The number 1 secret to look for before buying any business - Marketing Secrets EP. 6

I'll give you a million dollars right now for it. And the person's like, but everyone else says it's worth 150. Why would you give me a million dollars for me? Like, there's this Rembrandt in the attic. Rembrandt's in the attic. The Rembrandt in the attic. Rembrandt in the attic. Rembrandt's in the attic. There's a Rembrandt in the attic. What did you just say? During today's episode, we are going to be talking about a concept I call the Rembrandt in the Attic. If you ever thought about, like, why in the world do big companies buy other companies, right? Facebook is a really good example. Facebook spot a lot of companies like Instagram, which makes a lot of sense, but they bought, like, a Oculus. Like, why would they have bought that? And now it's becoming, like, everything, right? It's the metaverse, is the future. You have other companies, like. Like Coca Cola buying Monster. You have Salesforce buying Slack. Like, why would they make these acquisitions, right? And so you see this happening at a big, huge scale, but it's also happening in a small scale that every one of us, you and me, can participate in and be part of. And it's gonna be happening every single day. I'm gonna be showing you guys behind the scenes of some of the companies that we're buying and acquiring and why we're doing it. Talk about why I've spent five or six million dollars on old books and how it opens up a whole new world of things for you. You start seeing opportunities in a whole bunch different places you probably never saw them before. And I think this is gonna be an episode you are going to love. So my intention for you guys during this episode is you're going through it is. I want you to start thinking for yourself, like, how could I do this? I want you looking at literally, companies like, look at clickfunnels. If I was to buy clickfunnels, what would I do? Look at Monster. What would I do? If I would buy Facebook tape, what would I do If I was to go buy, you know, whatever your favorite companies, your brands are, like, what would you do if you were to buy those things? Like, what would it look like? What would be the Rembrandt in the Attic you could can identify that, make this more valuable to you than to anybody else on the planet. This episode's also been brought to you by your sponsor. Your sponsor for today is Dan Kennedy. Dan thank you so much. You're sponsoring today. Dan Kennedy sponsors episode. If you go to nobsletter.com, you'll get a free the most incredible free gift ever from Dan. This has got like over $10,000 worth of money making gifts for free when you show up there@nobsletter.com thank you, Dan Kennedy, for sponsoring this episode. We're grateful for you. With that said, let me have some fun on this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast. You're listening to Marketing Secrets with your host, Russell Brunson. So the story of Rembrandt in the Addict. When people buy companies, you know, a lot of times a company will go for sale on the market and hopefully look at it. Maybe they'll lowball like, oh, it's worth 10 million, 10 million, whatever. But someone comes in like, oh, that's worth $50 million. And why would one company be 50 million? Everyone else in the market's like, oh, it's only worth 10. The guy says, because that person who wants to spend 50 million knows there's a Rembrandt in the attic. And I remember asking him, like, what did you just say? He said, a Rembrandt in the attic. I'm like, what does that mean? He said, well, imagine somebody is selling a house, right? And a bunch of people coming to the house, they're looking at it. It's like, oh, the house is worth $100,000. Everyone's offering $100,000 to this house. And someone comes in and they come out, and they offer the person like, okay, I want this house. I'll give you a million dollars right now for it. And the person's like, but everyone else says, it's worth 150. Why would you give me a million dollars? And the person's like, I just want to pay a million dollars for it. So the guy signs on the house, he gets a house, spends a million dollars, buys a house. And what the homeowner and all the other people didn't know is if you went and searched in the attic of the house, there's actually an original Rembrandt painting was worth $100 million sitting up there. So the person who recognized the Rembrandt in the attic, they saw that it was worth way more to them. They were willing to spend more because they knew what to do with it. And so for you, right now, I want you understand, like, there are so many. Like, we're in this crazy era with recession hitting and things shutting down. There's companies for sale Right now, there's opportunities. Opportunities to partner with people. There's, like, so many things that are happening right now where there are literally these. These assets that are super, super cheap. But if you have the mindset, you understand marketing and sales and funnels and traffic and distribution, where you can come in and you recognize the Rembrandt in the attic and get insane deal, that could be huge for you. I was thinking about just, like, another example to kind of help you guys see this. And the example I share is Shark Tank. And maybe it's