The 90-Day Mindset Shift for Exponential Growth ft. Dan Sullivan

It's about changing your game. And, you know, back in 1974, when I first started coaching, I developed a role model, and the role model was the microchip, which people were just talking about the microchip around 1974. And the microchip basically takes the speed of information and puts it into a smaller space. So the constant evolution of microtechnology over the last— 50 years. going on 50, 60 years now, has constantly pumped more and more information to more space. Well, since that was taken care of by the microchip, I decided to focus on another area and take the most actionable wisdom and pack it into the shortest period of time. And so in order— what this does is that as you do this, you actually increase your impact on the planet. And so my thing, I just, little quote here from George Bernard Shaw, that progress is impossible without change. We know that the microchip is causing change. The question is, are you changing with it? So it really requires mind shifts all the time, actually changing your mind. So I'm gonna pack 41 years of coaching. Yeah. Well, my original attempt was to Pack 41 years of coaching into 50 minutes. That was my goal. But as I got thinking about it over the last month, I decided to pack it into 30 minutes, and then leave some room for your wisdom in response to what I'm showing you. So I've taken my entire coaching career and broken it down into 3 graphics. One of them is a circle. The other one is 4 boxes, and the other one is a curve. So I'm going to go to the circle first. And what this circle really represents, and what I want you to do is to actually get your pen out because we're going to actually write here. And the thing I'd like you to do is to consider this circle all of your time and all of your activities as they're presently devoted to your business. So the circle represents Just where you are right now. And so in 15 minutes, I'm going to get you to change your mind about where you are right now. And then I have 4 boxes I'm going to show you, and in 10 minutes, I'm going to show you where— how you're going to change your mind about what you're going to do during the next 90 days. And then the upward curve that I spoke about, in 5 minutes, I'm going to show you how you're going to change your mind about what you're going to do for the next 25 years. So So this is basically what I'm gonna do in the next half hour. So the first thing I want you to do is to imagine this circle that actually has 3 parts. And what this circle really represents is your emotional reaction to different things that you're actually doing right now, snapshot of where you are right now. And what A stands— what the first outer circle stands for, we call this A, And the second one we call B, and the third one we call C. And A stands for everything in your business right now, all the time that you're spending, that really irritates you. So this is the irritating part of your life right now. How many of you can relate to that right away? Okay. Yeah. And it's very important to actually tell the truth about what irritates you, because if you don't tell the truth about what irritates you, you can't actually do something else. The second part of what your life is right now is B, and this is the okay part of your business. And usually the okay part of your business is related to cash flow. Okay, how many of you are okay with cash flow? Okay, it's not irritating, but it's also, some of it is not very exciting. Okay, and then the third part, C, really represents the part of your business where you're spending your time and your action, With— that is really fascinating and motivating. Okay, so you're very fascinated with this. It's new, it's got a lot of promise, and it's very motivating because it looks like it's going to be really big. It's going to be a lot better. Okay, how many of you have all 3 of those right now? You have irritating, you have okay. Good. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have you actually do a little list of the 3 most irritating things right now. Okay. And people can be irritating. So how many of you have people who are irritating? Yeah. Situations. How many of you have situations that are irritating? Right. And how many of you just have activities or tasks that are very irritating? You know, maybe obligations. How many of you have obligations that are irritating? Yeah. So anyway, it's just your truth. And I'm just going to give you an example of 3 of mine. And one of mine is spending any time with entrepreneurs who don't have any ambition. Okay, it seems like a wasted effort to me. How many of you realize that being an entrepreneur is a life sentence? How many of you know you can't go back? How many of you know they won't have you? How many of you wouldn't hire you? Okay, so that's really— so I tell people it's a life sentence. There's no out. And so don't do your life sentence in an irritating fashion. Actually get rid of the irritations. That's why you became an entrepreneur in the first place. Okay, so the second one for me is meetings that don't have any impact. Okay, so we have a tool in Strategic Coach which is called the Impact Filter. And what I require is that before we have a meeting, I want your impact filter the day before, because I don't want to spend half the meeting trying to figure out what the meeting's about. I want to know what the meeting's about the next day, and I don't ask anyone to meet with me unless they get an impact filter. And then the next one is non-strategic days and hours. So I have a time system where I only do 3 important things a day. Okay. So sometimes I get my 3 important things done by 11 o'clock in the morning, and that's my day. The rest of the day is not for work. Okay. And the reason why I figure 3 hours, 3 things a day, is that in a 5-day work week, I get 15 important things done. How many of you, if you got 15 important things done in a week, that's a good week? Okay. And I work, 210 days a year. Babs and I— Babs is she who decides. So anyway, she who decides decided about 25 years ago that we'd take 155 free days a year, so we have free, which gives me 210 days. And if I do 3 important things, that's 630 important things. 630 important things in a year. How many of you, if you did 630 important things in here, it would be a good year. And do that for 25 years and, uh, a good lifetime for a life sentence. Okay, so that's yours. Now I want you to write down right now where you are, this is October 26th, 2015, what really irritates you now. And there's a huge bonus for telling the truth here. Okay, just tell the truth about what irritates you. Okay? If you don't tell your brain what irritates you, your brain can't take action. Your brain can't see any solution to it. So just write it down. The moment you write it down, your brain starts finding the solution. Could be big or small. A lot of people won't write what irritates them because they think there isn't a solution. But the truth is there is no solution until you write it down. Yeah. So, you know, our brain just wants to know what to work on and you're the only one that can tell it. Okay. So that's it. Okay. Now I'm going to move on to okay. And for me, okay is, I like intro sales presentations. We started off where I had to travel all over the world actually to do sales presentations. Now they're closer to home and they don't irritate me, they don't excite me, but they're great. I mean, they're great for cash flow and I'm still in a position where that's important for my company, so I do it, but it's not— I'd like to see a future where I don't have to do this anymore. And that's usually what okay things are for you. It's, you'll do it right now. Another one is coaching the basic concepts. So we've been coaching for 41 years, and I personally coached 6,000 people. And there's basic concepts related to time and money and relationship and purpose. And I don't mind coaching those. I mean, I'm more excited about The new stuff that's being created, but I'll do it. And then the third one is, there's new knowledge products that I'm creating, and there's parts of the process that's okay for me. Lots of parts of the process are fascinating and motivating, but there's still some things that are okay. Okay? So this is a good area. This is a tremendous area. And what we want to do as part of the logic of what I'm showing you, this ABC model, is you want to always every 90 days be eliminating Your current irritating, and then you want to systematize and automate the Bs, the okay part. So that's a— that's kind of a progression: eliminate the As, systematize and automate the Bs. The Four Seasons Hotel has a great line, which is, systematize the predictable and humanize the exceptional. Okay, so the more you can systematize the predictable part of your business, it frees you up to humanize, which means creativity and all sorts of new kinds of innovation, and it's really great. And then the third one, C, is what I love. I've come up with this fabulous new idea. I'm so excited. And it's been about the last 6 months where I've discovered how you can score mindsets. And basically what I'm really discovering is that the whole world actually runs by mindsets. It doesn't run by products or services. It actually runs by people wanting to graduate in their lives to a particular type of mindset. And I figured out how to create the mindsets. But not only that, I can teach anyone else how to create a mindset, a scorecard for mindsets that are important to you. So I'm very, very excited about this. Next thing is we have a part of the program which is called the 10 Times Ambition Program. And I really love it because I'm about 90 days ahead of my clients, and I have to constantly come up with new stuff, and I'm very excited about that. And my final one is I've got a whole group, a growing number of my 10x clients. You know, a lot of them are in the room right here. You know, Joe, very much so. I've got Dean Graziosi here. I've got Stefan Wissenbach. I've got lots and lots of people here. And they're really changing games for other people. So I really, really love Robin. Robin's over here. Robin's a game changer. So I really, really, really love working with people who are game changers. And my definition of a game changer is that where all of your competitors actually become your customers and promoters. When you have changed the game of the entire industry, then your competitors actually become your biggest customers and your biggest promoters. And you can tell, that's one of the telltale signs. How many of you would really like to do that? You would actually— yeah, that's a huge thing. I really don't like competition. You know, I like everybody else to be competing, but I just really don't like doing it. I'm the 5th child of 2 5th children, and we kind of I wasn't born with a competitive chip. I was just born with a sneaky chip. Sneaky chip. I know how to bypass trouble. And I never thought competing was really a good use of time.

