Everything You Need To Know About Marketing

You know, the thing that's been so fascinating to me in the Internet world is that, you know, we have a database of 9 million people on our database of people who bought something from us over the last 20, 25 years.

Some of you can make incredibly beautiful art, but then you don't do the same thing for yourself. You don't create bio videos, you don't make your brand and the way you position yourself desirable and attractive and awesome.

Well, marketing connects people. And for my companies, I'm always looking for a way to allow people to see what do we do and how do we do it and how we can serve them.

I'm going to give you some fundamentals that many of you that have been with me a long time have heard me say over and over again. And I'm going to give you a definition of marketing and I'm going to tell you what the marketing that we're going to share with you this event is all about. There's this little. We can probably put this up on the screen. Yep. So over here would be, say, a cold prospect. Over here would be a client. So when they actually become a client and they hire you and they start giving you money. Now, to use Dan Kennedy language, many of you are familiar with Dan Kennedy. He's a marketing guy that used to write a lot of my sales copy for like the first nine years of my business. Alright, so Dan, really sharp marketing guy, he said you can either be an annoying pest and I can't spell, by the way. You can be an annoying pest or a welcome guest. Okay? And when it comes to selling, imagine this like a mountain. A hill, and right here in the middle where gravity actually shifts. Going up a hill to sell is very difficult. That requires a lot of rapport building, a lot of things that you do in the very beginning. Frankly, everything that you do is a sales job. But when it comes to selling, though, you want to set it up in order to have an elf business, easy, lucrative and fun. You want to set it up so that the people that you're talking with and that you're wanting to attract his clients, you're actually spending your personal time or your human time, your staff time, on this side of the hill so that gravity is working in your favor. Trying to push a string uphill is hard. Pulling is much easier. So you'll hear a lot of people talk about positioning and packaging and how you set it up and how people call and they're no longer asking, how much do you charge? Because when someone calls up and Says, how much do you charge? That's the first thing that they ask you. That's because the marketing has not been communicated to them in a way to where they actually have any trust and rapport. Because the number one question in all consumers minds is who can I trust? Okay, trust. And so marketers have to establish trust. And you do that by building rapport so that they not only trust you, but they feel comfortable with you also. So trust is rapport with comfort. And how many of you have a whole bunch of clients that not only trust you, but they're comfortable with you, they give you the keys to their house, that sort of stuff? How many of you have when those clients refer other people to you that you've never done business with because of the trust and rapport that that person already has with you, they've communicated it in advance to that other person and those people call you up already with built and established rep rapport. How many of you have that, okay, so that person calls you already over here. You're not like an annoying pest trying to sell them carpet cleaning services. You're some person that can actually solve a problem for them because someone they already trusted, knew, referred them, and all of a sudden they call you up and they're like, hey, you know, I hear really great things about you. You know, I'd like to do business with you. That's why referrals are so awesome. That's why we all love them. But those types of referrals for most companies are accidental. It's not strategic. They don't have systems set up that, that replicate that sort of process. And if they do do it, they're doing it manually. So there's a lot of manual human interaction. And what I want to do for all of you as much as I can, is I want to give you ways to multiply the effectiveness of every marketing campaign and tool that you're going to do. There's all kinds of different ways that you can convey trust in advance. Because what marketing is, and I want you to write this down, marketing is selling in advance. That's what marketing is. It's simply setting it up so that the selling is happening before you even talk to them. Because a lot of people think selling is you show up and you talk to someone. Well, that's part of it. But there's a lot of things you can do in advance. And those of you that are already skilled, experienced marketers, including me, we're always looking for ways to continually improve our ability to communicate to more people. In, in a manner that has more leads, more clients, more prospects showing up that are predisposed, pre qualified, pre interested, pre motivated. It doesn't matter what order they're in. If these sort of criteria exist, your whole job of building and growing your business becomes infinitely easier. And if you have to do it manually, you have to hire salespeople, you have to get very good at closing. But if you do it with marketing, you actually, it's the ultimate leverage. Marketing is the ultimate leverage. There's nothing that can help you delegate better than just really kick ass marketing that works 247 whenever you use it and it delivers to you prospects and clients that are pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and predisposed to give you 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, 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 joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

You know, I have a question I want to ask both of you guys. See if I can phrase this correctly. Where would you put ethics and ethical behavior in the world of entrepreneurship or marketing? You know, because a lot of times we think that success equates to unethical behavior, right? You always see a lot of people that are cheating and lying and so on and so forth. Or that if you're too ethical, you're out the door. Right? So, and I know that you guys each have a real kind of deep take on this. Let me ask you, Dan, start off. Where do you put ethics and ethical behavior in the realm of marketing or success?

Yeah, it's, you know, it's really interesting and you know, I'll join another word to ethics, and that's morality. Know that the, the two go together. Ethics, you know, I mean, morality has to do a lot with your mindset and you know, the values that you have. But ethics is really about your behavior. How you know, really the ethics is your morality in action. And but one of the things I've noticed, I read an article once about inner city kids, you know, who are, you know, who could be dead at 8, they could be dead at 12. South Chicago. So part of the year, I live in Chicago because our main US company is right near o' Hare. And, but it's a war, war zone down there. You know, there's two coastal zones. America is really organized. If you Go to any big city. You go to the police, you know, police headquarters and police headquarters, and you want. You talk to the officer in charge of violent crime, you know, in the city, and you bring a map and you give him a marker, and you say, where should I not go in this city? And they always do it by postal zones. And in Chicago, it's two postal zones. Isn't it interesting how Americans organize crime according to Post? I mean, what a country, you know? And anyway, so those kids do not have enough certainty about life that they can think more than 24 hours at a time. So when there's a possibility of stealing something, their first thought is, can I get into trouble in the next 24 hours? So what I came to is that ethics is a function of your time perspective. Okay? If, on the other hand, you have a time perspective, if I do this now, what's it look like 10 years from now? The behavior that you will exhibit during the next 24 hours will be ethical. And the reason is you don't want to be doing something today that costs you ten years from now. And so my sense is that ethics is really a function of time perspective.

Ah, very interesting. One of the things I really admire about both you guys, Dan, is you guys both have really interesting perspectives on stuff. You know, it's not just the usual that you read in books, you know, like, who else would come up with that? I mean, I think you're absolutely right, you know, but over to you, Joe, what's your. What's your take on ethics in business?

Yeah, you know, it's.

It's considering for even the carpet cleaning industry, which is where I started off. I created a thing called ethical services. And I tried to. I've always tried to use the whole concept of, like, Dan. I asked Dan years ago, let me start with this. And I'll try to share several different ideas in. In a little riff that I'll do here. So I asked Dan what's, you know, what's your favorite definition? What's your definition of selling? And he. He just blurted out, and I don't know how many years ago this was now, Damn, probably like 15 years ago or something. And he said, selling is getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and getting them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result. Now I have that memorized because I thought about it quite a bit when he said it, and I. Yeah, Dan always has these very interesting quotes that he shares. And let me just say this, too. I probably should have said this early on. Do you know between both of you, do you know how many, God knows how many hundreds of thousands of people, maybe in the millions range, that both of you have inspired, encouraged, have them show up to face incredible difficulties with, you know, maybe not in the funnest of ways, but just the ability to, to, to get through life when life is very difficult. I mean, both of you have been such incredible mentors and, and role models, if you've intended to be that or not. It's just what you are. I mean, by the very nature of, I mean, Jesus, just look at how many reviews the War of Art has, right? And, and, and how, how much both of you impact people. And so, you know, everyone has something to sell. You know, part of it is a bigger future, though, in a way, to look at life. And so when I asked Dan that definition, I started asking my clients, you know, what do you think are the most important words in the definition? Getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and getting them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result. People would say engage, they would say action, they would say commitment. And most people didn't get the three words good for them. And I always thought you can get someone intellectually and emotionally engaged in porn and shitty food and doing something damaging. I mean, what I've liked about the War of Art is it's always about the higher self, not about the lower self. I mean, you can, you know, yeah, you can be a degenerate and you can get involved in vices and all that that does. There's, you know, that, as you say, you know, resistance will give you a free pass on that sort of stuff. Stuff. And so as it relates to ethics, I always think of, you know, what's good for someone. And would you sell it to your best friend? Would you sell it to your mother or your father with the assumption you like your mother and your father? You know, for someone that you really care about, if you're in a situation where someone's going to go down a bad path or something, that could be damaging or it could be rotten, or it could be scandalous or not good for them, and you cared about that person, you would try to intervene. You might use words, you might use a challenge, you might use an intervention, you might try to block them from harm's way. And so who are we in the best of terms, when we care about someone? We're selling, we're being persuasive, but we're doing it with the mindset of we're trying to care for this person and we're trying to protect them. So when it comes to. I think everything in my life is about connecting. Connecting other people with ideas, with each other, with things that make them better, not always feel good. But, like, for instance, you wrote the. The Warriors Ethos, which you recorded in 2011. Everyone would be very. Their lives will be enhanced if you download that book and listen to Stephen read it. It's called the Warriors Ethos. Like, I think it's less than 90 minutes, and it's great. And you talk a lot about, you know, Spartans and you have such. This deep knowledge of so much of history. But anyway, you know, there's. The whole goal of making someone better is not always going to make them feel better. It's not always about happiness, right? And we live in this culture. Everyone wants to pursue feeling, you know, sweet and loving and all that sort of stuff. But the fact is, human progress oftentimes takes enormous effort and in many cases, sacrifice. And so when it comes to connecting, there's true connecting, because you're either in communication with someone or you're trying to escape, you know, and when you are connecting with someone, you care about them, you're operating from a good place. Connecting, though, is when you're conning people and making it look like connecting. So there's connectors that use con artistry and they con people and they blow smoke up their ass and they sell crap and they make promises and they. They don't that they have no intention of delivering on, or they're selling crap on a box, and the very best thing you're going to ever see from them is sales pitch or their marketing. But then there's real people that when they sell something to somebody or when they offer something to somebody, they actually really care about that person being better off as a human. So for me, I don't. There's a difference between situational behavior and situational ethics. I mean, you might tell really crude, dirty jokes to your buddies that you would, you know, were in the military with. That could be vulgar. That could be inappropriate to many people. But you might not say that to someone's grandma. Most people have drank beer. Most people have gone to church. You usually don't drink beer in church, although I'm sure people drink beer in church. There's a difference between situational behavior and situational ethics. And I like people who understand the distinction and who operate that way because we've all met people that, man, they just put on A great show. They really act like they care about you, but they're usually narcissists or sociopaths or they have just created a values system, you know, that is different than, you know, the ones that we made it adhere to.

And the weird thing, and I'd like.

To ask you guys about this, you know, as I'm rambling here, what I'm thinking in my mind is that I think most people think they're right. It's that saying that, you know, we judge others by their actions, we judge ourselves by our intentions. And I first heard that when. I don't know if you bought. Well, Dan, I know you know Harvey McKay. Do you happen to know Harvey McKay?

No.

He wrote a book years ago, his most famous book. He's written a bunch of books was called how to Swim with the Sharks without being Eaten Alive.

I've heard of the book.

Yeah, yeah. Sold millions of copies. And he's now 90 years old and he's a dear friend of mine. And so Harvey, he was doing the small event that he invited me to. It was like kind of a brainstorm with a bunch of, a bunch of business owners. And one guy was, Chris Widener was talking and he said to the, to the group, he's like, how many have ever been ripped off by someone? About half people raise their head and he's like, how many of you ever ripped off anyone? And no one raised their head and.

He said, he goes, huh?

