The One With Dan Kennedy - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #16

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

Hey, everybody, it's Dean, Jack and Joe Polish.

What's up, Joe?

We got a special guest today, don't we?

Oh, yeah, we got a very special guest. It's Mr. Dan Kennedy. Dan, how are you doing?

I'm doing great. Awesome.

First off, thank you for, you know, thank you for coming on. And for people that don't know you, most people in the marketing world know who Dan Kennedy is. You've written a bazillion books. There's a lot of things that I could say about who you are and all the famous clients you have and thousands of people you've spoken in front of. But I'd just like to straight out ask you, who is Dan Kennedy? What do you do? What are you known for? Why should people listen to you?

I suppose I'm best known for direct marketing. Bringing direct marketing to non direct marketing businesses virtually created something of a movement of it in hundreds of niche industries, including the one in which you began, often in concert with advisors and coaches and consultants in those industries. Now every year that we can track, I directly influence over a million folks a year who are almost entirely entrepreneurs and small business owners. I'm sort of known for a very blunt, straightforward, no BS approach, very results oriented, very pragmatic.

Even.

As you've said on a couple of occasions, you know, you don't have to be that harsh. And you know, I guess the reason people should listen is because generally speaking, I tend to make folks a lot of money.

Yes, you do, you do.

Well, you know, let me say, company included. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, me and Dean have been massively influenced by you. I mean, Gary Halbert's the first guy that I was introduced to direct response from. And that ended up leading to you, which ended up in a very long term relationship. I mean, the first, you know, nine years of my business, you wrote predominantly most of my sales copy that actually worked. Millions of dollars were generated as a result of the stuff that helped me with. You've spoken at a lot of my conferences. I've spoken at quite a few of yours in the past. You're our featured speaker at our first ever I Love Marketing Conference on September 21st and 22nd, which is one of the reasons we wanted to even introduce you to the I Love Marketing crowd and the listeners so they can get an idea of who you are. And you have a pretty rabid following of people that have made a boatload of money with what it is you do and how you do it. You've written a whole series of books called no BS. I think you've written seven of those and something like 13 other different business books. And. Yeah, so, I mean, we've done a lot of stuff, including I even had an investment with you in racehorses that didn't really make me any money, which I'm not happy about, but you do.

A lot of stuff.

So, Dean, I've got a lot of questions for Dan, but I want to give you an opportunity, since I have such a history with Dan, to have you first hit him with some of the first questions and then we'll.

Yeah, absolutely.

Dan. In the first few episodes of I Love Marketing, we talked about their kind of like our life in advertising story of the discoveries that kind of sparked that fire for us, sparked that love for marketing. So for me, starting out as a real estate agent and doing cold calling and all the traditional things that. That you have to do to get business, and then discovering my first direct response postcard, sending it to an apartment complex and getting all the business reply cards sent back to me and talking to those people on the phone, calling them up, it was just like a dream. And that moment for me, I knew that I would never have to make another cold call again. And that really was the beginning of what has completely changed my life. And so I'm very interested to hear because, you know, we've all sort of stood on the shoulders of giants, you being, you know, one. One of the giants that we learned this whole model from. How did you discover direct response in. Contrasted with what. What you were doing before and how that kind of came about?

