Chris Voss: Mistakes Beginners Make Using the Mirror Technique in Negotiations!

So let me ask you this, Chris. So what's the most valuable negotiation technique or strategy that you've ever learned and why is it so valuable? Because you know a lot of them.

You know one of the simplest ones. All right, let's go with simplest. Mirroring. Repeating the last three words of what someone just said.

The last three words?

Yeah, you know the last three words. Just repeat the. Nice job, Dean. I know what you're doing to me.

For it right away without even how.

Dare you put me on me. Nice. No, if you can master that skill. Because a lot of times you just need some time to think. Everybody says, boy, now that I'm thinking about it, I know what I wish.

I would have said.

And now that I'm thinking about it, now I see what I missed. That mirror technique, the last three words buys you that time in the moment without the other side realizing that's what you're doing. Because they're going to go on, they're going to talk some more, they're going to add a lot in. One of the crazy things about the mirror technique is it's a preferred move of the people that possess both a high IQ and a high eq. Now, I cannot explain why that is the case. I can speculate on it. I think if they are high in both areas, they love the simplicity of it and the lack of effort and the data loving people. So they love how little they have to do to get a bunch of information out of the other side. But that's probably the single most valuable thing that you could learn.

Simply very good. Very good. Well, so we've talked about this one before, but it's always so important because you've shifted. You've helped so many people just with this one. So why is the word no more important than yes? And if you could give an example.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah. Okay, so the key to negotiation, it's not about you. We hear this all the time. But here you hear no. And you go like, oh my God. Oh my God, I hate no. I hate being told no. I think we get that conditioned. Every child on earth, regardless of their language, what's the first word they learn? No. Because they get told no. And they get pointed at them and no, don't do that. No, no, no. So we get it beat into a hardwired into us. So when we hear it, something horrible has just happened. But the flip side, the person who's saying it feels protected and safe.

And.

They calm down and they relax. They feel like they just protected themselves the other Thing too is you can say no when you're tired and then immediately contribute to the conversation and think things through really quickly. So it's completely different if it's about them. People love to say no. They feel. And they're gonna say a bunch more afterwards. You know, I got a couple no stories that I love, but I'll tell one of my favorites. Robert Herjavec. We're negotiating with Robert Herjavec's crew over how many tickets they're gonna buy for one of our training events. I've already offered him one. His response for free. His response to the one for free was how many can we buy? Not how many more free ones can we get? I'm a huge Robert Herjavec fan. Based on my interaction with them, I find him to be a generous, decent human being. So we're going back and forth and the event is getting ready to sell out. And my son Brandon, who runs my company, he calls me on the phone late in the day. I'm in la. He says, you get Herjavec to commit how many tickets are gonna buy now or they're gonna be sold out by the time the sun rises in New York tomorrow. Cause my son's on east coast town. We're getting ready to sell the event out. And Brandon says, and if he doesn't buy any, I'm giving away. I'm selling a ticket that was supposed to be given for free. So I'm like, all right, I got to cut this deal now. It's five o' clock in la. When's the last time you tried to get a hard decision out of somebody at 5 o' clock? At 5:03. And also an email. At 5:03. I sent a two line email to Robert Herjavec. Is it a ridiculous idea for you to commit to buying three tickets now? Second line. Are you against paying for them before the business day starts in New York tomorrow? Again, we're three hours behind New York. The time stamp on his email response is 5:04. One minute later. No, we'll commit to the three tickets right now. No, it's not a problem. We'll pay for them right away. Send me a link. Will pay for them right now. Within the hour I send them the link. We got the money at 523. Get people to say no. You'd be shocked at the responses you get.

Fantastic. So there's some questions that people have. But what I'm going to ask everyone, save your questions. When we open it up for Q and A. I might ask you to repost them because it's sometimes hard for me to. To track everything and be present here, too. So, Chris, how might an entrepreneur use these strategies and techniques that you teach to better understand and serve their clients?