because we're actually working on a project right now with Daymond John. So I've been, like, thinking. I've been watching more Shark Tank and, like, getting back in that mindset. But it's interesting is each shark on Shark Tank has different skill sets. You know that Damon is, like, the guy who built fubu, and so he understands retail and clothing, things that really. And then you got Mark, who's like, the tech guy who's built big tech companies. Then you got Lori, who doesn't qvc. You got Robert, who's good at security. They all have their own little thing. And so when some entrepreneur comes to pitch the sharks on Shark Tank, like, here's the offer. You know, if it's like a gadgety thing, Damon's gonna be like, I don't do that. Right? But Lori's like, oh, my gosh. I know. Like, that'll sell in qvc. Like, I'll give you a million dollars for, you know, half the company. Because I know that in 50 seconds, I can call a phone, get you on QVC, and we're rich, right? Or someone brings us a new clothing line, and everyone else is like, why? Like, you know, Mark Cuban's like, why would you do that? It doesn't make any sense. But for Damon, like, there's a Rembrandt in the attic. Damon knows. Like, oh, my gosh. I know if I call this person right here, I get in retail, and we'll make $100 million in, like, 25 seconds, right? Because he understands that. But each shark has a distribution channel that they know, they understand, and they master. So when the product comes to them, they say, like, I understand this distribution channel. They can plug it in. It just takes off really quickly. Okay, so for you as an entrepreneur, like, there's a lot of these different things you can become good at. Like, I just look at, like, the three books right here, like, Dot Com Secrets, Expert Seekers, Traffic Secrets, right? Like, if you go to any of these, like, let's say you find a business that's got a really, really good product, really good sales letter, sales video, webinar, whatever. But like they're not making much money. It's like, well, they need more traffic. Well, if you are really good at traffic, you can come in and like take this company's making almost no money, but like they have all the right assets, right? They've got this Rembrandt in the ad, they've got an amazing product, amazing sales pitch. They just can't get traffic. You can buy the company or partner or acquire it or whatever it is. And also you bring the traffic and boom, overnight you can have a success. Or maybe you have a company that's got really good traffic, but their conversions are low or sales low. It's like, well, they need a funnel or oh, they need somebody to help build a webinar or whatever it is. Like you have these skill sets. We can find these deals and by bringing in these talents, you can dramatically grow the company. As you guys know, over the last couple like years, so we've been buying a lot of different companies and people always ask me, why did you buy that? Why did you spend that much money? Doesn't make any sense to me. Also, in the last, less than a year since last funnel hacking live, those who are watching the video right now, I'm in the Napoleon Hill room. I have all these first edition Napoleon Hill books and other books. Last we're looking at, I spent between 5 and 6 million dollars in books in the last year. There's probably, I don't know what you guys think, three, four thousand books between all these different rooms in here. And people are like, why are you doing that? You're so dumb. You're buying old books. There's no value in them. But they don't understand. It's like, I know something they don't know. I understand what I can do with these books. I understand how the public domain works. I understand republishing, I understand how NFTs, how they can work with public. There's some things I understand. And so I wanted to share some of these stories with you guys just to get the wheels of your head spinning so you can start looking at like the skill sets you have acquired that you have learned. Or like, I need to learn the skills, I need to learn traffic so I can go and like plug in these other companies or, you know, whatever those things are just to help honestly, I want you guys just to flex your mental muscles and strengthen these muscles so you can start seeing these opportunities everywhere. Okay, Magnetic Marketing, Dan Kennedy's company. A lot of you guys know, last year we acquired it. It was so much fun for me. It's been a great thing. But reality is like why would I bought that company, right? Like I have an info publishing company, I've got a bunch of books, I have software, I have these things like why would I buy Dan Kenney's company, right? And if you look at it, you know back in the day when Bill Glaze ran, it was killing, it was making much money. But then it was sold to this PE firm who kind of ran off the ground. And when you look at all said and done, like when I had a chance to acquire the company, it wasn't worth a lot of money. You'd be shocked how much I was able to acquire the company for. So I was able to acquire the company. But why would I, like still like why would you do that now you have all this, you know, you've got more staff, more people, like why was it worth it to you? And for me it was like, well like I know