One 10-Minute Talk Away From Transforming Your Future - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #156

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

Hello, everyone, it's Joe Polish. And I'm here with boy, a whole group of people. We've got Mr. Dan Sullivan in the studio in Toronto, my dear friend Dean Jackson, and a very special guest, the mysterious J.R. we will not reveal anything but the initials. So, J.R. everybody knows we've done a couple episodes with you on I Love Marketing, but never on 10x talk. And you're very, very familiar with the brilliance of myself, not brilliance of Dan Sullivan and stuff.

So he's a specialist in the brilliance of your song.

I think I'm the luckiest person alive right now because I'm. And here with Dan and here with Dean, and these are the smartest people on the planet. I don't think anyone could be listening to anyone better except you, Dan and Dean.

Well, thank you. I won't disagree with any of that. All right, so, Dan, we do something in Genius Network where people also refer to it as the 25k group, where we do 10 minute talks. And the 10 minute talks are really just condensed, powerful wisdom ideas worth using. And they have been instrumental in helping people clarify their message. And prior to doing this recording, we actually recorded some episodes together with Dean and we were talking about marketing. And your story is your marketing, your sales letter is how you take your pitch and how you replicate it. And I learned from the late Gary Halbert that the difference between rich and being broke could be one good sales letter. And you're only one sales letter away from potentially millions of dollars. And you made a comment while we've been hanging out this weekend that you're one 10 minute talk away from transforming your future. And I'd love to have you speak to that and then we'll talk about the 10 minute talk.

One of the things I've been coaching entrepreneurs for 40 years now. And probably around halfway through those 40 years, I began to see that what I had done for myself to create basically a program that's based on ideas and it's based on questions and it's based on thinking exercises that I could also help really talented, successful, ambitious entrepreneurs to do the same thing with what they were really good at. And every entrepreneur has a unique area of expertise where they have a unique impact. So over the years, and especially lately, over the last three or four years, I've just decided to partner up with. Right now I've got about a half dozen what I call game changers in the program. And one of the things is the advantage for me is that they're very, very close to their ideas. They're very close to experiences, they're very close to their value creation proposition. And this has all developed over decades. And so they don't really see the significance frequently of what it is that they're doing. But because I come from a model of creating thinking exercises, essentially what I do is I help people think about their thinking. I simply say, you know, if you took this one idea you have here and moved it to the center, and then other things could start collecting around it. You wouldn't just be asking people to bring a shopping cart into your supermarket and choose anything you want. You would actually have a step by step stage of personal and organizational development. But you have to start with this one idea. And sometimes it clicks and sometimes it does. But Joe, you've developed a very powerful thinking and performing exercise right at the middle of the Genius network in your 25k workshops. And it's called the 10 Minute Talk. The moment I saw it, I said, bingo. That's the. Because it's actually a transformational experience that people have that requires them to do a little bit of thinking, but then to actually get up in front of the workshop and actually get their most important idea, their central value creation proposition, to get it over in 10 minutes. And the lesson that you say, Joe, it's easy to do it in an hour. It's really hard to do it in 10 minutes.

Exactly.

It's easy to write a 15 page sales letter. It's really hard to write a one page sales letter.

Who was it that said that? Sorry for writing such a long letter. If I had more time, I could have written a shorter letter.

Yeah, exactly.

