Why Dan Kennedy sold me his company and what I'm planning now - MARKETING SECRETS EP. 4

He sold the company and it went downhill fast. They ended up burning it to the ground. They offended most of the existing members like me and other people. And it got smaller and smaller and smaller at that point where basically he had died on the vine. Hey, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secret Show. During today's episode, we're going to be talking about all things related to Dan Kennedy and the no BS Marketing newsletter. We'll talk about the history of gkic, Dan Kennedy's company. I'm going to talk about the things that they did to grow their company, what we did when we acquired the company, why we acquired, and all the things we're doing now to grow the company. I'm gonna show you guys behind the scenes of the new launch we're doing to get people to ascend up to a higher level and a whole bunch of other really fun things. Before you get into this episode, I wanna make sure you set an intention going into this. Understand that I'm gonna be sharing behind the scenes of this huge business model. And you don't need to take on everything. Like I want you listening specifically for the one or two nuggets you can actually apply to your business. Don't just listen to this for entertainment, although I will try to be entertaining for you guys. Make sure you're looking, listening with intention of like, oh, there's something I can apply to my business right now. Hopefully that'll help you guys as you're going through this. This episode is actually brought to you by a very special sponsor. Maybe this is a shameless plug. I don't even know. But today this is actually being Sponsored by NoBS Newsletter because we're gonna be talking about it. I'm sure you guys behind the scenes, but honestly, if you are not subscribed to no BS newsletter, the only logical reason I can think of is you must hate money. So now is the time. If you go to nobsletter.com, you get access to what we call the most incredible free gift ever. It's like over $10,000 of money making material for me and Dan Kennedy. You get for free when you subscribe to the NoBS Marketing Newsletter which comes to you every single month in the mail. This is the personal letter from Dan Kennedy and from me talking about the most important thing you can implement in your business. This is like having us hand deliver a seminar every single month in the mail. And when you get the no BS newsletter, you also get for free the behind the scenes newsletter where I Show you guys behind the scenes of our marketing campaigns, our funnels with screenshots, images and stats, everything we're doing. Again, this is the greatest offer of all time. All you gotta do is go to nobsletter.com to go get subscribed the newsletter and go get the most incredible free gift ever. And with that said, you guys, we're going to jump into the podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. You're listening to Marketing Secrets with your host, Russell Brunson. Some backstory for those who don't know who Dan Kennedy is, He is. A lot of them consider him like the godfather of marketing. He was one of the first, if not the first people that really was in this industry. Not just doing it, but also teaching other people how to do it. He's been big. He was, you know, behind the scenes of writing infomercials for guntheranker and a bunch of big companies you would be aware of. But he's been in the trenches forever. And then I think 1996 is when he published the very first version of no BS marketing letter. I don't have a copy of that one here, but I do have a copy of this one from May 2002. So those who are watching the video, you can see it's this newsletter and it's like black and white, 10 pages stapled together. And this was their newsletter. And this is the backbone of Kennedy's company. So he launched in 1996, I believe the company was called Kennedy Inner Circle, K I C. And then eventually Dan was like, I don't want to be running a business. I want to do content, but I want to do business anymore. And so one of the people in his Mastermind was Bill Glaser. And he actually sold the company to Bill Glaser and Bill Glaser rebranded as gkic and instead for Glaser, Kennedy Inner Circle. In fact, one funny side note. I spoke at a. I joined the Mastermind. I was like, all in drinking the Kool Aid. I was in the Mastermind for six years. And my last year there, before Bill had sold the company, they had me speak on stage and I gave four presentations. And I joked because I actually spent more time on stage than Dan did at this event. And so my slides, I took the GKIC logo and I rebranded it to say gkbic. I was like, this is the Glaser Kennedy Brunson Inner Circle meeting. Thanks so much for being here. I kept calling it that. Apparently Bill didn't think it was funny. I was in that world for six years, I was in Bill's masterminds. He was my, honestly, my first big mentor. And Bill and Dan, I just learned so much from. Even to this day, people always ask me, where do you learn marketing from? I'm like, I listen to Dan Kennedy almost daily to this day because he still brings the best insights. Back. When Bill owned the company, I had a really unique