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So the big thing here now, how many of you this is clarifying? You know, it's kind of clarifying where you are, and you do this every 90 days. Like, this gives you 90 days of work and you can make a big shift. How many of you, if you eliminated the A's, automated and systematized the B's, And then focus a lot more time on the C's, this would be a big deal for you. This would be a big shift. Okay, well, how are we going to figure out where we are right now? So what I want you to do, you'll notice the little boxes right under A, B, and C, your activities. What I want you to do is say what percentage out of 100% of your time right now, what percentage are you spending in A? What amount of time are you spending in B? And what amount of time are you spending in C? And these are my real numbers for this quarter. Okay? And what I want to tell you is, no matter how good you get at getting rid of A's, next quarter there will be a new bunch of A's that irritate you. Some of the okay's right now will become irritating next quarter. Okay? And the reason is because as you get more and more into fascinating and motivating, Okay things become irritating. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what I want you to do now is, this is where you are right now, and what I want you to do is say what percentage of your time next time in 90 days do you want to be spending on A? And for me, it's zero. Okay? Those activities. What percentage of those activities Do I want to be spending? And I want to drop it down to 10. So I've gotten rid of 10, I've gotten rid of 10% there. And so next time I want to spend 90% of my time on this. Okay? Really good. How many of you can see the shift? That's a big shift. 20% of your time being shifted to fascinating and motivating. That's a big deal. How many of you can get excited? Really good. Right now by the prospect of doing that? Yeah, that's really super. Now I'm just going to have you come down below this, and I want you to say how you're actually going to do this. Okay? So one of our things is that the scorecard concept that we have, we've really developed it very well at the 10x ambition level. And now next, over the next quarter, I want it to go throughout the program. Everybody on a scorecard. Impact filter only rules. Okay. So sometimes I let people meet with me without an impact filter, and I'm getting mad as hell, and I'm not going to put up with it anymore. And so the next quarter, no impact filter, no meeting. And the next one is just to reinforce my 3 things a day. Okay. 3 important things. You know, if you restrict the number of things that you do in a day to a fixed number, like 3, you only have one way of improving, and that is the— since you can't increase the quantity of things that you're doing, you have to increase the quality. OK, so I'm an enemy of busyness on the planet. I'm a huge enemy of busyness. I think busyness interferes with people's growth of ambition, and I think busyness interferes with people's sense of courage. Okay. You can fool yourself by being busy that you're actually making progress, but it's a bit of a treadmill. Okay. And then I'm just going to put these in. More of this is my information, but I want you to say the 3 things that you're going to do to automate and systematize B. And then with the 90% that I have here, and you have another percentage, what I want you to do is to actually say what you're going to really focus on and what these activities are. So we've identified 9 possible areas for growth, and we've identified 9 activities that would lead to growth. And this is really super. We're really moving very, very nicely here. Okay, so this is, this is cool. And now if you could only do one thing over the next quarter, If you could only do one thing, I'll let you— I know some of you are writing furiously. Okay. 60% of my client base historically have been ADD. And so I've found that with ADD people, you got to do it really fast and you got to get them to write in small boxes. That you can keep them almost forever and have them only write about themselves. I find the greatest way to engage another human being is have the entire conversation be only about them. How many of you are quite engaged when it's about you? Yeah. That comes from being a 5th child. I have a rule. I'm number 21, so when I meet a new person, I automatically assume that they have 20 more important things in their life than meeting me. Okay, and then if they are going to move me up into the top 20, it's because I'm creating value for them that actually engages them, but it has to be about them. Okay, so that makes, that makes life a lot simpler. You know, the worst illusion in life that this, any of this was created for you. Okay, so what I want you to do now is zero in on the one thing That would actually be a game changer? What would be a game changer here? Okay. And you can only pick one. You'll do more than one, but I want you to have your focus on one. Okay. So for me, it's the— I have 3 game changers and I want to get them into a digital platform. So not only do they have a scorecard, but they have a digital platform. And by— What's a digital platform? By December— January 31st, I want 3 of my game changers with a scorecard in a digital platform. Okay? And I'm working with Stefan here, bright guy from England. Not all of them are, you know. They stick out. Yeah. All right. That goes for Americans too. All right. So how many of you this is revealing? So this is kind of like a really, really fast way of taking a look at your quarter. Now here's a real tip for you. How many of you have teams? Okay. Go back. There's an extra blank one of these in your pack. Go back and do this with your team. And allow your team the movement now to get rid of the irritating work. And a lot of the irritating work really is what your company used to do, but it's, it's not really necessary. You know, it's kind of like your wardrobe, 80% of it you haven't worn in a year. Okay, so why do you still have those clothes around? Okay, just get rid of it. And how many of you have people in your life that are like clothes, 80% of them 80% of them, you feel some sort of obligation, but you actually don't act on it. So we get rid of that. Okay, now we got to do another thing. So we're going to go to the 4 boxes right now. And this is a little thing that I discovered probably over the course of my life, but most people want— To be right. A change delivered to them so they can always stay in a state of capability and confidence. And that's what perfectionism, by the way, perfectionism is absolutely the enemy of entrepreneurism, because perfectionism is the demand that you be guaranteed upfront with success before you'll actually commit yourself to it. How many of you have done that, where you absolutely guarantee— You demand that success be guaranteed to you before you'll actually commit to the project. Okay? And the world doesn't work that way. It needs you to actually commit before the success can actually be created. And what that requires is courage. Okay? So commitment requires courage. So I want you to take the game changer breakthrough from the previous one, and I want you just to write From the bottom of the ABC page, write what you have in the bottom box and put that at the top. Okay? And so we have the create one-on-one game changer coaching process by December 31st. Okay? So we'll have that in place. And then this is really part of getting them digital. Okay? And then my commitment. Now, a commitment is the statement to yourself that I am going to commit to this even though I don't have the guarantee of success. And that's what entrepreneurism is, that you commit yourself before you have a guarantee of success. Okay? And I've coached entrepreneurs all over, you know, all over the world from 60, 70 different industries. And one of the things I notice is when entrepreneurs start to die is when they start thinking of having a courage-free Future. When you start thinking you're going to have a courage-free life, the universe notices. It's a bit like the Terminator, the light's going out like this, and the universe starts wanting the parts back. When you tell the universe, I want a courage-free life, the universe wants the parts back. Okay? And you start dying, okay, in life. So with mine, by the end of 2015, I used all my experience from individual game-changing coaching sessions over the past 2 and a half years to create a unique process that standardizes everything I know will be working for all existing and new Game Changer sessions in 2016. Okay, so Game Changer is the scary part of my life right now. Okay, and I'm really— I just have to create it out of courage right now. When I— the moment you start creating stuff, and each of you can analyze the 5 biggest You've taken all the breakthroughs in your life with this card. Okay? Every time you took a big breakthrough in your life is because you committed before there was a guarantee of success, which required courage. The difference between courage and confidence is that confidence feels really good. Courage doesn't feel— how many of you, when you're feeling really shaky and you're feeling really, really scared, and you're saying, oh, this is really terrible, actually it's courage? It's actually courage. And that's why a lot of people don't like courage because it feels lousy. Okay? But the more you commit 100%, the shorter the courage that's required. And that's really interesting. So I'm into short courage. I've tested long courage, and I like short courage. I like courage that's maybe 24-hour courage. Okay? 15 minutes is even better. 15 minutes is better. You know, then there's some people, crazy people like Peter Diamandis, who has a lifetime of courage. Lifetime of courage. I'm not that advanced yet. Okay, then the courage is that I hate going back. First of all, I have to go back and do an activity that I actually hate, and I have to collect all my notes over the last 2 and a half years, and I got to organize them because I'm the only one who knows where they are. And I'm the only one who knows how they actually connect with each other. So part of courage is for a while doing a particular type of activity that moves you to the next level, but you're going to have to put in the time to actually do that. How many of you have something right now that it requires a very unpleasant activity on your part for a period of time, but if once you get it finished, then you never have to do that again in your life, and it puts you in a position where you can take a jump? Yeah. And so everybody thinks about courage, you know, like in a very heroic medal-winning terms, but a lot of courage is just what it is in your life right today that is required to go through to get to the next level. There's 7.3 billion people on the planet right now, and each of them got up during this 24-hour period and they're facing something that represents the next jump for them. Okay. So one of my goals, I'll talk to you a little bit later, is that this is an exercise that's going to be online. It'll be an online app by the end of this month, probably by November 1st. And it's for phones, it's for pads, and it's for computers where you can just download this and use it. But what I'd like you to do is to distribute it to everybody in your network. Because I have a goal, and this is my influence from Peter Diamandis, that by 2039 we have a billion people on the planet using this exercise to basically grow on a daily basis. It'll be 1 out of 9 people. And if you have 1 out of 9 people actually going through courage on a day, it makes everything better. Just makes it— What they're doing, I have no idea, nor do I care. I just want them moving forward on the thing that gives them courage. That's all I want to do. OK? And then once we get this, you get a capability out of it. So it's the commitment and the courage that actually creates capability. OK? So it's a bit like the commercials, you know, apply, lather, rinse, reapply. This is the same thing here. Okay? So the same thing is you have to— commitment creates courage, courage creates capability, capability creates confidence. So the next one is confidence. Okay? And see, this is what people really, really want, but they want confidence given to them. Nobody can give you confidence. You have to create confidence by going through commitment, courage, capability. And developing a new capability, and it's the 3 of those. And once you get the higher level of confidence, then you can commit at a higher level. Okay? And as long as you keep doing this for the rest of your life, you'll always be young. No matter what age you are, you'll always be young. People get old when they try to have capability and confidence without commitment and courage. Okay? So that, that's just how the world works. And what it means to be truly human. Okay, so that's it. So I've— this is what your next 90 days is about. How many of you, if you did this during the next 90 days, that would be a real breakthrough? Yeah. Yeah. And I've got a lot of people here. You know, we have 300 in the room, and each of you is working on something else, and it's you working on something else that makes the world go round. Okay? Because you influence a lot of other people while you're doing it. Okay. It's not big stuff. It's the thing that you have to deal with right now. Okay. Now I'm going to take you to the next one. And this is an upward arrow. And this is really important. So I did the 90 days. You've just done the ABC to set this up, and then you did the 4 Cs. And now I'm going to show you that if you do the— ABC and you do the 4 Cs every day, or every— at the beginning of every 90 days, that just locks you in just for the next 90 days. So in my program at Strategic Coach, the time period I get everybody to think about is 25 years. Okay? So for me, I started a new 25-year period last year, 2014, and I'm going to— How old are you? 2039. But for you today, what you're doing, you're doing 25 years from 2015 to 2040. Okay? So last year I was 70. So my next growth period, and this will be my biggest growth period, is from age 70 to age 95. So when I'm 95, I'm more energized. I'm a lot smarter. I'm a lot more ambitious than I am right now. Okay? And the reason I want to do that is because I want to do it. People say, well, why do you need to do that? I say, I do not need to do that. I want to do it. Okay? Most of you in this room are beyond the borderline of need. You're into the world now of want. Okay? And want doesn't have anything to do with other people thinking about what you should do. Want is simply, this is what I want to do. And the reason why you want to do it is because you want to do it. How many of you, that's actually relieving? There's no justification in the world of wanting. In the world of needing, there's total justification because you're expecting other people to do it. In the world of wanting, strictly your game. So you got the 90 days, and then you do 100 quarters like this. So you do the ABCs. So this quarter, which goes right up until the beginning of 2016, You do that, okay, and then you jump to a higher level, and then the beginning of the next 90 days, you do that, and you do this for 100 quarters in a row. How many of you think it would really take you somewhere? Yeah. And remember, each one of those 90 days is just 1% of 25 years. So if you blow one, it doesn't really matter. So what I do is every quarter I do 5 things. This is my number one thing, but I actually do 5 things, 5 multiplier projects. And it's like compound interest. See, people think— people really grasp compound interest when it comes to money, but they don't actually understand compound interest when it comes to capability. So every 90 days I want to ratchet up my level, first of all, of operating in the area of fascinating and motivating, and I want to ratchet up being in a continual cycle of commitment, courage, capability, and confidence, and do that every quarter. And it's like investing now in something that's going to keep paying off. One of the big problems of living in the microchip age is people's reduced Timeframes. And if you reduce your timeframes, time speeds up. If you lengthen your timeframe, everything slows down. Okay? Okay, so this is October 26th, 2015. I'd like to take you down to— back to October 26th, 1990. And what I'd like you to do is tell me the 3 things that were really ticking you off that day. Nobody remembers. How many of you though can remember what generally you were really excited about in 1990? How many of you can get a handle on that? So here's a tip. Our brain only remembers excitement. It doesn't remember getting ticked off. That being the case about the future, don't try to remember getting ticked off in the future. Just get— just remember, see, the only memory-worthy things that are things that are fascinating and motivating. Nothing else is worth Reminding, doesn't last more than a couple days.