Well, the sort of spiritual conversion from ugly cold prospecting, you know, manual labor, unwelcome guest at the door, to marketing and use of media in place of manual labor. That's a very. That's a very common experience for people who come over from the sales side. And the way you just told it, I've heard it thousands and thousands of times. Perry Marshall leaps to mind as somebody who would tell it exactly the same way. I never really didn't do direct response, but I did have. So I have sales experience as you do, and very quickly figured out that, you know, I didn't like cold prospecting and I didn't like having to literally or figuratively batter down the door and play the classic numbers game. And I did a brief stint in traditional advertising at a small advertising agency and doing brand image, you know, very traditional stuff, very quickly figuring out that you can make money that way, but the clients can't. Which is one of the reasons that you see all of that done by bigger, dumber companies more than by small companies. But in fact, a big name owner of a big name agency told me very early that if you got a decent sized account and you want to keep them for a while. So imagine you have a dog food company as a client and the wife of the chairman of the board has little white fluffy poodles with pink ribbons in their ears. You make sure you put little white fluffy poodle with a pink ribbon in its ear and all the ads and you keep the account for at least two calendar quarters because it takes them that long to figure out nothing's happening. They can't evaluate, you know, on a day to day, on a day to day basis. And so, you know, I very quickly determined that, you know, that's, that's not, that's not the way I wanted to play the game. I became a student of direct response pretty much on my own and really identifying that the folks doing mail order, which now we would call direct marketing, had a very, very different approach than everybody else in the traditional advertising world. One of the first people who I made a point of getting all his stuff and studying it was David Ogilvie. I even purloined internal materials from an Ogilvy and Mather office where I was doing some work. And Ogilvy, although he built a full service, full scale ad agency, was constantly telling his people that the only people who really knew what the hell they were doing were the mail order guys. And so that sort of led me now, okay, let's study the mail order guys and Halbert sort of parallel track, if you will. I mean, I grew up stone's throw from Gary and although at this point in time I never met him, but where I went to high school, a goodly number of my fellow students worked after school in Halbert's offices that he rented above the banks in little small town bank branches so everybody could open the envelope, separate the checks and the money and it could be deposited right downstairs. And so we all knew of Halbert's and we all knew what that was. At high school, my first freelance copywriting gig was a cattle call from Halbert's, a beat to control for beer mugs with the family crest on him. It was some years later that I met Gary. I actually got a sales letter in the mail at my office in Phoenix for his newsletter and of course knew of him and picked up the phone and got him on the phone and said, you know, I'm from Bath, Ohio, you're from Barberton, Ohio. You know, everybody I went to school with, except me, was working for you. And everybody I know has got the family crest. And I got your picture with Ernie Borgnine's photo on it. And on an impulse, I just thought I'd pick up the phone and call. And an hour later, excuse me, I was booked to come speak at Monte Halbert seminars because candidly, he wasn't all that discriminatory about who he invited to come speak, but. Or circumspect might be a better word. But, you know, I certainly was influenced by Halbert and a number of other really great direct response copywriters. But I've been entirely Dr. Direct Response since 1975. Wow. And have pioneered a few things of my own. Although, you know, the fundamentals and the principles of this do not change. And it is still really about applying tested and proven mail order methodology to non mail order businesses.

That's an interesting statement that you just made because one of the things I was going to ask you about is like, what is different today or no longer works as it relates to the principles of marketing versus the Internet and social media. Because you hear it all the time. We hear it all the time. Long sales letters don't work anymore. Yellow pages are dead. Advertising doesn't work. It's all about social media. And there's certain truths on certain things. But for the most part, I think most people have their head up their ass when they make those sorts of comments.

Well, look, there aren't any truths in anything that you just said the way you phrased it. I mean, it's all bullshit. I mean, so today was my private coaching call day and I talked to a lot of my private clients today. And one in a particular field is consistently making over a million dollars a month. And I write copy for them. And we are mailing postcards, 16 page booklets and 8 page sales letters that drive leads to a website. The website is fairly elaborate and then they come back off lying out the backside in order to be sold various things. So first of all, not only is direct mail not dead, still the overwhelming majority of commerce of all kinds is driven by direct mail. Everything from the credit card industry to the apparel industry to the information business to local service businesses. And the length of copy argument is, you know, as dumb today as it ever was because you don't win by reducing your marketing to appeal to large numbers of fundamentally uninterested people. And in fact, the fundamental principle of my approach to marketing is let's make sure we're talking to highly interested, highly motivated, very appropriate prospects for what it is that we have to offer, who will have a high level of interest the minute we show them ourselves, and therefore, because they have a high level of interest, will read a lot, listen to a lot, watch a lot, so we can do a decent job of selling to them instead of trying to reduce everything we do to 146 characters. Tweets and no video longer than 3.8 minutes and no sales letter with words of more than two syllables so that everybody can pay attention to it. But what good is that? So the truth is the. The media, there's more media, right? So the whole plethora of online media, But Yellow pages, not for all businesses. And of course, in some cities, they're foolishly eliminating it because advertisers are abandoning it. But in a number of categories, Yellow pages is still a very viable media. Including your core category.

Oh, yeah, No. I was just in Alaska a few months ago and one of my clients is running yellow page ads, doing five to one. I mean.

