Fine Art Marketing Presentation with Joe Polish

Hey, this is Joe Polish, and I've got a couple of friends of mine sitting here. Let me kind of give you some background, then you're going to hear both of them talk. I am at. We're inside a tent right now. And Susan started this business called Celebration of Fine Art in Scottsdale, Arizona. And this is my buddy, Joe Woodford, who I actually went to high school with. He's one of the world's top ceramic artist. Just does amazing stuff. So give you some quick background. I came to this tent. It goes on for 10 weeks once a year, right from what date to what date? Is it always the same dates?

Mid January to the end of March.

Okay. And so I came here because I started taking a ceramics class and I met an artist named Jossy, who actually I started talking to her and she. I said, you know a guy named Joe Woodford? She's like, yeah, I mean, we're selling art in this Celebration of Fine Arts location. And so I came here the other day. I hadn't seen Joe in years, although over the years we've stayed in touch, kind of, because I've always had an interest in doing ceramics. It's one of the few things I ever did that made my brain escape. And so I came here. He introduced me to Susan, who owns this, and she invited me to come to one of their meetings where they actually help the artists with building and growing their business. And what you're about to see, after I'm done babbling here and introducing both of them, is me giving a talk to a group of many of the artists that are here. So prepare yourself because you're actually going to see my presentation where I share with them my thoughts and ideas about marketing. What I wanted to do is let the people that are watching this and listening to this know a little bit about Celebration Fine Art and who you are. And I'd like Joe Woodford to actually talk about what he does now. He does it because it's awesome. So since.

Okay, well, Celebration of Fine Art is what we call the place where art lovers and artists connect. And this is our 25th year and we bring together some of the most brilliant minds in art from across the country. They come from all over. They set up working studios right here on our 40,000 square foot tent. And they are here every day creating their works of art. So you can come in, watch what they do, ask them why they do it, get the story behind it, and hopefully walk away with a piece of art that you love. And this is our 25th year. And it just keeps getting better every year. And we love having people like Joe stumble upon us and then want to share it with their friends. So we're glad you came in.

So now we're sharing this with the world. So if you ever come out to Scottsdale, Arizona, celebrateart.com is the site, but you're going to see the presentation. And then Joe Woodford, which is we're going to do a lot of stuff together, which you'll get an idea about after you watch the presentation. But Joe, so how long you been doing art? Started in 1983, Dobson High School. Took a pottery class as elective. And I just fell in love with it and it became something that I could not do. I had to do it in order to have peace of my mind. So I just kept growing and doing it and working and growing and it became the most important thing in my life. Yeah. And so we're about to watch the presentation and it's because of you that this sort of thing happened. And I got recruited into. Well, no, you made the introduction, but it all started here. At what point did you actually, how many years did you have to go through being an artist? You realize this is my profession. This is literally what I'm going to do. I would say that it was about 15 years. 13. You go to college, you do that, but you never think you can make a living doing something like making pottery or making art. It doesn't seem that feasible. But if your passion is passionate enough about it and you put so much of your energy, life and who you are into it, it just happens. So you don't go into it to make money. That happens as a byproduct of you loving what you do. Awesome. So you're about to hear my thoughts to a group of artists about marketing and positioning. At the end of it, I'll give out the link so you can find both of these individuals and find out about Celebration of Fine Art. And I hope you find it valuable. So any famous last words or first words from you guys since we're going to go.

Well, I'm going to add on to Joe. He's a brilliant artist, which he's honed his craft over the years and he's learned about marketing because he creates a beautiful product. And we all know that you can have the most amazing anything, but if nobody knows about it, you're not going to be able to share your gift with the world. So what we do at the Celebration Fine Art is help put that marketing piece in so that these Talented people can bring their work to share with all the viewers.