Well, yeah, I mean, first of all, simply understanding them better will help you serve them. All right, so let's say you're the favorite, and let's say that they're elf. They're not half. They want you to dial into them. You want to be open to a better deal, which is you tailoring your services to them so that it better serves them, and it's more lucrative for you because, first of all, I'm going to presume that everybody on this call believes the same thing that I do, that you over deliver. So first of all, if you're over delivering, you are bargaining whatever you were charging anyway, which means if you tailor your service, you're good of service so that it's a better delivery for them, you're worth even more. Yes. You want to get what you do. No, don't. Don't be greedy. Don't grab with both hands. But when you provide a service that's worth it, you are entitled to be paid. So the more that you listen to them and understand them, and I'm here to tell you there are ways that you can tailor whatever you're providing that would be easier for you to provide it, which means it would be more profitable for you and it would be better for them. So be willing to engage in conversations and be open to that. And then, you know, the other crazy thing is there might be something really counterintuitive that'll make it profitable for you in unexpected ways. And one of my favorites is, you know our mutual friend Dan Sullivan. He's talking about his book deal. He's talking about listening to me. Never split the difference. And we pay.

Sorry, I pushed the wrong button.

We pay people what they ask. No, I don't pound people on price. So Dan turns around and gives every dime of the book proceeds to Dan and Tucker.

Ben.

Ben and Tucker. Sorry. And then Ben and Tucker. Tucker says, dan got the last drop of my blood. When you're not greedy on the price term, what the other side gives you back might be worth 10 times what the dollars were worth. And those guys, I think those guys. I think Ben and Tucker would die for Dan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's. See, the beauty of Dan, too, is. And I think it's one of the reasons. I mean, heck, me and Dan have done Podcasts on this is we like reciprocal people. You know, we like people that are generous, we like people that are useful. And it's just so much easier to. That's what an ELF person is. People keep asking, what does ELF mean? ELF is easy, lucrative, and fun, and half is hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. It's actually a term I got over 20 years ago from my friend Mark Schneider, who unfortunately passed away earlier this year. But I heard him say elf years ago. And I said, I'm going to develop that into something because I started thinking of all the different business methodologies you can use in terms of marketing and the stuff that me and Dean Jackson teach on. I love marketing. It's ELF marketing. It's automated, it's robotic. But then I started thinking, how do you. You can filter everything through an ELF filter. What are people? What are projects? What are things that you're doing? Are they easy, lucrative, and fun, or are they hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating? Sometimes people can be hard, annoying, lucrative, and frustrating. Not all money is created equal. So ELF is a really great filter. And I'm super happy, Chris, that you're referring to that, because I think it just offers some framing. So, yeah, I mean, once you become skilled at utilizing what Chris is teaching and what he talking about here, you will find a lot of things in your life that were difficult become more elf. And that's the whole. That's the whole goal, is to bring ELF to people in all areas of their entrepreneurial endeavors.

I'm going to jump in real quick because there's one more tangent I want to go on to on half and ELF before you fire your half clients. And we just shifted into this recently. We got a couple of deals that were proposed to us, and they were half deals before we.

Walked away.

And I had this conversation with my son Brandon and everybody else in our company. When it came up, I said, what's the counteroffer that would make this an ELF deal before we walk? Maybe they don't know that this is half. Maybe they don't understand it. And there's a pretty good chance of what you know, the chances are that they're going to offer you a half deal because they don't know any better. They can't help themselves. There's a whole bunch of reasons. I said, let's counter with what would make this an ELF relationship. At that point, there's no doubt in anybody's mind what we're looking for. And they had the option to take it or leave it. And we have the option to take it or leave it. And we turned a couple of deals around with that by simply countering. Instead of saying goodbye so long, we said, all right, here's what would work for us. Here's what would make us want to do business with you forever and make us want, 10 years from now, look back on the last 10 years and say, that was cool and we threw it out there, and the batting average is actually pretty high on that. We don't counter offer their offer term by term. We construct what would be great for us and how we would love to do business with them before we walk. And you'd be surprised at how many people will embrace that because they just didn't know any better.

Do you ever have situations, Chris, where you look outside of the scope of what will be the immediate terms that are on the negotiation to see, to draw in other things that might tip things some way or be an influence? I was just thinking about how, you.

Know, that's a great question. I'm glad you brought that up. We're trying for that all the time. And, you know, how do you know what you don't know? What we'll do is we'll start to say, let's brainstorm this a little bit. Like, here's some ideas that people have gotten in the past. Start throwing out wacky stuff that people brought up, and that will kick their brain into gear. So, yeah, try to kick them into a collaborative brainstorming process to look for how to get outside the scope. But, I mean, I love that question because that's absolutely what everybody should be doing.