I just showed this in one of my newsletters. Here's interesting proof of how dumb local businesses are to abandon it. National direct response advertisers are coming into it more than ever. So there's a major weight loss company that advertises in every yellow pages in America. One of my clients, who's in a skin care business, advertises in almost every yellow pages in America, Driving customers to websites in 800 numbers and making sales at a distance. So as the foolish local advertisers have left it, the smart direct response advertisers have come in and really no media goes away. My financial advisor clients newspaper freestanding inserts. So you hear all the time, well, nobody reads a newspaper anymore. Well, except people 50 years of age and up with money. Right. So it depends on who you know, who you want to sell to. A place strategy, which is really media strategy, is all about what customer you want. And so no media has really died. You know, I can't even actually think of one that's died. So there's new and additional media, and there are nuances about how to use different media, just as there have always been nuances about how to use it. But they are nuances. The fundamentals and the principles apply. And when you get away from them and anybody starts to think that any one particular media is now unique and that the rules and the fundamentals and the strategies that drive response don't apply to this particular media because it's blue or because it's on a particular machine or because people click to it or whatever, they're dead wrong. I mean, one of my clients is Guthey Renker and I've had them for 20 some odd years. Very recently I did a lot of work for them on Proactive, the acne product and on TV where, where we're creating demand amongst teens. You see TV commercials right now with Justin Bieber and Katy Perry and the radio spots, including some I've written, have Jennifer Love Hewitt in them. However, a little secret. The overwhelming majority of that business is not driven by television, either short form or infomercials. Nor is it driven by radio, although a lot of it is driven by radio. The overwhelming majority of that business, because we're actually selling to mom and mom has to write the check or actually mom has to provide her credit card, the overwhelming majority of that business is done in good old fashioned print media, credit card statement stuffers, newspaper freestanding inserts, direct mail, valpak, you know, etc. Etc. So this idea, every, every few years somebody pronounces a whole bunch of things dead and a whole bunch of old rules don't apply and it's all just goofy.

Well, you know, I mean, the vast majority of my money even to this day does not come from online marketing. It comes from direct mail. It comes from free recorded messages. It comes from, you know, just things that I've been doing for, you know, since 1992.

Well, and even a lot of e commerce companies. So like in my mail stack yesterday, I have a printed catalog from 1-800-Flowers for Mother's Day, I have a printed catalog from Amazon, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So a lot of companies that people think of as e commerce companies are at various stages in their sales process or in their customer relationships. They're using a lot of offline media. Yep.

You know, so when you hear dan terms like someone says I'm an Internet marketer, I mean, what does that. I mean, not that you probably care that much, but what goes through your head? I mean, what do you think of when someone.

I think that I essentially sort of feel sorry for them because. Well, because they don't. They're not differentiating between what is a business. I mean, it's as dumb as saying you're a yellow pages marketer because, because you advertise in the yellow pages. I mean, it's. Well, I mean, seriously, you know, it's true. Or because you have signage on Your company's van. You, you describe yourself as a sign marketer. I mean, first of all, anybody who limits themselves to any one anything, One Media One, you know, I teach one of the principles, I teach entrepreneurial principles is one is the worst number ever in business. So one of anything, one key staff person, one key account, one product, one income stream, one sales process, one media, one anything. You're just asking to get whacked. And so that's foolish. Second of all, you do not want to think of yourself as a practitioner of one media. Why on earth would you want to be that? You know, I mean, it just doesn't make any sense. And in all probability, your business is not that you are using the Internet as a media and perhaps as a delivery mechanism for deliverables, but Internet marketing is not a business nor is it a profession. It's a use of a media. And so ultimately, you know, we're in the marketing business. We're in the money business, we're in the customer development and nurturing business. We're in the influence and persuasion business tied to whatever products and services, you know, that are our deliverables. But we certainly are not Internet marketers or direct mail marketers or. I mean, hardly anybody who makes a great deal of money from marketing would think of themselves that way. Now again, an outsider might, you know, so to go back to Guthy Ranker, most outsiders would look at them and think they're an infomercial company and might describe them as a direct response TV marketer. But that would be a uninformed, superficial look at, at how their businesses are fueled and what their businesses really are.

Yeah, absolutely fantastic.

I just love the distinctions and I think that will really kind of freak out some of the people that are listening here.

But I mean, there's a lot of people who confuse a website with a business.

Yeah, totally.

I'm in business, I have a website. Well, so for, I mean, how in.

Your opinion, has the Internet changed marketing?