I'm in an industry filled with, you know, people that, uh, you know, are frankly kind of scummy marketers. And I've, I've— like my buddy, uh, Harvey Mackay, you know, he wrote a book called, you know, How to Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive. I mean, you go into the industry of publishing books and speaking or whatever, you're going to run into a lot of sharks. The question is, you know, like, what's your reputation? And so I think You know, takes years to build a great reputation and a moment of stupidity to destroy it. Well, it also takes many constant little stupidities to build a lifetime of a bad reputation. And so a lot of these people aren't making a mistake once, they just don't care. And so that's— so anyway, so the point is, with, with taking all of this marketing, you know, me and you tend to attract, I think, a very high quality member and client because of the way we market and the way that we bring value. And we speak to this. I think we, you know, not that they can't sneak in and don't try to get into our world. The people that are scummy, they come into our worlds trying to steal what we do. And then there's other people that come into our worlds because they're genuinely wanting to grow and build their companies. They want to be around really smart people. They're smart themselves. They want to be contributors. And, you know, the very best Genius Network members don't just come to learn something. They actually come to help, they come to be contributors. And I think that's the commonality between, you know, our clients is they're filled with a lot of givers and they're filled with a lot of, you know, talented individuals. And so what I'm doing to prepare for my sabbatical is I'm like, all right, I've got this incredible group of talented people. It's a connection network. What are the results that they want? And so you have this DOS conversation, which is dangers, opportunities, and strengths. And you have this R-factor question that I've learned from the day I started Strategic Coach, where you ask people, if we were to meet a year from today, what needs to happen both personally and professionally for you to feel happy with your progress? So for the last several months, I've been asking our members in ways, a lot of them, we just ask them questions. Even during my annual event, what do you want before the annual event? Me and Dean Jackson did a special training on how to prepare for the annual event, and we asked people to type into the chat, What do you want? What is it that they want? And then I designed our annual event and the entire year of curriculum, uh, that I'm going to be gone on sabbatical to deliver results based on the DOS of our clients. Yeah. So I took your DOS conversation, which you teach Strategic Coach members, utilize this to help identify, you know, because once COVID hit, uh, same people but their DOS changed. All of a sudden they had different dangers, different opportunities, and we have to utilize their strengths in order to help them reach their opportunities. Because as you say, people are not going to reach their opportunities until you help them eliminate the real dangers and their psychological dangers.