He goes, that's interesting. He goes, you know why? He goes, because, you know, the reason you've been screwed by someone, but you don't think you screwed anyone is we judge ourselves by our intentions, we judge others by their actions. And, and I thought about that quite a bit and we all, like you could intend to do the right thing, but do your actions actually show that? So I think it takes a deep level of awareness and looking at the byproduct of your behavior and your, you know, because all of us have times where we're loving and we're caring and we're doing well in life and others where we're desperate and we're self centered and we're tired and we're exhausted and we're maybe taking advantage. And so part of it is not that there's some perfect, you know, angel human that's always operating out of, you know, perfect ethics and morality. It's just being able to set up a way you operate and way you behave and the way you conduct yourself in your character. Like, my whole book is not about Capabilities, even though I share a lot of them. It's about character. My goal of my book is to not just build, you know, Hitler had enormous capabilities. I'd say it'd be really hard to say his character was a good character. I mean, look at the destruction that some of these people. You know, when, Dan, you were talking earlier with Stalin and Mussolini, I mean, they all had capabilities. You don't rule a country. You don't do what these people did without capability. Some of the smartest marketers I know have enormous capabilities, but their character is kind of shit. And so, but that's my opinion, because if you were to ask them their intentions, they all think their value system is their value system. So there's a lot of den of thieves. It's. I grapple with this, you know, one person's freedom fighters and other person's terrorists. So, you know, what is it? But those are my thoughts. That's, that's at least some of my thoughts about ethics and morality. Is what's the byproduct of what your life is about and where it leaves people? Does it leave the world and people and, you know, around you in a better place or does it cause destruction?

But I think you would say, Joe, that like as a, as a marketer or an entrepreneur, that the more, and I'm sure you would say the same thing, Dan, the more good you can do, the better it is for you. For even for your, Your own selfish interests. Would you agree with that?

I would totally agree with that. And Dan, I'd love to, love to hear your thoughts on it. And I have more thoughts on it, but I want to kind of share.

Well, I think the other thing is that there's a matter of leading a very complicated life for a simple life. And I'm a straight ticket Republican ever since I could vote in Canada, I'm a straight ticket conservative. But one of the, One of the presidents that I admire most was Harry Truman. And after, you know, because he's the one that had the big decisions, you know, I mean, so many big decisions. And you know, and I remember there's a story, it might be apocryphal, but the day after Roosevelt died, of course he was sworn in as the president. And he met with Roosevelt's cabinet. And he came in and he said, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, you know, here comes Harry, a hick from Missouri. And he said, and you're used to Roosevelt, one of the great gods of American politics. But he says, here's the facts of it. I'm as powerful as he is because I'm President of the United States. And guess what, you're still cabinet secretaries. And I can fire you just as easy as he could fire you. And it just put everybody straight because he knew they were going to scheme against him. He knew what they were doing because they schemed against Roosevelt. They do that. But he had a great saying. He says, always tell the truth. It's more economical. You only have to remember one version. And I think that ethics is a form of truth, and that is you can be the same person in all situations. And I think that, you know, a lot of people, they have to check out their surroundings to figure out who they're going to be in that situation, or they have to figure out who they've told, what, what, make sure that, you know, they're keeping their story straight. And their story is so complicated, it's very, very hard to keep it straight. And I said, that all comes at the price of what you're really good at. You know, that comes all that. I mean, if you do that, you're totally non creative. You're a totally reactive human being. And I think that ethics gives you a very simple, energizing path into the future where you only have to be the same person all the time.

Yeah, I mean, another way of looking, I haven't really thought this one through. I'm going to be blathering as I say this, but another word for it, it seems to me, could be authenticity in the sense of when you open your mouth and you speak, you're really saying what you really think and not what you think is the other is going to create a, you know, a favorable impression in somebody else's mind.

Yeah, one of your, you know, in the, in your current book, the book's coming out, you were talking about what your attitude has to be when you're writing and you can't think about, oh, this is, is this a great book? Is it, you know, is it, you know, am I, you know, is this really going to move people? You say, I'm going to throw myself completely in it and I'm going to finish it, you know, and get the book. And I remember Reagan. I'm kind of a Reagan type of writer. And when Reagan, you know, got to govern more, I don't think so much when he was governor of California, but when he became president, people say, yeah, everybody laughs at me because of the movies I was in, you know, what about crappy movies? And he said, well, I have to tell you back then, they didn't tell us that the movie had to be good. They said they didn't want the movie good. They wanted the movie Tuesday. Yeah, and it's kind of like that. And I think that's a copywriter's attitude, you know, in other words, you got a deadline. I mean, people say Shakespeare, you know, Shakespeare. Oh, I could be like Shakespeare. I said, there's two things you have to remember. He did it for money and on deadline.

Yeah, yeah. And Dickens, like Dickens, too, that was.

Writing, you know, install for money. And so my feel. My feeling is that. And Joe brought it up at the beginning. Joe brought it up or you brought it up, Stephen, that the best way to be really good in yourself is have it be for value for other people. In other words, that you have in mind who you're doing this for. And so is it going to make a difference in that person's life? And how are they going to feel after? You know, I mean, how are they going to feel about the value that they got from you? If you have your emphasis on that, you're taken care of. You know, your friend who was in 24 that you visit with in Sundance, the actor Glenn Marshaw, Glenn Marshall, and he's fascinating guy. And I have to say that if you looked at his life, you know, he's, you know, Hollywood actor. He does movies, he does TV and everything. I bet he is the most fully employed actor in the history of the United States over the last 50 years. And he was telling Joe, he said, well, you know, he says, you got to look at it from the standpoint of a director. He says, you can't look at it from any other standpoint of the director. And the director needs two or three stars to even get on the board. He said, so I'm not a star. Okay. And then he comes down to about number five. And he said, who am I going to put in number five? And he says, I'm always number five in the directors. In the directors. And he said, I always prepared. I always show up on time. I'm always a great team member. And he said, I'm always grateful and thankful for every role I get. And then he's employed nonstop for 50 years because it isn't about him. It's about the. It isn't about him that when the director gets to number five, oh, we'll put in Glenn, because that's an easy one. And my sense is, the other thing is also to know your value to other people and what can they Always count on you for. You know, I spent a lot of time saying, that can be a hard one, you know.

Yeah.

What.

What can. You know, I always show up on time. I'm always prepared. I always come up with something new, you know, and my team just depends upon that. My clients.

By the way, I was gonna ask you, Stephen, do you know who Glenn Morshauer is? No.

No.

Yeah. So he's not, like Dan said, he's.

Not like some, you know, a list celebrity, but.

No, that's why he doesn't. That's why he does his face.

I'm sure I would know, but every director.

Every director everywhere knows who he is.

Is.

Yeah. Let me share a story that Dan.

Knows this one, but years ago, me and. Me and Glenn were speaking at an event in Las Vegas, and it was. I think it was 2009. 2000. Yeah, I think it's around 2009, 2010. And Glenn has been in more military roles than any living actor. And so he's. Yeah, he was on every episode of 24. Other than Kiefer Sutherland, who was the main star, he was on every episode of 24. And at the time, there were pictures of Kiefer Sutherland on People magazine, I believe, National Enquirer, basically all the tabloid type of magazines on the COVID with him drunk on the sidewalk outside of the Viper Room in L. A. And I was asking him, I said, so what's.

You were asking Glenn, correct?

Yeah, I was asking Glenn, what's the story on Kiefer? He goes, well, now that he's been outed, he goes, you know, I can maybe, you know, say a few things. He said, you know, great guy, super professional. Shows up, does a great job. Everyone likes working with him. Awesome guy. And he said, at the end of, you know, at the end of his. Of the day, he finds it sometimes easier to sit and hang around and, you know, drink in his trailer and on set than go home to his mansion alone. He said, and at this point in Kiefer's life, he goes, his fame is globally inescapable. He said, there's nowhere on the planet that he could go without being recognized. And he said, you know, a single piranha won't do much damage, but a swarm of them will take down a great creature. And he said, if you get into this business, he was referring to the entertainment business. Without knowing who you are, it will misinform you. That was the statement he made. And I was like, yeah. I go, that's really interesting. And. And when I first met him at Sundance. We're having lunch. A friend introduced us, and all these people were coming up to him asking for autographs. And I said to him, I go, does that ever bother you? And he said. He goes, you know, sometimes, you know, if you have to really be somewhere in a hurry, it could sometimes be challenging. He goes, but I am. He goes, I wouldn't even have a career if it wasn't for these people. He's like, I am so appreciative that anyone likes what it is I do. He goes, how would I even do what it is I do without these people that like what I do, like my work? And appreciative. He goes, why on earth would I have anything other than gratitude for these individuals? And he had an incredible work ethic, and he was. And I've. I've seen him in many situations, and he is. Always loves his wife, is just a super caring, grateful, appreciative person. And therefore, he gets roles and. And gets opportunities that others do not, because he just comes from that place. But he also has done a tremendous amount of work on himself, and he's really quite aware of. Don't take yourself too seriously. Like my dear friend Dave Keckage, who unfortunately passed away at 78 years old last year from kind of a malpractice surgery. It was horrible. And Dave wrote, he was my friend who was paralyzed from the chest down for half of his life. And he had one of his credos. He had a hundred credos called Kekich credos. Kekich's Credos. He had an interesting last name, and he said, things are seldom as bleak as they seem when they're going wrong or seldom as great as they seem when they're going, well, lighten up. You'll live longer. You know, it's just having the state of mind on how you approach things.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video, and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's coming 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's freebook.com and you can get a copy there.

If we can go back and pick up on the ethics. The ethics topic. So I, you know, I looked at your biography. So I looked and I, you know, I got to the end of your biography. I said, oh, another guy who. Into a university. And these were all the classes he took, all the all the, you know, the different occupations you were in the oil fields, you were a fruit picker, you know, and you did Airbnb in your own car or somebody else's car and everything else. So lots of different kinds of people, lots of different kinds of situations, including Hollywood, you know, being in Hollywood and, you know, being in the, you know, movie, writing scripts and writing books and everything else. But from the standpoint is that ethics in one area of life is the same as ethics in another area of life.

Mm, definitely.

There isn't any industry that's more ethical than any other industry.

No. And like. Like you were saying about the actor, your actor friend. I mean, showing up and being ready to, you know, hit. Hit your mark and say your lines and. And not, you know, be shafting anybody else is at least as important as talent, you know, and. Because somebody will bring you back, you know, and you will bring them back, you know, that's really like. Joe, you. One of the things you've always said, and this actually comes from Dan, too, that part of being an entrepreneur is not only doing what you want to do, but doing it with the people you want to do it with, you know, and so in order to be with those people, you have to be for them what you want them to be for you, right? You have to show up for them and deliver the goods for them and be somebody that, you know, that's. That's ethical, Right. That's not going to throw their buddies under the bus when. When the heat gets applied, you know? Well, I mean, I just want to say this before I forget it. You were talking about how we judge other people by their actions, but our own selves by our intentions. And that one of the axioms in. In screenwriting or also in novel writing, in any kind of story writing, is that the villain never thinks he's the villain. From the villain's point of view, he's doing the right thing, Right? And that's. That's, you know, if you think of any of sort of the great villain speeches, like Jack Nicholson's one in A Few Good Men, you know, or he says, you know, you can't handle the truth, and he, you know, he's the guy that, you know, basically, you know, okayed the murder of this young Marine, right? But from his point of view, he goes, this wonderful, great speech that Aaron Sorkin wrote about, we have to stand on a wall. There are bad guys on the other side of the wall, and God damn it, you need people like me on that wall. You know, no, so it was one.