Well, it has. It has done a number of good things and it has done a number of bad things. Like just about every innovation prior to it has. And so, you know, every coin has a head and a tails, right? So everything has its pluses and minuses. The biggest plus probably is it has virtually raced all barriers to entry and made testing cheap, easy and quick, made startup launches faster. Secondly, it provides essentially which is an asset a lot of people aren't using because they're buying into this have to be brief idea. But it provides unlimited real estate without cost. So, you know, if you and I want to mail a 36 page sales letter, that costs more than an eight page sales letter. If we want to put 36 pages of stuff up on the Internet, it doesn't cost us any more to do that than it does to put up six pages. So it provides unlimited real estate, which if used wisely is an enormous asset. And the third thing it allows, the third big plus is that it allows instant and frequent communication. So we can be timely, we can be, you know, the Collier copywriting principle of enter the conversation, that's already occurring in the customer's mind. See, we can do that literally on a day by day or hour by hour basis, whereas most other media really doesn't give us, you know, a practical way to do that. In sequential marketing, 16 step, 48 step campaigns, obviously you can put in more steps affordably because of the way you can communicate online. The big negatives are a, it has virtually erased all barriers to entry. So it has, it has erroneously democratized the marketplace with very confused consumers and moral equivalency among very unequivalent competitors. So a lot of old advantages for most purposes like traditional credibility or leadership position now are severely compromised in the online environment because the consumer really can't differentiate between, you know, your company, that's that Granddad founded and is 83 years old and somebody who copycatted you and maybe copycatted you better. And really people are looking at two websites and making a decision. In the content world, the pimply faced doofus who lives in his mother's basement is now equivalent to the New York Times. Free content is equivalent to paid content. So all of that has made both intellectual property marketers and marketers in general jobs harder. It allows parasitical feed on market makers. So again, to use them as an example, proactive. I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in media every year and there are parasitical marketers who do nothing but work online and feed off that traffic and essentially step in and say, hey, we're the same as that glop, but we're cheaper. And they couldn't even exist were it not for all the money the leader is spending on media. But they are able to prosper with hardly any investment at a lower level. So all of that is kind of a muddy mess. And when you leave customers prospects online, you're very susceptible to it. In the financial advisor community, where I'm doing a lot of work, they call it the Google Slap, where they generate a prospect, they nurture a prospect, they kind of educate a Prospect, they move a prospect along. But if they've left him online and they are communicating a lot with him online, right in front of him is the enormous temptation and ease of typing in the word variable annuities and seeing what else comes up. And now he's in a world of comparing rates and yields, but really he can't compare quality. And you've lost control of this guy. And so in many businesses, you know, that's a real problem and it requires us to get that customer. Even if we generated him online as a lead or we took him through an online media, we got to get him off of there and get back to selling in a vacuum. So I mean look, it's made. Nothing has made me more money in my life than the existence of the Internet directly and indirectly in terms of working with clients. But having said that, your statement also applies in that hardly any of that money has been made solely and exclusively by use of the Internet without comprehensive support of other media marketing processes and sales processes. Societally, you know, that's a whole other question. But in marketing, you know, it has provided a fascinating, fast, very agile collection really. Portfolio of media, social media, websites, online video, YouTube. There's a nutrition company I do a lot of work with and they are very effectively monetizing YouTube exposure. But to sell their highest end product, that lead and every other lead comes offline at some point and is FedExed information package and the person is then driven to a counselor on the phone. Yep.

Well, there you go.

That's interesting because in a lot of, you know, you have been a pioneer and sort of, you mentioned that you pioneered some different approaches. One of them probably being the multi step smaller lead generation ad followed up by multiple direct mail. And I think that a lot of people have gone the route of taking people from using traditional offline things to drive people online, hoping to complete the cycle and the sale there. And what you are just describing is the most successful of them that you are talking about are actually doing it the other way. Getting people online and taking them offline.

Yep. Or they're, they may be lead generating online even, but then taking them off.

That's what I mean.

Yeah, they may be taking them back online after they have a customer relationship with them in order to do back end business.

Right.