Because you have a lot of rambling and a lot of thoughts that are all over the place to prune it, to get to the bare essence. You know what I will say, Dan, based on what you were just referring to is I've thought a lot about high level successful entrepreneurs. I focus the Genius Network on industry Transformers. That's really a term I got from you. You even wrote a book called Industry Transform the top people in a Particular Industry. And those are the ones that I like, helping to develop better storytelling and influence skills as we would call marketing and sales. Right. And they're my favorite group of people to be around because they do so much, they create so much value, and I learn so much while simultaneously doing it. And what I've learned about very successful people, and that comes from my own group and of course, being in Strategic Coach is most of these people can come up with better ideas sitting by themselves with a napkin or a notepad than many multi day seminars or events that they can go to because they're very talented, skilled people. If you're going to bring them to a two day event or they're going to commit time to be in Strategic Coach or be in my Genius Network, they don't just want ideas. What they want is they want elegant ideas. And one elegant idea is worth more than a thousand semi good ideas. Which is what I learned from the late Gary Halbert. I've thought about that a lot and I've also thought about the price point of Genius Network. We have a 25k group and we're about to have a 100k group. I thought how could I give these individuals some of the best practices, strategies, methods, techniques, ways of doing things and attach a financial value on it that we could actually have people deliver wisdom in 10 minutes that would be worth 25 grand. We focused on $250,000 ideas. We even have 250,000 doll thinking processes. I even say when you join Genius Network, if you don't make a quarter million dollars within the first year of being in the group, I don't want you to renew for the next year because you're not executing, you're not a player at a particular level because the conversations and the ideas shared. Certainly you can make many millions from it. Take one example, Dean Graziosi. When Dean first joined the group about eight years ago, his company was doing between $12 million to $20 million a year, which is a pretty substantial size small business. Just he did right under 200 million in sales, predominantly from what he learned and developed by being part of Genius Network. Dan, you wrote me this great impact filter about how you attribute about $16 million added to your business to your bottom line in the last four years as a result of being in the group. Because Dan is an executor, he knows how to take ideas and do something with them. I thought how do we get our members who have so much knowledge and so much wisdom, but they've never narrowed it down in this sort of format and get them to deliver it in 10 minutes so that every minute is worth 25 grand if they really live up to it. So that will be really useful for the group and that's a great value proposition. But it will also be incredibly useful for them because if they can do that with one idea, how many different pieces of knowledge and understanding and know how do they have developed as being a successful entrepreneur that they can continue to share. So we have now found that this has become the seed in a platform and a foundation for them to grow many other things on top of it. And of course, both of you have given many talks in Genius Network. And Dean, you gave one of the best talks and I'd like you to talk about your experience with that and what that's done for your thinking as a result of doing it. Because the thing for the listener, I'll define the we have a tool called the Genius Network 10 Minute Talk prep tool. And it usually takes someone about half an hour to even think through given a 10 minute talk. And so part of it is getting them to do the thinking about it. You don't just blurt out a 10 minute talk because you can't unless it's all over the map or you're so skilled at doing it, which most people aren't. A genius network 10 minute talk is defined as a prepared 10 minute powerful breakthrough presentation focused on a single topic or idea worth at least $250,000 that is compelling, persuasive and immediately useful for the listeners. If you can get yourself to do that, you have taken your knowledge and made it really digestible and really usable.

How many years have we been doing the 10 minute talks? I think I've done at least three years at the annual event.

The first time I tested it out was in the 25k group meetings, genius Network at my office. And then we decided to take one of the annual events. And the annual event is where everyone that's in Genius Network because we usually meet in smaller groups, 25 to 35 people at my office. And then we have an annual event where we have a couple hundred people. Everyone that's in Genius Network can actually come to the annual event. And it's the only event that I do once a year where people that aren't in the group can come currently at a $10,000 investment and we may raise the price of that to 25,000 because it's such a powerful event. Of course, my opinion, and I believe everyone would say that, but we started doing them there in 2012.

I think I've given three 10 minute talks like that. So it is absolutely a clarifying exercise because you can't just show up and do a good 10 minute talk. I can show up and talk for an hour just right now. I'm ready to go right now. But if you're limiting it down to 10 minutes, I need to take some time to figure out what's the essence of that message and what's the one clear thing that comes from that? So just going through that process is really valuable as an exercise for the person who's preparing to deliver the 10 minute talk. I think the last two we did, the clarifying question of what would you do if you only got paid if your client gets the result? That was the core message. And going through my four realizations about that, then we expanded that into a full I love marketing episode, but you got the essence of it in that 10 minutes. And then last year I did one about the amazing nine word email that revives dead leads. And that was something actionable that somebody can do. And that's.

That's generated millions of dollars for people that have just taken that and used that nine word email.

Exactly. I take that really seriously when you say in preparing these to share an idea that is worth at least $250,000 or has been literally worth at least $250,000 to me personally and has created multiples of that for people who've implemented both of those ideas. Yeah, yeah.