Of the finest movie speeches of all time, by the way.

It's a great one.

Yeah.

But sort of ethics, too, in a crazy.

Oh, it is. I'm sure.

You know, if we had Putin on the. On that show right now, he would say, God damn it, the worst thing that ever happened was when the Soviet Union broke up. My people were crushed mentally by that.

And psychological, greatest tragedy of the 20th century.

I'm going to bring the USSR back, and I don't care who I have to kill or what I have to do to do it. And I'm sure that in his mind, he's a saint. And. And to, you know, tens of millions of Russians, he's a saint, too.

Yep.

Not to the Ukrainians, but to the Russians.

It's.

It's an interesting to do with anything, but it's just a thought.

No, here, here's. I mean, I think it's a lot.

To ponder about, like, what do we.

Believe and why do we believe it.

And what are we really trying to do? 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. 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 jamming with 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 XYZ 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? Positioning. Positioning by 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 were 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, this 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 coolers 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 and you're a group of 10 people, you're not going to 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 and Scribe. 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. Here's the different versions of Position. This is the 20th anniversary edition, which was years ago still. And then, you know, they've got the origin of brand, same authors, 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. And 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.

Yeah, for sure. And those opposite adjectives. So we'll take Joe and Genius Network. We're all here. The opposite adjectives. Tips for that. We 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. Yeah.

Fun.

Yeah. So I've got a unique technology called the Capital Logics Insight Engineering. And it gives businesses a way to use AI and real time contextual information to make better decisions. We are our own first customer and we used it to generate a hedge fund. Okay. And unlike most people that are using AI to predict the market, hold that closer to you.

Also, I want to make sure people downstairs can hear.

Yeah.

We're using AI to predict the performance of all the little constraints, constituent algorithms and bots to figure out what's working in real time. So we're not actually predicting what's going to work in the market. We're measuring all the things that are working and then trying to use AI to figure out what does that mean or what should we really be doing more of.

Yeah. And then ultimately I want to sell.

That Insight engine the way people buy cloud computing, so that it's the people, the process, the automation, the execution capability. And make sure you get the right answer.

Yeah.

Not just that you're doing the math right, but that you actually get an answer that's helpful and right.

Sure.

And we figure we can use that because AI is about to terraform every industry and there's an old way and a new way and we can help people take the best of what they already know, but create the next level business that's going to infuse AI and better decision making to create new products or new delivery messages or delivery methods to compete in the world that's coming rather than the world that they used to live in.

Sure, absolutely. So I think I understand your business pretty well. What's do you want me to do? The XY or talk about.

But we can do that your way for a second, but then realize the second thing is, so we've got this hedge fund and there's like an automatic advantage by eliminating the fear, the greed, the discretionary mistake. But while people are enticed by that, they're also afraid of Skynet. So it's a really weird thing where I'm ultimately selling safety, I'm ultimately helping people realize this is something that's going to impact your portfolio and your business regardless of whether you want to believe it or not. But you're now taking steps to take advantage of it rather than be trampled by it.

Right.

And when he says Skynet, he's referring to the Terminator software that killed everybody.

Sure. Yeah. So two of the most powerful words in marketing are you and your. So every single one of you look at your website headlines, look at your social media bios, and see if it says you and your. If you grab Tucker's book, the Book in a Box, or the scribe method, and you open the inside flap, the word you or your or you've is like eight of the or is like six of the first 20 words. Because he's really good at this. The framework for explaining what you do. A great place to start, sort of like the atomic element or like the sourdough starter of positioning and messaging for your business, is a framework I came up with called verb, your noun. So what is the noun that your customers want?

Verbed.

This little magic phrase does a few different things by using you and your. You're automatically framing it and talking about your customers, not ourselves. Remember old school marketing? Direct marketing. We used to be so proud of the plaque that said established 1926. The customer doesn't care. They care about themselves. Yeah. Or see your future or decode your future. Right. That's what they really want. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot we could play with. Enhance your decisions. Could be. And what's great about verb, you noun is it can be your main headline and then it can be six or seven different sub headlines. So if you're digging deep on the decision part, it could be enhance your decisions and then you can flip it into questions. What would you pay for a functioning crystal ball? Or what would you pay for the world's best crystal ball? Now you've got them to attach kind of a price to it, but this.

Is actually pretty good. You could just take what he's saying here and just start using it.

Yeah, yeah.

Verb, your noun is great. I used to do like Joe said in the bio, I used to do a ton with crowdfunding. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, the positioning around that an average marketer would have said, I'm the world's leading crowdfunding strategist, or worse, gone with a platform name and been like, I'm the world's leading kickstarter strategist. That's the wrong thing because it's about me. Nobody cares about you. Nobody cares about you until they know that what you do can help them. Then they care about you. So by starting with you and your and by using verb, your noun, you automatically make it about them and not about you. So everyone in here look at your website. Chances are it says something about your business or your offering or your framework or whatever. That's all great. That comes later. Challenge yourself to come up with a verb, your noun. So for crowdfunding, mine was fund your dream. I did the work to figure out it doesn't matter if they're doing a leather wallet or a new kind of drone or whatever. That entrepreneur or that creative had a dream that they want funded. The fund part of crowdfunding is really what they wanted. Crowdfunding, again, is just one tool to get there. They had a dream they want funded. So I said fund your dream. And another little tidbit or tip. The goal of any headline is not to close the sale. The goal of the headline is to get them to read the sub headline or get them to scroll down or get them to click play on the video. The goal of any headline is to earn permission for them to go a little bit deeper. So think about a headline, like an opening line. If you're at the bar and you walk up to somebody, the headline, the opening line might get you the chance to ask them if you can buy them a drink. And then down the road you get the phone number. And then down the road it can progress. Everyone tries to make their headlines so complete, they try to jam it, full of industry buzzwords and things like that. Think of the most primal. I call this the alarm clock test. So go get any issue of Men's Health magazine and on the COVID it will say some version of six pack abs or rock hard abs. And some version of more sex. And some version plays around every cover every month. Because when guys wake up in the morning, that's what I mean by the alarm clock test. Before the dreams fade away, the alarm goes off. What do guys want? Six pack abs and more sex. So that's why Men's Health puts that on every single cover, because it sells magazines. So your challenge for you guys is that's not the business you're in, but challenge yourself to think of what's your verb, your noun? What's your predict your future, see your future? What is the verb that your customer what is the noun that your customer wants?

Verbed.

And then what's that verb? This is what I mean by we make it too complicated. If you start with verb, your Noun. As the atomic element of your marketing and messaging language. Everything can flow from there. You might end up with seven verb. Your nouns. Cool. Now you just wrote half your website.

Yeah, that was okay, Howard.

Does that help?

How do you think about the opposite adjectives?

Use the mic, please, please.

How do you think about the opposite adjectives for people? Yeah, so because it sounds like better or cheaper or faster, but what do.

You really think through?

Yeah, it needs to be, how are you different than your competitors? So I usually ask people, who are your competitors? And then how do you want to be known about known as being different than them? And then how do you want people to talk about that? So yeti coolers, you know, one of theirs, if you're just looking at the facts, is more expensive, but yeti's not trying to own more expensive. Yeti being more expensive is a result of the fact that they have this brand. You know what Yeti's portable story is? We can talk about portable stories Yeti spread because out of 10, let's say, fishing and hunting guides in Austin, that was their initial core customer. Right? They weren't trying to reach the housewife in Iowa when they started, but now housewives in Iowa buy yeti. They were in the middle of their bullseye. That was fishing and hunting guides and fishermen. And like hardcore outdoor enthusiasts, they had a problem. It was not that their sandwich was getting warm. It was that their cooler was not cool enough to brag about. So they built a cooler worth bragging about. You know, one thing yeti did, and it wasn't the viral video. The point of this story is not that it was a viral video on YouTube, but they seeded a video where it was a little bit like the yeti version of the Pepsi Challenge. They put a bunch of blood and meat and whatever in the yeti cooler, and they put a bunch of blood and meat in the baby blue Coleman cooler that nobody wants to brag about. Anyway, they put them both in the woods, and of course, the grizzly bear attacked both and could get into the Coleman and ate well and then tried to get into the yeti and it couldn't. So they created this story that a yeti is grizzly proof. That is the portable story. So that the guys brag about the cooler to their other friends. My cooler's grizzly proof. Yo, Tucker. My cooler's grizzly proof is yours. That's what they get to brag about. That's worth $200 per cooler to brag about. The funny thing is there's not a grizzly bear within 1,000 miles of Austin, Texas, where they're based. That's how much.

It's a story.

They planted a story and a seed. They basically said, I mean, they did build a better cooler, but this is a brand, like I said, Tesla. Nobody buys a Tesla because their Mercedes didn't get them to the meeting on time. They buy a Tesla so that they can talk about Elon and Mars and electricity and saving the world. So when you're buying a Tesla, you're buying the story. Almost none of you only sell the product that you sell. And your opportunity is not to make your product better. Your opportunity is to make your story better.

That's really funny, because when I see. I first bought a member of those Fisker Karmas. Oh, yeah, yeah. I bought one of those, right? And then he had a Tesla. This is back in, like, 2015, 2014. No, no, it's funny. He kept, like, talking about his Tesla and how great it was, everything. And I bought this Fisker, which looked amazing, but it was a real piece. And I mean, it was so complicated. I even met the, you know, Henry Fisker. But I ultimately, you know, Dave, like, kept beating on me about this.

That guy.

But he.

But, you know, it really. He. He had bragging rights to the. I've now bought four Teslas.

But go ahead. So. So the real story is that we're at this party, and Joe has this new Fisker, and he's got everyone outside, and. And he lifts up the hood and shows this huge engine.

And of course, I got this boring Tesla I just got last week, first one in Arizona. And he's showing this huge engine. And of course, I go, so, Joe.

How many miles do you get on it?

Well, I don't know, like, 300. No, on electricity, and it gets something like 5. And so everyone now wants to see my car.

So I said, hey, you want to see the engine?

I opened the front.

Oh, who took it?

Yeah.

Anyway, I'm just being an asshole. That's a huge. The only power I had over Joe at this party was that I had no engine in my car, and he had a big one.

Yeah, yeah.

This is what I call story math. Part of what you paid for. Because you knew that parlor trick before you did it, right? You knew where the engine was in your car. And so opening the hood to say, oh, where is it?

Who took it?

Being able to do that 100 times, a thousand times is part of what you pay for when you buy a Tesla, right? So think about that. What is the Story. How do your customers want to feel when they buy your product? A lot of us think about that. How do your customers want to feel when they recommend the product that they bought from you? That's the part that most of us don't think about. Because if YETI does not have enough advertising budget to reach each person individually, but they have plenty to reach the hardcore person in the middle of the bullseye. The middle of the bullseye will sell the outer rings of the bullseye better than you ever can. Meaning in A group of 10 fishing and hunting guides, there's always one like Joe, like you, who get the. Joe's early adopter. He's always got the cool new thing, a cool new toy, and then Joe sells a few of them to the next people and then they sell them the next people and the last guy still has 12 blinking on his VCR and he's never buying anything. And so that's where focusing on your core customers and then crafting the story of figuring out how people talk about your product.

And like to bring up the point of this because Tesla does zero advertising.

Zero.

It's all referability.

Right.

And get a lot of news.

Right.

Which is, but it's, that's, that's what I'm saying.

Yeah.

That's when I say, how do people talk about you? That includes the media.

Yeah. And see, like the thing is, is, is. It's all positioned as this environmentally safe thing and fossil fuels are evil and everything, but they don't factor in. What does, what does it do environmentally to dispose of a lithium battery? I mean, there's nothing environmental about a fricking Tesla. I don't give a shit what they like.