But, but nobody, no big successful direct marketing company, even those people think of as e commerce companies and no client I'm working with. And keep in mind there's like at this point no client paying me less than six figures a year. So they Got to be doing well enough to justify that expense to me, let alone everything else they're spending money on. None of them are generating a lead, making a sale, doing the delivery. In other words, doing everything within the, the cyber walls of cyberspace. And I have rescued clients in trouble from doing that. And you know, the other thing about media, which is, which, as you know, is only one third of the whole, you know, marketing puzzle, right? There's message, there's market, there's media in my triangle. But the other thing people don't get about media, and especially younger marketers, is how, how vulnerable it is to change or disappearance. And so a lot of people have never lived through the disappearance of a media. But if you work backwards, excuse me, it's only a few years ago that there were a ton of marketers and companies, small businesses locally, big companies nationally, making tons and tons and tons of money with broadcast facts. And by law, it's virtually gone cold telemarketing, mass cold telemarketing. The do not call list has decimated that business. Major impact on the mortgage industry. Infomercials were on the air in the early days of tv, then they were outlawed and infomercials were possible only after Ronald Reagan deregulated the airwaves. So as you click around the dial tonight, you know, people had infomercials on the air that they were mint money with and they went to bed at night and woke up the next morning and couldn't run them anymore. People went to bed at night making a million dollars a week with broadcast facts and woke up in the morning and couldn't do it anymore. And there's nothing that says anything is safe from that. Not to mention just the disruption of, especially with online media, the constant change and you know, Google changing all the rules every other day and email deliverable issues. And that doesn't make any of it unprofitable or unproductive, but it makes it very foolish to be overly dependent on any of it.

Well, you know, I guess comes back to that one being having one avenue again. That's dangerous.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I guess, you know, that sounds like, man, there's a lot of things.

Going on with this.

There's a lot that one could know. So I guess the obvious question is, why do you love marketing, Dan? You've been in this for many, many years. It's where your primary focus is. There's a lot of different aspects that create business success. I personally, and I think I speak for Dean, would probably put marketing as the number one thing I don't know. I'm sure maybe that's the same for you, but why is marketing so damn important?

Well, I mean, for me personally, you know, the alternative would be asking people if they want fries with that.

We're otherwise unemployable.

Yeah, so, I mean, you know, I have a certain level of personal affection for it, but. But, you know, it is the. So I. So I tell this story often. For almost two years, I was doing a lot of consulting with Weight Watchers International, and one day, it's CEO of that particular year. I'm at their headquarters in Long Island. He comes and gets me and takes me to his office. And as we're going in his office, he says, we have to talk. And that means exactly the same thing in a client relationship that it does in a marriage. Nothing good is going to come of this. So we go into his office and he closes the door. He sits down by his desk and he says, look, he says, I've recently done an analysis, and to my surprise, I've figured out we're paying you more per hour than we're paying me, and I'm the CEO. Now, my temptation is to say, you know, is there a question in there somewhere? But, you know, it's not the time to be sarcastic. And so I patiently explained, I said, well, look, there's a very good reason for that. You presumably know everything there is to know about every aspect of this company, and you know how to do everything here far better than I know how to do it, with one small exception. I know how to put fat people in meetings who will sign up for weight loss programs. And about that, you are clueless. So unfortunately for you, without me knowing what I know and applying it, everything you know is worthless, which means you would get paid even less. So that's why it is the way it is. And Les, we'll just keep it our little secret. And I was out the door. Well, see, that describes the reality. You know, so Iacocca told me this story of when he took over Chrysler, which now this is Chrysler's first rescue. You know, this is many moons ago, not the most recent government risk, but. So Iacocca took over Chrysler, and he spent the first week calling people in his office, handing them a piece of chalk and telling them to go over the chalkboard. And you got seven minutes to show me a diagram of how whatever the hell you do around here ends up selling cars. And anybody that couldn't draw the diagram, he fired. And his theory was, if it turned out they actually were important, everybody figured out and they'd go get him. But it was a fairly safe bet you didn't need them. So really. So all the money's in marketing, all the juice, the fuel, the drive of a business is in marketing. And a lot of people get confused about this. They think they're in the book business or the training business or the publishing business or the carpet cleaning business or the dental business. And they confuse what the business is with the product or service deliverable. Now it's shorthand. If you're at a cocktail party and you're a dentist and somebody asks you what you do, it's perfectly acceptable to say I'm a dentist or I own a dental practice. As long as you understand that you're just giving a convenient shorthand and completely incorrect answer. If you want a high income. Because everybody with a high income understands the distinction and difference between product and service deliverables and the business they're really in. And the business we're really in is the marketing business. That's where all the money is. And so if you don't love it and you aspire to high income, high financial security, high autonomy, being able to live on your terms, do things where you want, if you aspire to those things, excuse me, you damn well better learn to love it. You better become fascinated with it like you are fascinated with nothing else on the planet. You better be more passionate about it than you know, Charlie Sheen is about hookers and cocaine. I mean you have got to be. I mean you have got to be into it because really if you look for the commonality in all great wealth and wealthy individuals and all high income individuals, it is this commonality. I mean, you go back in history so you know the person that inspired Napoleon Hill and picked the row rich and all that, Andrew Carnegie, the history books treat him as if he was a steel magnet. Well, read the big biography of Carnegie, read Carnegie's own writings and you will quickly figure out that a he didn't know shit about steel and didn't care that he didn't know anything about steel. He could hire people who knew about steel, right? He was a marketer and a salesman. I mean mostly he was about raising money, which is a marketing function. And if you go look at so you can come forward now and go through any industry you like all the way to now contemporary terms and analyze any business you want. And you're going to find when you separate out its product and service deliverables, what you really have is a marketing business. And so you have to love it. Now, it happens to be, for an intellectually curious person, it happens to be a fairly easy thing to love because 50% of it is behavioral psych, right? So half of its math and half of its behavioral psych. So we are really spending our lives, you know, decoding the conscious and subconscious motivations and psychology of the people to whom we sell and deliver, whatever it is we sell and deliver, and actually knowing more about what drives their behavior than they do. And then applying that as storyteller, speech maker, human interest writer, motivator, demonstrator, you know, in interesting ways. And I mean, really, if you are, if you're an intellectually curious person, what could be more fascinating than that? We are solving mysteries, we're making deductions about our particular prospects and in my case, about clients prospects. I mean, I work in, I've worked in hundreds of fields, but at any one given time I'm working in five, six, seven, eight different, you know, so for proactive, I'm dealing with teenage girls and boys, moms mostly for the financial advisors. I'm dealing with 55 to 72 year old married men and women with obviously a very different set of concerns and a very different frame of reference and different values. You know, so the, the deductive part of all that, the Sherlock Holmesian part of all that, the figuring things out part of all that, you know, is fascinating. And the business owner who sort of retreats into the doing of his thing, the stocking of his shelf, the driving of his truck, you know, that's really sad actually, because he's missing out on not only the opportunity to make an exceptional income from fundamentally an ordinary business, but the opportunity to do exceptionally fascinating work instead of mundane, ordinary work.