Yeah.

So, now, there's cash flow dangers that didn't exist before COVID for many companies. And so, I'm now having strategic coach methodology in terms of finding out what my Genius Network members want, and then we package it and deliver it, and it's done and curated through other members. And so, Dean Jackson is doing this whole training. Not only are we teaching people, uh, and we're recording all this. So any new members that come in have access to all of this knowledge and, and it's, and it's all there in the membership site. And so, uh, Dean is gonna be doing training the whole year on this free book thing. And so I went and registered URLs for, uh, every Genius Network member that we could capture their name for a free book. And that's part of being in Genius Network. And we're setting up, uh, the websites and And we're setting up the systems and the databases. So they're not just— and we're showing them exactly how to put together a book, a short, simple book, how to do it as effectively as possible. So it's a really good book, not with a bunch of different topics, but on a specific topic. Dean's training that. I'm doing that until my sabbatical starts because I've done already 2 of the trainings with Dean. And then Chris Voss— I wish I could even speak to this on this podcast, but today Chris Voss He came to my house last week when he was in town. I had Mark Tarbell actually make dinner for us, which was super cool. He's a— he won Iron Chef. And Chris is like, he's like, you know, people— he's, he's been so involved as a speaker in Genius Network that people thought he was a member, and he had not become a member yet. And he's like, man, I need to join Genius Network. I've gotten so much value. And he shows up wearing a Genius Network shirt. He's great. I love Chris. And he's the former FBI hostage negotiator. He was the top international FBI hostage negotiator in the world. And he wrote a book called Never Split the Difference, which has now sold over a million copies. And it's the top negotiation book in the world. And so Chris is incredibly bright. And so he's like, you know, I got to join Genius Network. I look at all these related— he even said, he goes, I met Dan Sullivan through you. I met this person. But— and he was— and Chris is just really cool. And so I'm like, you know, would you be part of the faculty? He's like, I would love that. I'd love that. So Eunice is talking with him today about being part of the faculty for the $100K Group and for Genius Network to teach our members the very best negotiation methodologies that he's learned. And so, yeah, when people ask who's going to run Genius Network, I'm like, it's going to be run by the awesome members. That's who's going to run Genius Network.