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

I got a question for you, though, that I think will help kickstart everything. So imagine that I'm like, I own a business doing well, but I know I don't have my marketing, especially my branding and positioning. I see a lot of people, a.

Lot of authors we work with who.

Have good businesses, and their branding and positioning is bad. And through the book process, we have to actually unpack that a little bit, which is not what our process was designed to do. It just kind of happens. But if I'm in that position, successful business, my positioning marketing is not what I want it to be my brand and my message. Where do I even start thinking about that? Because a lot of them I see, they're almost overwhelmed thinking about anything about messaging or branding. So what do I do? Walk me through the thought process.

Yeah, for sure. And Tucker's being modest because he's legit. One of the best in the world I've ever seen at this. So love Jim. To Tucker on this, he said three things. Marketing, branding, and positioning. And actually another one, messaging. So start with positioning. And this is where Tucker starts with all of his authors. A lot of you have worked with Scribe. If any of you haven't, before he starts with any author, he says, what's the positioning? And the simplest way to start positioning is opposite adjectives and an XY graph. So you all have paper in front of you. Draw a vertical line and a horizontal line. Positioning is the beginning of all marketing. And for positioning, you want to own opposite adjectives. So I'll give you a simple example. If I say, what are the two competitors to, let's say the post office, who would you say? FedEx and UPS. Exactly. FedEx and UPS. So draw a vertical line and then draw a horizontal line. You want to choose opposite adjectives for your business, and we're going to do it for FedEx, UPS and the Postal Service. Opposite adjectives are adjectives like fast and slow, expensive and cheap, exclusive and open. TED. The TED conference is very exclusive. Toastmasters or even TEDx is fairly open.

Right.

These aren't right or wrong. The idea is not to choose the right one. The idea is to choose two opposite adjectives so that you're in a quadrant completely by yourself. So FedEx owns fast and expensive. There's an arrow in the FedEx logo to remind you that they're fast and they're happy to own expensive. If I need to mail a Rolex to Tucker, and it's got to be in Austin by tomorrow, I'm not using the Postal Service. They own fast and expensive, and they're happy to. Now the Postal Service is happy to own slow and cheap, the exact opposite of fast and expensive. If I'm going to mail a birthday card to my grandma and I'm a week early, which I never am, I could just buy a stamp and take it to the Postal Service. So, yes, they're competitors, but they're really not competitors at all because FedEx is over here and the Postal Service is down here. Now, when you do this, most entrepreneurs, they get all excited about doing this exercise, and then they choose opposite Adjectives, we're amazing and they suck. We're awesome and they're terrible. No, the positioning graph has to. You basically should be able to hand it to your competitor and have them go, yeah, the postal service knows they're cheaper and slower than FedEx, and FedEx knows they're faster. So that's positioning. And there's a whole book. Jack Reeves and Al Trout. It's kind of fascinating.

The book.

It's one of the best marketing books of all time, if you want to go down the rabbit hole. But that's the summary of the book, is that XY axis and opposite adjectives. Plot yourself and all of your direct competitors on that and then say, how are you different? And what two words do you want to own? And with a personal brand? And we can go into personal branding if you want personal brand, you want to own one word. Right? So like, if I say, who is the vulnerability woman, who would that be? Brene Brown. Exactly. If I was like, who's the hustle guy?

Gary.

Gary and the Four hour guy. Tim Ferriss.

Right.

You all know their name with just their word. So with a personal brand, you want to own one word. With positioning your business, you want to own opposite adjectives. So two words. Does that make sense? Awesome. Positioning, Positioning, the Battle for your mind by Al Rees and Jack Trout.

Very good book.

Incredible book.

Yeah.

But the funny thing about that book is it's written in the early 80s and he talks all about how many marketing messages we're being bombarded with and how busy the world is and how distracted we all are. And it came out in like 82.

Right.

