek out you, they can go to Briankurtz.

Me, and I'll put up something there about hiring me as a consultant. But, you know, I think I want to add one little, quick little thing, is that, you know, it's not just hiring me or you. I mean, when someone contacts me and says, brian, I want to do X, let's go back to radio. Since it's top of my mind. I wouldn't be the best consultant for that if it was just that.

No.

And then I would recommend the right person, as we do it all the time.

I recommend Kennedy for consulting John Carlton.

Me, too.

You know, a whole variety of people.

Mary Ellen. Right. So there's, like, all these people. So I just think that, you know, choosing the right consultant, making sure you have the right person, and people like you and I are actually so well connected that I think we would either say, hire me at this rate, if that's a rate we want to even do, or join Genius Network, join Brian's mastermind, or join this other mastermind, or hire so and so, because I think that's a better fit for what you need because you got to hire the right person, too. You want that sounding board, you want all that stuff, but it's got to be the right person.

Yep, exactly. And so I'm Joe Polish, this is Brian Kurtz, and wish you the very best in building and growing your business. And if we can help you in any way, shape, or form, you know what to do and how to do it. And beyond that, make it a great day. It.