And of course, what Dan always helps me do, and this is a big lesson for everyone listening, is, you know, surround yourself with really smart people that can help expand you, which Dan certainly is an expander of thinking, is he's allowed me to even see the depth of how far this can go and how great we can expand it. So one of the reasons we're talking about it today is that Dan even created a focus for me and some suggestions related to just how deep we can go in Genius Network and what we can do with these 10 minute talks other than just sharing them with people that are part of Genius Network. And I haven't 100% decided on this yet, but I have a website that I'm going to set up and I'm toying around with the name. I own the name geniusx.com and I'm thinking about there, but not 100% sure yet where I'm going to take the 10 minute talks, the very best ones, the ones from the annual event where people pay 10 grand to come for some of the 10 minute talks that are actually done at the workshops. And I'm just going to put them out for free out into the world. Because when people join Genius Network, they come not just for the content, but they come for the relationship, they come for the discussions, they come for the conversations. And that's really for players. But man, are we creating some of the most usable, powerful content there is. So, Dan, I'D love to have you share with the listeners some of your thoughts and suggestions. And many of these I'm going to be implementing. So I'm actually sharing with people some of the backstage of how we go deeper with ideas just because of our collaboration together.

Yeah, it was just the very first year, Dean, that you did the 10 minute talk, it was actually cheese and whiskers.

Oh, right.

That's right. And I heard it not in Joe's setting, but you had told me personally what it was. And I immediately went to my sales team and I said, let's look at our entire sales process and identify everything that's a whisker. So the whole point here is mice only see two things. They either see whiskers, which means there's a cat around, you know, danger, or they see cheese, and that means that there's a reward around. And so if you're selling to the marketplace, don't show any whiskers, just show cheese. You know, I mean, more cheese, less whiskers, more cheese. And it had a profound, profound impact. It was like a 15 minute conversation, but you could just see the increased sales. And I said, stop talking about that. Don't talk about us, talk about them. You know, talking about yourself is pure whiskers. Talking about them is pure cheese, you know, and everything. But I would say, you know, because we have JR in on the call that JR, I don't think you necessarily think about it as 10 minute talk, but when you get a handle to create an article, a sales letter, a podcast, or anything else, there's some sort of process that you go through where what might have started off as a very complex amount of information has to just be narrowed down to something that can be gotten across and then continually reinforced throughout that letter.

Yeah. Not everything is most important. Something is most important. So when you say narrowing down. Absolutely, there are things. I happen to think everything Joe says is important, but it needs to be turned into multiple things, articles. Something has to come first and it has to be turned into valuable material. So, yeah, I absolutely agree with everything you said.

And I think all great communicators have this ability to take something very, very complex and just get it down to very, very simple things. But one of the things that I wanted to contribute, I put together a little position piece, strategy piece for Joe, but I said, let's just move the 10 minute talk right to the center of Genius Network. The biggest thing here, you say they come for Affilia and they come for ideas, but in my world, they come for capabilities. In other words, by being in a room for a day or being in a room for two days, they want to be noticeably better at something leaving at the end of the second day. That doesn't depend upon them being there for it to work. In other words, they've actually gained a new skill. They've actually gained a new capability. So by putting the 10 times talk right at the center, you're saying to them, I can actually show you how to engage with an amazing universe of marketing capabilities all around the world. A lot of it electronic of course today because of the Internet. But you can't go through that doorway until you have a 10 minute talk. So I call it a qualifying threshold. You can sit here and listen to the ideas and you're going to get value. But if you really, really want to create a genius network of amazing marketing capab that will just multiply you 10 times, 100 times, thousand times, you don't get to go through that doorway until you have your 10 minute talk.

I totally agree with that. And I will say that I never would have thought of it that seriously had I not gotten the feedback from Dan related to this and not talked about it. And what I'm finding now with all of our members when we do the workshops at my office, we'll have everyone fill out a Genius Network 10 Minute Talk prep form which basically has three phases. There's the intro, the unveiling, and then the wrap up. And it starts with people will come up with a title. Just like if you're going to write a book, what are you going to call it? What's the topic of your presentation? Now some people have actually come up with an operating title and then they'll fill out the rest of the form. Then they'll come back and realize they want to name it something else. The topic could actually change by doing the thinking. But the form that we have the tool is they have a topic and then they write why is it so important to share? What makes this topic so unique to anything else that you could share? Then there's a genius brainstorm where people just list all the discussion points that they have to share regarding the topic and then they select the very top five. And then there's three sections where there's an intro which we have them think about. If you had three minutes to kind of intro this, your ideal outcome, best result for the listener, the big promise and why. And then the unveiling, sharing your wisdom and have about a five minute chunk for that, list the top five bullet points from above. And it may end up being one bullet point. And what's one compelling story or lesson that you can share that supports the topic or the idea? And then there's the wrap up, which is about two minutes. What is the number one takeaway you want the listener to remember? And what's the single most important action that they can take right now to implement that? Now, if someone goes through that level of thinking, hearing about it here is one thing, but actually sitting down and doing it creates this whole context and creates this structure. And we've had everyone do it. Even people that have never spoken publicly before. They're successful, but that's not their thing. They could be really introverted or they're in a business that doesn't yet lend itself. What happens with everyone doing it? All of a sudden the light bulb goes off. And I've had people that never even they had anything to talk about now determined by doing it. Wow. Not only can I talk about this, but I could do a 10 minute talk on this and this and this. I can go share this with my team. I can use this in my personal life. I can write an article. And books have been sprouted out of this. Entire new speeches have been sprouted out of this. Products have been created out of it. I remember Doug Andrews heard one of the talks at a Genius Network annual event and he literally implemented something that made him over a million dollars within a year just from one of the talks.