What else? Who's got another question on market? Oh, so that's. So that's positioning, branding. I mean, we could spend a whole week here on branding, but branding, in a word, is the collective feeling of what people feel and know about your brand. So a brand is not a logo, it's not a color palette, it's everything all rolled into one. But this, again, is a room full of expert direct marketers with branding. Tesla sold 21. Tesla's revenue was over $21 billion last year. And they do not buy ads. Tesla has never bought an ad and they did 21 billion. That's because they built a brand. Yeti Coolors built a billion dollar company selling a product that nobody needed. If you think about a cooler, everybody know Yeti coolers, the white 10 years ago, yeti, yeah, they saw a problem, et cetera, et cetera. But nobody had sandwiches that were spoiling. Nobody's Beer was getting warm, Yeti came around and they solved a problem that we didn't even know we had, which is we weren't proud to brag about our cooler. Nobody had a cooler problem. Everybody had a story about their cooler problem. Because if you're the toughest fishing and hunting guide in your group of 10 people, you're not gonna brag about your $33 Coleman five day cooler. That, guess what works fine. We worry too much about the product and the features and the benefits and not enough about the story and what I call a portable story. So Yeti created a cooler. Sure, it's three times better. So it should cost $100 compared to the Coleman. That works fine, but it costs $300. That additional $200 in the price is the story. It's because a Yeti cooler is worth bragging about. And then they have brand extensions and can buy, can sell $30 mugs for people who can't afford the $300 cooler. But they can get the mug that's worth bragging about. Does that make sense? So if you don't know what store, if you don't know how your customers are talking about your product, if you don't know how your story about your business is spreading, it's not. So what I love to do is think about and we can do hot seat. We can pick out anyone and say, when people talk about your business, what are they saying? And you can't use our fancy copywriting marketing terms. You have to say like what they would say in human language at the bar.

Right.

So take Tucker Inscribe a business I know pretty well they turn ideas into books. So the way people talk about them is I've had this idea for a book for a long time. I just can't get it out of my head. And then I worked with Scribe and it's cool. I didn't have to write. They just interviewed me and pulled it out of me. That kind of language. Know your customer's words and how your customer talks about your business.

I went and grabbed all these books because it's so funny.

I got them all.

Here's the different versions of positioning. This is the 20th anniversary edition, which was years ago still. And then you know, they've got the origin of brand, same author, and then the 22 immutable laws of marketing.

These are all absolute brands.

Yeah, these are. Yeah, all out. What's funny about these guys? This is one of their books that didn't do as well as the other one. It's called Horse sense how to pull.

Ahead of the business track.

And one of the promises behind this is they say, in spite of what many people will say about success, a lot of success is just simply riding the right horse, you know, is latching on to someone who's like, making shit happen.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's, you know, so.

Yeah, for sure. And those opposite adjectives. So we'll take Joe and Genius Network. We're all here. The opposite adjectives for that. We've never talked about it. We don't know what they are. But one of them could be. Because there's a lot of masterminds you can join.

Right.

One of them could be, it's super fun and it's super generous. I've been parts of masterminds that are, you know, there's the okay content, but everyone's kind of eyes on their own paper, and they're trying to get the most value so they can take it away, and they see it as competitors. This is super generous, super sharing. You guys are all helping each other work with each other, and it's fun. Joe is a fun person. This entire everything around us is fun. Right. So those may not be the exact ones, but if someone said to Kathy, if someone said, I'm thinking about joining Genius Network versus a different mastermind, what makes Genius Network different? Fun, Generous. There's a hundred other adjectives you could use.

Fun.

Yeah.