Try to argue the stories shouldn't be unethical, but they don't have to be 1000% true. Undeniably true. If you look at Rideau wine glasses is one of my favorite examples. Rideau wine glasses. I mean, Tucker's a wine expert and Tucker has much more fancy wine glasses than that. But Rideau built a billion dollar wine glass company selling the story that if you're going to buy a expensive bottle of wine, you should drink it out of the right glass.

Right?

Now that story works at a family level. If you're, you know, you have most, most people have wine glasses have big for red, smaller for white. Right. If I go to Eunice's house and we're at a party and Eunice is like, oh, we're serving Pinot Noir now. Okay, let's put away the Bordeaux glasses and get out the Pinot Noir glasses. That creates a conversation between me and Angie on the way home. And you can imagine that conversation. We don't have Bordeaux glasses. And now I just bought a case of Riedel Bordeaux glasses.

Right?

Because. And the reality is, it's funny because it's true and it's not true. It's true because Riedel spent a lot of money. And if you look at the regular taste test and everything else, they'll say, wine drank out of the appropriate shaped glass. Right. A big bowl for Bordeaux and taller for Pinot Noir, that it works. Well, if you look at the true, actual triple blind appropriate studies, it's not mathematically true, but then something magical called placebo comes into play where if you believe wine is going to taste better, it does taste better. So is it true? Is it not true scientifically? Are you going to care about the triple blind thing or do you just want to care about the thing? And then part of what you get is part of what Eunice is paying for when she buys a ride. A wine glass is, oh, baby, are we switching to, okay, let's put away our one red glasses and get out the other red glasses. Right. That's part of what you're buying. That's what I call story math. So don't be unethical. But also don't worry so much about if the story is 1000% scientifically true.

Yeah, I mean, the fact is people.

They are enrolled into Stories and bragging.

Rights, and they, you know, I mean, you gotta engage them. And if it's, you know, it's like David Ogilvy's, you can't bore people into buying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Stories is all we buy, is all we pay for. Netflix is just full of stories. Game of Thrones is Stories. There is no Netflix of press releases at all. No kid ever said, mommy, please read me a press release.

Hello, this is Joe Polish and this is a shark, but it sort of looks like a piranha. Now, the name of my company is Piranha Marketing, and this video I'm shooting, and I'm going to encourage Vic Conan to actually email this out or put it on their website@nightingale.com for all the Nightingale Conant clients and customers and prospects and anyone that would want to come to Nightingale Conant because they sell so many awesome different audio programs on personal development and business and you name it, anyway, I'm one of their authors and we have one of their best selling programs, which is Piranha Marketing. The seven Success Multiplying factors that dominate any market you enter. Now, there's a big sticker up top because when someone enters this, they can call and listen to a free recorded message that has me describe how to get the most out of this program. Now the program is awesome. It comes with a money back guarantee. It's made a lot of people a lot of money. So anyway, the reason that I'm doing this video is because I want to teach you a marketing campaign. I want to give you an idea right now that anyone that's in business can use to replicate themselves. It's an elf marketing campaign. Because what I teach in this program is how to have an elf business, which is easy, lucrative and fun versus a half business, which is hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. Now you could have a business that's hard, annoying, lucrative and frustrating. But what's the point if you're making a lot of money but you hate it and you're a workaholic and everything's onerous and it causes lots of angst when you can create robotic systems that do the selling for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Now, one of the things that I teach in the program is the difference between selling and marketing. Selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody. Marketing is what you do to get someone on the phone with you properly positioned so that the people you're talking to, your prospects are pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and pre disposed to do business with you. Now one of the methods that I teach in this program, there's literally dozens that are simple, they cost literally nothing to test and they make lots of money, is a consumer awareness guide which could also be turned into a 24 hour free recorded message. Meaning as soon as you invest in this 9 Gale Kona program, you're given a free recorded message. But you actually could use this technique in your business by having a 24 hour a day, seven day a week salesperson that delivers a compelling pitch, never complains about a headache, always shows up to work on time, never asks for a raise, and always does a fantastic job of representing your company. You never have to worry about it and it's totally non threatening. Well, you can use that same methodology offline in print. Like one of the people that invested in this program created the Consumer's guide to choosing a golf Instructor. You can use it for anything if you're a web designer, if you're a chiropractor, if you're a carpet cleaner. I started learning marketing When I was a dead broke carpet cleaner living off credit cards, I had to actually create powerful marketing strategies because I needed to eat. Never thinking that I would ever develop a Nightingale Conan program or do trips to Necker island with Richard Branson and all the things that learning marketing have allowed me to do. But one of the very first things that I created, which is explain in detail in the Nightingale Kona program, is how to create a consumer awareness guide. Now, this one is for carpet cleaners. This one is a template for carpet cleaners. And I'll show you because I know this stuff so well. It says, the Consumer's Guide to Carpet Cleaning. Read this guide and you'll discover six costly misconceptions about carpet cleaning. Seven questions. Ask a carpet cleaner before you invite them into your home. Crawling critters and crud. A guide to the slime, grime and livestock that's seeping, creeping and galloping through your carpet.

And.