Right? Yeah. And it's awesome. And so enjoy and hopefully we'll see you next year at the Celebration of Fine Art. Hello everyone. Hi Jossy, how are you? So this, yeah, as you heard, this is how this started where I'm throwing pots at Shimmer 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 hand out 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, you know, 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 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 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 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 exactly? Selling? Someone says, prostitution. That's not true. You first had to sell it. Okay, so 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 nonprofit, 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 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. And so since then I was like 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, 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 Wylan. 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 Wylan's business is 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, Weiland'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 this 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, 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 I have a dear friend, John Butcher. John Butcher owns the company Precious Moments. Anyone familiar with 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 are these little figurines, which I would never be caught dead having one of these things in my house, but they have sold 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. 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. So I want to tell you a little bit of background, so of how I got into the world that I'm in. Like Joe Woodford mentioned, I started out as a Deborah carpet cleaner, living off credit cards in 1990. And I got into this business from a friend in high school that talked me into starting a carpet cleaning company. My mother died when I was 4 years old and my father never remarried. So my childhood kind of sucked. And every two years we would move to a different town because my father just could never settle down. He was tormented after my mother passed away. And so he was a locksmith. And so he would go into a new city, small town, start build up a clientele, and right when it was starting to work, he would up and move away. So it was some weird form of self sabotage, but I never saw us ever get our carpets professionally cleaned. And over the years I've kind of maybe changed, changed history a little bit and said maybe he just got sick of the carpet, didn't know what to do with it, so he needed to move. But I had no experience in the carpet cleaning business. So it's kind of one of these accidental industries where I just fell into. And so I got into this business and I bought some chemicals and equipment, took $1,500 of the money I'd saved delivering newspapers and selling things door to door, like newspaper subscriptions and stuff like that. And overnight I was a quote unquote professional carpet cleaner. Now one thing I want to mention too, this may not seem to have any rele, but when I was 18 years old, Joe didn't mention this. In high school, I started getting into drugs very badly. At my worst state, When I was 18 years old, I weighed 105 pounds from free basing coke for three months straight. I was a terrible drug addict, I was nearly dead. So I literally moved away from Arizona for a couple of years, lived in a trailer with my father so I could literally remove myself from the environment and get clean. And had I not started listening to personal development tapes, things like Earl Nightingale, going to 12 step groups, doing stuff like that, who the hell knows what would have ever happened with my life. So when I moved back to Arizona, I actually started this carpet cleaning business. And I didn't know what the heck I was doing. So I get into this business and I'm thinking, well, if you're just good at what it is you do, that you should get paid for what it is you do. And I learned a really painful realization. And this is something that maybe write it down or just remember this. There's no relationship between being good and getting paid. 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 could 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. If I learned how to successfully sell a service that nobody wants to buy, I think you could probably learn a couple of things for 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. 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 went and 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. Because it had to go through the bureaucracies of how to cut a check to some poor service labor guy. And I remember cleaning carpets in the middle of summer. I'm allergic to cats. So I start wheez. 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. 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's 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 multimillion dollar real estate investor and has these jet skis and could we go to Seguro Lake and go jet skiing? And I was like, well, 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. And but he said the magic word that this guy that owned the Jet skis with this 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 cleaning 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. And I said, no, no, you don't understand. I've gotten certified, I'm trained, I actually care about my customers. A lot of these companies do bait and switch advertising where they run low price coupons, they get into people's homes and they try to upsell them. I go, I don't do any of that, but it's just a real competitive business. And he said, look, young man, he goes, you're like most people, you think the grass is always greener on the other side. He goes, what's going to happen if you go into another business? You're going to spend another six months, another year, another two years learning the technical skills of another industry so you can go out and repeat the same bad business habits that have caused you to be a failure in this business. And I was like, oh, wow, thanks for the motivational talk. But what he said, he goes, what you need to do is you need to learn fundamental business rules. He goes, because once you learn fundamentals, it doesn't matter what business you get into, because business is business. And if you're going to jump to another business, but you don't learn how to make a business work, you're never going to have success and you'll spend your whole life just kind of squandering. First off, this was the most impactful conversation of my life at that time. And there wasn't anything that I had not heard before. But it's kind of like when the student's ready, the teacher will appear sort of thing. But he said it at the exact right time. So I said to myself, you know, I live in America, I'm not the smartest guy in the world. I certainly have. I'm dysfunctional as all hell. I have plenty of problems, but I have my limbs. I think this country is great. I feel lucky to have been born here. And there's a lot of people that seem to be doing better than me that I don't think are that smart. So what are they doing that I'm not? And that put me into my pursuit of I'm not going to get out of this business until I know how to successfully make it work. Now, the reason I told you that story is if there's artists that are making money, and there are certainly, I mean, there's thousands of people that make an enormously great living doing what it is they love and producing however you want to Define art. Has anyone ever read the book the War of Art by Steven Pressfield? Okay, so great. Everyone here, I swear, you have got to read that book. Steven is a