First of all, the word direct is important here. By direct, we're saying that it's anything in direct marketing. Direct mail is something that is measurable. It's something that, if you. If you send out a piece of media, whether it's in the mail, whether it's email, whatever direct marketing says, you have to have a response come back and then pay for the media that you bought. So that. That goes without saying. And that's the broad umbrella concept of direct mail. What's happened over the last 40 years that I've been in the business, that direct market, direct mail became synonymous with direct marketing. So when someone says direct marketing, now they think they're talking about just direct mail. Well, they're not, but they are, because that's what they think. So that's why we had to do direct response marketing. So just a little terminology thing. Direct marketing is not direct mail. Direct mail is direct mail. It's a medium, and it's an important medium still, as it was in yesteryear. In 1981. In 1981, advertising opportunities were finite. Basically, you had direct mail, you had print advertising, you had tv, and Radio, you had package inserts, but you kind of knew where to find the bodies, where to find the prospects, where to find your family members as it were. Offline, there was no Internet, no email, nothing of that sort. So today advertising opportunities are infinite and direct mail is still around and it's just one medium of many. So we'll focus on the few aspects. But the overriding theme is that direct mail is not a be all, end all. It's an and not an or. It was the most scalable marketing medium in the 80s and 90s, but it's not the most scalable anymore. But it's still scalable and it's a great and in your marketing mix, I mean that's a broad statement and I believe it and it's still true. It's not old school either. I mean, I think what's old is new again. And I get inquiries all the time. It's like, Brian, can you tell me something about this new medium called direct mail? And you know, when you're a 20 something and don't even know what direct mail is, I think they missed out. Now I'm not being grandpa saying get off my lawn. And you know, I'm not saying those young whippersnappers don't know what they're talking about. That's not my game. I am an online and offline marketer through and through. But I did a chapter in my book, chapter three was how paying postage made me a better marketer. Not because direct mail is the be all, end all, but because the discipline that it took to do direct mail in the 1980s and 90s before you hit send, meaning that before you mailed millions of pieces of mail with printing, there's these things called printing and postage regarding direct mail and that creates a barrier to entry that you can't do it at home by yourself. It's like making sushi. You know, you can make it at home if you want. I wouldn't recommend it. So I do believe that it's more about direct mail is a medium that you're going to have customers or prospects on your list that are, that's where they're going to want to be met. You want to meet. You want to meet your customers and prospects where they want to be met, not where you think you want to meet them. And you got to have a variety of sources to do that. In my book I also talked about O2O2O, which was online to offline to online. And I'll just read this quickly. This will set up our session. So O2, always be aware of the life cycle of a new customer entering your world. They can start in either o online or offline, then be directed to the alternate and then pulled back to the original source that o where they started. So it's not. There's no one thing. The most dangerous number in business is one. One employee, one source and one medium would be a disaster. And there are a lot of online marketers today that they have their entire business on Facebook and Facebook shuts them down and they're out of business. So direct mail is just another one of those mediums that you can go into to create a variety so that you're diversified in case something goes awry.

We last saw you in the room with Takis event back when you came out here to Australia.

Right, right, right.

So good to see you again. And the question kind of surrounds around tracking the intangible or even like sales or marketing around the intangible. Cause as you know, Joe, like for our business, like in health and wellness and helping people to feel better, quite often it's like people, it's so easy to forget feeling good or tools to feel good. So one would be like around being able to measure or track results and feeling good and being able to use that in like a marketing context.

And just to give you some more context, Dean, specifically the tool we use is breathing. You know, it's about breathing, but it's not really about breathing. It's what the breathing gives you. So that's been the challenge for us has been that you do something that's so simple that everyone has some awareness of. But when you actually get into the practices, they have a profound effect and they rise. You know, all boats rise with that. With that kind of thing. So it's been hard for us to kind of pinpoint exactly what it will do because the results are different. Points for everybody.

Well, it's interesting because you reminds me of, you know, I heard one that we have one word for snow, and the Eskimos have so many different, 50 different words for snow. Because there's all kinds of distinctions and granular things that you need to be able to know about what type of snow it is. Right. And so I think that for most people, breathing is like snow. It's just got the one word for it. Right. That we don't know. One of the greatest things for quantifying qualitative things, because that's essentially what you're trying to do, is if you can point out what some of those distinctions are that you're looking for and people a way to find themselves. Dan Sullivan has maybe one of the best scorecard systems, the only scorecard system I know of, for quantitating or quantifying qualitative things. So if you were to think about the. The seven or eight most important elements of breathing and have, you know, the way he sets it up is you have little description of where you would fall on a progression from you're failing at this one, or you're frustrated with this one, or you're winning traditionally with this one, or you are transforming, which is a lot of times people who might think they're winning, they're in column three. That, right. You give yourself a score from 1 to 12. So you can be 1, 2, 3 or 4, 5, 6, or 7, 8, 9, but you give yourself a score for the statement that fits the most for you right now. So you. This, this was how. How you would describe who's failing at that element of breathing. Then somebody who's frustrated with it recognizes that they want to do better in this one. They recognize it as a problem, and they want to do better. So we give them an opportunity to give both the score where they are right now and the score where they want to be. So you could rate yourself, I'm a four now, but I want to be a 12. And in column four, when you kind of describe the best possible outcome of applying this principle or this mindset or this activity or this whatever distinction you're making about breathing, because I don't know anything about what you're talking about, but I know that you know what those kind of distinct developments are, that even the people who think that they're winning at that wouldn't recognize that they have a problem sometimes reading column four transforming, they don't even know that column four exists as a possibility. And so they think, wow, I thought I was really doing well with that, But I'm not this. I'm not the way you describe it as what it would be to be transforming in all of these elements. And so when people fill out a scorecard like that, that gives you.