And no, I don't have a teleprompter. We're using a little flip video. Okay, so how to avoid 4 Carpet Cleaning RIP offs. The difference between value and price. That sort of stuff. Now, if you look at those as just templates, those are all the things that people don't know that they don't know about carpet cleaning. Now you're saying to yourself, well, I'm not a carpet cleaner, so how's that going to work for me? Well, here's the deal. If you sell anything that's even remotely more exciting than carpet cleaning, you certainly can can use these marketing strategies. Because I've taught thousands of people in the carpet cleaning industry how to sell a service that nobody wants to buy. Because unless you really, really enjoy going and getting your oil changed or doing some sort of owner's job like hiring a carpet cleaner, there's nothing sexy and exciting about having your carpets clean. You do it because you own the stuff. So the point is, if I had to figure out how to sell something that nobody wants to buy, that required me to really come up with some innovative marketing techniques and utilize them, which is what my entire Nightingale Conant program is all about. So whatever your business you're in, you're going to want to have a really powerful automated canned and clone can and clone. I'll say it again. You want to can who it is, you are what you do, and you want to clone it. You want to put it in a printing machine so you can print off many of them. You want to put it onto a free recorded message. You want to put a couple consumer awareness guide onto your website or a free report. It doesn't matter if you go direct to consumers, if you're business to business, or if you're a nonprofit. These marketing strategies work for anyone. And not only are they very powerful and effective, but it's time management marketing. I want you to really think about it. In the last week or the last two weeks of the last month, have you spent any time on the phone or physically face to face talking to a prospect or talking to a client explaining things to them that are many of the same questions and concerns that everyone has? That if you had a 24 hour free recorded message doing it for you, that it would have saved you 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes if the answer is yes, if you multiply all of those interactions that you have, all of the time that you spent communicating things to people face to face, romance over the phone, or you have your salespeople doing it for you, how many hours does that take? It takes a lot. And even if you're never the one doing prospecting or doing selling, if you've hired salespeople to do it for you, if you set up these automated ELF strategies, you're going to enhance every one of your salespeople's efforts. So by the time they talk to people because of the great marketing you've put together, like a free recorded message or a consumer awareness guide, then the only people that they're talking to are people that are pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and predisposed to do business with your company. And if you install those sorts of marketing systems, which are very simple, we explain to you how to do them and we tell you exactly where to go to get it done, it will not only make you thousands of dollars, but I guarantee you, by not having these systems in place, it's costing you thousands of dollars. So the real question here in investing in this Nightingale kind of program, it's not how much does it cost? Okay, because it's not cheap, but it's free. What I mean by it's free is if you implement any of it, it's going to bring you back multiples of what the investment is. So the real question to ask is, 12 months from now, how much will I lose by not having one system like that in place? And there's dozens of proven systems that are in there. How to do teleseminars, how to build referral programs, how to do direct mail, how to do online online marketing, how to create contest models. I mean, people like Bill Phillips, the author of Body for Life. I've been his marketing consultant for over a decade. I have him utilizing these marketing strategies. I mean there's huge billion dollar corporations and thousands of small mom and pop operations and people in between. It doesn't matter if you're online or offline, they work. So think about it. How much better will your business be a year from now if you actually get this program, listen to it and implement these simple strategies? And so that's my educational pitch for you for the day. I gave you a strategy there that alone is worth a ton of money. Now if you want to learn the exact words to say, how to say it, how to distribute it, that's what the Nightingale Conant program is for. It's very expansive and so I appreciate you taking the time and Nightingale Conant is awesome. So I hope you utilize all the capabilities and education that are available through this organization. Talk to you later. So yeah, as you heard, this is how this started. I'm throwing pots at Schemer and Jossy starts telling me about this particular event. And then I start talking about Joe Woodford and next thing you know, here I am and I bought a pot from Joe and I'll probably buy a couple of other pieces of things that I've seen here. And here I am. So happy to be here. Can everyone hear me? Okay. Okay. Awesome. Alright, you have a handout in front of you. I'm going to touch on a few things. It looks like this, if you do not have one, go ahead and raise your hand and someone on my team will actually give you a copy. But it just goes through a few things that I'll cover with you because I don't have a lot of time here. I've had a marketing company since 1994. I'll give you a little bit of background on who I am and what I do and how it applies to you. I am not at all a skilled artist. So the confession is I'm not like an expert on selling art. However, I have built a multi million dollar business. I've sold tens of millions of dollars worth of how to information to entrepreneurs and I run the highest level discussion group in the world for marketers. So some of the top marketers on the planet are clients of mine. And an event that I did, I have a company called Genius Network. I had the highest number level marketing event ever in history that I did in August of last year. All kinds of high level people and so I do very high level events. And how that applies to you is I get to hear some of the latest cutting edge things on marketing. And I facilitate these great discussion groups. So how many of you consider yourself great salespeople? Show of hands. Okay. How many of you do not consider, consider yourself great salespeople? Okay. How many of you would never raise your hand no matter what question you're ever asked? How many of you actually hate selling? You just, you don't really like it? Here's the thing that I have. After doing marketing for many, many years, it dawned on me about a year ago how to reframe, how to think of selling and marketing. Because everything that comes out of my mouth, anything that comes out of your mouth is either designed to attract or repel someone. And everything starts with selling. What is the world's oldest profession? Everyone's probably heard this before. What is it selling exactly? Selling. Someone says prostitution. That's not true. You first had to sell it. Okay, so it's, everything happens with selling. But selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody. Marketing is what you do to get someone on the phone or face to face with you properly positioned so that by the time that they are talking to you or meeting with you, they're pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and predisposed to do business with you. It could be for a non profit, it could be for a for profit business, whatever. And so think of selling as influence and think of marketing as storytelling. If you're more influential, you're going to do better in business. If you tell a better story, then you're going to get, have more people give you money and they're going to buy into what it is that you're doing, no matter what business that you're actually in. So many of you tell stories in your art. I mean, how many of you consider your art the way that you express and communicate? I mean, I would think of art as some sort of visual communication. What are you trying to communicate? But prior to coming here, I mean, we just, you know, I just met Susan. What day was that? Okay, yeah, I mean it was just a few days ago. So since then I was going, okay, so I talked to Steven Creech yesterday. Do you know the artist Wylan? Is anyone familiar with the artist Wylan? Okay, Wylan's a good friend of mine and I interviewed him. I actually did the very first interview with Wylan. He's been on Larry King, but he's never actually been interviewed before about his business. And so I put a link to my interview with Wylan on Here. So you can watch the interview that I did with. With Weiland. It's JoePolish.com Weiland. You can watch my interview I did with him something like six or seven years ago. And I was talking to Steve yesterday, who actually runs Wylan's business, and I said, what is your marketing strategy? And he said, you know, he goes, what many artists do is they always are trying to surprise themselves, coming up with stuff that just is outlandish or is different than what they've done. And he said, what we do in Wyland's businesses, we actually try to surprise. Just like Wylan is doing the wailing walls, and he's doing all the murals, and he's, you know. And again, Wylan's art is not the typical art that I would put in my house. I mean, I frankly, it's not my style of art. Although he's incredibly talented, he does between 350 to 400 unique pieces every year. And Wylan does upwards of 100 million a year in sales. So he's a pretty sharp business guy in the art world. But he says that Wylan would always try to surprise himself. So we have taken that into business where we're like, what can we do to surprise ourselves? So what I want to encourage you today, what I want everyone to walk away with with my short talk today, is thinking. I'm going to give you some frameworks on how to think about your business and how to think about positioning your business and where I believe, the real value of your business lies not just in your art and in your creations, but how you actually position yourself. Because with. I have a dear friend, John Butcher. John Butcher owns the company Precious Moments. Are you familiar with anyone familiar? Precious Moments little figurine company, largest collectible company in the world. 11 billion in worldwide sales that they've done with Precious Moments. Now, these little figurines, which I would never be caught dead having one of these things in my house, but they have soldiers a lot. And John is a really good friend of mine, and he owns millions of dollars worth of art. He actually considers art one of the greatest investments that he understands inside out. He's read every catalog of all of the auction houses, every single catalog cover to cover for the last 23 years. And what I've learned from him about art is that in that world, people don't buy art, they buy artists. And so a lot of people, I don't think like that. I even was watching Damien Hirst documentaries. Some of you probably know Damien Hirst. Has anyone ever read the $12 million stuffed shark? Okay. Quite fascinating. Quite fascinating. And I think some people either hate him or you love him, or at least, how in the hell did he do this? But it is marketing. That's how it was done. I mean, like, the art, like, the methodology is irrelevant. The point is, how do you actually set up yourself so that you are so well positioned? Because that's what marketing is. You can be the best artist in the world. Has nothing to do with getting paid. You can be the nicest person. You can have integrity. You can really care about other people. Has absolutely nothing to do with getting paid. There's a huge relationship between being good, being a good marketer, and getting paid. I didn't know that yet. So I had this carpet cleaning business, and the reason I'm bringing up carpet cleaning is I would like to think that everything being sold in these tents here is more exciting than carpet cleaning. I got into a business selling something that nobody wants to buy. And if I learned how to successfully sell a service that nobody wants to buy, I think you could probably learn a couple of things from me about how to actually sell something that's more interesting than carpet cleaning. Because hiring a carpet cleaner is like going to the DMV A. I mean, nobody wants to do it. It's like one of these unnecessary evils of owning the stuff. So I had this carpet cleaning company. I hated it. I didn't know what I was doing. I wouldn't have gotten certified. I was, like, racking up debt and credit cards. In 1991, I was $30,000 in debt on credit cards. When I first started the business, I only was in debt, like, a couple of grand. So basically, I spent the first couple of years in my business paying money to work. I mean, there's many ways to go broke in the world, but one of the stupidest ways to go broke is doing hard manual labor in Arizona. Cleaning carpets 8 to 10 to 12 hours a day, sweating your ass off when it's. And plus, I'm allergic to cats. And so I remember in the middle of summer, I would have these apartment complexes that would pay me, like, 20, 25 bucks a unit. And I would literally do sometimes 12 in a day. And then they would pay me in a very timely manner. Like in 90 days or later, they would actually, you know, because it had to go through the bureaucracies of how to cut a check to some, you know, poor service labor guy. And I remember, like, cleaning carpets in the middle of summer. I'M allergic to cats. So I start wheezing and there's no air conditioning on in some of the units. And I'm running an extension core with a little portable steam cleaner down three stories, lugging all of this crap up three stories and doing hard manual labor where it's like 120, 140 degrees. Sometimes in some of these units, it's like a sauna. Could you imagine cleaning with a sauna with a bag over your head because you can't breathe? I mean, I did that stuff and see, the worst thing is I was actually paying money to do that. I wasn't even making money. So, I mean, if you want to go broke, sit on a couch, watch tv, eat potato chips, don't go broke doing it. It just doesn't make any sense. So I did a lot of really stupid things. And so I was frustrated with this business and I'm like, you know what? I got to get into another business where I can make more money. So I had a friend named Pat from high school. I don't hang out with friends from high school that much anymore. I mean, I swear to God, I think Joe Woodford is probably the first guy I've seen from high school in years, other than one other guy named Pat Nahas, which you probably know that goofball. But anyway, so I was like, I got to get into another business. And so this guy Pat asked me if I want to go jet skiing. He has a friend who's a multi million dollar real estate investor and has these jet skis and could we go to Segura Lake and go jet skiing? And I was like, well, you know, I got a lot of stuff to do. And if you've ever been so strapped for cash where you literally have no available money to do anything entertaining, it's kind of hard to have fun doing anything. But he said the magic word, that this guy that owned the jet skis with his multi million dollar real estate investor. And at the time I needed money and so I was like, well, maybe I could talk to this guy and he could give me some tips. So we go out to Saguaro Lake and there's two jet skis and there's four of us. This guy, I can't even remember his name, that owned the jet skis, one of his friends, my buddy Pat and me. And so I finally had a chance to sit on the tailgate of this pickup and talk to this rich guy. And I'm this young dude in my 20s with long hair and a Ponytail. And I said, you know, I hear you do really well in business. I own a carpet cleaner company. It's kind of a hard business and I'm looking for another industry that I can go into where I can make better money. Do you have any recommendations? And so he said to me, he goes, well, is there anyone in your business making good money? And I said, yeah, there's a couple of companies in the Phoenix area here that do over a million a year in sales. And at the time, that was a lot of money to me. And he said, I said, yes, a couple companies making over a million a year. He goes, well, he goes, if there's other people making money in your industry and you're not, there's nothing wrong with the business you're in. There's something wrong with you. What I want to share with you on this particular sheet, I'm going to go through it. It's the art of marketing. Your story. Now, this presentation here, in this short time that I have with you here is just a setup. I actually am going to show share with you interviews that I've done. If you want them, if you want them, I'll be happy to provide them with you. I have the top marketing podcast in the world on itunes every day. Currently about 40 to 50,000 people listen to an hour of me babbling about something related to building and growing a business. So my podcast is called ilovemarketing.com there's over 200 hours of very valuable things on how to build and market your business. I'm also, I am speaking here because I am genuinely interested in the whole fascinating world of art and the reason I threw my first pot since I was 18 years old three weeks ago.

And it was good.