That's the thing when you look at your commitment to somebody getting a 10 times return on their participation in Genius Network, that they're going to turn their $25,000 investment into $250,000. You and I have had conversations about that. That there's really only two things that are going to drive that. It's going to be an idea that they get or a connection that they make because of being part of the network. Being able to articulate your idea. It's almost like when to the annual event they get to see and be exposed to all of these ideas. It's almost like from concentrate you see all of that. You get to see what is possible, what the idea is and attach that to who that person is that you need to be able to connect with the brilliance of that. Really it is a multiplier in terms of the volume of information that you get in one of those events as opposed to if everybody had an hour to expand and talk all their stuff.

You know, the difference for me that the 10 minute talk actually does for me is that I'M a great consumer of ideas. I really operate in the realm of ideas. But there's a huge difference between being a consumer of ideas and a creator of ideas. It's almost like you can tell people what going out on a first date is like and you can actually have a program that actually tells them, but if they just listen to the tape and never have an actual first date, it isn't really, really going to make that much difference. I have people who have come to introductions for a strategic coach for 15 years and they probably have logged in about 25 watching Dan present the program, but they've actually never joined the program. And I said, you know, if you add up 25 introductions, it doesn't add up to an hour of the workshop, you know, in terms of the impact. So one of the things I think what is so amazing about this, I mean, it's simple, there's a lot in it, is that it's an actual transformation that takes the people's clarity about who they are is transformed. Their confidence about who they are and their ability to communicate is profoundly transformed. But not only that, they come out of it with a capability. And it's a half hour of thinking and 10 minutes of talking. And the thing about it is that you do it the first time and you've got a great coach who comes and actually critiques people. And he's very positive as Joel Welpin and he really, really tells the truth about what the impact of it. I'm a speaker. I've been there for 40 years. I've sold tens of thousands. But I have to tell you, when I went through Joe's critique, I said, I feel like a baby starting over again. And I have had more progress in the last two and a half months of my writing, my presenting, my creation of new ideas than I had in the previous 20 years. And it was all because I gave the talk and I got the critique. And I think that just the willingness to go into that process, as you can see, say you're just a 10 minute talk away from 10 times bigger.

Results and measurable improvement.

Yeah, you know, I want to really speak to what you just said, Dan. This obviously is a plug for both of our programs. It's one of those things to where you can read it, you can listen to it, you can hear it, but actually doing it are two completely different things. Let's take the world of sports. For the amount of players out on the field, there are multiple observers that watch, yell, scream, hope, cry, try, bet, lose, win. But how Many the ones that really make the most, they get the biggest benefits, not just financially, but fame and all of the other things otherwise are the participants. And so you can be a player of the game or you can observe it. And until you actually get in the arena, you're not going to have the chance to win big, but it might keep you from losing. But I think if you won't step in the arena, you're losing anyway because you're not willing to go there. And that's why I love working with people that are in the arena. The dust and sweat and bar. You don't Theodore Roosevelt quotes and what you said, Dan, about capabilities. I have said this before and I don't think it's 100% true all the time, but I think it's true most of the time that most people don't want to go to seminars or read books or listen to podcasts or participate in webinars or go through workshops or any of that stuff. What they want is they want results. But in order to get results, they need capabilities. And the only way that I know how to deliver capabilities to people, people is to actually educate them, have other people share with them, present, get them together and do that sort of stuff. And so this is a capability process. And the 10 minute talk, one of the things that I'm getting a big kick out of is I've had several people that have come to the annual events and have given 10 minute talks and have watched and observed all of the great content. And I really like TED talks. I mean, I've watched many, many TED talks. I've gone to a couple of TED events and I've had people that have actually spoken at TED, that have spoken at Genius and have given a 10 minute talk, and people that go to TED events that have come up to me and say, this is more valuable to me as an entrepreneur than going to ted.