The.

Basis for a conversation. Because if somebody's falling or failing or frustrated at three of these elements and you know how to get them to the next one, it's really a great thing for you to show them the protocols, the interventions, the practices, the tools, whatever it is, supplements, whatever they can do to improve along that plane and then constantly get them to presence. They're advancing up the chain. And if anybody who's firing on all four, you know, on all cylinders in each of the things is gonna be. They're gonna know that something changed, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's very helpful.

Yeah. Especially the distinction for the qualitative. Getting that down.

And is that used as like a lead?

Sure, but that would be a lead conversion tool. But tell me, what are the things that are the intangibles about breathing? Like, what are some. If you were to think about a couple of those elements.

Yeah. One of the top ones is lowering reactivity. And in doing that, it raises creativity. So they often have. As one comes down, one goes up sort of thing. If you have a negative come down, like reactivity, you know, the other one is also being able to have a lot more space to monitor what you're about to say rather than reacting and just blurting stuff out.

That is responding versus reacting.

Totally. The other one is just a change in the way people feel. Time as well, because the stress factor comes down in, you know, in being able to breathe more efficiently. You get a. You get a very real kind of, you know, feeling of lowered stress, calm enjoyment of time.

I find that thing like getting grounded into changing the granular time is racing. You know, often I have a Rolex with a sweeping secondhand, and often if I'm racing or if I feel something, I can. If I just center myself to watch that sweep and breathe for two minutes, it's a completely different. It's a recalibration, you know.

Yeah. So they're the real intent. The other one is, you know, understanding also that if your CO2 levels, if the gases are out in your body, it'll. It'll have you show up cranky, you know, you'll feel off as well. And there's some very. To balance that out.

So when you look at those things.

Let me mention something here. I want to. Ray just posted something. And by the way, I keep up with reading what I can. I can't. Sometimes I miss some of the stuff. So I apologize in advance, but Ray wrote, what's the end result that Shane and Angie, Angela. Look, I say Angie, but Angela, Angelina are looking for their guests with that specific solution that they are not finding in what they are currently doing. Just curious.

Yeah, look, you might get two different answers here. Well, for me, what I'm finding is that there's a lot of people seeking a lot of help outside themselves, like psychologists or chiropractors or massage or supplements, but really the answer lies within. So it's being able to tap into those internal tools that you have to be able to use in the moment to calm yourself, to know, connect with intuition, know what the next step is for yourself. So rather than looking outside yourself, it's finding the solutions within yourself. That's kind of like on a high level.

I think, for me, the specific one is really showing up. Like how you show up in your presence is everything, whether you're in sales or whether you're leading a team or whether it's just in general relationships. And that's a. It seems to be, for me, looking at it, it seems to be an intangible thing, you know, getting people or telling people that they're going to show up in a better way by linking it to something like breathing, which it makes sense if you then link it back to health, link it back to feeling better, to having lower reaction. So it's just, for us, it's been a challenge in sort of pinpointing that. But I like what you said, Dean, about having qualitative points there that are relative to everybody. I think that's going to be really helpful.

Definitely. How you show up matters resonates with.

All of our clients.

So I would say if those things, if you think about the overall, the end result of it, that would be your book. That is the. When all of these things are firing, this is the outcome that you can have. And each chapter is one of these elements. And then. So the next step after somebody has the book is to take the scorecard, get their score. So that's what we do. I do the Breakthrough DNA book, which talks about the eight profit activators. But then the next step is our profit activator scorecard that we set up@profitactivatorscore.com and you can see how people can go through. They fill it in online and we get the notification that somebody has done the score, but we see where their gaps are.

Yeah, like kind of like a spider graph.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's fabulous. We love that.

Lee, how would you define marketing and why do you love marketing?

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

Great.

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

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

Yeah. Great.

All right.

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

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

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

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

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

Absolutely.

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

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

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

He's a great interview on his channel right now with Kevin o' Leary from Shark Tank. He brilliantly did a two parter with him where it's one half of the interview on his channel, one half on Kevin o' Leary's channel. So what is a great model for collaboration there.

Well, Evan, why don't you pop on and explain what that is and then post it in the link so people can watch those interviews. And if there's anything that you want to say to either make things fun of Dean or to ask Lee or mention anything, feel free. Wherever you're at out there bouncing on his trampoline, I'm sure where you at.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, that's great, that's great.