Yeah, it wasn't that bad. But I swear it's like I still feel very clunky, but other than doing drugs, and this is going to sound so damn weird, other than doing drugs. When I used to do ceramics, that was the only thing where my head ever felt like it escaped, where I wasn't stressed out, where I didn't have this low level anxiety. And I've built a multi million dollar business. I reach a lot of people. I do a lot of cool stuff. I'm Richard Branson's largest fundraiser. I've interviewed Richard Branson more than anyone on business. I've got Tony Robbins speaking at my next event. John Paul dejorie. I know. I ran Arianna Huffington's last book Came campaign. I mean, I hang out with cool people, but you know what it was when I was throwing ceramics, where all of that other external crap that I do to try to feed my ego or do whatever actually made my mind feel good. And I'm really genuinely interested in art. And artists are interesting people. Some are very quirky, some are very weird, but they communicate in different ways. But we're all weird. I mean, this is like the. You see the Star wars, right? This is like talking to the Star wars bar. I mean, just a bunch of quirky individuals. But I think entrepreneurs are the same way. Entrepreneurs are just weird, quirky people, but they're more like corporate athletes and so on. I love marketing. On our podcast, we talk about how to frame your business. And so the art of marketing, your story. Marketing is a story, your story. And it starts with where you are now. What's your story? How can that become the basis for sharing your art? I believe a painting or a sculpture or whatever without a story attached to it has meaning to you, but it doesn't have meaning to someone else unless you leave it up to them to make the meaning. And that's fine. And a lot of people may want to do that. But if you don't have a system for selling what it is that you sell, you're always at the mercy of the consumer system for buying, which is price. If someone does not have any other criteria on how to make a purchase, they're going to default to the only way that we know how to do it, which is price. So couple things. Is the artist tools before, during, after. I want you to think of your business from now on as having three units. There's the before unit, which is getting people to appreciate who you are, what you do to get business. That's a before unit. And what I write here is getting people to present appreciate your art starts with appreciating where people are first. Where are they? Who are they? Understand your collectors and your customers. The during unit, after someone is doing business with you. When someone is sitting there and discussing with you and you're talking with them or they're looking at something, I would consider that they're kind of in the during unit. They're interested. They're stepping foot into this place where they actually may actually purchase something from you either now or later. That's the during unit. So to create art that stands out means differentiating you and your art. How are you positioning yourself and your art? So its experience is unique. Positioning is critical. There's that saying, a picture's worth a thousand words. Well, a mental picture is worth 10,000 words. So when you can attach a story to something, a great headline, titling your art is just as important. I've helped many book authors become better best sellers. And the title of the book in many cases is more important than the entire book. And a lot of people don't want to hear that. They're like, well, you know, I spent two years writing this book. Well, you should spend maybe a month coming up with the right headline and testing it and coming up with titles. And the same thing with art. After. After someone has given you money, once someone has interacted with you and your art, what are they doing to ensure they never forget it? How could they share your art with others? Sending thank yous, reinforcing the value they got referral systems. I mean, this is such basic advice, but I've used it my whole life in business. I heard early on, be nice to the people you meet on the way up. They're the same people you meet on the way down. If someone gives you money, send them a personal thank you, follow up with them. When someone gives you money and buys your art, it does not satiate the urge in the excitement that they had for buying it. I mean, it doesn't satiate it like it's done. It actually excites the urge. People selling is like seduction. All of the stuff you do before you ask someone to marry you or go on a date or sleep with you or whatever, that's all the foreplay and so it's all the setup. And if someone is willing to give you money once, they will give you money over and over and over again. And a lot of people don't realize that, that as soon as someone buys a piece of art, they are in the best possible state to give you more money or to give you a referral. So the after unit is what you do to orchestrate referrals. And with all of you here, every business card you have, every. I mean, put those people into a database and when you're here next year, send them a, hey, it was so great seeing you last year. Send a picture with the piece of art that they bought. If you, you can take pictures with your clients holding the art, do that and send it to them. Now, some of you may not like doing stuff like that, but again, if you like money, I think those things help. So expanding your gift with marketing. You can impact people's lives with your art. And the bridge is marketing. Your mission and desire to impact the world will be supported by marketing. Marketing carries your message. And did anyone watch the Video. I know that Susan sent out an email where I have a video called Is Selling Evil? Did anyone happen to watch that? Okay. Did that make sense? Did you like it? I created my very first Consumer's guide to carpet cleaning because no one cares about carpet cleaning. They're not going to do research to understand what's the difference between dry cleaning and carpet versus steam cleaning versus whatever. So I took something as boring and as dull as carpet cleaning and I created a consumer guide to carpet Cleaning. Everyone was using name, rank, serial number, who they are, what they do, and their phone number. And so I created Consumer's Guide to Carpet Cleaning and this is it. And I have all this stuff memorized because I've done this so many times, but it says, read this guide and discover how to avoid six costly misconceptions about carpet cleaning. Seven questions Ask a carpet cleaner before you invite them into your home. Crawling critters and crud. A guide to the slime, grime and livestock that's seeping, creeping and galloping through your carpet. How to avoid foreclosure, carpet cleaning, rip offs the difference between value and price, and how to get your carpet cleaner to 100% guarantee their work. So all of a sudden people were thinking carpet cleaning. But I didn't know there were six costly misconceptions about carpet cleaning. I didn't know there were eight mistakes to avoid when choosing a carpet cleaner. I didn't know there were four ways to avoid getting ripped off. So I started planting these seeds in what to do to look for a carpet cleaner. I was telling a story. I was, I was creating a picture in their mind so that they wouldn't call me up and say, how much do you charge? So then they would open this up because every flyer, every ad yelled out, someone's trying to sell you something. I was like, I want to actually educate people. So the type of marketing that I started doing is education based marketing. I started educating people on what I do and how I do it. Every single one of you have a story about how you started your business, why you do art. Some of it was started out of inspiration. How many of you, your art was started out of fear, desperation, anxiety, depression. You had a crazy ass upbringing. You had depressed parents, you had bipolar people, you had addictions in yourself, that sort of stuff. And it became an outlet for you to actually take your brain and turn it. Because every time Joe sits down at a potter's wheel, my guess, and I may be wrong, maybe he's very strategic. My guess is he makes it up and then he makes it real. How many of you sit in front of a canvas that are painters? And then you make it up and you make it real. That's what you do as an entrepreneur. You make it up and make it real. Every day we're getting up and we're bumbling our way through life as best we can. Now the more more strategic you are with bumbling around. Great. So here I had this thing where it's like, okay, how do I educate people on carpet cleaning? So choosing a carpet cleaner is easy. Why? Because you're bombarded with misleading advertising, confusing claims and simply bad information. From super low prices and high pressure sales to unqualified technicians and near worthless methods. How do you ever find a qualified, competent, professional carpet cleaner? You start by reading this consumer guide. In this fact filled booklet, you'll discover how to avoid four carpet cleaning rip offs, eight mistakes to avoid, blah blah, blah. And that says, we wrote this guide to help you better understand carpet cleaning. Now you can be a graphic designer, you can be an artist, you could be a pet grooming service. We wrote this guide to help you better understand ceramics or paint or whatever. Okay? And now with this information, you can make an informed, intelligent decision. Because that's all consumers want to make. They don't want to make an uninformed, idiotic decision. They want to make an informed, intelligent decision. So I created a consumer guide to carpet cleaning. So when people call me up, I would say, and they would say, how much do you charge? I said, well, you know, I've actually created a consumer guide that will teach you everything you need to know on how to hire a professional carpet cleaner. And I'm happy to mail it to you. And if you read it, we'll clean one room up to 200 square feet absolutely free so you can try our services out. And if you like it, we'll give you a carpet on it. Because everyone else is was giving free estimates. I didn't want to give free estimates. I didn't want to do what anyone else did. So I created a unique way of packaging and positioning carpet cleaning. And again, a boring ass service that nobody wants to buy. And so people would call me up and I would mail them the consumer guide and I wouldn't have to spend 15 or 20 minutes on the phone. I would totally position myself as being helpful and useful. And then they would call me back and say, when can you do the job? After they read it. Because. Because I was the one providing them with information on how to make an informed buying decision. They trusted me, they bonded with me. And that's what you want. You want to bond with your clients. And the more that you can bond with your clients, the more they're going to want to do business with you and the more they're going to want to refer you. Now, there was a problem if someone called me up and they wanted their carpets clean the next day because there was no Internet back then. The problem is the post office wasn't going to get them a consumer guide the next day. So I was like, how do I handle the that problem? So one of the first things that I did was I created a consumer awareness message. And I had a 24 hour free recorded message. And so I started giving out a number to people. I said, well, I've set up a 24 hour free recorded message. It'll teach you everything you need to know on how to choose a carpet cleaner. And it was a 10 minute recording that people would call up and it would say, hello, thank you for calling. This consumer awareness message. If all you're looking for is a cheap brush, the dirt off cleaning, we respond, respectfully, ask that you call another carpet cleaner. However, if you're looking for the best service, let me teach you what you need to know about how to hire a professional cleaner. And then I would proceed to teach them how to make a buying decision even if they didn't hire me. And because I was the one providing them with that information, they wanted to do business with me. And so this is before I started selling courses and programs. All I was trying to do was build my carpet cleaning business. And I learned the difference between a hundred dollar bill and a $101 bill is the message on the paper. Same paper, same ink, different message. Difference between a $5,000 painting and a $100,000 painting isn't just the message or the paint or the picture. It's the positioning before it even happens. You know when Damien Hirst can sell dots that he doesn't even paint himself for hundreds of millions of dollars? It's not about the dots, it's about the story. It's about the perception. It's about that sort of stuff. Can everyone still hear me? Okay, sound enough? The mic's going to. So I created this consumer guide to carpet cleaning. And I no longer ran ads that said call me and then ask me how much you charge. I would always drive people to call and get information. And so if you're going to have a website, have a consumer awareness video, tell your story, All I did was tell the story on how to buy. And people would call me up and say, when can you do do the job? It's sifted, sorted and screened. Price shoppers. Because of my marketing. Marketing is selling in advance. Like I said earlier, selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody. 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 talk to you, they're pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and pre disposed to give you money. And so I started running ads and, and yellow pages and they said, warning, don't call any carpet cleaner until you listen to this free recorded message. In the late 90s, every major phone book in the United States had one or multiple versions of my free recorded message. Ads running in chiropractic, real estate, heating and air conditioning, auto sales, pest control, florists, jewelers, you name it. Because I license my stuff to multiple people and we can loosely track over 2 billion worth of sales that have come directly off of my ads and promotions for my clients. And it's using robotic automated marketing. So the thing is, I don't think anyone's ever brought that type of marketing to the art world. And so my little lab rat test here is I also want to talk with Susan and I want to create a consumer awareness sort of message for this art show so that by the time this happens next year, you got a whole bunch of people that have already done business with you already know about this. But I actually want to take my marketing and actually work with Susan to try to come. Well, first off, I know I can pull a lot of this stuff off, but I also know there's a lot of stuff we don't know yet. That's what you have to be willing. In the real world it's called failure. In the marketing world, it's called testing. So you have to be willing to test a lot of stuff, but I'm willing to try that stuff. And the reason I want to throw all these ideas out to you, one of the reasons, Susan, because I talked with her about this. Susan, really obviously doing these meetings shows a real care. And plus, because the way you all make money with each other, you're all incentivized, the more everyone here makes, the more everyone makes. It's sort of like a win win situation. So part of this is instead of someone trying to increase their slice of the pie, you're just increasing the whole pie. And so part of it is I'd like to take the group of all of you and just help you increase the slice of the pie. I mean, my money is made in my genius network group. Okay. So this is sort of going to be like a skunk works project for me, But I actually want to become a better artist. And I actually really want to figure out, like. Because some of the stuff in the art world makes no sense to me, but it works. And so I want to figure out what is it that works and what is it that does not work and then figure out how to apply that stuff.

About blogs and Internet.

It sounds like direct marketing something in.

Somebody'S mailbox is just as legit in.

2015 as it has ever been. Yeah.

Good idea.

Well, yeah, I will even say this. Like, there's three things you need in order to sell something. You need a product or service. So think of your art here as your product or your service. If someone's going to commission you to do something, you're going to go set something up in their home, like a sculpture or whatever. It's not just art, but it's actually logistically involved. So everyone has a product or service. You have a sales pitch, which is your marketing message or what you say about it, what you call it, and then a delivery system. What most people do is they focus on what it is that they sell and how do we tell people about it. Do we have a blog? Do we use Twitter? Do we. Do we use Facebook? Do we use search engine? Do we use direct mail? Do we use tv? Do we use radio? Do we use referrals? Do we use billboards? There are a bazillion people in the world that are happy to take your money to deliver advertising or information about it. But if you have a lousy pitch, then you could have a great product or service. So part of it is you have to have all three of those sort of things together. So to go back to direct mail, I love. I love direct mail because, for one, it's totally under the radar. Secondly, like I said earlier, there's less noise in people's mailboxes today. I mean, how many of you got more mail 15 years ago than you do today? Like, a ton. Like, hardly anyone does good direct mail anymore. And, I mean, we make a fortune with direct mail because we have no competitors there. Like, if you're a single guy and you're going to go to a club, like, let's say, like, no positioning whatsoever. Okay. You know, like the thing I said earlier, if you're a guy and you're single and how Many single women do we have in the room that's willing to admit it. Okay, let's. Can I use you as an example? Okay. Now, if Jossie's, like, at, you know, I'm someone that. And I like, tap on her shoulder and say, jossy, I'd like to sleep with you now. And she's never met me before. Like, first off, it's going to creep her the hell out. She should probably call the cops. I'm probably going to get slapped, you know? And now, unless it's some famous person or someone that Jossy really already knows about, the chances of that being a good approach are pretty much slim to none. But that's how a lot of people actually do the marketing. There's like, no, you know, they go into an environment where it's super, like, tons of people, but in direct mail, like, you're like, the only one there. You're the only one there in the club, right? And so the chances are much better, and it gives you an opportunity. But here's the thing, though. I'm not even see how many of you actually have sold things to people while you've been here. How many of you sold at least, say, 10 pieces of art while you've been here? Okay, so those 10 people, if you send them a letter saying thank you, or you send them a picture and you drive them to your blog, or you drive them to your podcast, or you drive them to whatever you have online, then you can develop and nurture that relationship with people. So part of my thing is you want to build a database or you want to go to people that can even endorse you. See, what Susan is doing for all of you here is she's taking all kinds of different artists, and she does all of the marketing for you to bring them to this location. But your job here is. And the reason, of course, she wants a guy like me to come up and babble about my marketing stuff to you is to actually reframe how you think about your capabilities of selling. Because anything that you learn is really built around capabilities. If you want to make a million dollars a year, you're not going to make a million dollars a year with $50,000 a year capabilities. You got to have million dollar a year capabilities. So whenever I read a book or I listen to an audio, and believe me, I invest a lot of time, I've read over a thousand books. I've got a few of my team members here. I've got my assistant at Eunice back there. I'VE got Rochelle. Rochelle's been with me for like eight years. Eunice has been with me for, you know, 10 years. I would encourage you to hire someone. How many of you have employees? Okay. How many of you have no employees whatsoever? Okay. I think this is the artist's curse too. But again, some of you, that's just not your world and you don't want to have employees and you just operate better that way. So this is not like I think you need to do this sort of thing. It's just, this is like, treat this like a 12 step group. Take what you like and leave the rest. Right? So what an employee is. An employee is a behavior rental agreement. Okay? Like, I have my video guy, Rakim back here, who's amazing, and Chelsea, who's amazing. They're videotaping this thing. I'm renting their behavior right now. I pay them money to show up and take their capabilities of creating video and they're going to videotape this. And so some, since I'm speaking in front of a group of people, I want to repurpose this stuff. I want to have it captured. If any of you want to watch this again, if you actually liked anything I had to say, we'll make this video available to you so you can watch it again, Whatever. But the thing is, when someone hires me, they're renting my behavior. When someone's hiring you to do art, they're renting your behavior. And in your highest and best use of your time, your skills are worth a lot of money. And how much you actually get paid has everything to do with, with mentally how much value you put on yourself when you put a price tag on a piece of art. The real sales job that you need to do. My core message here, the biggest sales job you need to do is not to all the people that are just going to look at your art or potentially could buy art from you. The number one sales job you have to do is what? Who do you have to sell? Yourself. Exactly. And if you cannot sell yourself, you're going to do a really piss poor job of selling someone else. And so like Joe mentioned this earlier, there's two things in business that I don't think you should ever delegate. You shouldn't delegate the checkbook unless you want to get ripped off, unless you have real good measures. And I had one CEO in the past that cost me $2.5 million in losses because of a very bad decision that he made. And if you let someone else, if you don't count the Cookies in the cookie jar. Some people may take the cookies. So don't delegate the checkbook and don't delegate the marketing. Some people are waiting to be discovered. Well, I'm so good, let me have someone else and come and do the marketing. And honestly it happens every once in a while. You see the Justin Bieber's of the world that get a great agent and like him or not, Justin Bieber worked his ass off in the very beginning. Some people do get discovered, but talentless people rarely get discovered and get lucky. But it's so rare that people get discovered that I wouldn't rely on it as a strategy. So you have to get yourself discovered. You have to really position yourself, you really have to set it up. So do a sales job on yourself and this will not happen overnight. But what I would encourage you to do is the number one reason people don't do well with marketing. And I have worked with tens of thousands of people in the world of marketing. The people that don't do well are the ones that don't have a marketing mindset. They don't appreciate it, they don't, they don't respect it. And they have some historical experience with selling and marketing. Like the used car salesman that didn't care about them but used high pressure techniques that tried to sell them. See, people love to be sold. They hate to be pressured. When you are selling art here to people and they really fall in love with your work and they're giving you money, it's not even occurring in their mind that you're selling them. When you see someone totally interested in something, ask them them, what do you like about it? How does that make you feel? People make decisions based on emotion. And of course you all know that, you're artists, I mean you already know that. I'll tell you one thing that I taught a this is so weird. I don't even know why this stuff. See I'm so add that this crap just comes into my head. I was in a bar many, many years ago with a friend of mine. She wasn't my girlfriend though. She was female, but she wasn't a girlfriend. And we were sitting there and some girl had this like bucket of roses and she said, you know, would you like to buy a rose? And I said, I go no, I don't even like her, she's annoying as hell, but thank you. And she's like, oh. And I go, no. I go, she's just my friend, it's not my girlfriend, so I'm not going to buy her. Rose. And I go, however. I go, do you want me to tell you how to sell all these roses tonight? And she's like, yeah. And I go, if you do this, I swear it'll work. But it's going to. It's going to put pressure in gear, guilt on people. She's like, yeah, tell me. So I go, don't go up and say, would you like to buy a rose? If the guy is with a woman, Say, would you like to. Would you like to tell her how much you love her? And she goes, what if he doesn't love her? What's the first date? Well, I said, well, just say something like, would you like to show her how much of a good time you're having? If you go up to a guy and you say, would you like to show her how much you love her? I mean, and if the guy doesn't borrow a rose, he looks like a total jackass. Like, how could he not do that, right? So I just say this to her very. Just kind of not even really professional. I just, like, I just said it to you now. I didn't even. It wasn't very articulate. I just kind of said that. But the girl grasped that. Oh, I just got to ask a question that links the buying of a rose to how he's feeling with his date or his wife. She came back to me an hour later. She was sold every rose something like 30. She goes, oh, my God, that was the best line ever. Thank you so much. I sold them all. That's so awesome. It changed your life. I then proceeded to share that with, like, about five other rose girls over the next whatever period of time. No one's ever come back and done it. Like, she was the only one that followed my advice. Brian Kurtz, I've known for almost 20 years, and you have done all kinds of things, including running the awesome company Boardroom, Inc. Which was founded by the late Marty Edelston, who was a direct marketing, direct mail genius, as are you. And of course, I started in direct marketing and direct mail. First learned about it in 1992. Before the Internet existed as a sales platform, I used direct mail and advertising and many forms of offline marketing to build and grow my business. First as a dead bro carpet cleaner who used marketing to transform my small company. And then I fell in love with marketing, and then I started teaching it to other carpet cleaners.