Well, there's a big difference. I've recently kind of made this distinction because I'm a big consumer of ideas too. But you can tell the difference between somebody giving what I call a book report, meaning they've read and adapted ideas and they're sharing what they've learned, versus field reports, which are people who've been out and actually gotten a result. And there's so much more value in the field report than the book report.

Right.

I just want to test out an idea here because one of my thesis is that the 10 minute talk is the starting point of all other communications. So I'm just going to ask JR here. If someone came to you and all this information was totally clear for you and they could send their video from, you know, when they're with Joe, of them giving the talk and you got the transcript and you as a really superb copywriter, you got that information, what would that do for you then?

Yeah, well, it gets rid of the twaddle. Twaddle is a lot of nonsense, by the way. Twaddle is a Charlie Munger word and it just clarifies, simplifies, and gets to the core of the most important essence of what someone is communicating. That is what this tool does. And it turns, I guess you'd say a commodity, which is a bunch of talk, into value, which is a 10 times that is a very important difference.

Yeah, I know what twaddle is. Who's Charlie Munger? That's just a joke. That is.

Well, so here's what I'd like to do to kind of wrap up with the whole point of the conversation, which is just a subtle way to plug the heck out of my genius network. And any high level person just needs to join immediately if this resonates. No, but in all seriousness, there are some people that don't want to participate at this level. They just want to go and listen, but they're not willing.

And that's not being part of a network.

Exactly. Network for Strategic Coach. For someone to really come to those programs, we don't want to really talk about Dean's breakthrough blueprint too much, but we will. To actually go through that, you need to love ideas, you need to want to be able to interact. You also need to have a semblance of being coachable because some people are too cool for school. They know a lot, but man, you're not going to teach them anything without kicking and screaming sort of thing. So it's really for people that love and appreciate ideas, they like sharing and they want to continually develop their own. And if you have a rough idea or you have some wisdom that you've captured, your ability to really think it through, cut out all the fat and the waste and really get to the essence of it, man. Is your story going to improve? If your story improves, everything about how your clientele respond to you is going to improve, your sales are going to improve. And my bet is you're going to make a heck of a lot more money and make a heck of a lot more impact. That's why it's really important to think about this. And with the massive amount of overwhelmed information that people are being hammered with, there's nothing that I could think of that would be a more valuable way for me to deliver things to people than do it in the form of best practice and 10 minute talks, but also teaching them how to do it so they can not only learn from everyone else in Genius Network, but they can start doing it themselves. And so we're going to continually go deep with this process. Now, in Future episodes of 10X Talk, we'll continue to talk about what we're learning from this. And I just wanted to kind of share this. So I'll just leave any wrap up famous last words with you guys if you want to add anything else to it.

I'm excited about coming back doing another 10 minute talk. I learned so much doing them.

Yeah. Well, what I've done since Joe and I have been talking about this is simply to start all my planning for if I'm writing a book, if I'm putting together a new workshop, is to frame everything as a 10 minute talk at the start and then move into that particular framework of a workshop or a book chapter or a sales letter. So for the rest of my life, and I've just planned out my next 25 years, over this next 25 years, all idea creation starts with a 10 minute talk. Even if I'm not giving it as a 10 minute talk, the thinking is going to be the 10 minute talk.

There you go. The thinking is the 10 minute talk. You just said a key word here because a lot of people are like, well, I don't talk. I don't go in front of audiences. Well, yeah, you do all day long. And you do it in your own head. You do it when you're just sitting there. And so it's a great process to do that. It'll help you lay down the tracks. And you want to say anything.

Jer, who was the sculptor who would sculpt away anything that wasn't the sculptor? Was that Michelangelo?

Yes.

This Michelangelo's your communications. So that's what this tool does.

Love it. Awesome. Well, it's always a joy, all four of us together. This is the first time we've ever done this in the same room together. So to all of Our listeners, subscribe to 10xtalk.com and ilovemarketing.com, post your comments and let us know what the title and topic is of your 10 minute talk and what this did for your thinking and what do you think it'll do for your future? If you go deep with this and if you want to see us in person, then check out geniusnetwork.com and come to one of our events and go from there. And today will be the last day of the way you used to be. Thank you.