insight. I got to know Bill really well. I had a chance to see behind the scenes what they were doing at a pretty deep level. And so Bill's whole thought. In fact, Bill told me, he's like, I'm in the two things business. I'm in the business of getting customers. I'm in the business of retaining customers. Like that's all I do. Everything else is an appendage to that. That was the two things. And so he was all about how do I get people and how do I get them to stick? When I got into the Kennedy world, Bill launched an offer that they called the mifke. And MIFKE stands for Most Incredible free gift. And it was a big package of like $630 of money making stuff for free. When you join the no BS newsletter. So I signed up for it back in the day. I got a kit in the mail and then the newsletter started coming. I get a newsletter every single month and I would read it and it was like having a conversation with Dan Kennedy, which was, you know, super fun. Eventually I joined the Mastermind group. And I remember Bill walking me through the process. He said that, you know, they have funnels. He didn't call them funnels back then. He's like, we have offers like the MIFKE that acquire new customers. Is after we acquire a customer, our goal then is to ascend the customer. And so inside their company, they had different levels. They had a gold level and then a diamond level and then like a peak performer letner level and then a platinum and a Titanium. And there are five or six different levels. And I remember that he said that they had someone on their team that was specifically in charge of marketing to each level. The other big thing I learned from, from Bill and from Dan is when you went to their events, you'll notice me. I do some funnel hacking live a lot. When I would speak at a GKIC event, they never said, this is Internet marketing nerd Russell Brunson come on stage. They'd say, this is Titanium member Russell Brunson. They labeled me by the level of membership I was. And you notice the people on stage are always a Platinum and Titanium member. So if you want to be on stage, like, I have to be a Platinum Titanium member. You probably know, it's funny, hacking live. People always ask me, how do you get on stage? Well, notice how we introduce them. Like, this is two comic club members so and so speaking. This is inner circle member, so and so speaking. Like we label them as we. As we introduce them with the level of membership that they're at, which makes people want to ascend up. Right? Mastermind was in Baltimore where Bill lived. I remember I was sitting at the table and we're in this big U shaped Mastermind table. Someone's up there presenting and I'm sitting next to Bill and Bill was kind of being fidgety and I was like, everything okay? He's like, I'm just waiting for something. I'm like, what? He's like, I sold gkic. I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, the wire's supposed to hit today. How much did you sell it for? He's like, I can't tell you, but I can tell you that as soon as this wire lands, I'll never have to work again. And I was like, what? He's like, don't tell anybody. I'm like, I'm the worst secret keeper ever. You can't tell me to not tell someone and I'm going to go tell. Like, I was just kind of freaking out, but I was so excited, right? And. And then he sold the company. And then it went downhill fast. The company sold. He was a PE firm who. And hopefully they're watching this. They didn't know what they were doing. They didn't understand the business that they bought. They were making choices that had nothing to do with like, the focus of the business is to getting, you know, to get members and keep members. And this, These guys, this PE firm, they ended up going through, I don't know, six or seven different CEOs throughout the time. They ended up burning it to the ground. They offended most of the existing members, other people. And it got smaller, smaller, smaller to the point where, I don't know all the stats and the details, but that point where basically had kind of died on the vine. And about that time, they were going to fire, sell it or something. And Adam Witty, who's a. Who was a GKC member, he owns Forbes Books. Adam was a friend of Dan's. And basically Dan said, hey, Adam, you should buy it. And so Adam bought it. And then Adam owned the company. And so Adam Witty bought the company. Dan was Working with him. And then about a year into it, as you guys know, that's when Dan almost passed away. Poor Adam, he's got this new business, he's trying to launch it. The face of it kind of thought he died. And then he came back and then he wasn't able to work for like a year. Just. It got a point where it's just the burden became too heavy for Adam as well. About a year ago, right now, actually is when I got a message from Adam saying like, hey, would you be interested in buying this company? Obviously, I was like, yes, that'd be amazing. And so we had it right before Funnel Hacking Live. And that's when I was signing my contracts with Dan. I was like, speak at Funnel Hacking Live. And then he's like, do you want to do a promotional to promote it? I'm like, no, we're not telling anybody. This is going to be the greatest secret of all