You know, clearly you know your stuff and I hope people that have never, you know, heard of Dan Kennedy before that either found I love marketing on itunes or wherever, clearly see how much you know and the value to read your books, come see you speak at our event, that sort of stuff. Couple things I want to ask you about. One being time, how you use your time, how you get shit done. But really before we do that is like, what if there is some secret sauce? If there are some. The main characteristics of people that are successful make money versus ones that don't. I mean, what's the big difference?

I mean, look there, yes, there are, there is no single. There is no single secret. You know that. That's all nonsense too. Yeah. And so, you know, to use the analogy of secret sauce, I mean, yes, there is a Collection of commonalities that, that separate people at the very top of the pyramid from people in the rest of the pyramid. And what's most interesting about them, I suppose is that for the most part they are behavioral more than they are attitudinal and certainly more than they are background, education, credentials, genetic upbringing, you know, any of that kind of stuff. And they apply universally across all professions and businesses and industries. So there's no particular difference in the commonalities whether we're talking about, you know, a guy that has a chain of restaurants in barbecue joints in Louisiana, or we're talking about Donald Trump, or you know, we're talking about Bob Iger running Disney, or we're talking about, I don't know, Chris Cardell, who most people would think of as an Internet marketer, although he does a lot of direct mail. Or we're talking about you or I. And you know, I've been very fortunate in that really the overwhelming majority of my work is not with big dumb companies like Weight Watchers. It is with first generation from scratch, self paid multimillionaire and seven figure income entrepreneurs, salespeople, business builders. You know the two guys that own Guthrie Ranker, that company did 1.8 billion last year and when I started working with them they were doing like 10 million. So I mean these guys build businesses and so it doesn't really matter. There are commonalities and they tend to be behavioral. And so you went into one category 30 seconds ago when you wanted to talk about time. We really have been in another category of emphasis focus on marketing, on how you use marketing and how you use direct marketing. It's a profound commonality amongst those at the top of the money pyramids. And by the way, there's a link between the two because one of the things that really good marketing does and that being adept at marketing does is it makes your time infinitely more valuable because it provides leverage and it allows you to better monetize both your time and all your other talents. And it liberates people from drudgery of otherwise getting a customer, client, patient and making a sale and putting money in the bank through manual labor, repetitive labor, just the ability to sell one to many versus one to one, you know, is a life changer for many, many, many people. I have a client here at a health source and, and Chris has gone from four chiropractic clinics to 336 franchise clinics in four years. And that speed of franchising is almost unheard of. But it's because he's Very adept at, with some early help from me, but very adept at selling one to many instead of one to one, which is the way franchises are typically sold. And then his chiropractors are very successful because they're very adept at one to many versus one to one. So like they have a particular treatment program for diabetics and those numbers typically work like this. 20 to 30 people in an evening class yields 15 plus patients at $6,000 apiece, average case. So that's, what is that, 60, that's $90,000 put on the books in an evening. The average chiro not adept at one to many to generate that same revenue is going to have to do 90 to 181 to one report of findings, new patient presentations. And then of course you're putting in the room with effective direct marketing, you're not putting them in the room with manual labor and so forth and so on. So there is a profound link here, really a three way link between time, marketing and autonomy. And it all gives you leverage. And so these commonalities, back to your bigger question. Yeah, obviously there are things that people in the top 1% earning category throwing out the very small percentage of that 1% that is like freak show stuff. So you know, the superstar athlete of which there aren't that many and there is actually talent, not just skill or the complete freak, you know, like briefly like Snooki is going to be in the top 5%. But you know. Well, I mean she is. I mean last year the, well, the Kardashians last year earned $28 million. Yeah.