Yeah. And the thing that's going to develop out of it, you know, and I'll give you an example of Long time ago, this is during the '90s. I had a client who was deeply involved in—he was a financial advisor, but very successful financial advisor—and he was involved in Latter-day Saints, the Mormon Church. And he had, you know, and you know, those who know LDS. They don't really have a clergy as such. They have people who, you know, um, uh, you know, are prominent in the community and they take responsibility for the various activities that let the church grow. And, uh, he came to me one day and, uh, and I've always had a lot of, uh, very, very successful, um, entrepreneurs in the program who are also members of LDS. And I'm, you know, my knowledge of this goes back 30 years before the conversation. And he says, he said, well, he said, I've been asked by, you know, the, the top members in the church in Salt Lake City if I would take 3 years off and go to Brazil and be in charge of the missions, you know, the missions to, you know, to spread the faith in Brazil and also bring in new members. And I said, so, you know, I'm guessing that you said yes. And he said, yes, I did. And he says, but the question is, how can I do it? I have a company. And he says, when we're on a mission like that, we can't be back in touch with the, you know, we might call once during the 12 months, but we can't be doing that. And he says, I'm going to have to take family member, family members with me. So I said, well, if you say yes, when do you have to go? And he said, well, I'm talking to you early. He says, it's a year from now. And I says, good. He said, let's do a strategy circle, which is, you know, a very fundamental thinking tool in coach. And what it does is say that When he gets to the leave date before he leaves for Brazil, this is going to be true. All these things are going to be true about how he's taking care of the company so that the company can exist when he comes back 3 years from now. Okay. So, he does it and leaves a year later, has his strategy circle, communicates with all his team, puts it in place and everything else. Comes back 3 years later. And the company has grown 25% each year. So it was double the size when he got back. And 2 things about it, Joe, it was double the size and very profitably, but there wasn't any work for him because all the work had been taken up by other people. So he says, well, we're— he was city-based, you know, they, they had an area, but it was based on a single city. And so he said, I'm gonna make this a regional company. So in the next 4 or 5 years, he— they had like 5 offices in different cities. And again, they had grown. And, and one day he says, can I talk to you afterwards? And I said, sure. And he said— He had a big smile on his face and he said, I need another one of those strategy circles. And I said, okay, what was the phone call about this time? And he said, they'd actually like me just to devote the rest of my life to growing the church. I said, they give you a year? And he said, yeah, they gave me a year. I said, okay, let's do another strategy. I mean, I said, it worked last time. Why wouldn't it work this time? And the big thing was now is that he was giving up the company, you know, because he wouldn't be there. And what he achieved out of that is his company agreed to him that for the rest of his life, they would give him an amount of money equal to his best year, best year, and then they would own the company. But every year for the rest of his life, The company, as long as it existed, and it's still in existence, would pay him out the biggest amount that, you know, it was equal to the biggest amount that he had ever received. And now he's, you know, he's like, you know, I see a picture every once in a while of the leading, you know, the leading contributors and the top leaders, and he's right there, you know, like every 2 or 3 years I see him, he's moving up. But the whole point is that, you know, he took into account everything that his company had to be ready for the first time and then, of course, the second time. And I tell this story. I said, you know, if you give yourself the right amount of time and you do the right type of communication, you can pull off anything in the world. As long as you're willing to trust other people that they'll take it seriously and they'll, you know, they'll do their best so that you feel happy about the experience.

Exactly. I love that. That's, I mean, the wheels are turning in my head with you telling that story as it relates to my own team right now. I mean, I won't say exactly because I have to think about it, but that's really interesting. You know, you taught me the concept of strategic byproducts, that when you pursue a goal, you know, the example I always use all the time with people is if you're gonna run a marathon, right? If you decide you're gonna be in a Spartan Race, or you're gonna do some physical activity, and it's 6 months from now, and you have to, you know, prepare physically for, you know, something that will require endurance as an example. Well, then all of a sudden you start eating differently. You might change your sleep schedule. You may quit, you know, drinking alcohol with your friends or whatever. And all of these things happen off to the side, which you call strategic byproducts. And so when I go on my sabbatical, I'm looking for the strategic byproducts. But even what you just explained, I realized when, when I first heard that from you, that my entire life, of all the things that have really been the biggest breakthroughs, were never the initial goal. They were all the strategic byproducts of pursuing a goal. But I paid attention to the things that happened off on the side, and by paying attention to it, I was able to develop stuff. And, you know, I keep having people ask me, you know, well, are you going to quit thinking about business and stuff? Are you going to not do anything business-wise? And I said, look, I go, my brain is my brain. I mean, I can't say exactly what my— you know, I'm not going to tell my brain, even if I did tell my brain, do not think about business, do not think about what you spent you know, since literally— how long have I been in business now? I mean, I, I've had my own company for, damn, you know, uh, over 30 years now, right? Yeah. And it's, you know, I started, you know, I started literally in my very early 20s, uh, my own company. And so I'm, you know, I certainly have all kinds of ideas and stuff. There's just certain things I won't act on. It's similar to that— remember that movie, uh, A Beautiful Mind, where he You know, he said, you know, he would see other people, but he says, I just learned to ignore them, right?

No, the great scene is where the representatives of the Nobel Prize come to announce to him that— and would he accept the prize? So they come from Oslo or Stockholm. I don't know where the center of this is. And they come and he shows his new skill. Because he's got somebody with him. And so they're talking to him and he turns to his friend. He says, are there any— are there actual people here that I'm talking to?

Yeah, exactly.

He says, I'm hearing some things. People are talking to me. I just want to check out that they're actually real, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. So, so in a, in a, in a way, you know, I'm certainly going to have— I'll certainly have ideas and stuff. You know, and that's fine that, you know, ideas can come, but I'm not going to do business. And I also made a commitment that if someone offered me $100 million to not go on a sabbatical, I would not take the money. Do I want $100 million? Of course. You know, I mean, however, I had to do that as sort of a game with myself to say, no, nothing's— this is not— I'm not going to be bought here. This is about me. This is about things will open up and it's going to be amazing. And I mean, even now, I like—

Well, the other thing is you'll get the $100 million anyways.

So your latest book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits 2.0: Scaling Up, How a Few Companies Make It and Why the Rest Don't. What's this book about? Because I would recommend people get all your books and even all your Gazelle coaches. I mean, I've been to your events. You guys do amazing stuff. Thank you. I mean, you have literally impacted— I mean, truthfully, with what your creation with EO, there are millions of people that have been impacted by the seeds that you planted. So this is your latest work. What's it— who's it for? What's it about? What will people get out of it?

Yeah, well, you know, a lot of companies start up, and there's this craze about startups and accelerators and incubators and that kind of stuff, but very few scale up. And it's the scale-ups, Joe, that really move economies, really drive innovation. And the problem is, because they're not young, they're not cute, they're older, more established companies, they don't get any attention. And so we wrote the book for them, those that have been kind of toiling away for 5 or 50 years and have finally figured out what they need to do and are going to take this thing from $10 million to a billion. And what are the key things that are necessary to scale up the company?

Gotcha. Well, I was having a conversation with, with Dan Sullivan. As you know, he's one of my dear friends, and he founded a company Strategic Coach. And he was— we were having this conversation because we have a friend, I won't mention his name, we all know him, who puts a lot of emphasis on trying to help startup entrepreneurs and putting together programs for them and all that. And Dan just made this funny comment because, I mean, I'm— I want to help anyone that, you know, really wants to grow and learn. I mean, that's why I put out my free podcast. It's like this interview. I mean, we're putting it out to the world for free just so, you know, it'll help people that come across it. And Dad made this comment. He goes, you know, there's all this emphasis on funding startups. He's like, you know, if you really want to make an impact, fund people who've like literally had to borrow the money, had to, you know, go into debt on credit cards, had no one was there to help them. He goes, that's what weeds out the ones that can make it and ones that don't. I mean, if you just hand over money to someone that's a startup just because you should give them a reward because they want to start a business, he goes, the ones that are really successful, they've They've gone through the crap, they've gone through the hell that they've had to, and I just thought it was kind of funny.