time. And so we didn't tell anybody. And then obviously FHL Dan came on stage and those who were there, he freaked out. And it was awesome. And for most people, they thought they know he had survived his accidents and stuff. And so a lot of people were just excited to see him. And it was just, it was a magical moment. And that was in what, September of last year. So then from September to December is when we could sat back and, okay, we gotta figure out this business, like, what is it doing? What's happened the last decade since Bill sold it, what's good, what's bad. And luckily there were a handful of like Rockstar team members from the original team that were still around. And so we flew them out to Boise, made a chance to look at everything, look at the numbers, like, here's what's working, here's what's not working, here's what's. And just seeing all sorts of things. And so for the most part we did is we almost shut off everything. I was like, let's just shut down everything and then slowly relaunch things in the sequential order. That makes sense. And so for me, the very first thing is like, well, how did Bill launch this company? He created a Mifkey. And basically we give an insane gift. You cover shipping and handling and you get a month worth of the newsletter. And number two is like, and I wanted to launch the new newsletter in January just because, I don't know, I wanted to start in January so someday I can bind these in 12 month books or whatever. So I was like, January 1st, we're launching the new version of the newsletter and we gotta make a new one. And then we had big debates back and forth because Dan Kennedy's like, Dan's like, I want it to be black and white stapled together. Like that's what it's supposed to be. And in the past, like, I've done newsletters that like. Like magazines. And he's like, no. In fact, one of the versions, someone who owned the company at one time turned to a magazine and. And all the members hated it. Cause like, oh, I feel like I paid five bucks in a newsstand for this versus 100 bucks for this. This paper off Dan's fax machine or whatever. And so we kind of made a middle ground where we designed a version that's not a staple together, black and white, but it's not a magazine. It's kind of this individual version. And so we created the new newsletter. And then my biggest fear was like, we've got Dan's audience and we have the clickfunnels audience. I'm like, I know that Dan's audience is gonna love Dan, so that's awesome. I was like, I'm afraid that my audience isn't gonna spend enough time to really get to know Dan to stick with him, right? So I had this fear that all the clickfunnels for me to come here get no obs newsletter, and they would leave because they wouldn't get it. I was like, if we're gonna get people to stick, like, I'd love to have something for both sides. Plus, all the Kennedy people need more Internet stuff. And I wanna show people behind the scenes of the online campaigns that we're running. And so that's what we decided to do, is instead of having one newsletter, have two, which is a big undertaking. Like now we write two newsletters a month, which is a lot. I mean, each of these is like 20 to 40 to 50 pages. I mean, it's almost writing like 50 or 60 page newsletter every single month. That's 800, almost a thousand pages a year. I guess it's like publishing two books a year on marketing with Dan Kennedy. So it's a lot of work on this side. And it's taking us a couple months to get in the process of it. But now finally we have a process in the thing and it's been working. And like, people are even like the old timers who didn't like the newsletter when we first came out with it. Now, like, okay, this is turning out really good. You've done a good job. Like, thank you. But it's been really cool. So, again, if you don't have these letters, like, it's our best stuff, delivered every single month to your mailbox. So if you don't have it, like, you need to get it, you'd be insane not to. But this is the business, right? So the first phase of our business, like, how do we grow the newsletter? Right. Bill Glazer 101. Like, step number one is how to get new members. And so the MIFKE obviously launched, and we've been buying ads and creating things. We've had about 6,000 people now who have. I think it's like 6,006 this morning who have got the mifty, which is AMAZING Right now, 71% of the people stay through the first month billing, which is insane. Most continuity programs are half of that. So really proud of the initial thing of keeping members at least through the first billing. We're still working on keeping them longer, but it's been really, really good. The business has already 100% paid itself off and it's profitable, which is obviously exciting and amazing. 