Isn't that amazing?

Well, and it's, it's an important principle by the way I teach a lot is the higher up the money pyramid you go, the more somebody's getting paid for who they are rather than what they do. That, that leads to a whole long conversation that we don't have time for, but kind of is an oh, by the way, it's an important principle and it explains both the Kardashians, it explains Trump, it explains me, it explains this why. It explains why one carpet cleaner makes $200,000 a year and five others in his town, you know, kit can't, can't make pay payroll. Somebody gets good at hooing, not just at, at wedding, but so there are these. Well, yeah, I've made it a verb.

I love that.

So there, yeah, there's clearly things they do and things they don't do, those at the top of the pyramid that are dramatically different from what everybody else does. And that's really why, you know, coming to the right events, tuning into content like this, being on your own personal search all the time for models, examples, information, inspiration, and. And. And what can convince you of commonalities that you then decide to adopt for yourself? Yeah, I was backstage with Trump and at an event where we were both speaking and not long ago, a couple of years ago, and. And after a few minutes, when he determined in his mind that I was not a moron, he immediately asked me three questions. So two of the questions had to do with how the money's being made at this thing. Right. In other words, what's the business model here? The third question was, what three books are you reading right now? A. It's significant that Trump asks the question because a lot of people would think he ain't bothering to learn anything. The second significant thing in it is he didn't ask, what book are you reading? He asked, what three books are you reading? And there's significance in that. And third, why is he asking? Well, because something might have escaped his attention, and he's discovered there's a fairly smart guy here, and maybe this guy's paying attention to something I'm not that I ought to be paying attention to. And why not ask that question instead of waste the three minutes on trivial conversation? And I'm sure it didn't, you know, fall out of the sky, hit him on the head that day. And I'm the only person he's ever asked it of. It's probably routine procedure with him. And so a big commonality is that kind of routine procedure. Right? I mean, losers, if you want to go to the bottom of the pyramid, you know, the average adult American doesn't even read one book a year. They aren't looking for anything. They aren't paying attention to much. And they drive past the library every day and wouldn't dream of stopping. And at the top of the pyramid, even all the way at the very top of the pyramid, they're still searching their practitioners a slight edge, and so they're still looking for, can I tweak this a little? Can I tweak this a little? Is it possible this guy knows one little tiny gem about something that, you know, I don't know, and if so, I want to know it. And that, you know, extends into everything they do. One of my private clients I spoke with earlier today is in the. In the fitness and the gym industry. And essentially, he's what you are to carpet cleaners, Joe. He is to that industry. Yep. And now he's he's also a French, so he's a franchisor. He's also an information marketer and a coach. He's got a big business. And he said to me today, he said. He said, you know, I sat down and figured it up because I got curious, and I spent over $220,000 with you, you know, over the years, and he's only recently been a private client, so most of that other money is, you know, attending conferences and buying courses and so forth. And. And I said, you know, and. And your point, you know, and he said, well, you know, I'm just wondering what we're really looking for was a gold star, you know, he said, I'm just wondering if that's a big number. And I said, like anything else, it's a big number compared to 95% of the people who pass through my front door and go out my back door. It's not a particularly big number for the top 5%, and it's a little low for the top 1%. So, by the way, if you'd like to be in the 1%, you know, we should take a look. Yeah, yeah, but, yeah, absolutely. There are commonalities, and they can be modeled and they can be applied. Now, I think everybody, every person puts together their own, ultimately, their own shortlist, their own collection. In marketing, Halberd used to call it clicks on the dial. You know, their own customized a person and their own customized approach. But there are key commonalities that virtually every successful person uses. I always said when Sam Walton was alive, if you put Walton and Trump in the room and you looked at him, or you went and hung out with Walton one day and Trump the other, and you ask him a bunch of questions, you would be struck by the thousands of ways in which they differ politically, philosophically, the way they dress, where they like to eat, the car they drive, modesty versus ego, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the useful thing to do would be to identify the three things about which they're in total. Behavioral agreement. And one, by the way, would be understanding looping all the way back that the business there really ends the marketing business. I am but a minute or two away from having to. To exit. Well, okay, so.