dear friend of mine. I've interviewed him before and that book is just absolutely fantastic. But the thing is, the reason I told you that story is that if you think that anyone other than you is responsible for your success in your business, you're delusional. If you're waiting to be discovered, and I know many of you aren't. I mean, I think I'm preaching to the choir. I think some of you here do very well, at least. I've talked to quite a few people when I was here and it seems. But I don't know, I don't really know your income, I don't know your goals, I don't know your aspirations. But what I do know is that when I got the attitude that any money that I make in the world, like money earned ethically, is a byproduct of value creation. So I got to create value for other people. And the second thing is I'm not entitled to anything unless I can create value first. And until I acquired that attitude, I was a victim. Basically, 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 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. You know, I've got Tony Robbins speaking at my next event. You know, John Paul dejorie. I know. You know, I ran Arianna Huffington's last book 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. I. This is like the. You see 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. 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 appreciate your art starts with appreciating where people are first. Where are they? Who are they? Understand your collectors, 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 and 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 in your art so it's experienced as unique? Positioning is critical. There's that saying, a picture's worth a thousand words, while 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 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, 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 is giving 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. And the excitement that they had for buying 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 and every business card you have, 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 a piece of art that they bought. If 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? Yeah. See, I actually do my homework on stuff. And when I was talking to Steven yesterday, I was like, you know what? And I asked Joe this and I talked to Susan, I was like, what will be the most helpful thing for people? And I think, you know, the only way that anyone ever does well with marketing is they gotta appreciate it and respect it. When people say I don't like marketing or marketing isn't important, that's like saying, I really don't like oxygen. You know that oxygen just isn't really that big of a thing. I mean, hold your breath for three minutes and see how gasping for air kind of sucks. And if you don't utilize marketing and appreciate marketing and reframe it, we can take any painting here, any painting, and we can duct tape it to the wall and it's going to look a certain way. If you put it in a nice frame, you position it well, it's going to look completely different. Your whole business is that way. 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 and, and so you cannot bore people into buying. You're not even going to create a desire that already doesn't pre exist. What I would encourage you to do, and I'll do some Q and A if we have time for that, and if we don't, I will be happy to hang around. Because more than anything, it's really hard to share 20 years worth of marketing experience in a short talk. But I have a couple hundred hours of amazing content with some of the world's greatest thinkers in business and entrepreneurship and in marketing that I will share with all of you for free. I'm not going to try to sell any of you guys anything. I'm happy to just provide this stuff because I'm going to actually take Joe as a case study and I'm going to, he's going to teach me how to be like a better artist than I am. And he's going to actually show me how to throw. Thank you. Thank you. But no. We're going to throw some pots and we're going to videotape this stuff. And I'm actually going to, I'm going to see if we can actually create a multi million dollar campaign with Joe's art because the guy's incredibly talented and he already does. Well, he's made a living doing this. I'm going to do a skunk's work thing and I'm going to see if we can actually utilize him as a killer case study. And if we document it, we'll share it with you guys next year when you all come here and do that. So I'll do Q and A. I'll do whatever I can to be useful. Does the carpet cleaning thing seem not to resonate with all? With anyone? Because I actually. Does it resonate? Okay. I like it because it's like again, if you have to figure out how to sell something nobody wants to buy, you have to figure out how to persuade. And so let me share with you a couple of things. The number one question in all consumers minds is who can I trust? All of you are walking like if I was trying to sell something, all of you right now, you just met me. Other than Joe came up and said something nice about me. Susan did maybe you saw a video of mine, Whatever. So because they introduced me, there's this implied this guy maybe knows what he's talking about. But none of you really know me. So you don't know if I'm a good person. You don't know what my motivations are. You don't know if you could trust me. Whatever. So the whole process of doing business with someone is rapport. That's why McDonald's, although you should never eat that food. Or Pizza Hut. I saw Krispy Kreme doughnuts, which is hysterical. Basically, people, McDonald's is not the best food in the world, but it's the biggest restaurant chain in the world. You can go into any country and it's familiarity. So there's a certain level of even though it's not good food, you can trust it to a degree. If you can trust that it's crappy food and not healthy for you, but maybe you know you're not going to get food poisoning. But here's the interesting thing. And I've thought about a lot of stuff related to business. And so the number one question is who can I trust? And so your Job as an entrepreneur is to establish trust and rapport with people. And it is so much harder to make the first sale than it is to make additional sales. It's so much harder to get a cold prospect to do business with you or to buy into something unless they just happen to see something you have and they love it and then, boom. And that does happen here. So that's the interesting thing about art. I'm the type of guy that if I walk around and I see it, I'm like, I want that. And I'm also in the position where I can buy most things that I want. I mean, I net over a million a year, so I have money where I can actually buy stuff, but at the same time, I'm not a chump. And I also know that a lot of the. This is maybe the worst thing to say to a group of artists. I think a lot of art that is put out in the world as art is simply pollution. But it has a great marketing story attached to it. So they're like, oh, this is real art. But I look at some art and I'm like, what the hell? Lack of creativity, insane sort of brain created this. But again, if you can sell it and you can, I appreciate that sort of stuff. But then there's other art, which is incredibly powerful. And so the whole thing with trust, when you're selling like carpet cleaning services, nobody wants to buy it. So when I first started reading about direct response marketing, which is the type of marketing I use, it's very copy intensive, using powerful words. And so I have one of my first marketing tools. I think you guys will crack up at this. But one of the very first things that I created was a consumer guide to carpet cleaning. Now, I learned