350, $400,000 a month, I think, is coming from the newsletter revenue, which is great. My big goal is, obviously, is like, keep fueling this. And so the first question, I'm sure some of you think, okay, we have this newsletter. You promote it, you've driven ads. Like, how do you scale faster? And that's the question asking myself as well. Obviously, Dan has written, like, 40 different books. So now we're coming back and building book funnels. And the goal of the book funnels is get people into the MIFKE offer. So the first one we're doing is Dan wrote two books. One's called the Ultimate Sales Letter, one's called the Ultimate Business Plans. And this is another exciting thing. So Dan and I are working on a book together. And I think the time I'm like, 90% sure the title of the book is gonna be called the Ultimate Sales Funnel. What it'll be a trilogy of the ultimate sales letter, ultimate business model, and then the ultimate sales funnel, which is gonna be so exciting. So working on that right now. And so that's all about getting new customers. So now that it's all in place now the next step is, okay, what's the next level? The next thing is like, okay, how do we. Like, what's the process to ascend somebody from gold into diamond? And so we wanted to basically create a new mifkey. Now, we're not calling this the mifke, but it is like what's an offer we can create that's so good, that's so powerful. They can only get if they ascend to become a Diamond member. When we bought Dan's company, I got a hard drive with everything he's created in the last 40 years, which is like a gold mine going through. As I was going through everything, I found this one folder. It was called Diamond Faxes and I knew there's a Diamond level member. So what are the diamond faxes? I opened up, I started reading them and these were faxes. And I talked to Molly who has been with the company forever. I said, molly, what are these diamond faxes? She said, well, from 2012, 2019, if you know Dan Kennedy, he doesn't have an email. He just faxes things to people. So he would fax all of his diamond members the fax of like his thoughts of the week. Like the best marketing strategies, the best personal development, the best whatever he was excited about that week. He'd write a one page fax and he'd fax it to all the diamond members. The only people who ever seen these are the people that run diamond, that little window of time who actually had a fax machine. So most of the world's never seen this stuff. And it is insanely good. And so I'm a book nerd. So I was like, I want these in a book. And so we, we published them together in this book. And then right now this book is 446 pages long with I think 360 something faxes from Dan Kennedy directly to diamond members. So because it was just for diamond members, I was like, this is the hook. This is the mifke so the offer. In fact you can see if you go to diamondupgrade.com you get a free copy of this book. When you upgrade to diamond, there's the hook. There's the thing to get people in, right? This is the, the sexy thing. If you're trying to get something to ascend your next level or to stick or whatever, like what is the sexy thing they want so bad? Like diamond members want this. I'm hoping you want this. I wanted this. Like, it is one of my favorite books that we've ever. Anyway, it's amazing. So the next question, like, what do diamond members get each month? Dan does a masterclass. They're just for diamond members. He's like full video production where you can sit down, listen to Dan, which are amazing. Another cool thing we had inherited was they created Dan Kennedy's search engine which basically goes Back to all the newsletters back to like 1996, and put them in the search engine where you could go and type in Disney. And it shows all of the times the Dan's ever written about Disney. You can go find those. You can type in Russell Brunson. You see all the times that he ever mentioned me. You can type in whatever. And so we created the search engine, we plugged that in, which is really good as well, right? So the search engine, they sell for two grand. You get as a Diamond member. You get the book as a Diamond member. And then I was like, how do we. I want people to stick, though. I never want them to leave. Like, what do we have that's sticky? And one thing that Bill used to always tell me is like, stick is about creating pain and disconnect. Where traditionally with info, product membership sites and stuff, there's no pain to disconnect that you cancel. You know, you cancel, right? And so for Diamond, I'm like, how do we create a pain and disconnect? And then we had this idea, and when I used to go to Kennedy's events back in the day, they would like, sell all their different courses. But then if you go back and they had all the courses, like on this big, huge thing, and they had one product called the Whole Enchilada, which is basically like 25 or 30 grand. And he would just ship you one of everything. And it was so cool. It's called Whole Enchilada. So I was like, what if we gave people who came Diamond a Whole Enchilada? I mean, the problem is, then you log in and you're like, here's every core stands I've ever had. Which is kind of cool. But I was like, would be more powerful. And to get people to stick, it's like, what if we create this whole enchilada, but they have access to everything, but they only they get to pick like one or two courses a month, right? And it's every course Dan's ever created in the last 40 years. They're all in there. And each month you log in, you get two tokens or two credits or whatever it is. You can unlock a course, right? So you're like, oh, I want a speaking from