So from a time perspective of how you use your time, I guess what I will say is that everyone should read your no bs, you know, time management book on how Dan gets things done. You have some very interesting perspectives. So I guess the last thing she only got couple minutes left is, you know, you're Coming and speaking at our conference and I'd love to give sort of a sneak peek trailer of what the heck will they learn when they come to I love marketing and hear Dan Kennedy present because I really think it will change people's lives as it has many, many people in the past.

Well, in a specific first of all, as you know, I take very few speaking gigs anymore. Yeah, at one time I did it a lot, but I take very few. And in part and by and furthermore, not only do I take very few, but I try and avoid traveling so.

Well, I mean. Yeah. And so we're having him come up on a private plane so they have.

To cheap to get him so people don't get confused. My office is in Phoenix, but that's because my one and only staff person is there. I live in Ohio and in Virginia and I don't like to be away from my racehorses. So I rarely travel. People bring the meetings to me and I try not to travel west at all. And so, you know, I'm doing something that I ordinarily don't do when you're spending a lot of money because I only fly private and a west trip all the way the west and back is, I mean the cost is indefensible other than the fact that I get free parking at the airport. So the specifics of what they're going to learn, I'm not going to do bullet points. And to be candid about it, not only will it be a customized presentation for you, but it will be timely. So I won't put it to bed until a couple of weeks before the actual presentation. But in a general sense, what I want to look at and bring to the table are the handful of really big game changers, really big areas of marketing that can lead to big breakthroughs in every and any kind of business. And do it rich with examples and diverse examples. So I'm thinking 4, 5, 6 at the most in the time I'll have available really big strategy categories from which people can take things to do to immediately affect their businesses. What I won't be doing is talking about, you know, things to think, but things to do. And I'll be pulling, of course from both current and now a 35 plus year tenure at this of essentially turning ordinary businesses into extraordinary businesses through marketing tactics and methods and processes. So that's what I have planned. Awesome. Awesome.

So you know, Dan, thank you so much. Not only are you a very special smart marketer and business guy, but you're also very effective because you actually give people stuff that actually works. And so thank you for sharing your thoughts, Dean. I'll let you say any final things, and then we will call it a wrap.

That's been great, Dan. Thank you so much. We couldn't be more excited about having you come to Phoenix, and we're really looking forward to it.

Well, I'm excited to, but I have to, you know, when I said I'm doing something that I, you know, try and now avoid and generally successfully avoid doing that, I knew when I accepted that damn car as a gift that that there.

You know, the funny story, Dan, is he was at my house, but he did that.

My idea that there would be a day.

Yeah, yeah. Dad drives the car that I bought for many years ago.

That's a whole. Can I ask you something? Honestly is, were you at least, like, partially hoping that we would reject this indefensible amount of money that it costs.

To fly using Phoenix privately? Of course.

Yes, of course I was.

He said.

Oh, my God, that's awesome.

All right, so thank you, Dan, and everyone at I Love Marketing. You can get. If you listening to this on itunes, you can get the transcripts of this call in its entirety at the website ilovemarketing.com along with any other information about Dan Kennedy and whatnot. So buy his books, listen to his stuff, and come see him at September 21st and 22nd in Phoenix at the I Love Marketing Conference. Thank you, Dan.

Thanks, guys. Thanks.