that the way we've grown click funnels is by having these front end offers, right? It's like dot com secrets, expert seekers, traffic seers. These books people would buy, they come in and we sell them clickfunnels on the back end, right? And that's how we grew clickfunnels. But for me it's like we wanted to figure out how do we create more non Russell based front end. So by buying Magnetic Marketing I was able to buy, I mean dan Kane's written 40 something books. Like I have 40 potential frontends we could do. But also like looking through the archives like we found like 7 years of old faxes he had sent. I found old. All these courses are unpublished that are worth so much. Like there's so much value in here. Like all these Rembrandts in the attic. Just the Google Drive we got from the company when we acquired it. Like there's hundreds of millions of dollars in value in there if you know what to do with it, right? If I understand how to publish, how to republish, how to do these kind of things. Like there's so much value there that all of a sudden it's like I buy this thing for not that much money but because we now we have assets that are going to be front ends for our, for our company. They'll be back ends, they're going to be bonuses for things. Like I'm literally flying out an hour to go fly to Dean Graziosi's office. We're participating in their big product launch. I'm trying to figure out how do I get everyone to buy through me versus all the other affiliates. I'm like, well, let me look at Dan's hard drive. I go through the hard drive and there's this course in there that's just like, no one's ever seen it, no one's ever heard of it. And so I took this course. It was a three day event. Dan sold for $10,000. And now I can offer that as a bonus. And we'll probably, man, I don't know, we'll make, I don't know, six, seven figures in affiliate commissions. Because I knew that there was this bonus in a folder, this Rembrandt in the attic I was able to use and leverage that way. And there's a, like dozens of things like that just inside the magnetic marketing business. This is something we haven't talked about publicly too much. A lot of you guys know Brandon Kaelin, Poland. They some of our biggest success stories inside of clickfunnels. They built this huge movement called Ladyboss. And over the last year or so, they decided to shut the company down. They were ready to retire, they made a lot of money and Caitlin wanted to be a mom and Brandon wanted to kind of start another business. So they decided to shut the company down. And it was interesting because, you know, you may look at me and like, Russell, like, you sell business stuff. Why would you have bought Ladyboss? Okay. And the reason why is I looked at it, I was like, there's five or six Rembrandts in the attic that other people aren't seeing. My question is like, let's say you were to buy Ladyboss, the company, what would you do with it? Right? There's 1.9 million people on their email list. 700,000 people, 700,000 supplement buyers on the list. They've got all the info, products, the supplements. They spent three years building coaching curriculum to coach somebody for three years on a weight loss journey. They have sales script how they sell it, all these things. Like, there's so many Rembrandts in that, in that business. If I connect them with this person here, this person here, we can launch this business in a different way and grow dramatically. Another good example is the last podcast episode, I believe I talked about Doodly, how we bought the doodly toonly that company as well. One of the big reasons why I bought that company is because the way they structure their sales funnel to the point where they were getting 500,000. Excuse me, not 500,000. 500 buyers a day coming into their world. And recently we found another company, another software company for sale, and that. It's this funnel simulation software. And we'll talk about that in future episodes. But I saw that software and it was doing good, but not great. But I was like, if I just take that software and if I build the funnel to match the same funnel structure that doodly.com has, if I model that funnel structure, I can take this funnel simulation software from, you know, from 30 or 40 cells a day to 300, 400 sales a day, overnight, just by restructuring how the funnel looks and then creating some new ads and relaunching it. And so we looked down. It's like, oh, my gosh. Like, you know, right now they're struggling to sell this company. But, like, for me, like, there's this Rembrandt in the ad because I know exactly how to shift it from 30 sales a day to 300 sales a day. I know exactly how to take those people now and put them to click funnels. And suddenly, I think, becomes so valuable for me, right? Because, like, I know what I'm going to do with it. Again, this is for me to help you guys start flexing your mind. Like, I started buying these books, and again, most people I know were like, this is crazy. Why would you keep buying these old books? What's the purpose? Like, there's like, put it on a. Put in a bookshelf or to put it on a glass and show people. And yes, that's part of the strategy. There's a thing called the public domain. Some of you may have heard of it. But public domain is when something was