Thank you. Most of the time, speakers wait till the end to show the disclosures. So let me just take care of that right up front. Everyone got that? I'm going to begin by borrowing from the great book A Tale of Two Cities. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. I went from being very happy to very sad in a matter of seconds. I left a big brokerage firm in 1999 when Mimi and I started our own wealth management company and began our entrepreneurial journey to this moment when I realized we had netted more than a million dollars from, from our company. But just when I was getting excited, I scanned down the tax return to see how much we had paid in taxes that year. And I remember thinking to myself, you could buy a pretty nice home for that much money. And then I was overcome with doubt. Doubt about the way I was managing our own wealth. Had we hired the right professionals on our team? Was I making mistakes? Was I missing big opportunities? And even though we lived a great lifestyle, was it sustainable? You have to remember, at that moment in time, I thought I knew everything there was to know about wealth management for entrepreneurs. So I started asking other wealth managers I respected. And I kept hearing the same traditional answers. Then I heard about something called a family office, the way billionaires manage their wealth. And luckily I got introduced to a family office in New York City. I jumped on a plane, I flew out there and I met with the CEO and we hit it off. We just connected. And he shared with me how they would hire the best accountants, attorneys, legal, tax, insurance and investment professionals working for that one billionaire and his family as full time employees. I knew immediately that this was the best way to manage money for entrepreneurs. There was only one problem. You need about 200 or $300 million before that makes any sense. Then I thought, I wonder if I could create a virtual family office at a fraction of the cost for entrepreneurs like me and my clients who are making great money. But don't yet have $200 million in assets I needed didn't exist. So I created it first for my own clients and our family. And now we do it for every new client. I'm going to cover three things with you today. Okay. I'm going to cover the entrepreneur's virtual family office. So this is the structure of how you should think about your wealth management as an entrepreneur. I'm going to go over stress testing which billionaires do and you should too. And finally, I'm going to cover some questions you can ask yourself for a self assessment to see where you are in your wealth planning journey. First, the entrepreneur's virtual family office. If I can get a slide up here. There we go. Perfect. So here's the framework. I want you to think about things. I believe that entrepreneurs are the reason for everything great in this country. You're the reason for the economy. You're the reason for innovation. You're the reason for giving. And I believe you deserve to make rich real. Now, that means different things to different entrepreneurs. So to one entrepreneur, it might mean something as simple as flying first class or flying private. For another, it might mean taking three months off a year to travel the world. For another, it might mean knowing that your great grandchildren never have to worry about the cost of an education. And for still others, it might mean serving a cause you care about, both while you're on this planet and beyond, which for Dave Asprey is 180 years in my 24 years of helping entrepreneurs. To make rich real, you need three outcomes. You need absolute confidence in your team. You need max wealth both inside and outside your company. And you need sustained wealth. I meet entrepreneurs all the time. They had a huge exit. They made a lot of money and they squandered it because as Joe said in the intro, it's a different skill set to make money than to keep money.