No, he's right on. It's one of, I think, the problems with incubators. They, they, they baby them too much, and then when they finally set them free, they didn't get some of the basic learnings from failing that are necessary to take the venture to the next level. And then what happens is when they do fail, it's at such a bigger level that it's devastating to their families, to their own net worth, It's a mess. And so I think, I think you gotta be careful helping folks too much in their beginning.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I heard this line, and I say this speaking from ignorance because I'm not a parent. It was, it was, the quote was, don't handicap your children by making their lives too easy. Yeah, for sure. Although I think that applies to anyone. I mean, you can really baby someone trying to start a business, and you don't— you can rob them of the learning that comes from it. Absolutely. Yeah. So, well, you've created a lot of tools. Speaking of tools, what is the Buckminster Fuller quote that you gave today? I love that quote.

Yeah, I know. I'm a mechanical engineer by training, got a worthless MBA on top of that. And Bucky had this notion that you can't really change the way people think. All you can do is give them a tool, the use of which will change their thinking. And I mean, think about what the phone has done to change our behaviors more than any other change management, you know, seminar that you might be able to go through. And so we're tool builders, and we wanted to build some tools that help people make those changes.

Well, you know, I got a lap full of stuff here that I've, you know, books and everything here. So there's a bunch of growth tools that you have, and you're known for the one-page strategic plan. Talk about what that is and where people can get it, because I want the people that are watching this and listening to this to not just, you know, have some business insight, but I'd like to send them off to where they can get access to some of the things that you have literally done with thousands of companies and have created that will make a big impact for them, that will, you know, allow them to think more strategically, more creatively. And so talk about some of the tools you've created, specifically the One Page Plan.

Yeah, it's, it's the thing that we're probably best known for. To date, about 40,000 companies are using this tool, and it was a very simple idea. Everyone sits around and says, man, how do I get everybody on the same page? Well, you gotta have the page first for everyone to get on. And we use the analogy of jazz bands. You know, I love jazz because you can bring these players in from all over the world who've never played together, but there's gotta be a few things that they have in common. And one of them is we're playing the same song. Mm-hmm. And so we thought, hey, how can we put on a single sheet of paper a way for people to get down from their core values all the way to what is the thing we need to focus on the next quarter? In a simple format that they can communicate that to everybody else in the organization. And it's this common set of music that people can all play together. So that's what it does.

So where do people get this? Because I know you make it available online. I'll put a link to all the different places that I put this interview.

So go to scalingup.com or gazelles.com, but scalingup.com, and they'll see a thing that says The OnePage tools. And we've got them in multiple languages, uh, from Russian to Spanish to French to, you know, English obviously. And so it's there for people to use free of charge. We've had them up there, uh, for decades.

Great. So what are some other tools that you've created that have been really helpful to, to yourself, to other business owners that you've done?

Well, you know, it's, it's a challenge, this whole life side and business side. You know, everyone's talking about the balance. We see it more as a blend. And so we created a one-page personal plan to go along with the one-page strategic plan so that if you can kind of, as the entrepreneur, get down and the executives in the company, what is it I need to do on the personal side? And then look at that in relation to what I've got to do on the business side and mesh those up. You know, we find people are much more successful in both aspects of their business. And we mirrored the same people, strategy, execution, and cash, but we said, look, Let's look at the relationships. Let's look at the achievements. Let's take a look at those rituals that we do on a daily basis, our exercise and other things. And then obviously there's the wealth component that we have to pay attention to. And so that's become a tool that started to really catch hold around the world as well. And then we're known for this Rockefeller Habits Checklist. What are these 10 habits, these routines, ones that John D. Rockefeller had in place over 100 years ago that made him the wealthiest guy on the planet, wealthier than any of the guys that we have here today except maybe Putin. But, and, and these are things that you can put in place in any company from startup all the way to the largest companies in the world.

Started this conference off and he was introducing Joe, if you recall, and he was talking about how like, oh, how sweet Joe Polish, he like showed up at I was in Sean's hospital room and was there with him all night. Raise your hand if you remember him saying that yesterday early in the morning. Yeah. So you want to know the whole story about that? Yeah. Okay, so first of all, I almost die. I fly out of my wheelchair. My wheelchair tips over. I hit the cement. I break almost all the bones on the right side of my body, and I get a concussion. My brain's swelling. They're going to possibly take me into surgery. I am messed up at the hospital, not too far from here, and it's late at night. I'm on a lot of meds, okay? And I think I'm gonna die, right? And in walks Joe Polish, and I thought he was my priest, okay? And so I'm sharing with Joe, like, in this moment of concussion, disorientation, I start telling Joe Polish every bad thing I've done in my life. But when you tell Joe Polish every bad thing you've done, he's like, that's nothing. That is not that impressive compared to— compared to 3 weeks when I was a teenager. So, but he's talking to me, and I am not joking, I've since become friends with this person, so don't take offense to it. But I look over and there is a woman in 8-inch stilettos and a pencil skirt. And I am looking over at this woman, I'm looking at Joe. I wave Joe closer, I'm like, did you bring a hooker to my hospital room? Oh, my God. Should we call Gabor right now? Like, is this really that— well, anyway, the hooker turned out to be his girlfriend and one of my best friends now. So that went well for nobody. But then we have a bad story for me. Hold on.

Am I not on?

You ruin every joke. Every joke.

That was Crystal, who I was with, and she's back there videotaping everything you just said.

I warned her in advance that I was gonna call her a whore, but she was like, go for it. So I got the permission. Anyway, so the next story— you see, the reason why I'm friends with Joe is because we're constantly Constantly laughing together. Okay, it's fun to get together with somebody that every time you know you're going to be with them, you're going to belly laugh. Raise your hand if you have somebody in your life that you know when you see them, you're going to have a good time and you're going to have a belly laugh. Raise it up if you know. Tell me, no matter how many stupid things they do to you, you keep them around, right? You're like, ah. That's kind of like Joe and I's friendship, you know? I'm just like, I got to keep him around. The belly laughs are worth it, right? So fast forward to this year. I've not shared this story on any stage yet, so it's very personal. And that's why I want to open it up in all honesty to the Genius Network. And it's kind of a story to let you know about why this organization is so important to me. There's a few things you may not know about me, one of which is I watched people succeed like Eben Pagan and learned so much from Eben. And then I watched people that was Eben's apprentices like Craig Clemens succeed because of following the work and actually moving nearby Eben and learning from him. And I thought, you know, that's what I want to do if I want to succeed in life. So well before I ever had the $25,000 a year to pay to learn about marketing and business and network with amazing folks like yourself. I moved to Arizona with my wife to be close to the Genius Network and Joe Polish, because I knew that y'all get together several times a year, and you go out for dinner, and maybe if I could just hang out and catch people on the way out of the building, I could get invited to these dinners, and I could learn about what to do with my business, and I could be become closer with Joe. And this is something that I really learned from Tony Robbins when I was a young kid, which is proximity is power. If you want to be around amazing experiences, then you need to be around amazing people that know how to manifest them with ease. And when you're around somebody socially, like what I love about Joe Polish is Joe is somebody that he's got a million things going on his plate, but you know what? If you call up Joe Polish and you're in town and you say, hey, you want to catch a 5 o'clock movie? He will see if he can clear his schedule to go to that movie with you. Now, find me many CEOs of successful companies that will be okay with clearing their schedule to go to a 5 o'clock movie with you, and Joe is one of those people, and that's one of the things I'm proud of, the fact that my success in business is not because of the things that I've done, but the