Well, I used to come out here for the boot camps, which was just incredible. I mean, you were teaching them gold.

I mean, these are carpet cleaners.

From all over the country. And you're teaching them basic direct response techniques. Them being able to market at a level that world class marketers were doing in all other industries. And the carpet cleaners were lucky because they got you. And I used to be amazed being there.

Yeah.

And I mean when you came out to talk to the cleaners, you were pretty awesome. You've always been great.

I love talking to them because they were just so hungry for this information. And I remember, I just remember the first time I came out, you gave them a book. It was like this thick and it had, it was basically a how to be. How to be, not how to be a carpet cleaner. How to be a direct response response maven. And it was, you know, the sample ads and you were basically teaching them basic direct marketing and basic direct response. And a lot of it was direct mail. I mean, back then, right?

No, and it still is. And what I've always said to people too is because anyone that's not in that industry, because, you know, now in Genius Network, I mean, you're part of the group, we have, you know, we have people, we have a billionaire in the group. We have people running, you know, 100 million to 500 million dollar companies. We've got about 15 people in the group that do that. What I've always told people is that if I can figure out how to successfully sell carpet cleaning services using direct mail and direct marketing and you've got anything even remotely more exciting, anyone could use it. Because what first comes up is a negative for some people saying, oh, that won't apply to me because I'm not in that business. Soon realizes if you frame it it properly that this applies to.

Well, we talk all the time about, you know, I spend a lot of time now at conferences of quote unquote Internet marketers. And it just blows me away that anybody would want to define themselves by a channel.

Right.

You know, we used to look at ourselves as direct marketers. Direct mail was a channel, space was a channel. When email came out, you know, that was a channel. Direct response television, all of those are channels. And to not use everything at your disposal, you're not really doing justice to being the kind of world class marketers that you and I are and the people that we like to hang around with.

Well, let's talk about for people that don't know who you are because you've never positioned yourself as a guru. You don't go out there and you always downplay the knowledge that you have, but you have, you've Mailed. How many letters do you think you've mailed?

You know, I tried to like estimate recently and I put it into some bio stuff now because it took me a long time to count it all because it was 1.3 billion pieces of direct mail and it was only over the last 20 years. And only over the. Only over the last 20 years. So I don't know what the total number would be. And of course I didn't, you know, lick every stamp and I didn't, you know, put every piece in the mail, but I was overseeing that kind of volume over a long period of time with an incredible staff of people, people who really understood the intricacies of how to do direct mail. And it's not just direct, it's database marketing. The thing that's been so fascinating to me in the Internet world is that we have a database of 9 million people on our database of people who bought something from us over the last 20, 25 years. And I tell people if they have a 9,000 name list or a 900 name list, to not look at that audience and think about what's on that list and what they bought, how they bought, how much they bought, and all the basics of direct marketing, which is what we call rfm, recency, frequency, monetary, which we can talk about if we want.

Yeah, we're going to, I'm going to make a little note of that.

Yeah. But I think that all of those things still apply, even it's not just because we had a big database. So yeah, I can brag, as you say. You know, it's not bragging if you've done it, but I think John Wayne said that or something. I thought Joe Polish said that.

Well, you can credit me on making me look better, but no, I definitely was not the first to say that.

Yeah, it's a good. And the thing is, it's not bragging to say, you know, you mail 1.3 billion pieces of mail. What's really exciting is that we actually were targeting customers in a way that enabled us to mail that many names at an acceptable profit and loss because of the way we selected our list, the way we did our creative, the way that we looked at the whole process, which, you know, you can be a lot sloppier today.

Right.

I mean, the quote is, the quote that I like today is 75 cent. Marketing deserves $500 per thousand. Thinking so 75 cents, we'll say it's the average cost for an email, for.

An email, I guess, to send emails.

But I don't know, 50 to 75 cents a thousand. So I don't know. I use 75 cents. Maybe I'm overpaying. I better go check my vendors.

It could be.

Yeah, but $500 a thousand is, you know, a rate that you would pay with postage and printing. And, you know, we do magalogs and all kinds of different formats in direct mail. And if you're spending $500 per thousand to do your marketing, you better be thinking carefully about before you put anything in the mail.

Right.

And I think that there's. There's just a lot of haphazard marketing going on because email is cheap and anybody can get into business. The Internet, the beauty of the Internet is that the cost of entry is low. The bad news about the Internet is the cost of entry is low.

So people can be very sloppy. They don't think through everything.

Exactly.

And they think because it's free, it's really free. When in reality, what you're saying, if you put some serious thinking into the offer, that's everything, everything, then it could. The retail returns could be 10 times greater.

Well, Gordon Grossman was one of my gurus. He built Reader's Digest, and he used to always say that in direct mail that when you mailed a certain segment of your list, that if it was a bad offer and the wrong select those names. Not to say that they're not going to respond next time to something else, but you've now kind of. You've kind of made them. The possibility would be that they might not respond as well next time to the next next offer. And I don't think, you know, the online marketers think that way about the attrition of their lists. And I came out of the list business, too. That's really where I started. So going back to my history, it was more about the audience and the list. And I just love the idea that you have this list of. There are no unique names, only unique lists. Right. And so the assembly of that list and online marketers have figured this out, you know, on steroids.

Right.

I mean, knowing that they've developed this tribe and they can give them so much good content before they really sell them something, those are the guys that are doing it, right? The ones that are just bashing their list all the time. They're not using that $500 per thousand thinking. And not only that, they have no interest in doing direct mail either, which is kind of like what you and I want to be out there talking about and saying, you know what, you could use Direct material, even though you've never used it before.

Well, my hope would be that anyone watching this, listening to this, would become interested, intrigued enough to realize there is a ton of gold within their existing database, within their sphere of influence, within their affiliates, if they're an affiliate. There's a tremendous amount of untapped gold that most people aren't even aware that they could mine for it because they don't even know this mining methodology. It's like handing someone a shovel that can or a pick that can dig up gold, but they don't even use it yesterday.