marketing before the Internet, there was no Internet and we were using direct mail, which I'm still a huge fan of direct mail. If I could only rely on one method of selling my services, what I sell, I would use direct mail. There's less noise in people's mailboxes today than ever before in history because so much attention and has been put on the Internet. Now we make a lot of money on the Internet. I have many websites, we do a lot of conversion, all that sort of stuff. And certainly all my podcasts are delivered because of technology. But I love direct mail. So back in the day, all my competitors were running price advertising. And like I said earlier, if you don't have a system for selling your services, every consumer has a system for buying and it's price. Because when you don't know what something costs, and you're interested in hiring a plumber, or you're going to get your house painted, or you're going to buy an article of clothing, or people are walking around here and you don't have prices on your art and they want it. What's the first thing they typically ask you? Yeah, how much you charge. Well, the reason you ask how much and you all do it, every one of you does this is because you don't know any other way to make a buying decision. So you would have people call me up if they ever called me up and say, how much you charge for carpet cleaning? Because I didn't really know quite how to price. So I was using price advertising. And I hated that question because I would be on the phone with someone, normally a woman, for anywhere, 15, 20 minutes, explaining my method, what it is I do, and she'd say, let me talk to my husband or let me think about it, and I'll call you back. And I did that over and over again, and I was like, what a waste of freaking time. This just sucks. But why are they asking me that? Because they don't have any other criteria to make a price. And if I advertise price, that's the bait. You know, if you don't like the fish, you got to look at what's the bait you're using to catch them. You know, people have disdain for their clients because all these people care about is price. But you're fishing with price. You know, if you don't like the, you know, only the hungriest fish will snap at the crappiest bait. So it's kind of like, well, what are you fishing with? So I read this. I read a lot of stuff from a guy named Gary Halbert. He was a copywriter. He was the first guy I learned marketing from. And he said that any problem in the world could be solved with the right sales letter. And I would encourage you to write that down or think about it. Any problem in the world could be solved with the right sales letter. When I first heard that, I was like, there's many problems that can't be solved with a sales letter. What if you have cancer? What if you have a relationship problem? What if you don't have good health? Well, as a matter of fact, most of those problems can be solved or at least assisted with a sales letter, because all a sales letter is are words that are designed to persuade people in order to do something. So I created my very first Consumers Guide to Carpet Cleaning because no one cares about carpet cleaning. They're not going to do research to understand, you know, what's the difference between dry cleaning and carpet versus steam cleaning versus whatever. And 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 4 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 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 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 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 audit. Because everyone else is 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. 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, and then they would call me back and say, when can you do the job after they read it? 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 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 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 $100 bill and a $1 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, 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. If 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 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 predisposed to give you money. And so I started running ads in 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. And 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 of 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. 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. 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. And so, yes, we spend a lot of time thinking about blogs and Internet. It sounds like direct marketing, something in somebody's mailbox is just as legit in 2015 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. Okay? If someone's going to commission you to do something, you're going to go set something up in their home, like a sculpture, whatever. It's not just art, but it's actually logistically involved. So, you know, 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 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 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 of, 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. 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 now. Unless it's some famous person or someone that Joci 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, you know, 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 and you want to. 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 Eunice back there. I've got Rachelle. Rachelle's been with me for, like eight years. Eunice has been with me for 10 years. I would encourage you to hire someone. How many of you have employees? How many of you have no employees whatsoever? 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 gonna videotape this. And, and so 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 like 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 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, 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, ok? 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 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 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 are 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 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 bucket of water 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 put pressure and 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 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? 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 rose. She goes, oh, my God, that was the best line ever. Thank you so much. I sold them all. That is so awesome. It, like, 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. But the point is, if someone's looking at the art, link it to a feeling. Link it to a feeling. Like, if I'm sitting there looking at something that I really like and it has my eye, and I have the money to buy most things within reason, it's up to the guy or the galaxy to actually link it into my emotional state. Because once you're in that emotional state, you want to harness it. You want to grasp it. And the fact is, it makes people feel good. People aren't here because they need a new sink. I mean, none of this stuff is needed for survival, okay? This is all because it's kind of, you know, oh, it's going to make me feel good. People are here because they're sad. People are here because they're bored. People are here because they're excited. There's all these sort of feelings that they're trying to fill. And you will insist there is value there. So the perceived value in how you can link them to that is very important. So anyway, I could go on and on and on, but I think I'm at the time, so is that helpful? Okay, thank you thank you. Thank you.