stage. You click a button, it unlocks it. Now you have access to it, and then you have it for forever. But if you ever cancel, you lose access to all the ones you've unlocked, right? Each month you unlock more and more similar how audible does it, right? And other companies. And so we're building that infrastructure in the members area right now. It should be done before the officially goes live here soon. But it's the goal again here's the offer to get people to send up and how do we get them to stick? We make it where there's pain of disconnect. We unlock things and give them things but then if they leave, they lose these things. Right. You could go re sign up but then you got to go and each month earn your courses back till you have all the different courses. And so just some things we're doing strategically. And again we haven't launched diamond yet. I don't know what the conversions or numbers or anything are going to be but that's the things we're doing because we know that's the next tier to really get people in here. Other things I want to kind of mention just again visualizing where I'm going in the future. So we've got the gold level, we got the diamond level. I do know there's going to be a third level which is going to be our high ticket level. I don't know what that is yet. Some of you guys have been watching clickfunnels. You know we recently launched our certification program which sold really, really well. Part of me is thinking about launching like a marketing consulting certification program that goes based off Dan's teachings. I'm not sure about that. Again I'm always looking at like what are the different funnels, different businesses and different industries that are working well. People always ask like why'd you buy the company? Why'd you buy it? And there are a couple reasons, right? There's a reason like I want to work with Dan Kennedy. Number two, I want to extend his legacy. Like he's had such impact on me. Want to do it? Number three, like I love this game. Like building funnels, these things are so much fun. Finding like diamonds in the rough like Dan Kennedy's faxes is like it's like treasure hunting. Like it's so much fun. So I'm enjoying that part of it. But when all said and done, like the, the reason why we're building this company is because three years ago I had the thought like we need to create more non Russell based front ends. Like if I'm the front end of everything in clickfunnels then if I get hit by a bus, what happens to clickfunnels? Or someday we wanna sell clickfunnels. Boom. The book fell, Faxbook fell. And so when we look at Dan Kennedy, he's got 40 books he's written, he's got newsletters, he's got courses, he's got books, all these amazing things. I think these are a whole bunch of non Russell based front ends I can use to get people who are marketers, who are entrepreneurs into a conversation where now I can expose them to clickfunnels and then my books and other things like that. As much fun and as profitable as this business is in and of itself, without anything else, its core goal, its core purpose for existing and being is to find people and either turn them into entrepreneurs or find entrepreneurs, bring them in, train them on good marketing principles and then from there send them into click funnels. As much fun as I'm having this company, if it wasn't for that purpose, it doesn't make a lot of sense. I think those are the core things I want to talk about right now inside of the Dan Kennedy business. So that's some of the reasons why we did it, how we're doing it, where it came from, where it's going, what we're doing, and hopefully from that you got insights of how you can use some of these principles in your business. How to get people to sign up for your newsletters or your membership sites, whatever, how do you get them stick? How do you get them to ascend after that? Like where do you take people? What's the process? I hope this gives you some ideas for that. So that's the thank you guys so much for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode of the podcast, please share with other people. Share it with people on your team, share with the spouse, share it with in your favorite marketing group on Facebook or text it out to your text list or whatever. Let people know about it if you're enjoying it. That's how we get the word out. I will keep sharing behind the scenes of all these fun things if you guys do that. If you want to see actual physical behind the scenes screenshots of everything, make sure you get subscribed to the newsletter. Because twice or once a month you get the behind the scenes newsletter where I'm showing screenshots of every single page. The last thing, if you have any questions about this episode, about Dan Kennedy, about the newsletter, about this business, please go to marketingsecrets.com and there's a spot there where you can go and you can leave me a personal message. And when I do the next update on Dan Kennedy business, I will listen to the ones you guys posted about that and I can answer your question live. So that said, thank you guys so much for listening. I appreciate you. Hope you enjoyed this episode, and I'll see you on the next episode of the Marketing Secret Show.