In a few weeks, I'll be 82 years old. I literally go 12, 14 hours a day, five and a half days a week. Do not know the name of anybody that keeps up with me at any age. Plus, I enjoy every minute of it. Our company is 50 years old this year. We'll mail between now and election day next year, November, about 150 million postal letters, 2,300 million emails. We have 75 employees. Most of them are really high powered direct marketers operating at a very high level. 1961, I get the opportunity to go to New York to become executive secretary of a political youth organization that had been founded a few months earlier, earlier on Bill Buckley's family estate. So I run this organization. I'm in charge of everything, including fundraising. And I've found, 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 what 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 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 I hired five or six women, and after a couple months, I. I had 12,500. It gave me the courage, the confidence to quit a good job with a wife and two babies and to go where no one had gone before. No one literally had done political fundraising through postal mail before. And that's one of the most important things you can do in life. We'll talk about that here in a little bit about branding. If you can at all. You want to be first, can you be first? And if you can't be first in some category, find a category where you can be first and where you can own that category. I've been in multiple groups of different times. People were talking about me, not knowing that I was in the group there, and they were talking about me because I was first. You know, who knows the name of the second pope who was the second person to fly solo across the Atlantic? You know, nobody knows. Okay, it's the first. So whatever. You know, find a category that you can own that you can be first in, and that's how you build your brand. So, anyway, I did that for the next 15 years and had no competitors, basically. And by the way, I caught a lot of criticism because I was doing something no one had ever done before. And I was regularly, literally regularly attacked on cbs, abc, NBC, cnn, New York Times, Time Magazine, and Republicans and Democrats. The establishment was coming, you know, really hard at me. But all of the criticism stopped within a few hours. And the few hours was election night, November 1980. Aha. That's what Vigory has been up to, okay? And so the left had been relying mostly for their campaign funds on involuntary sources. The union, views, corporation foundations, et cetera. And so they ran out there real quick, like, and tried to replicate, duplicate what we had been doing. And I told my conservative friends, don't worry, you know, it's taken me 15 years to do what I'm doing here, and Besides, I'm smarter than they are, so it's going to take them 20 years to catch up with us. Not so. And within three or four years, in my opinion, the left caught up with the conservatives. And to this day, they do a far better job, the left does, than the right does in marketing. Think of the 2008 campaign. Obama had 3 million donors to his campaign. I haven't been able to see numbers for 2012, but it's something north of 3 million donors plus 10 million additional names of his supporters on email. Huge. Republicans had nothing like that. And so as a general rule, to this day, the Republicans are not doing the job they need to do to be competitive with the Democrats. So one of the things that I do to this day, at age be 82 in a few weeks, as I said, I spend two to three hours every day study marketing. Okay, I don't need to do that, but I do two to three hours, six days a week studying marketing. And one thing I can leave with you more than anything else. Study, study, study marketing. I don't know of a competitor that I have on the right that spends two or three hours a month studying marketing. Okay? I've developed something that I call Vigory's Four Horsemen of Marketing. You've got to get these four things right and get them right. Life is downhill, the wind to your back, pretty easy. Get any of them wrong, you're going uphill, the wind in your face. Highly unlikely you're going to succeed. And I'll explain each one, but just the four things briefly are position, differentiation, benefit and brand. Position is nothing more than a hole, hole 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. And Roger Ailes 20 years ago. They're thinking about setting building a national cable television news network. They don't sit there and say, well, CBS does this, we'll do this, ABC does this, cnn. They don't care what they do because they're going to occupy a hole in the marketplace right of center. 50% of the country is not being served by television news. Life gets pretty simple at that point. Okay, then differentiation is what you do publicly. So publicly they differentiated themselves from all the other television Networks with Bill O'Reilly, Megyn Kelly, Hannity, Glenn Beck for a while, okay? That's how they differentiated themselves from the others. Third benefit is obvious. You get news and information on Fox, you Don't get anywhere else, okay, fourth brand. Brand is the ball game, okay? That's products these days are seldomly sold. They are bought, okay? I bought this week a new car. Well, a new car to me it's a few years old, but they didn't sell me the car, I bought the car, okay? They could have had hundred different types of cars out there. I was looking at my daughter's strong and wife's strong recommendation for a Lexus, okay? I wanted a Lexus and that was it. I did. That 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. Vigory, you shouldn't buy this brand of paper towels. Buy this one over here. I'm a Viva man, I like Viva paper towels. That's what I'm going to buy. I'm sure Bounty makes a good paper towel. But I've been sold before I walk into that store. And so brand is so important for success in your marketing. So position is what you do privately. Differentiation. You differentiate yourself from your competitors by whatever you do to differentiate yourself. Benefit is number three. And then fourth is brand. And by the way, I do almost nothing in my life of any consequence, any importance without a written 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 try to bring conservatives to power. And we'd come up with a problem. There was a young congressman from Georgia, part of our group of 2025, Newt Gingrich. He didn't invariably, when we came up with a problem, go to the blackboard. We didn't have whiteboards 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 a of that. So the exercise of writing the plan is so, so important. Joe said yesterday that Dan Sullivan gives me a lot of credit for Reagan's election. Quite frankly, I appreciate the compliment, but it's nonsense. And I've seen different people at different times take excessive credit for, 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. Reagan with a freight train. And the rest of us had very little to do. The one thing though that was very, very helpful to Reagan was what was something called the New right that came into to 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 in 80, was running against the entire Republican establishment for the most part. Bob Dole, of course, Jerry Ford, George Bush, John Connally, Howard Baker. And they were getting the thousand dollar gifts. Reagan depended upon the $10, 15, 25, $50. And he had 250,000 of those people. And so the small givers, through direct mail, just changed American history. March of 1976, Reagan is literally out of money riding commercial airlines. And his aide Lynn 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 30, 1976, and makes a 25 minute stump speech. The last 15 minutes he asked for contributions. About $1,600,000 came in. And that was huge back in 1976, turned his campaign around, allowed him to go to Kansas City that summer and get 49% of the vote against the sitting president and propelled him onward in 1980 for success. And if he hadn't been able to do that In March of 76, he would have never been the candidate that he was in 1980. There's a number of odds and ends here, but I know Joe wants to get to some Q and A here, but let me just mention a few things here. I know a lot of you are focused on marketing through the Internet and that's important. You need to do that. Obviously, we certainly do it at our company. But the workhorse of marketing today, in my opinion, is still direct mail. And when I started in 1961 in New York City, direct mail was the second largest form of advertising in the country. Today in 2015, it's the second largest form of advertising in the country. And by the way, I understood that most people in the nonprofit community to this day and in commercial world as well, do not understand, do not comprehend that direct mail is advertising. Okay, so in 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 see me and he sat down in my office and we had a casual conversation for an hour or two. And it's late 1970s, he said, Richard, I'm perplexed. I've been all over Capitol Hill, the White House, et cetera. The Democrats have almost a two thirds majority in the House, in the Senate, at 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 that. 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 saw him in an interview just this week complaining about he had a announced in March, April 1977 that he wanted to change the election laws in four ways. Been devastating to the Republicans like instant voter registration. Just show up on election day, say I live down the street, I'm going 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 beat this. He had just come from meeting us Republicans and Senators saying we can't stop this, it's a bad idea. But it's a time has come and so it's going to pass. I said, we can defeat this. Let's talk in the morning, I'm going back to bed. So we did. We got together for four or five months at my home, my office, et cetera. And we designed the strategy through direct mail, using it as advertising. And we defeated all four pieces of legislation. And to this day there's Democrats 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 output, short letters counterintuitive. And by the way, most of what we know about direct mail is counterintuitive, intuitive. You don't want to go to a doctor with an appendicitis attack and say, doctor says, 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, cut them up and do what doctors do. Okay? So this, what we do is learn behavior. Most people. And you've got to be careful about direct mail. It's very expensive. It does great and wonderful things, but it can also be very, very expensive. And you can lose a lot of money because people say, well, I learned to write in first grade. I know when they sell postage stamps, what's the big deal? It is a big deal. You know, 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 syllable words. Don't use big words that stop people in their reading. If 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 tagline, a sub headline. Joe, I like these coffee cups and these glasses. But Genius Network doesn't say anything. If it says something like the world's largest gathering of marketing professionals or something like that, 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 is a collection of the world's largest, you know, high powered market or something like that. So anyway, taglines, sometimes your name, it just doesn't, doesn't say anything. So you need to tell people what 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. 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 pet and people who want to do better in the world. I just absolutely love supporting them on their journey.

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

Lot to do with their mindset.

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

Yeah.

Great.

All right.

So with that, let's talk about something that me and Dean have spent hundreds of hours discussing on I love marketing, which is how to get more customers. So what are some of the best ways that you've discovered in your 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 there's 13 ways is because there's 13 weeks and a quarter. And every we deep dive on one of them. One might be networking, one might be JVs, one might be social media. Doesn't mean we ignore the other ones. But each week we deep dive on one and get really crystal clear on our plan for that quarter. And then we repeated 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 going to say? There's a lot, like I power like.

What getting your team members involved in.

In the process, because everybody's got great ideas.

You just need good direction by, you know, framing the question that's going to elicit the great response. I remember reading there's a great book about Albert Lasker, who was one of.

The old original advertising men.

And when they were selling refrigerators back.

When refrigeration was brand new, one of the things that people were afraid of.

Is that they didn't want to have something that was plugged in all the time and sucking electricity because they were new to the whole.

You had this meter outside your house.

That you could see it moving, and when that's moving, it's costing you money. So people were weighing the benefits of having refrigeration versus their fear of this bottomless pit of electricity spent. And they said.

He tasked the entire company.

He said, we need some phrase that.

Makes people comfortable with the.

With Frigidaire as the brand that they.

Can trust for refrigeration. And somebody who was like the equivalent.

Of in the mail room came up.

With the idea of that every Frigidaire.

Is equipped with meter miser technology. And just those words, meter miser said exactly what you need words to say.

To say, it's watching your back. It's not going to take any more.

Electricity than it absolutely needs to.

And that was really the thing that.

Made people comfortable choosing Frigidaire over all the others, because all the others are just money pits.

But you better get that meter miser.

Because that one will save us the most money.

This is 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.

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

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

But interview on his, on his channel.

Right now with Kevin o' Leary from Shark Tank.

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

Well, Evan, why don't you pop on and explain what that is and then post it in the link so people can watch those interviews. And if there's anything that you want to say to either make fun of Dean or to ask Lee 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's this epic video across the top of her coaching and speaking and with Oprah and high fiving and it's like, wow, how did she do that? I wanna, I gotta 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. He wanted to do something in person because all of his stuff has now been, you know, remote and, you know, Covid era. And so we connected and we did a two part series. We had two hours or so of time to talk. And what we did was we took questions from both of our audiences. What do you want us to answer? And then we went through about 11 or 12 questions and we put half on my channel and half on his channel. And since I edited it or my team was editing and filming it, we took our favorite questions and then gave him the rest. But they're still good on both channels. And one of the great things you can do on YouTube is there's a thing called an end card, which in the last 20 seconds of every video, you can call things out and it's clickable. So that could be your PDF download, that could be your lead magnet, that could be sign up for your email, that could be your website, that could be your offer that you want to send people to. And so what we did was we did a thing at the end where said, hey, if you want to see part two of this interview, go check it out on Kevin's channel or on Evan's channel. And we call it the Kevin and Evan show for that day. And it's just great way to do collaboration. So anybody who's doing YouTube, I always love Genius Network events. They're great, amazing people. Huge, warm hearts here. And so I'm looking forward to the annual event and jamming out with all you guys.

Awesome. Yeah. And there's a bunch of Genius Network members that are here too. So Evan's going to do a whole session on just how to really build and grow a sustainable YouTube channel, 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. 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 are things that don't meet that criteria. And I cut it out.

Yeah, I love it. And that actually that term was given to me by my friend Mark Schneider, who recently passed away.

Away.

And you know, it has been a great criteria on not just marketing, because I've actually trademarked ELF marketing. Right. And so if you do use it, you have to give me credit because.

We'Re gonna just sue you.

Really?

No, I'm kidding.

Well, it depends. We may see you. It depends if you totally plagiarize my shit. But I love the term elf and I recommend using it as a criteria, use it as a process, and it's helped me. I used to think of it just as marketing, doing automated robotic types of marketing methodologies. But I now apply ELF to people, projects, anything. Because if it's not money, is it easy, liberating and fun? I even applied into my personal life. So I'm going to take next year as a sabbatical. And so there's going to be a lot of things that need to be just ELF for me that aren't money related, but they're, you know, it has to be liberating. So I highly encourage it as a filter because the genius network members that we have a tool called ELF versus Half, where they list what are the people and the projects and things in their life that are elf and what are the things that are hard, annoying, lame and frustrating and really take a look at, you know, how do you eliminate the half and how do you get to the elf? So one thing I want to, I have this question I wrote down here. And then I'm going to ask Jeff Madoff to ask you a question about print. How can people utilize tough times? As many people in the world have been going through incredibly difficult times with the pandemic, how can people utilize tough times as a springboard for greater success? And what does that word that gets thrown around a lot, success, mean to you?

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

Okay.

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

Watch them.