created and the copyright expires. And so any book or work. So it could be art, can be movies, could be tv, could be music, film, audio. Anything that was published before 1923 in America is automatically in the public domain. In fact, interesting. If you look at Walt Disney, Walt Disney's entire company was built off public domain things. There were books that were written back in the early late 1800s, early 1900s, like Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast. Like, Walt Disney didn't write those stories. Those were stories that were in the public domain, took them and they wrote movies and created movies out of and built the Disney empire, right? And so anything published before 1923 in America is automatically in the public domain. You can take those things, you can republish them, right? From 1923 to 1963, and I'm going to mess up the numbers here, but is when the copyright laws changed, something had to be renewed during those wins of 1923, 1963, if the copyright was renewed, it's still copyrighted, but if it wasn't, then it's in the public domain. And they assume that only, I think 7% of works were ever public, were ever recopyrighted. So anything between 1923, 1963, that the copyright was renewed is in the public domain. So all these works, all these books are in the public domain and you can start reselling them, right? You can republish them, you can use them for courses, for podcasts, for books, for bonuses. Like there's a million things you can do with it, right? And so as I started this journey, we started finding these books that were super rare, that nobody has. In fact, I went and bought this Napoleon Hill 1st Edition Laws of Success. And we flew out there to meet with the guy. I ended up buying his entire collection. And part of the collection was 250 pages of these hand type stuff, Napoleon Hill. And I remember going through my, like, this is really, really cool. And he told the guy who I bought it from told me, he's like, I used to charge people $10,000. They'd come to my house for a day and they would just read these things and then I make them leave. And so when we got that stuff back here, I started going through it. And what I realized is that literally these 250 pages were an unpublished book that Napoleon Hill wrote that he never published, no one's ever seen before. And I have the only copy of the manuscripts of this book. And it's all in the public domain. So it's like, I'm able to take this and I can republish it. Guys would go crazy to buy an unpublished book from Napoleon Hill and no one has seen ever, right? Like directly from his typewriter. I have these things and we can turn that into money. I can turn it into a, you know, a hook to get somebody to join a continuity program or a newsletter or like there's a million ways I can republish that, right? Logan Paul I saw he, he bought a Pokemon card he wore on WWE and his Pokemon card and saying, like, why would you spend $6 million on this Pokemon card, right? He's using it, he's building up the value of it by telling the story, like bringing it out also. Now this thing worth $6 million worth more. What you can do nowadays with NFTs you can sell partial ownership, right? I've been studying this as well because people are doing this a lot with paintings now where these rare paintings that are worth $30 million. Most people can't buy a $30 million painting, right? But paintings beat S&P, like 14x, I believe or 10x or something crazy like that. Old books beat the S and P, I think by 7 or 8x. Old Mormon books, by the way, beat it by 40x. And so I've spent multiple million dollars in old Mormon books. And like, so those are valuable to me. They're, they're beating the stock market. But most people aren't going to buy $6 million NFT. They're not going to buy a $30 million paint. They're not going to buy, you know, a million dollar or 150,000 dollar old first edition book of Mormon or Doctrine and Covenants or these things are expensive. So like I have the first edition Laws of Success that, you know, cost me a million and a half dollars. It's the only edition on the planet signed by Napoleon Hill. And again, Most market spend $1.5 million. But hey, did you know that you can invest 1500 bucks for an NFT and you own 1/100th of this thing and as the value of it goes up over time, your NFT value goes up over time. So I can sell fractional ownerships to a book, to a painting, to a Pokemon card and things like that. The core point of this podcast is just for all you guys is the more skill sets you get, especially in the marketing game, like, and more Rembrandts in the attic pop up when you become a good marketer than anything else in the world, right? Because if you get good at marketing your business, that's amazing. But then it's like, oh, this business is for sale or I told you this before, right now there's so many because we're going to recession. A lot of people who don't want their business, their business aren't profitable and they're just shutting them down because they can't sell them in a traditional way. So you can go to these people who are shutting their business down or they're struggling, say, hey, I want to buy your business. I'll give you $100,000 for the business, but I'm not going to give you any money right now. I'm going to