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

And so I moved to Arizona, and I've had so many different experiences that grew my business because I basically became a good apprentice. And if you're in this room, you probably mentored a lot of people, but are you still a good apprentice to somebody? You know, I've watched Joe quote Dan all these years. When Dan speaks, Joe actually is quiet. This is a huge thing, right? But when Joe speaks, I'm quiet. Because at the end of the day, I know what Joe tells me to do is going to make my life Better. And this year I went through a very personal thing. After 23 years of being in business with my business partner, I finally realized that it was time to go out on my own and that things were getting very tumultuous. Raise your hand if you ever realized that your business partnership needed to break up, but you were scared to do it. Raise it up high. Yeah. Imagine if that business partner was your father. Ooh. So I'm having this awareness that at 38 years old, it was time to go out on my own and do things. And if I was going to fail, I needed to fail on my own. If I needed to succeed, I needed to succeed on my own. Now let me be clear, I love my father, I love my family. I just was done being in business with them. But I was scared. I was scared out of my mind. And I went through— and most of you don't know this— but I went through a 4-month darkest period of my life this year. So dark I actually considered killing myself. And you know how hard it is to be the motivational speaker that gets up in front of a crowd and tells people, you can go through anything, you can handle anything, and look at the things that I've done, and then to be in that dark of a spot. But do you know it was the Genius Network and Joe Polish that pulled me out of that spot? And I want to tell you why. And if you have not joined Genius Network, or you're one of these members that's like, eh, do I want to re-sign? Listen up. Is Denise here? Denise Gazno? Where's Denise? She's not here? All right. Well, Denise is a lawyer in this group, and I called her up and I said, you know, you mentioned to me if there ever was anything that I needed, you would help me. And so I started to talk to Denise about what's the ramifications of ending a long-term business partnership with somebody where there's contracts and assets and all this. And she carved out time for me and started working as my attorney. Then I called up Michael Fishman and Elaine. Where are you guys? Yeah. And they came over to my office and I cried on their shoulders. And then I called up Michael Bernoff. Michael, raise your hand. Michael, I said, I am so I'm fucking scared. I'm angry. This could end my relationship with my family. They're gonna take it so hard. How am I gonna do this? And he sat at my dining room table and he counseled me using the best material in, in NLP and hypnosis and walked me through the process. You know how hard it is to be a success world thought leader, a therapist, person that's supposed to have it all together. Who's scared out of his mind. And honestly, it was only because I reached out to these people. But do you know who I reached out to last? I reached out to Joe Polish last, and I'll tell you why. Because I was scared. You know, I'm scared to reach out to Joe on these things because he's like my big brother. He just rips the Band-Aid off. Joe doesn't pad things with Shawn Stevenson. Apparently, I've abused him enough on stage. No, apparently, I believe he knows I'm strong enough to take it. I called up Joe, and I said, Joe, what do I do? And I was waiting, and he said, Sean, you know what to do. Stop dicking around and being a pussy and pull the plug. You know, whenever I quote Joe, he's like, I didn't say it that way. But that's how I remember it, okay? And so Joe said, this is what it's like to own a company, Shawn Stevenson. You have to do what's best for the company. You have to do what's best for your mission and your vision. And then what was so hard about it was I sent off a packet in the mail with all of the legal documentation To my family to let them know I was done being in business with them. And, you know, you all can have your own opinions about how I should handle it or what's going to happen next, and I don't have my own answer here about how to handle a breakup in a family business. But I can tell you the reason why I went through a dark period is after that I had incredible jaw pain and— What happened? Kevin Donahue, where are you, Kevin? Kevin, you came over right after I got back from the dentist, and they had extracted my last molar that made physical contact in my mouth. So now I can no longer chew solid food. Everything has to pretty much be blended before I eat it now. This happened at the same time I'm going through this legal issue with my family, and at the same time I go on Facebook about 2 days after— Kevin Donahue, you came over and you brought me soup, and I had an incredible conversation with you. But 2 days after that, I open up my Facebook account, and I see that my 10th and final friend with my bone disorder, disorder that I've had my whole life, had died in an accident similar to that accident that brought me to the hospital that Joe brought the friend of his. Yes. And so here I am, I'm questioning, what did I do ending this partnership? It was a true divorce. I was separating from somebody that I loved, that brought me birth. And I was in this excruciating jaw pain, and I called out to many of you on FaceTime, and I cried with many of you. And Joe had the strength to just say, you have it in you, Shaun, to do what needs to be done to forward your mission. And then seeing the last person with my disability that I knew die brought my own mortality into my face. And there's no way in these 4 dark months that I'm now just coming out of I would have made it had it not been For each of these people and many more that I acknowledged in the Genius Network. You see, Genius Network, it's not where we come together to learn about business and marketing strategies. Get over yourself if you think that's what this is. What this is, is this is the best group of firefighters in the world, and your life is going to catch fire, and I don't know when, and some of you are already there. And when you catch fire, you're going to need a firefighter. You're going to need— a team of them. You're going to need people that are going to tell you, you're not crazy. You're going to be okay. They're going to hold you when you cry. They're going to see you as you slam your hand down on the table saying, why do I have to go through this? And they're going to tell you, because you are playing a bigger game with your life than you see possible. See, the Genius Network, this is a group of firefighters, and we come together because when your life is on fire, I, as another member of yours, You can call upon me because I know it's only a matter of time when you do big things, when your heart is on fire, things catch fire and you need people to help you put them out. And I do hope if you're not one of those queasy, light-stomached people that thinks like, oh, I could use my $25,000 somewhere else, I could buy a used car every year than join this group, shut up and leave our group. Because I only want to be around people who see the value here right now.

As I mentioned to you yesterday, in a few weeks I'll be 82 years old. I literally go 12, 14 hours a day, 5 and a half days a week. Do not know the name of anybody that keeps up with me at any age. And plus, I enjoy every 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, 200, 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 on Bill Buckley's family estate. So I run this organization, I'm in charge of everything, including fundraising. And I found out real quick-like, I didn't like asking people for money. I asked some very famous people for contributions. Yes. 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. We want to focus on that. Did that for a year and a half and by then I had a wife and 2 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 don't— I didn't know a fraction of 1% of what I know now, but I thought I did. But what I was, I had— I was blind in one eye and had blurred vision in the other, but everybody else was totally, you know, blind in terms of direct marketing, so I looked pretty good. And, but though I knew, I thought I knew much more than I did, of course, there was one thing 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 a legal pad and started writing Barry Goldwater's $50-plus donors. And I did that for a couple of days. They said, hey, Richard, you're not making a lot of progress here. So I hired 5 or 6 women, and after, you know, a couple months, I had $12,500. That gave me the courage, the confidence to quit a good job with a wife and 2 babies and to go where no one had gone before. No one had 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. You— if you can at all, you want to be first. Can you be first? Yes. 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 kinds, people were talking about me not knowing that I was in the group there. And they were talking about me because I was first. Who knows the name of the second Pope? Who was the second person to fly solo across the Atlantic? Nobody knows, okay? It's the first. So whatever— find a category that you can own, that you can be first in, and that's how you build your confidence. 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, 'cause 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. Okay. But all of the criticism stopped within a few hours, and the few hours was election night, November 1980. Aha, that's what Viguerie has been up to, okay? And so, the left had been relying mostly for their campaign funds on involuntary sources, the union dues, corporations, 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 3 or 4 years, in my opinion, the left caught up with the conservatives, and this— 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 don't— 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, That's true. 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 2 to 3 hours every day studying marketing, okay? I don't need to do that, but I do. 2 to 3 hours, 6 days a week, studying marketing. And I said, 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 2 or 3 hours a month studying marketing, okay? I've developed something that I call Viguerie's Four Horsemen of Marketing. You've got to get these 4 things right. You 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 4 things briefly are position, differentiation, benefit, and brand. Position is nothing more than a hole, H-O-L-E, in the market. 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 do. And I like to use the example, say, of Rupert Murdoch 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 ballgame, 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 2 years old. It's a few years old, but they didn't sell me the car. I bought the car, okay? They could have had 100 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 didn't have to be sold. I bought that car. You go into the supermarket now, 40,000, 50,000 items to be sold. sold. Not one salesperson in the store. They will check you out, but nobody's saying, no, Mr. Vigree, 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 business. Yeah. In your marketing. So, position is what you do privately. Differentiation, you differentiate yourself from your competitors by, you know, whatever you do to differentiate yourself. Benefit is number 3, and then 4th is brand, okay? And by the way, I do almost nothing in my life of any consequence, any importance, without a 4-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. And there was a young congressman from Georgia, part of our group of 2025, Newt Gingrich. He'd invariably, when we came up with a problem, go to the blackboard. We didn't have whiteboards. Yeah. We didn't have whiteboards in those days, and he'd write 4 words on there: vision, goals, strategy, and tactics. An hour later, we'd filled in those 4 words and we saw a clear path forward of how we should proceed. And that's not the only way to do a plan, but that's a good way to do a plan. It's simple, doesn't take very long. And by the way, the number one benefit of a plan is not working The plan. That's important, but that's secondary. The number one benefit of writing a plan is writing the plan. Because as you write the plan, it clarifies your thinking. It crystallizes it. You thought you wanted to go over here, but as you write it down, you say, no, I think I need to go over here, more of this, less of that. So, the exercise of writing the plan is so, so important. Joe said, you know, I found out yesterday that Dan Sullivan gives me a lot of credit for Reagan's election. Oh, that's— quite frankly, I appreciate the compliment, but it's nonsense. And I've seen different people at different times take excessive credit for Reagan's election, 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 was a freight train, you know. And the rest of us had very little to do. The one thing, though, that was very, very helpful to Reagan was the, what was something called the New Right that came into being in the mid-'70s, and the entire conservative movement began to come together in the '60s and the '70s with hundreds and hundreds of new organizations, and almost every single one of these organizations was funded, they got their membership, they sold their books, they sold their subscriptions through direct mail. And Reagan, when he ran and lost in '76, and ran and won in '80, was running against the entire Republican establishment for the most part, Bob Dole, of course, Jerry Ford, George Bush, John Connally, Howard Baker, and they were getting the $1,000 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. In March of 1976, Reagan is literally out of money, riding commercial airlines, and— He's a nobody. His aide, Len Knopfzinger, goes on and buys $90,000 worth of time on NBC. Reagan sits on a stool, much like this, I guess, for 25 minutes, March 30th, 1976, and makes a 25-minute stump speech. The last 5 minutes, he asks 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&A here, but let me just 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 2nd 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, a nonprofit In the late '70s, David Broder, the preeminent political correspondent in Washington, D.C. at that time, since passed on, just a giant in 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 this is late 1970s. And he said, Richard, I'm perplexed. I've been all over Capitol Hill, the White House, et cetera. The Democrats have almost a two-thirds majority in the House, in the Senate, you got the White House, nothing is happening for the Democrats. They're not able to pass their legislation. And said, I've been to Walter Mondale's office, the Vice President, he can't help me, nobody knows what— do you know what's happening out there? Well, I don't know, David, if this will be of help, but I began to explain to him what we were doing, mailing 100 million postal letters a year, doing this and that, all under the radar. And, When we were mailing those 100 million letters, we were very focused on passing legislation, mostly in those days trying to defeat the Democrats' proposed legislation. Jimmy Carter, I saw him in an interview just this week complaining about— he had announced in March, April 1977 that he wanted to change the election laws in 4 ways. It had been devastating to the Republicans, like instant voter registration, you just show up on Election Day and 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 a meeting of Republican senators saying, we can't stop this, it's a bad idea, but the 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 4 or 5 months at my home, my office, etc., and we designed a strategy through direct mail, using it as advertising, and we defeated all 4 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 I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm dealing with a lot of the weeds of direct mail, so I may get these questions here, but I'll just briefly say, long letters outpull short letters. Counterintuitive. And by the way, most of what we know about direct mail is counterintuitive. You don't want to go to a doctor with an appendicitis attack and say— doctor 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 and cut them up and do what doctors do, okay? So this, what we do, is learned behavior. Most people— and you have 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 the first grade. I know where they sell postage stamps. What's the big deal? No, it is a big deal. You know, that's why I spend 2 or 3 hours every day studying marketing. So, just if you're going to do a big marketing campaign, get a professional involved. It'll reach Great benefits for you. So, long letters, I pull short letters. Short paragraphs are better than long paragraphs. Use 1 or 2 syllable words. Don't use big words that stop people in their reading. If I was— a wonderful book called The Man Nobody Knows, written back in the 1920s by a congressman at the time, talking— he was a major advertising executive, and The Man Nobody Knows, was Jesus Christ, and he described how he communicated with 1 and 2 syllable words. Christ didn't use a lot of 3 and 4 or 5 syllable words. Write to 1 person. You may be sending it to a million people. Write to 1 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. It doesn't mean anything. So sometimes you need what we call a tagline, a subheadline. Joe, I like these coffee cups and these glasses, but Genius Network doesn't say anything. If it said something like, the world's largest gathering of marketing professionals, or something like that. Well, what's the genius? 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 marketers, something like that. So, anyway, taglines, sometimes your name, it just doesn't say anything, so you need to tell people what it says there. And so, Joe, that, I could go on for a long time, but that covers That's the highlights I wanted to say. No, that's great. That's great.

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