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

A copy there to get these three outcomes. There's three main drivers. Entrepreneurs love to grow, but I'm going to leave that to third. The first is protect moving from vulnerable to secure manage, which is moving from uncoordinated to worry free and finally grow the part you're Excited about moving from incremental to exponential. So when you protect and manage, you get absolute confidence. When you manage and grow, you get maximum wealth. And when you grow and protect, you get sustained wealth. For each of these protect, manage and grow, I created three catalysts and this is where the work is really done. First, asset protection. This is having a plan so your assets can't be taken by a lawsuit. Second is wealth transfer. So making sure the right people get your stuff and money when you're done with it, at the right time, in the right way, without ruining your kids. If you don't have kids, your wisdom as an entrepreneur should be passed on through stories and videos. And then finally, the time energy shield. You should have a wealth manager on your team that protects you from other professionals, pitches and projects. Under manage business value, your business is the most valuable asset you have. You need to get a business valuation to know it's worth. You need a monetization strategy which could be a high multiple exit. Or it could be turning your company into mailbox money, where you live a great lifestyle and you go out to the mailbox and pick up a check. If you're under 30, ask an old person at your table what a mailbox is so we can move to the next one. The next is the wealth wheel. You're going to pick up advisors and professionals over your life as an entrepreneur. You're going to pick up an accountant, you're going to pick up an attorney, you're going to pick up an insurance agent. Often they're not all a players. They're not talking to each other. And the worst part is you're in the middle trying to manage that team and you shouldn't be in the middle. And then finally, the linchpin partner this is who holds the whole thing together. This is a wealth manager who has three distinct qualifications. First, a specialization in working with entrepreneurs. Most financial advisors are generalists. Second, experience in working with entrepreneurs at least 10 or 20 years. And third, a fiduciary standard of care in all dealings with you. That's a fancy legal term. That means the advisor has to by law represent you and your interest before their own. Under grow tax planning, your largest expense as a successful entrepreneur is going to be taxes. You should have a well thought out, annually updated and implemented tax plan investments. I put these in three categories. Private equity, real estate and stocks and bonds. You want to have a smart strategy for how you're handling those areas to build wealth outside of your company. And finally, the profit accelerator. Knowing what are your critical drivers to profitability, having a simple way to monitor and improve those key drivers and by doing that, increase your cash flow. Second thing I want to cover today is is the stress test. CEG Worldwide did a study of 199 family offices. These are families that have more than $500 million and 93.5% of them do stress testing. What is stress testing? What does that look like? It's a deep dive with a wealth expert on everything that touches your wealth. So it's looking at your business insurance, your personal insurance, your liability coverages, your estate documents, your asset protection plan, your investment statements, your business tax returns, your personal tax returns, Your P&LS, your business operating agreements, your buy sell agreements, your debt, and even the plans you put together for your employees. At an event like this, I get asked a lot, Jim, what's the first thing I need to do on my wealth management? You need to get a stress test by a qualified wealth manager that does this on a regular basis. We do it for all of our clients and we do it to answer three questions for them. First, are you making any big mistakes? Second, are you missing any opportunities? And third, does your team consist of a players and are they talking to each other? The third is the self assessment within the nine categories that I went over earlier. I created a question for each so an entrepreneur like you can find out where are you in your wealth planning journey? I only have time to go over two today of the nine, but let's do this together. So question seven of nine is, how convinced are you that your annual plan for paying less tax is delivering on all the legal opportunities available to you? This is one to ten. One is bad, ten is excellent. So one might be. Every year the US treasury sends me a birthday card. I hope that's not you. And a 10 would be my plan is second to none. And most likely you're somewhere in between one and 10. Question number five of nine, how confident are you that you could completely forget about your wealth management and still know for sure that your wealth team is proactively driving your wealth forward? A1 would be it's a hot mess and A10 totally confident. We created for the nine questions the make Rich Real scorecard. And this is my gift to you. Go to makerichreal.com and you can get the scorecard. There is no required opt in. I promise you're not going to be tagged, pixeled, prodded or poked. A lot of smart people in the room could show me how to do that, but that's not the purpose of this. I'm going to leave you today with this story. My office manager buzzed me one day and said, jim, Steve just called and Steve and Joanne are coming in tomorrow. And they said it's urgent. And that concerned me because Steve was a high flying entrepreneur. We had been working together for more than 10 years and Joanne never came in. It was always Steve. He said she didn't care about the finances and then he handled everything. The next day I walked into the lobby to greet them. First I saw Joanne. Her face was pale and she looked sad. Then I looked over and saw Steve. He was in a wheelchair and his hair had fallen out. And I knew immediately that Steve had cancer. No one mentioned the elephant in the room. I got them back into my office and as soon as we got settled, Steve went into the meeting like normal, started talking about our plan and the strategies about the professionals on the team. And when he finished, he looked at me and he said, very matter of fact, Jim, I've got pancreatic cancer. I only have a couple of months to live. Can we go over the part of the plan where I'm not here and it's just Joanne? I looked at Joanne and she had tears streaming down her face. So I went over the plan, the way it worked without Steve when he's gone. And when I finished, I looked at Steve and I was surprised to see this look on his face, this look of peace, this look of contentment. And then he looked deep into my eyes and I looked deep back into his and he simply said, you got her? I said, yeah, Steve, I've got her. And we teared up. A couple of months later, Joanne called me to tell me that Steve had passed. And as I hung up the phone, I said to myself, don't worry, Steve, I've got her. Who's got you? Who's got your family? You deserve to have a team of a players. You deserve to have a team that talks to each other. You deserve to have a team that puts your interests before their own. Now is the time to get the team that you deserve.

Okay.

I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here.

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