finance this. And so like from the profit I make, I'll pay you back 10 grand a month for the next, you know, 10 months, whatever it is. And that's how I'll buy your business. And those deals are there all day, every single day, where you can pick up the business again for you. There's a red magnetic. Like, oh, my gosh, I know that my list would love to buy this thing. So I could do a joint venture, or I could just acquire the business, promote it, and pay it off, literally, with the Dan Kennedy offer. And we bought magnetic marketing. We bought the company. We created a funnel, we launched it to our list. We got all the cash, we paid it off, and now everything moving forward is complete, pure profit. And so, like, there's so many deals like that when you start understanding these principles. So even if you're in the spot, like, I don't have a business yet, Russell. I can't figure out all different pieces. That's okay. Like, the skill set you guys are learning are so, so, so, so, so valuable. If you just focus on traffic, you just focus on funnels. If you just focus on, you know, on webinars or selling, you're telling people stories, and you master that piece and start looking for different opportunities out there that don't have that piece. They have the other things, but they're missing that one piece, right? Or maybe you find somebody who's really good at traffic, and you find someone who's really good at funnels, and you just become the middle person, like, setting up these deals, right? Like, Daymond John is not going out there making the phone calls to go get distribution in all these different clothing lines, right? But he's like, I got a dude who does that. I got a dude who does that. I got to do, you know, dudette, whatever. You got different people who do things. He knows that all I have to do is, if I say yes to this deal, I call three people. Now, this is in 3,000 stores. Give me the same thing for you. Like, I don't know how to get traffic, but this is the guy who's really good at traffic, this person who get at funnels. I find this deal, take over the deal, make two phone calls. Can you do the funnel? You do traffic. I'll give you each a piece of the pie. And then, boom, all of a sudden, now you're in business. And so this is the stuff I want you guys thinking through. So my goal for this podcast episode, literally, my notes here says, I want you guys exercising, flexing the muscles in your brain. What would you do? So start looking at deals. Like, think about the ladyboss deal we bought, right? Think about doodly. Think about magnetic marketing. Like, if you were to buy that company, what would you do? It all starts there, right? What would you do? Okay, look at another company. Like, what's the company in your market? Let's say Onnit is a really cool supplement company. What would you do if you bought Onnit? What would you do if you bought Success magazine? What would you do if you bought an old book on ebay? Like, what would you do? And then start that exercise and it's gonna get the wheels your head spinning. You're start realizing like, oh my gosh, like I learned this over here, I learned this over here. I could do this, I could do this, I could do this. And as you start doing that, these muscles in your brain are going to get smarter. Okay, if you were to buy clickfunnels, what would you do? I want to ask you guys that question. Think about it. If you own click, if I give you the like the keys clickfunnels, congratulations to the owner. What are you going to do? What would you do? What would it look like? How would you make it better? How, like, what would the structure be? How would you try to grow sales? How would you try to like start thinking through these things and it'll start opening up all these things for you. So that's kind of the goal I want you guys to start looking at is just flexing these muscles in your brain. So when the opportunities show up, when you're out looking at houses and you look in the attic, also you see a hundred million dollar Rembrandt that you are able to go execute on it, take that opportunity and run with it. Because you don't want to be the person who walks and looks around. No, it's only worth a hundred grand. And leave. When the things worth a hundred million dollars, okay, those opportunities around you every single day and your skill set gives you the ability to capitalize on it and have success. So with that said, you guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you have please share with somebody, post it on your social media and also make sure you go to the podcast sites and rate and review them, meaning the world to me. On top of that, if you have any questions about this specific topic, I can do an update episode in the Future. Go to marketingsecrets.com There's a chat block in there. You can literally go ask that question and come directly to me. And if we do an update on this episode, I will try to answer all your questions about Rembrandts and the addicts, about opportunities that are hiding right behind your nose that are sitting there, you can just grab them, let me know. And with that said, thank you guys so much for listening. I appreciate you being a listener, and I will see you guys on the next episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast.