LIVE: Your Future Profits

Foreign.

Welcome to another live stream.

Today is Tuesday and I do these.

Live streams from Tuesday, 2 to 4pm, Thursdays, 6 to 8pm Eastern, both times. I am back from Scottsdale, Arizona. I am back in my office. My name is Rich Sheffern, in case I didn't say that. And what I want to do today is share a really kind of special presentation. I've never really shared it, which is kind of cool. Excuse me. I was eating right before we got on air and yeah, I gave this presentation only one time and it was about some future trends as I was working on the.

I believe it was.

Yeah, I was working on the Attention age doctrine too. So I think it is very appropriate, especially right now, as attention scarcity is becoming more and more prevalent, people are recognizing it more and more and more. This presentation was when I was in the midst of working on the second attention report I wrote back in 2008. So I'd love it if you guys would say hello. I don't even know if you guys can hear me. I see that there's a few people here who have joined me so far and hopefully there will be more joining us as we continue. And yeah, let me know where you're watching it from. Let me know who's watching and if you can hear me and all that. So it was a really good time in Scottsdale. It was actually really interesting and I've definitely had my eyes opened about certain biz oppy type of opportunities out there where people can actually make a decent income and actually kind of prepare them for future things. So I'm sure I will be speaking about that in the days and weeks that to come. Okay, cool. Hey, Michael, glad that you can hear me. And in New York. New York. Yeah, it seems like it's going to be, I don't know, maybe it's a lighter crowd than normal, but I appreciate Tina and Michael that you guys are here as well as a bunch of others that are kind of lurking in the shadows. So, yeah, I'm trying to think if.

There'S anything else I wanted to share with you.

I got a presentation that I'm giving later today on Infinity Funnels. So for those of you who kind of took advantage of that opportunity, you'll be hearing more from me today. And let's see, what else? Just a really busy week as I get back from Arizona and have to prepare to go to San Diego for traffic and conversion. Hopefully that does not get canceled, but who knows in the days of COVID what will actually happen. Okay, look, all Right. Let me move this over here so I can kind of look. In the days of COVID what will actually happen. Okay, look. All right, let me that over here so I can kind of.

I don't even know what's going on right now, because. How am I hearing myself?

That is the strangest thing.

I don't even know what's going on right now because. Holy crap. Okay. How am I hearing myself?

That is the strangest thing. Okay, I'm going to mute myself because I don't. That is a weird. I don't know if you guys are hearing an echo. Something happened with the audio, so you're hearing it, too. Yeah, that's really strange because. Are you hearing an echo? Because I turned mine off just so that I wouldn't hear that there's a feedback loop going on. Okay, let me see. That's really strange because. Are you hearing an echo? Because I turned mine off just so that I wouldn't hear that there's a feedback loop going on. Okay, let me see. Yeah, that's really strange because. Are you hearing an echo? Because I turned mine off just so that I wouldn't hear that there's a feedback, because. Are you hearing. Yeah.

All right.

Well.

I don't know what the hell is going on. I'm going to put the video on. Hopefully it works. If it doesn't work, then I will be back.

This is much better because it actually indicates that we have been drinking last night. So it's much more in keeping with what we're doing. So we obviously have a very cool. Again, I wanted to remind everybody, today is the day that we go into confidential roundtables and the site reviews, gauze and bandages not included. So you will see outside there are a bunch of signs that will direct you if you have a site review, where and when to go and what the topics of the roundtables are. So go ahead, and after this presentation, take your little break. We're going to try to speed things up from the time that we lost. I know I said I was going to slow things down, but I'm an Internet marketer. I can't be trusted. So take a look at that stuff. Head over to the place that you want to be, and we're going to have a terrific time. Just wanted to get some feedback from you all yesterday. I mean, we're headed in the right direction. Did you get some stuff out of it? Yeah.

Cool.

His arms are crossed, so. I'm sorry I failed you, man. I'm very sorry. I was talking yesterday about synergy and conflict. How that if you start to look at the events that take place in your life and in your business, the people that have faster success stories seem to be able to identify the synergies that affect their business, the things that they're good at, how they can cause that to be a synergy. You're asking me to move over here? Okay, I'm moving over here. I cannot share the stage with him. He is such an amazing person. Is this enough room for you? And it occurred to me, you know, just to be completely transparent, everybody knows who Rich is, right? Everybody's heard of Rich. Rich, yeah. Right, exactly. It occurs to me now, what can I say about Rich? You know, he's the consultant to the consultant. He's the senior strategist. And I thought, that's just not very genuine because I have a more meaningful relationship with Rich than that. And here's one of the things that actually is the anchor about my feelings about Rich. Everybody remember his manifestos that he wrote back in the day? I mean, he was one of the first guys to just push the free line, right? Just, I mean, really push it. Like, I can't believe this guy's giving this away. And I got it because it was cool. And I remember reading it and he was talking about how in that actual manifestation, what you really ought to do is build trust and credibility with your product first. You know, find a way to build trust and credibility with your product. It's great to have a third party authority talk about you. We call it a testimonial. But it's great to actually have the first party build your credibility. And the way that you do that is you let them sample your product without any risk. And I thought, that's a really good idea. And so I made the first Going Natural videos. And so in that way, Rich was the guy that was responsible for helping me make those first three videos that launched StopperNet, because he gave away first. And that's been really powerful and poignant for me. And so now I think about it, I was thinking, God, this guy's pretty cool and he's pretty smart. He's probably an arrogant snob, you know, and I'll never meet him. And now he's come to speak. And so there's that synergy and that confluence, because as it turns out, he's nothing like I thought he would be because he was so good at what he does. And I'm just really thrilled to have him because, you know, aside from being every time he opens his Mouth, I feel like I gotta record it. He's a good friend and he actually is a man of integrity. What's cool, among all the other things is Rich hasn't spoke at another event outside of his own in like almost a year. And the one that he spoke at was with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, I mean, right up our alley. And he got paid $25,000 to speak for one hour. And I thought I went like this when I heard that. Wow, maybe he still likes me. Depends on the intro I gave him. So, Rich, for those of you that don't know Rich, Rich was the first person to make strategy sexy, right? He was oftentimes in stompernet, we like to talk about the tactics. Alright, so you want this anchor text and this link pointing to this page and everybody's like, cool. And here's a video that shows you step by step how to do it. Oftentimes when we form our relationship with you, you've already got a plan, you've already got your strategy already moving down the field. Well, Rich is the guy that usually inspires that. He's usually the guy that says, this is the strategy that you want, this is how you're going to execute your business. The tactics and stuff, well, you can learn that from other intelligent people. And I don't think we spend enough time talking about the strategic implications of our business. You know, Paul Emberger was on stage the other day talking about how. Well, I showed you guys. Remember the mind map that had a bazillion things on it. Those were all tactics. And then we distilled those down into five really important overall strategies. Rich is right up at that level. And the result has been companies that have just gone from mediocre to magnificent. Excuse me, I'm sorry, did somebody call my name? Okay, sorry about that. Must be paranoid. You know, it's early, I haven't had my coffee. So among the other things that he's written besides the manifestos, he's written the Attention Age doctrine, which was another influencing document because that's what actually helped me go from. Remember the first Going Natural videos that were just kind of, kind of ghetto. And the second one, which was highly produced, where he was talking about how you have to actually work very hard to get your customer's attention. And I thought, hey, I can do video, I can do it maybe a little bit better than some of these other guys. And so let me do that again. So that's two that I owe him. So if you would please, I hate to ask you to help Me, you know, settle a debt, because I really do owe the guy. If you could help me welcome Rich Sheffrin.

Good morning. I'm really excited. This is going to be a pretty cool presentation. I've been working on the stuff that I'm going to tell you about today for about the last year, and it has grown and grown and grown, much to the dismay of everybody that I work with. Because we were supposed to release this report a couple days ago, and it's supposed to be about 80 pages and it's 350 pages, and we're trying to figure out how to shorten it. And so what I want to do today is really give you an overview of how things are changing, because they're changing in a very dramatic way. And it's going to change the way that business is being done. And there's no question it's kind of. I'm going to recommend certain things that are very non strategic. Like, and based on what Andy just said about me as being the guy that is the strategic guy, it's kind of almost paradoxical that I'm going to tell you that in certain ways, strategy in and of itself has completely changed because of the way that the Internet has kind of changed the rules of business. And so I'm going to try and go through this as fast as possible. And I'll make sure that Andy gets a copy of the slides so that you don't feel like you have to write anything down. Because it's much more important to me that you get it. Like, you just get the perspective. Because if you get the perspective, then I achieved my goal and it will make a huge impact, I promise, in your business. So with that said, you know, there's good news in this presentation and there's bad news. And so just keep an open mind with each of the things that I'm going to share with you. And the other thing that I want to just say up front is I haven't released this report yet. It's 350 pages. We got to try and whittle it down now. But I would really, really appreciate it if this material didn't just like, jump on somebody's blog tomorrow. Because I've spent the last year kind of like refining it and it would kind of suck if I released the report. And people were like, oh, I just read that on so and so's blog. So if you could just kind of hold back and not do that, I would really appreciate it. And this, don't freak out because some of it is Kind of doom and gloom, but. But I promise you, by the time we're through, it won't be okay. Yeah, when I told him, he just totally freaked out.

All right.

So the average entrepreneur works 14 weeks more now than he did in 1969. We actually lead the world in number of hours. Worked more than Japan, more than any place else now. And that's heavy duty because we are with the impact that the Internet has had and technology has had. Like you could work 24, 7 and never get it all done, right? And that was never the case before. This is pretty sad, pathetic, depressing. The average working parent spends twice as much time with email than they do with their children. That's pretty. That sucks. And this is a question that you should think about because I know I think about this question quite a bit. Like, if you're working really hard and you're doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it. And you get to the next day and you ask yourself, now that yesterday's over, what did you really do that's worth mentioning. If you don't have anything, then really, what was the purpose of that day? What is the purpose of this continual acceleration of trying to go faster and faster and faster? Because since there is so much that you can do, so many options, so many things, and you can never really finish everything, you could be this. You could be on a never ending race to succeed, right? You could just keep going. But the problem is that most people confuse busyness with purpose, right? Adrenaline with accomplishment. It is not how hard you work and it will never be about how hard you work, although it might be about how fast you work. The. Yeah, this kind of multitasking isn't a good idea. You know, I'm going to drive to a bar, I might as well start drinking now. But the. You know, if you look at how you structure your life, like, here's what I would imagine because I've had this conversation with so many people over the last 12 months. Most people multitask while they're driving. And there's like a 400% increase in the chance of an accident. If you're talking on the phone, it doesn't even matter if you're holding the phone. It's just, that's the reality now. I do it too. So I'm not saying like, shame, shame. I'm just saying like, this is reality. So we multitask while we're driving. We multitask while we're on the phone, right? We skim important documents, we text message sometimes instead of phoning. And what all of these things kind of have in common is that we're skimming the surface, right? We're not going deep so that we can go faster. And there's a real problem with that because if you're going faster and you're skimming, right? What are you doing with all this extra time that you saved? And for most people, what they're doing is more skimming, right? That doesn't really work. A life of skimming, never going deep, like, ends up hurting anyone, but especially an entrepreneur. You can go as fast as you need to go, but if you're doing it in a way that is skimming, you will not be successful.

Right?

There's a difference between skimming the surface, like by trying to get faster and faster and doing less and then going fast because you're just doing less, but you're going deeper. Make sense? Because.

Yeah.

Okay, cool. You see, if you're skimming and skimming and skimming, trying to save time and you still can't get in of front front, then this is what the reality is, is that your business doesn't work. You're trying to make up for that, and you can't make up for a business that doesn't work, right? It doesn't. You will burn out. It doesn't. You can't do that. It's just impossible. Because what happens if you're successful, if you're successful at compensating for a business that doesn't work, it's going to grow and then the demands are going to increase. And as the demands increase, then what? At some point you can't compensate enough.

Right?

So this is like, this is the challenge. And if you look at most of the economic growth that's happened in the last 10 years, it's all new companies, right? Companies that didn't even exist 10 years ago, right? Because the old companies are trying that model like skimming, going faster, and it's not working. And new companies, which are more focused in general because they just started something, right? They're limited in their capacity of what they can do. And if you think about all these big companies that are around us today, these are all companies like Google, eBay, PayPal, et cetera. These companies didn't exist 10 years ago, right. How far do you have to take it?

Right?

Like, if you're working everywhere, all the time, and that's the common entrepreneurial experience. I don't know if it is for everybody in this room or for most people or even for a minority of the people in this room. But most entrepreneurs, if they go on vacation, they take work with them because it's so easy to now with the laptop, you know, email on your iPhone, etc. Like, you know, there's really no difference between this and looking at your iPhone and answering email in the bathroom.

Right.

It's just that now technology's gotten smaller, right? And then all of a sudden doesn't seem so silly, right? Like, you know, because I've seen. Well, never mind the. So, so why is this happening, right? Why is. Why are entrepreneurs like kind of behaving in this silly way? And not only entrepreneurs actually. Why are bigger companies like, you know, hemorrhaging? Okay, well, I want to put it in context now. This is. I have another quote by this gentleman. This is like my biggest business hero because he was always like 20 years ahead of everybody else. It's Peter Drucker, right? And he really invented management thinking in the first place. He's dead now. Died like I think two years ago. But yeah, I mean he was talking about stuff that would happen 20 years before it happened. And I just don't understand how like some people can do that. But anyway, one of the things he said obviously before he passed away, was that the corporation is unlikely to survive the next 25 years. This is the guy that like came up with the whole concept of management thinking is not known for saying radical things. And that's a pretty radical statement. And the other statement is pretty radical too. So there's a fundamental shift in the way business is being done. And that's what I'm trying to convey to you today, that like there's a. The way a business operates is changing and it's not a small change. Like there's two ways to look at change. If you're looking at like the way an organism changes, right? There's evolutionary changes, which is like slow over time, adjustment. And then there's something called punctuated equilibrium where all of a sudden just something massively changes and it's like nothing like the way it was before. And that's what's happening in business. And the businesses that are adjusting to that are thriving and the businesses that don't are failing. Yeah, this is another. He's an extremely well known economist and this is what he had to say. There's going to be a fundamental change in the global economy unlike anything we have had since cavemen started bartering. And that was a pretty big leap. This is huge. Think about this, right? There have been six or five, five or six major leaps in communication. And the way humans communicate first was when we invented language, right? Then was when we invented written language. Then when we had printed, like, you know, we could print it then the way we could actually like do it through telephones and stuff like that. And now, right, you can put something on a blog or create a video or make a podcast and a billion people can have access to it immediately. The largest corporations in the world couldn't do that two years ago, five years ago, you know, whatever it was, now it's in the hands of everybody. Each of us can communicate with the whole world more than like what the largest multinational companies could do. Yeah, about 10 years ago. I mean, it's insane. So why are they saying that? All right, well, there was a time, and it wasn't too long ago, when business had all the power, right? We've moved from a place where proximity used to be one of the major influences of the decision making process in business. Who was close to us? Proximity. And now it has no relevance. Almost proximity has been changed to relevancy. And that's why, you know, that's one of the reasons why Stomper is so successful. Because they're teaching you how to make sure, like the search engines know that you're relevant, right? Because relevancy trumps proximity. You can do business with anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world now. And it wasn't always the case. In fact, it wasn't even the case a short time ago. And that changes the rules to everything. Because all of a sudden the consumer can buy something from not just the person in their immediate scope. They can find out what anyone's going to charge worldwide and then get the best price. And that changes, like the dynamic. So customers now have the ability to buy from anybody, right? Anybody, anybody. And it's increasing, you know, I mean, more and more people are joining the Internet each day, not less, right? And so more and more businesses are joining the Internet each day. And so customers prospects have more and more options each day. And so we've very quickly gone from a place where almost everything that is being sold very quickly tends or trends towards being a commodity. And that's because it's a buyer's market.

Okay?

Another area that hurts business owners, businesses is that talent, like talented people now have more power than they've ever had before. Before you got a job, you know, and you worked there the rest of your life if you were lucky. Talented people don't generally want to do that anymore. There's better options out there, right? So think about this. You Know, here's this, you know, big muscular company. All of a sudden, the two places where it had the most power, right? With its talent and its customers, all of a sudden now both of those are more powerful than the company because they have a lot more options. A lot. And I will take what I'm telling you here and I will apply it to how you actually operate differently in a business. But it's really important that you understand the philosophical side of things. So you understand, like, well, why do I really need to operate that way? It's because of these things. These are fundamental shifts in the way business gets done.

Right.

Change. Change has accelerated. And I don't. That shouldn't be a surprise to anybody, right? I mean, it's incredible how quickly things are changing and how much technology is changing. I was reading the other day. Well, I wasn't really reading. I was skimming, because I was. But they were talking about chemical engineering and about how there's so many new breakthroughs now on a consistent basis. Like, how do companies stay abreast that need to of like all of them so they can figure out which ones are relevant to them.

Right?

And these kinds of issues were never problems before, but they are now. So this, like, this change. But you see, the cool thing is that as business owners, the more change that there is, the more people go online to look for solutions. When you're confused or not, sure, you reach out. And so confusion comes a lot of times from change happening at an accelerated rate. But your business also has to adapt and change with change. And that changes the rules of the game, because now you have different people having more power than the company, and you also have to deal with change. The next thing is, and it's starting to happen now, but it isn't happened on a global basis yet, is that we are trending towards what a lot of experts tell us is a copycat economy, where really, when you're doing something and no one else is doing something in a business, you have an advantage, right? But more and more quickly, any kind of advantage like that is quickly being stripped away because other people can figure out what you're doing because there's very little that you can hide online especially. And then it doesn't stay an advantage. It becomes a new rule of, like, this is just like now, like, what you need to do. And so how do you prevent that? How do you prevent, like, being copied? How do you prevent being different, being special and staying special, staying different enough so that you're relevant to consumers? Because relevancy is what's important now. So you have copycats here, right? And accelerated change here. And you have talent here and consumers here. And they're all pressing on the business. And that's why entrepreneurs are like on this hamster wheel trying to go faster and faster and yet not getting anywhere, spending more time with email than they are with their children. And this is the beginning of the trend. It's not changing. Like this is where we're going. And so it's going to get worse and worse and worse. That's what I mean by don't freak out because it doesn't have to be that way for you. There's choices, but we're getting squeezed from all sides. So once again my business hero, Peter Drucker, the guy who coined management thinking, said uncertainty in economy, society, politics has become so great to render corporate planning counterproductive. I mean that is, I mean, you know, we could just zip over to the next slide. But like that is so like that. That's a very strong statement by the guy who invented the concept, right? Ebay has a five day plan. Five day plan. That's how they operate. That's what the CEO said. Forget a five year plan, we have a five day plan. I mean it wasn't that long ago that people were talking about a hundred year plan and how The Japanese have 100 year plans and how superior that is. And now we are in a completely different direction. It's not even a five year plan. When Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace, they asked him what was his plan. He said, well, we don't exactly have a plan yet.

Right.

And he didn't, but he had some ideas. So you can't have the kind of detailed plan that I used to recommend to people and that pretty much anyone in business used to recommend and do because things change too fast. So we've gone from make and sell.

Right?

And that's the model that still a lot of people follow to sense and respond, which is 10 times superior. If you think about like all the advancements in manufacturing, like do you know that like a. And they're not even like the gold standard anymore but like Dell could like I forget the stats. Exactly. But in a Dell factory, the inventory room could be a 10 by 10 closet that's satisfying like a million computers shipped a year and the inventory room for all of that is a 10 by 10 closet. Like less than this stage because it's just in time, right? Just in time. And, and Toyota's taken that even further that sense and respond, right? And that Concept is now carrying forward into everything, not just manufacturing. That's the way you have to operate your business. Now if you get good at that, sense and respond, and we'll talk about how you do that, then you can actually get in front and you can anticipate and preempt. And that's the goal. That's how you win. You win in business by anticipating and preempting. And so I want to kind of. I wish I could kind of carve that into your mind because this is what you always have to remember. Now this is your goal is to anticipate and preempt. This is kind of a hairy diagram and it will make a lot more sense later. So I just want to cover the big yellow balls, right? Monitor and sense.

Right?

Detect and interpret, analyze, decide, respond and execute. That's the process. We'll go back to that. Like I said, you're going to have copies of the slides. So if I. You can analyze them in detail later. Okay, think about this. HP and Canon, most of us have heard of those two companies. 80% of their revenues come from products that are less than 2 years old. I mean, that's like, wow. Like when I first saw that stat, I was like, jesus, we really are moving fast, right? 80%. I mean, these are both obviously multi billion dollar corporations, right? 80% of their revenue comes from products that are less than 2 years old. That's why you can't like make and sell, right? You have to anticipate, you have to sense and respond because of this. All right, so that's kind of like, I would say, the bad news of the presentation. Let's move into the good news. All right, according to comScore, there's 763 million people online in March of 2007. So it's a little bit outdated, but that's what it was then. And projected spending of about $200 billion online. These are rough estimates, right? There we go.

All right.

People here ever heard of like Metcalfe's Law?

No.

Okay. Metcalfe's Law is about, well, let's not even go there. A network. If you're the only person with a phone or a fax machine or a computer that gets online and there's nobody else there. Not too useful, Right? If there are a few people that have phones that you want to talk to and you have a phone, all of a sudden it becomes a lot more useful. If everybody has a phone, it becomes incred. Incredibly useful. And then it becomes necessary.

Right?

And so there's a Mathematical law about networks, that they increase in value, right? The more at an accelerated rate. So when a 1% increase in the size of a network doesn't correspond to a 1% increase in wealth generated or value generated, it actually is about four times that amount. So, so when there's an increase in a country of like, them getting online, like less developed countries, they'll see like about a 4% increase. For every 1% increase in people getting online, they'll see about a 4% increase in GDP, right? So as the network grows, the people associated in the network get more value, four times as much. In general, these are like, these are soft, right? It could be two and a half, it could be five. You know, these are soft. All right, well, they project that by about 2010, 2012, that there will be 3 billion users online. Okay, so the network goes from 700 million, but let's just call it a billion to 3 billion. Three times the size in the next five years. Three times as many people online. That's called a pivot point because that means that if you do the math, that there'll be over a trillion dollars worth of new wealth generated that doesn't exist today, just doesn't exist anywhere. All of a sudden, there will be a trillion dollars of new wealth.

And.

That hopefully I'll have some of that. I'd like to have as much of it as I can. And that should be your goal too. So the good news is that all of these kinds of things that are going on also are creating this. They're going to create a tremendous amount of wealth, but that wealth will be spread out throughout the world, like online, everywhere. So there's tremendous amounts of wealth that are going to be generated, and we haven't even seen the beginning of it. A good way to look at technology, right, is that it's never about the technology at the end of the day, like where the big money is made, where the shifts happen. It's always about when it is fully adopted, right? When enough people are using it. When enough people use it, then the impact of the technology is actually felt. Until then, it's like we haven't really felt the effect. And so the reason this is here is because we haven't really felt the effect yet of the Internet. And that's a profound statement after everything that we've just seen. But we haven't. It hasn't been around long enough. It hasn't been adopted enough, but it will be when there's 3 billion people online. You know, I love this reference because I think it puts it in perspective. 65 years. It took 65 years after the invention of the printing press for someone to come up with the concept of page numbers.

Right?

65 years until someone was like, page numbers would be a good idea.

Right?

It's the same. It's the same. We've only had the Internet for like, what, 10 years. It took 65 years to come up with page numbers. It's going to take time for this adoption rate to kind of, like, go through the world and have its impact. And when it does, that wealth that will be generated is just insane. So that's kind of the philosophical side of the presentation, kind of put it all in perspective so that you understand why I'm recommending what I recommend. All right, so rule number one, and we're not even sure we're going to call them rules, like, we're trying to think of, maybe they'll be axioms or something else that's kind of just more sexy than rules. Because I don't think most people like to follow rules. I know I don't. Do it wrong fast. This is the way you must operate if you are going to sense and respond.

Right.

If you're going to anticipate and preempt, you must embrace a do it wrong fast approach. I'm a perfectionist. I find that no matter when I start a presentation like this, I'm working on it, like, two minutes before I get up here. So this is very hard for me to do. Do it wrong fast. But this language I chose purposely because I could never embrace fail fast. That just felt weird, right? But it's the same concept, do it wrong fast. In other words, you cannot know what is going to work or not work until you get feedback. And research and study is not going to prevent mistakes. Just can't. The old rule was learn enough to not make mistakes. The new rule is make mistakes as fast as you can because that's how you're going to learn. And it really is that big of a shift. You cannot win the other way. You cannot win with a I'll do it. I'll learn enough and get it right. You cannot win that way anymore. Because if you wait till you know enough, you go too slow. No matter when you incorporate something new, it's going to be suboptimal or right. It's never going to be at its optimum when you incorporate something. And so if one of your competitors incorporates something at a suboptimal, you know, they're willing to have that be suboptimal. Then they're learning. Now when it gets perfected, you just then start that process. So you make the mistakes knowing that, like, you have a feedback mechanism in place so that you actually are learning. And that's all. We'll get to that. How many people here have heard of Trafo Data? Okay, two, three. Okay, three people. There's a reason I put up this company. They don't exist anymore. They went out of business. It was a sad story, really, or maybe not. But the Trafo Data was started by. That's their business card. Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Paul Gilbert. This was their first company. This was Pre Microsoft. Only 3 out of 400 or 500 ever heard of it. Nobody ever remembers your failures. They only remember your successes, right? And so that might. If you have a hard time kind of getting to that point of do it wrong fast, remember Trafo Data. Because nobody does remember Trafo Data. They remember Microsoft. I mean, and Microsoft's another perfect example. He sold the operating system before it existed. That's a pretty much do it wrong fast, right? Didn't even exist, okay? The Apple Store. When the Apple Store. When Steve Jobs decided that he was gonna do an Apple Store, right at that time, Gateway was closing their stores. Dell had tried a few stores and failed. And this is the time that Steve Jobs decided, we're gonna do stores. Not one, not one single analyst covering the computer industry thought it was a good idea. Not one. Everyone thought it was a bad idea. Every single one. The common wisdom was what BusinessWeek said, which was, in two years from now, Apple will turn off the lights of their last store. Like, with, you know, realizing the mistake that they made. Okay? It is the most successful store in history. It got to a billion dollars in sales in just three years. Two years later, it was doing a billion dollars a quarter. Like, the closest store that has ever been even remotely as successful was the Gap. And it's a fraction. One of these stores can do more business than a Best Buy, right? It does more business than six other stores that surround it in a mall. And yet nobody thought it was going to be successful. Nobody. They all thought it was going to be unsuccessful. And if that was the whole story, it would be enough to put here just to understand that you don't really know until you do. But it's actually, there's a better reason for putting it up there. I wanted to see if I actually went in more depth because he. Apple as a company with Steve Jobs at least at the helm, runs in that mode. Of do it wrong fast. Because it was also the only store in the history of retailing that I know and I used to be in retailing. So I'm pretty confident they did it wrong fast. They actually rented a warehouse. Steve Jobs is like a privacy freak, right? Like, you know, control freak, privacy freak, doesn't want anyone to know stuff. They rented a warehouse, right, By Apple headquarters, and they built prototypes of the store, right? They didn't study. They just kept building prototypes until they got it right. Build it and then change it. Build it, change it. Only store that's ever been built that way. As opposed to hire great architects. Design it perfectly, and then we'll start putting them in stores, right? They didn't do that. Instead, they built it fast. Now they built it fast in private because they didn't want anyone to know what they were doing. But it's the same methodology, rapid prototyping. And even Harvard Business Review did an article about two years ago about that. That is even in physical goods, that's the same way they now recommend red. Rapid prototyping is far superior than trying to get it right up front. Okay? So that's rule number do it wrong fast. And the concept there is don't wait until you know enough. Just start doing really.

Okay.

Now, if you embrace the do it wrong fast kind of concept, right, that you're not going to wait to know enough to start, then you move to the next one, which is understanding that, like Rule 2 is that action creates clarity. You're going to learn by moving, right? Movement over meditation creates knowledge. Action creates clarity. Doesn't take too many of these to learn not to kind of like, lean over, right? And I have kids. I have two wonderful daughters, too. So, like, I know that sometimes they got to go through this because they just, you shouldn't do that. You shouldn't do that. Shouldn't do that. Boom, they stop doing it. You want to take action, not notes, right? There is no forward movement in taking notes. There's forward movement in taking action. And you have to, in order to sense, respond, right? Action. You're not going to pick it up just like on the sidelines, like, taking notes. It doesn't work that way. Think about anybody who, like, talks from the stage here this weekend or any other time that you've gone to a Internet event. I can tell you that the people up here that are really teaching you stuff are the people that are taking action, right? They're not like, oh, I read in these five books this, and I want to convey that to you they're actually. They did stuff without being sure whether.

It would work or not.

Right.

And lo and behold, something worked and now they know something that other people don't know.

Right.

The way you learn things that other people don't know is by doing things.

Yeah.

Okay, so this is their product managing product manager, director. I don't know how you're a management director. Kind of seems like it's the same. You're either project head of all products, like director, or you're the manager. But anyway, Google. Google thrives on. This is a quote of his.

Right?

This is the guy who's in charge of products at Google. Google thrives on launching products quickly and then letting users tell us what needs improving. And every like a great book to kind of like, if this is a challenge, like these first two rules of like, I don't know. I don't know if I could actually do that. Founders at Work. There's a great book because it talks about how pretty much every company that we know didn't start out with the goal of what we know them for, PayPal, they were trying to build a encryption company. That was their goal. I have in the report. Well, I don't know if it's going to be in the report because it might be one of those pages that just magically disappears. But VCs who have done studies, right. Of like, the businesses that they've invested in. Companies that don't change their business plan after funding fail about 33% of the time. Companies that do change their plans after funding fail about 7% of the time. So, like the concept of staying firm and not, you know, making a decision, sticking to it is actually kind of silly. And that what was once seen maybe as weakness and flex so flexible that it's like weakness is actually the best way to go and flexibility tied to doing it wrong fast and action creates clarity. Like, creates a mindset of like, how best to operate. Okay, next one is measure, then build. Okay, because, and I said this because, like, in my mind, I think a lot of people take the concept of build and then measure. And that's a leftover way of thinking from direct response before the Internet existed, because you couldn't measure before the thing was fully built.

Right.

How could you. But now build and then measure is to me the equivalent of like field of dreams. Build it and they will come. And we know that that's not really a good approach. So measure and then build. And what do I mean by that? Let's talk about it. How many people Here have heard of clicktail. Show of hands. All right, so a few, maybe like 3%, 4%. Clicktail allows you to watch what visitors are doing on your site. You get videos of the sessions and you get to watch the cursor move through the page, like where they put their cursor. Now think about a sales letter and think about being able to see exactly what every visitor is doing on that page. Which testimonials they stop and read, which ones they pass over, which one. Do they really scroll to the bottom and look at the price or do they read the whole thing? You can do that. And not only can you do that, you can do that for free. So clicktail provides that clicktail.com so but you don't. It should not only be for sales letters, you could do that on your blog. If you have a blog. And you should have a blog. Because you need to understand the behavior of your market. If you're going to be able to sense and preempt.

Right.

Anticipate and preempt. You have to know your market like cold. That's the knowledge that you need to study and research and spend a lot of time on. And this is one of those things that provides it. How many people here use analytics? Show of hands.

All right.

Oh, that's a really good. Okay, cool. And okay, so that's how many people have analytics. How many actually drive decision making process like and change stuff on their site through analytics. Can I see a show of hands? Okay, less, but not bad.

All right.

Analytics is one of those things that allows you to measure, then build. You don't have to have things finished to measure with analytics, right? See conversion rate. We are so messed up about conversion rate. Do you know that like conversion rate does not matter. And I'll tell you why conversion rate doesn't matter. Because the goal of a business is not to have a high conversion rate. The goal of a business is to have more conversions. And the two are far apart. Because if you can get, let's say you have a 10% conversion rate, right? But you could get 10,000 more visitors to your site and they're only going to have a 1% conversion rate. Well, guess what? They just lowered your conversion rate, but they just raised your sales and they raised the number of conversions. So conversion rate is kind of a. It's in context, it makes sense. Out of context, it makes no sense.

Right?

So your goal is not to have a higher conversion rate ever, but the conversion rate mentality is what fosters build and then measure as opposed to measure and then build. Because conversions, like the actual sale, happens at the end, right? And so you need to have the process finished to measure that. But what I'm saying is that that measurement is really the least valuable of all your measurements, because it's just really one. It's a scoreboard, and it's not even an accurate scoreboard because that's not. You want the most amount of conversions, not necessarily the highest conversion rate. As you get more traffic, generally it's less targeted. Therefore, your conversion rates will go down, but your conversions will go up. Bounce rates, for those of you who are using analytics, for those of you who aren't, you should. But bounce rates are one of the best and most leverageable negative stats that you could ever deal with. And so, like, I was talking to a friend of mine about a week ago, and he mentioned to me that, oh, I've been studying analytics and I've learned a lot, but I don't know, what am I supposed to do with this information? Like, I know a lot, but, like, where's the action? And I said, well, what about your bounce rates? Like, why not look at your, you know, top entrance pages and see which one has the highest bounce rate? And now you know, like, where you're leaking the most traffic, right? So you can look at bounce rates and you can do a lot of different types of segmenting. Segmenting and bounce rates are like the two ways of really learning a lot about your business. A lot of. If I could make a suggestion, and I would imagine that most of you guys really got this down based on the number of people that raised their hand. But like, always, just make sure that when you're measuring something, you understand the concept of the measurement, like conversion rate. Nobody cares about. You shouldn't really care that much about conversion rate. You shouldn't really care about page views. The goal is not to have lots of page views. If you want more page views, make your navigation more archaic and you will get more page views, you'll get less sales, but you'll have more page views. So page views is not really the end all be all either, right? Exit pages, exit pages does not mean the page is suboptimal. I just did an interview. Well, I did an interview with Dan Ariely. He wrote a book called Predictably Irrational, which is a phenomenal book, and every marketer kind of needs to read that book. But anyway, I wanted to score some points with Dan because we're doing some stuff together. And so in the blog post where I put the interview for A free download. I recommended that everybody go to his site and opt in because he's a professor at MIT of Behavioral Economics and he does these studies and he looks for participants. And so I told everybody that you want to opt in here because you can learn about how these studies are being done. And it's a really educational thing. And so when people left my site to go to his site, all of a sudden that page became one of the largest exit pages of my site. But it was working the way I wanted it to because they were going to his site. So exit pages also not necessarily a bad thing. Look at every measurement in the context of what your real goal is. Task completion rate. We'll get back to that. Okay. This is heavy duty and it's worthy of spending a couple minutes on. Okay. Every buying decision goes through is not an event, it's a process. Even impulse decisions, there's a process. It might just happen, right? It happens really fast. So there's a series of steps that happen when people decide to buy something. And then based on what's being bought, based on how big of an expense it is, how the risk of making a wrong mistake, it can be slower and slower. So buying is a process, not a event. And so I came up with this list of to define the buying process. And I want to walk you through this because most of the advice that I've seen out there, and I don't study that much Internet marketing these days, I would imagine a lot of you actually study a lot more of it than I do these days. But when I did study it, and when I used to do black hat SEO and stuff like that, which is years ago, the common mentality was you want to get people right before purchase.

Right?

If you sell business planning software, you don't want people searching for business, you want people searching for business plan software.

Right?

And that makes sense because those people are closer to buying. But I want you to understand this in the context of everything we've just talked about. Okay? There's going to be more competition than ever before, right? We've kind of addressed that and more pressure on business owners, more all this stuff. So when somebody searches and they're this close to making a purchase, their buying criteria is already set. Right now they're just looking for what, like the cheapest price, the one who's going to deliver the most value as it relates to their criteria. So you're a commodity at that point. When someone's like looking at business planning software, they've already decided what they want and now you're competing with an ever increasing number of companies to then sell them what it is they want. The reason my company has grown as fast as it's grown is because that's not what I do. And that's. If you look at most companies that grow fast, that's not what they do. Because you can't grow fast if you're in the middle of a fight with all your other competitors. You're too busy fighting to really grow. The real power, the real leverage points of the buying process start at the very beginning. They always start at the very beginning because you get to define the criteria. You get to define the buying criteria, right? Andy was talking about my reports. My reports never are written about like here, like about the problems that people are already looking for, the solutions to my reports talk about current problems and then suggest something else is causing it all that you didn't even know of. And here's the situation and I'm framing the issue, which gives me a lot more ability to make a sale over everybody else because I've just now framed the problem. I framed it right, just like I'm doing here. I'm framing the problem, right? I've talked about all the issues that are causing like now this, right, These rules to be in effect. But you guys weren't like sitting around before I came up here and saying, you know, there really needs to be new rules because and then went out and looking for people who were providing them. And so all the power to grow your company is in the early stages. I'm not saying, please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you don't. You ignore the other group because the other group, they want to spend money and they want to spend money today and you want that money. But the growth, the big growth, the hyper growth, the ability to get out in front, right. Anticipate is never going to be meeting people where they are. So the buying process is recognition, like noticing that they have a problem or they want a benefit. They know something now that they didn't know before and that's going to start a chain of events to make a purchase. Research, going online, seeing who offers what, kind of getting a determination of what is out there. Refine and reflect, like deciding what options do I want, what options do I not want? What am I willing to spend for this? What am I not willing to spend for this? Reach out. There's other buying processes, right? I mean, I just kind of developed this one. None of the other ones that I see reflect this and it doesn't make any sense to me. Reach out is all about social media because it's an insane number consumers now that look to see what other people have to say about the product before making a buying decision. So reach out. Resolve. Deciding to make the purchase. There's a difference between deciding to make the purchase and making the purchase. Because look at abandonment rates, right? Imagine if, like a supermarket had the same abandonment rates as the average, like, you know, shopping cart. Imagine walking into a supermarket and seeing like 70% of the, like, carts full of stuff and nobody, like, who filled all this stuff, right? Like, it would just be insane. Like, you know, people going to the supermarket, filling carts and then just leaving and not buying it. That's the difference online people make. You know, they think they're going to buy it. They just decided they resolved, but they didn't buy it. Realization of purchase. That's actually when things happen, when we actually buy and then reconsider as soon as we buy. Oh, did we make the right decision? Maybe we didn't. So those are the steps. And increasingly what you want to do is you want to use analytics to understand all of these. You want to understand what's the purpose of someone coming to your website. You have a purpose for starting a business. Your business has a purpose for having a website. And the visitor to your website has a purpose for coming. We already know everybody's busy, so they didn't say, oh, I'll just check out this website. I don't know why. No, they have a purpose. You need to know that purpose. And that purpose will put them somewhere in this continuum. Our site. If you combine analytics and surveys, you start to get a whole perspective of what's their purpose and how do they act. Analytics tells you the what. The surveys tell you the why. A place where you can get a free survey that kind of works with analytics is4q.iperceptions.com 4q. Like the number 4 numeral q.iperceptions.com iperceptions perceptions. P E, R C. I'm a horrible speller. I don't know if any of these slides have been spelled wrong, but P E, R C E, P T, I, O, N. I don't know. S. I would not be the guy that's standing up at the end of the spelling bee.

All right?

Rule four, think systematically. Also remember, like, I'm just giving you, like, a touch, right? Like, we'll get you the slides. You'll have the information. Trust me. That's why My report is 350 pages, right? Now, think systematically. Most people do not think systematically or systemically. They think linearly.

Right?

We've been taught from a very early age to cut things up, right? So that we can solve problems. But the problem with cutting things up to solve problems is that we lose the greater whole. And when you lose the greater whole, then you cannot perform at an optimum. And you certainly can't sense and you certainly can't preempt. Business is a system, right? Your whole business is a system. I'm going to. I want to. I don't know. You might have learned this because I'm a crazy reader. I read about five books a week, and when I'm doing these kinds of things, I'm reading seven or eight books a week. And Brad is a crazy reader, too. I've recommended a lot of books that Brad probably has mentioned, but he's also recommended a lot of stuff that's been very impactful to me. And one of the things that he recommended to me a long time ago was theory of constraints. And so he might have. You might have been exposed to this. Can I just see, like, how many people have seen this before? Wow. Okay. Not a lot at all. Okay. So it's worthy of just talking about it for a minute. Okay. Because this really works on multiple levels. But let's talk about it on a project level. Okay? Let's pretend that each letter is a project, right? Project A, project B, project C. And. And that each box is a week. But it could be anything. Each box could be a month, it could be a year, it could be a day, it could be an hour. It doesn't really matter. It's a unit of time. And we're going to say it's a week. Okay? We're looking at projects, right? Project A, Project B, project C. The only reason that you do projects in business is because you're going to make more money at the end of the day, because the whole purpose of a business is to make. Make money. Now, you might be doing a project because you want more people to be happy and customers to say great things about you, but that's because you believe that that will translate into more money at the end of the day, okay? What determines how soon that money comes in is how soon the project is finished when it's done.

Okay?

So you have two ways of doing projects. You can be myopic, right? Where you focus on one at a time, or you can be working on multiple projects at the same time.

Right?

So top row, one, project At a time, bottom row, numerous projects, only three. Okay, let's see what that really means.

All right.

So in that top row, where you're doing one project at a.

Time.

You finish project A in three weeks, which means that for the rest of the time, you're making money. Week four, week five, week six, week seven, week nine.

Right?

You finish project B in six weeks. So you're making money on that. Week seven, week eight, week nine, nine units of time of money making, whatever that is. Let's look at the other way. It takes seven weeks to finish up what you did in three weeks. A doesn't get done here until seven weeks. And that's only three projects. And that's if each project is only three weeks. Most people have a lot more than three projects. You finish project B in eight weeks and C in nine weeks. Always the same. So now you only make three units of money. You make a third, you make a third. Making this choice, okay, this has profound implications in so many different areas of your business. If in projects, what it's saying is every time you say yes to a new project, you've just said later to every other project on your plate. And also I'd like to make less money. Also, we won't go into depth on it because I don't have time. But for those of you who've got this, think about this. Are you optimizing your day for task efficiency or for goal efficiency? And there's a huge difference. Task efficiency tells you make all your calls at the same time because it's faster, right? Okay, but are we trying to be task efficient or are we trying to get more goals accomplished? If I've got five phone calls to make, but one of those calls moves a project forward, and then I can do more stuff to get that project done, should I be making call number two, three and four and five just because it's quicker to get those calls done? Then when in the end of the day, it's the projects that actually bring in the money. I don't have time to really kind of go into depth on that. But just something to think about. Because the point being is that you could think about this chart. You'll have the slides. Think about it. Think about where it applies. It applies in a lot of areas, not just projects, not just the way you approach tasks. I said that model came from theory of constraints. Theory of constraints says that in any system, you know, every system has a goal. And the purpose of that goal is, is to. I'll read it to you. Don't worry about it. I'll explain the joke. Every system has a goal and what will determine. Well, let's take a step back from that for a second. You know, when I ask people what is going to determine how successful you are, I get a lot of answers, but I generally get all the wrong answers. I hear my intelligence, how committed I am, who I know, my strengths, my passion, blah, blah, blah, blah. Your strengths are very important. But what will determine how far you get in life are your constraints. How many people have ever met anybody who lived up to their full potential? How many people want to say that they're living up to their full potential? This is about as good as I am, right? It never gets any better than this. Nobody wants to admit that because it's not true now. So the best predictor of how far you'll go in life is not your strengths, it's what will prevent you from getting further. It's your constraints. That happens on a personal level. It happens in a business level, okay? And in systems, there is one constraint, and that's the important thing that's huge to know that every system has a goal and every system has one constraint that is preventing it from doing more of the goal. As soon as you get rid of that constraint, there's a new one. But there's always one thing that prevents it from doing more. My body. This is the example I like to give because I think it makes a lot of sense. My body is a system. Let's say the goal is of my body is to live a long life, right? Let's say I die of a heart attack when I'm 150. Then my heart was the constraint to living longer. And it wouldn't have mattered if I got like a facelift, dropped 40 pounds. None of that stuff would have mattered if the heart would have still failed, right? Those are all what we call false efficiencies in business. And this is a powerful point. So this cartoon, there's a little, little arrow in this huge elephant because people were trying to look at it and it says, maybe we should write that spot down. Because this huge elephant was taken down with this small little arrow, right? And the concept with this is that that is your constraint in your business. There is one thing right now that is preventing you from doing a lot more business. If you could figure that out and focus on that, you would grow your business and you would grow it a lot faster than you're currently doing it now. A lot faster. And it's hard, but it's not as hard as most people imagine, if you know what the capacity, let me say that you can, it can happen anywhere in the process. It can happen on the input side of your business, right? You can't find good talent, you can't find good material, you can't find like on the input side. It can happen with what you do with stuff, the way you do things. And it can happen on the output side of your business. Like the way you market. You're not getting, you know, you got great conversion rates, you're not getting enough traffic, you got lots of traffic, you have a really crappy conversion rate. My first set of clients in Internet marketing were a lot of the people that are gurus now. And they were the easiest, easiest to help. Why? Because their constraint was not related to marketing whatsoever. Their marketing gurus, their constraint was that they were the constraint, right? Like they could only get done in a certain amount and the business wanted to be bigger. If they would have come up with two more products that year, they would have sold a lot more. And that's not every business, but that was their business. And that's why I was able to help so many of these gurus like boom, because that was their constraint. You want to leverage your constraint. I mean that's, it should be apparently obvious to you that if you're not aware of the one thing that's holding you back right now, personally, professionally, business wise, that would be a good thing to know. Solving problems with systems. I've talked about this before, so I'm going to go really light on this. Here's the concept. Every time you have a problem in your business, you have two ways of looking at it. You can either look at it as a problem with people, a problem of that type, or you can look at it as a breakdown in a system, a breakdown in a process. Every like eminent thinker in quality in systems, et cetera, will tell you that 90 some odd percent of the time what you perceive to be a problem as a person, problem as something to that nature is not. It's actually a system problem. Okay? So when I have, and the story I usually tell about this is like I hired this idiot, right? I didn't know he was an idiot when I hired him, but he was an idiot. Now I could say, wow, he's an idiot and got to get rid of him and hopefully I won't hire another idiot. But that would be, then I would be the idiot because it was a breakdown in the system. If I look at it from a standpoint of what did we do wrong? Company like company to hire an idiot, where's the breakdown?

Right?

And we need a system to make sure that we hire non idiots. Now that process, there's a seven step process. It's going to be in the report and it's going to be free. I'll just kind of, I don't want to spend, you know, a third of the remaining time on that. But it's like seven steps and it starts with looking at your problems as a breakdown in the system, not as a personal or anything else, you know, because things will only change in a long term way. When you look at things as a system, the way you look at things with a system is process mapping. If you don't know about process mapping, this is a really quick way of understanding there's inputs, there's outputs and there's something in between. And if you want to understand it more like my company has process maps that we use that we sell as a monthly kind of thing. And I also wrote about it for free in the Internet Business Manifesto, the first report I ever wrote, I talked about process maps and how to use them in a business. That was the Internet Business Manifesto and it's still free and you can find it all over the place. Online power, once again, like this is so important, but it's so easy to talk about that we won't spend a lot of time here. You have to be a digital power user. Like the rules of the game have not only changed for business, they've also changed for how you get stuff done. You okay? Sprinting through work. Here's a concept that hopefully I can explain quickly and hopefully you can grasp quickly. And I'm going to ask you after I finish this if you did. So pay attention here, all right? Most people are inefficient. Most people, if they work 50 hours a week, they really only have like about 10 hours a week of stuff where they're really moving the business forward. Okay. This is just the reality and you either recognize it or you don't. That being the case, how can you get yourself to much higher efficiency rates? It's very challenging. It's very problematic because most people have no concept of how to operate that way. And so people buy time management courses and they buy programs, productivity stuff. And it doesn't work for most people and there's a reason why it doesn't work because they don't have an understanding of what it even feels like to work in a way that's not that way. And they don't have A method to get them into that. So I have a radical suggestion for anybody that wants to become a lot more productive. Let's say that you do a time log, and that's step one, time log for a week. And you determine that you've been productive 10 hours out of 50, that you were in your office or in front of your computer, and that's about average, about 20% productive. Meaning like you did something and now something's going to happen in your business that's like, good, like more money, more customers, something good, right? Not that you returned an email or you learned something new, because that's not productive. At the end of the day, that's not the net result you're after. So you're 20% productive, which means that's really like your comfort zone. 10 hours a week out of 50, you can get to about 80% productivity. 80, right. Which would be 40 hours a week of getting stuff done. But you don't get there buying time management courses at all. What you do is you actually get used to working at 80%. You get used to what that feels like. Like you get used to the way you that one day where you had to get all that stuff done right before you left on vacation. You got to make that the way you operate for long enough so that actually, that's your mode. That's how you operate.

Right?

And the way you do that is really pretty simple and actually kind of fun, but most people won't have the balls to do it. And it's. You scale back your hours to get to 80%. So if you've got 10 hours worth of productivity and you're in front of your computer for 50, you're going to scale back.

Right.

To get to 80%, you'd scale back to 12 and a half hours the whole week. Not in one day, but you'd spread it out over five days. So you'd be working two and a half hours a day, as opposed to 10 hours a day. Now what's going to happen? Day one, you're not going to get anything done. Day two, a little bit done, but not much. Day three, you're going to start panicking because I got to get stuff done, right? And then you're going to start getting stuff done, and then you're going to start getting used to working at a top efficiency rate. And then you're going to start adding hours back slow enough to maintain the efficiency rate. You know, that's what they tell people who want to lose weight, right? Like you slowly, you know, you lose weight slowly and then you slowly add back food so that you then know what maintenance feels like. I don't know why people don't like, take that perspective with other areas. Time is much if you don't know what it feels like and you don't have the habit to work at 80% efficiency rate, no book, no little electronic gizmo is ever going to get you there. What's going to get you there is the habit and the understanding of what it feels like to be do that. And I just told you how. But like I said, I mean, most people won't. It's a hard thing to kind of like, even though it's pleasant. I mean, who doesn't want to work 12 and a half hours as opposed to 50, right? Most people won't have the guts to kind of stick with it long enough to kind of force that issue until they actually it happens. There's a new kind of style of working too. If you understand everything that I just said, then you understand that it's so easy not to get that one money project done because everything interferes. And there's just a better way of working. And it's really about breaking your week into three different types of days. Total relaxation, recuperation, you do no work. Buffer days, like the day. This is from Dan Sullivan, really smart guy. Buffer days. Days where you do everything that is not the project, right. And then you have project days where like, it is just that one project that you're trying to like get done and you do nothing else. No email, no phones. Because every time you answer a phone, every time you go to the bathroom, every time you talk to someone, you lose any ability to get into a flow state. And a flow state, is that like what you're driving for? So you break up your calendar into these three types of days. And on days that you do projects, you do nothing else. Nothing. And it's not projects, it's project. Because you've already decided that, like the way you broke up, you know, your projects, you'd rather get one done than three moved a little bit forward. Got it. Okay. So that's like on a mindset way of looking at work, on a skill set way of looking at work and how you work, you have to change the way. If you don't know how to type at 60 words a minute, you are paying a tax every time you get in front of your computer. And it takes like two hours or three hours to learn how to type at 60 words per minute. So how long you would make up the two or three hours it took to learn in about three days, two days, this, and I'll like. So I'm going to leave that alone. I'm going to talk about this for a minute because this will blow your mind every time you pick up your hand off the keyboard. Once you do type fast and pick up and move it to the mouse. You've wasted a lot of time. A lot of time. And it's costing you so much more than you realize. Okay, example. It takes the average person about like 15 seconds to open up their web browser. It takes me about three seconds, okay, Because I don't have to pick up my hand, move it to the mouse, move the mouse to the icon, click, double click it. I just press a button and my hands are already there. So 12 seconds. Wow, I'm a really anal guy, aren't I? No, I'm not. Because think about this. Let's look at like email for a second. Let's say you get 100 emails a day.

All right?

100 emails a day. Let's say you respond to 50 of them. Well, you'd have to open the hundred, right? So that's 100 clicks. You'd have to do something with them. That's another hundred clicks. And then if you send, and you know, if you reply to 50, that's another 50 clicks. And then when you hit the send button, that's another 50 clicks. So now you're at 300 clicks. And guess what? Those 12 seconds times 300, 3600 seconds. That's one hour a day. One hour a day equals six weeks a year. That's just like, I'm just talking about the mouse. There's keyboard shortcuts for everything. And most people, like, you know, you're operating in a way that's just like, not the way that's in line with the current reality. I'm going to so have to fly through this. Okay? Network networks trump organizations for a gazillion reasons. You, you probably see some of the reasons already. Now, there are three things you have to know here. One, your network skill will determine to a great degree how far you go with your business. Not your skill in networking. Because networking is kind of like a selfish kind of like way of like trying to play people. Like an overly aggressive, multi level marketer, right? Like, you know, like, I'll get off this stage, hopefully it won't happen this time and people will just hand me their business card. Like, what am I supposed to do with your business card? I don't Know you. I didn't ask for it. Like why are you doing this? That's to me, networking. There's a difference between networking and understanding how to manage a network. Like of people, of staying in touch with people, like making a connection with people. Okay, three ways to do that is a great. It's an old book, but it's very relevant. It's still true. Is Love is a killer app by Tim Sanders. And it's three ways to manage a network. Information. Provide people with information, you deliver value. And there's three ways to deliver value. Give them information, hook people up, or empathize. Like, you know, show them love. Okay, but so why would. Why is network. Why is that even important? Because there's two networks that you gotta build and manage. One is a talent network. If you don't know what's about to happen with talent, it's going to be a real. I wish I could curse, but I won't cluster or something. Because we are about to have the biggest talent shortage that we've ever experienced in business. Which is one of the reasons why talent has more power, but we haven't really gone through it yet. And this is projections by the Department of Education. I mean this is not like me saying this. This is everybody saying this. Okay, so you have to build a talent network. This is the equivalent, right? Most people have such a hard time with freelancers. Why? Because these are the freelancers that they're hiring. Because this is the equivalent to going to an online site and hiring someone from a freelance board. That doesn't mean everybody on a freelance board is crap. It just means that the majority are to have a just in time hiring ability, you have to have a just in case approach to building out the network. And I hope that makes sense. Most people have a just in time hiring strategy and a just in time recruiting strategy. And you can't do it that way. You have to have a just in time hiring strategy supported by a just in case networking strategy. Which means that you have to go out and meet a players and there's a way to do that. You would be so much better off. Instead of using this model to get good at search Boolean Search, you could find people with all the skills that you need in your zip code. If you knew how to use Google better, you could search LinkedIn and find all the people that had every skill set that you would ever need in your business if you knew how to use Google better. I have some examples of that. But you know, explaining how to do a Boolean Search isn't going to be very pleasant, but you're developing a virtual bench. And the other group that you want to have a network with is partners. People that will do projects with you, people that will promote with you, et cetera. Those two networks, partners. I mean, I'm talking from a business standpoint, you might want to have some friends too. But from partners and providers, those two areas, you got to manage those two areas. And the better you're able to manage those, the more money you'll make. It's that simple. Social psychology is the new marketing. People for a long time were trying to get to like one to one marketing, but that doesn't work because we are social creatures.

Oh.

I had this great. If you thought some of my other slides were funny, I had this great slide and I don't have it and I'm bummed. Now it is one of the ways to just kind of prove the point that we are social creatures. And one of the best ways to predict behavior is what other people are doing. And I call it the rule of urinals. And you can predict where somebody is going to stand at a urinal or for women, where you're going to sit in a stall based on knowing what the current setup is and if anyone's currently sitting there or standing. Because the overwhelming majority of the population, if a guy is standing at a urinal, is going to try and maintain a space in between. Okay? Only freaks, like, when there's not space, like stand right next to you, that shows you that like, and that's a small little kind of thing. I like that example because it just like in other words, someone else's behavior is directly determining your behavior. Okay? And that's the point of that. And we are much more that way than we ever realize and that we're willing to realize. And we all are. It's the reason why we have expensive clothes versus cheap clothes and we're willing to spend a lot of money for a brand and all that kind of stuff because we're so influenced by everybody else. And so one to one marketing loses that. And the most powerful type of marketing is social psychology. And now that everybody's interconnected, it's even more so. It's hardwired social proof. I mean, we do. So I was talking to Robert Cialdini and I have an interview of him on my blog. But I was talking to him the other day and we were talking about the irs. And I don't know if that was in the interview that we did or if it was outside the interview. But the IRS did something where they saw that there was a lot more fraud than they were comfortable with. People were cheating on their taxes. Can you imagine? So they decided to take action, be proactive. And they made an announcement. Too many people are cheating on their taxes. So we've raised fines, penalties, and the interest on fines and penalties. You don't want to be doing it now. They felt good about themselves until the following year where guess what? More fraud. More fraud. Really? Why? Because what people don't realize is that social proof works both ways. When people hear that message, other people are cheating on their taxes. Well, then why don't I cheat on my taxes?

Right?

Social proof works both ways. So when you complain, and I've made this mistake, I, I never, like I made a mistake of asking my audience on my blog, right? Why is it that I have 800 comments on this post and I can't get more than five digs, right? Nobody's digging. And you know what that did those five people know that they didn't have to dig because nobody else was doing it? I mean, social proof, a lot of our behavior comes down to what other people are doing and what we think is acceptable. You know, laugh tracks, right? Faith communities, bond behavior. Applause. Like, you know, laugh tracks. Like when we hear laugh tracks, we think shows are funnier even though we know that it's like cheesy and canned and all that kind of stuff. It still works because we're hardwired. That's the point. We're hardwired. This is not optional. Like Dan Aureli, the author of Predictably Irrational, his whole point of his book was that we are irrational creatures, but we're predictable in our irrationality. And so like he did this one study where all decisions can't be. He did this one study where he boosted the conversion rate from 20% to 80% on something that's very irrelevant to what we do. Because he just changed one little thing and that changed the way people made their decision. Because we, we are predictable in what we do. Even if it's irrational commitment. Little commitments lead to big commitments. I don't think I'm telling anybody something new, and I hope I'm not. If I am telling you something new, you've got to run out and buy influence and. Yes, and predictably irrational. And these books I've just talked about, because you need to understand how this works. This is one study, right? Will you put this three inch sign of be a safe driver in your. I think it was in Your, in your, you know, garden, your front lawn, right? And then the next was a billboard. Will you put this billboard in your front yard? Like 6ft by 9ft? Drive carefully. If they got people to. If they got people to, they took the audience, they split them in half. Half they went and got, asked them to put the 3 inch sign, which an overwhelming amount of people said yes to. The other half, they didn't ask for that. When they came back and they asked, will you put this big monster sign that most people would say no to. 76% said yes if they had the little sign because, like, they wanted to stay consistent. This is with restaurants. Please call if you have to change your plans, like after you make a reservation. If that said 30% no show rate. And this also applies to the Red Cross with like, yeah, donating blood or the American heart is whatever, donating blood. Like showing up for your to donate blood if you make an appointment because they did the research too. 30% no show rate. If this is what's said. 10% no show rate. If it said, will you please call if you have to change your plans? And the person says yes, that one little shift because we have such a desire to stay consistent becomes very powerful in getting behavior changed. And marketing is sometimes about changing behavior. Oh, last one about this.

Oh.

Is it all going to be up?

All right.

Went to an apartment building, asked people to sign, like, you know, will you sign this petition so that we can have handicap access? And they went to half the group. Two weeks later, they went to all residents and asked them if they'd donate money to handicaps, 53% said yes. Of the group that wasn't asked to sign the petition and 92% donated money of the people who they went to and asked to sign the petition. Because once you signed the petition, you're on record in your own head of saying, like, I support the handicap. Trust. Trust is the new money. You gotta be trustworthy, listening to your market. We have a tool on our site, it's called the reputation monitor. It's free. You don't even have to opt in. Strategicprofits.com rep. You need to be very much aware of what's being said about you and what's being said in your market. And so we have some tools that you could use to do that. And you don't need to use those. There's other tools out there as well, but you need to know it because how can you sense or anticipate if you're not plugged in? Who influences your Prospect, if you don't know this, you need to learn this. These are all stuff that's being taught now. If we had more time, I would teach it to you, but I wouldn't be any more unique teaching it to you. And you can learn this in lots of places. What you wouldn't learn is everything that just preceded this Maven and the Milgram. Milgram was the guy that was like, yeah, go ahead and shock that person, will you? And, yeah, turn it up, turn it up, turn it up. It's amazing how much we will respond to authority. For those of you who don't know the site, like, people thought that they were, like, seriously damaging people, and they were doing so because somebody told them to. And the overwhelming amount of people, right, Complied hires. And people thought when they pressed a button, they were shocking the person in the other room. And they kept doing it and raising the rate and raising the rate. And the researcher would raise the rate and say, press the button again. And they would. They felt uncomfortable. And the results of the study was that humans possess an extreme willingness to go to almost any lengths to comply. So it would make sense that you'd want to be an authority in your market. And I wrote a report about that, about the 11 things that all authorities have in common. And it's free. It was me and Jay Abraham wrote that. It was called the Maven Manifesto. And that's the highest kind of marketing that you can have as a personal. On a personal basis. What will get people to talk about you? I think a lot of people have the wrong approach when it comes to viral marketing. Just kind of just think about this and. And ask yourself this, okay? Social currency, okay? There is almost no way that you could. For guys, at least. There's almost no way you could walk into that bathroom and not tell somebody about this bathroom.

Right?

And that is viral marketing, Right? You don't have to be more clever than that. I mean, if I walked out of that bathroom and I was like, we were in a bar with my friends, I'd be like, you gotta check out that bathroom. I probably would have taken a picture. Like, I would have, like, you know, and that's viral marketing.

Right?

I'm all of a sudden more interesting because I know this, and I get pleasure out of sharing it with my friends. So if you want, like, viral marketing to happen, that's what you gotta understand that, right? I love that. Okay? This is the last thing. Spent like two minutes on it. Then I got. Then I'm done. Customer superpower, you know, because of all the things that we talked about at the very beginning, the customer is in charge. So the more that, you know, I had a couple of jobs in my life, and I went very far, very fast because, like, I catered to my boss, right? Like, and because they were the one who made my. They made the decision how far and how fast I was going to get. Well, the customer is your boss. Always has been the case. But now they have so many options that they're like a finicky boss. And you need to know as much as you possibly can about them. And that's why analytics and the buying process and, you know, when I ask most people to describe their customers, this is the amount of detail they give me. Well, they're human. That's not enough. That's not enough. There are so many tools out there that you could use, like Quantcast. Go to, like, quantcast.com and put in, like, the most. The most popular forums and the most popular sites in your market and put it into Quantcast. And what Quantcast will tell you is the age distribution. It'll tell you, like, male or female. It'll tell you if they have kids in the house or not, et cetera. And all of a sudden, you'll have a perspective on your market that you've never had before. You want to know as much as possible. This is the most important knowledge to have, because how can you anticipate and preempt if you don't? You can. This is an advanced concept, so just store it in the back of your head. But everything I just talked about as far as systems and about, like, there being a constraint and a bottleneck and slowing it down. The buying process is a system, and you can speed that up, too. And when you speed that up, like anything else, when there's momentum, it carries forward. Which means if you want to build evangelists, if you want to grow your business faster, you want to look at the buying process in each of these steps and figure, where do people get slowed down? The whole concept behind, I think it was progressive, right? Like, why they give you everybody else's rates, like, right there when you're on their site, is to speed up the buying process. Is it any surprise that, like, they're selling faster more because, like, they just sped up the buying process? You want to speed up the buying process. You could spend weeks on this, right? So you're not going to miss out by not spending five minutes or zero minutes on it, but you want to understand your buyer's process. And then you want to start speeding it up. Okay? And the way you do that is with content in general. Content that reaches out and makes a difference. That's a cool graphic. I like that one. At the end of the day, you got to build raving fans online. Look, this is the last stat that I'll leave you with. Yeah, okay. Last stat that I'll leave you with. Or two last stats. Sorry. One stat is that, like, all the research shows that if you have customer reviews on your site, your conversion, unless you sell crap and everybody gives you a zero, you sell more. Okay? Even with some negatives, you sell more. It is the number one requested feature by Internet surfers these days is consumer reviews. And every study shows that it will boost your response. Okay? 30% or so of companies today use it. 70% of companies are considering using it. Like, you know, of 100% in the next year or two. It is only a matter of time until a site that does not have it is very suspect, right? Very, very suspect. Why are they not letting anyone talk on this site? Is there a reason? So a lot of the things that, like, people were allowed to get away with online was an anomaly. There was a period of time online when people couldn't communicate with each other, which was like no other time in history, because it was always where people could communicate, right? You had a reputation offline, and all of a sudden, like, you had no reputation online because people couldn't communicate. Now all of a sudden, people can communicate, like, an insane amount. You can communicate that you'll be able to communicate with 3 billion people in a matter of five years. So now we went from, like, one polar to the other, and you got to be able to deliver the goods, and you got to have people that, like, want to, like, say that you do. And so you have to have to have to spend time knowing about what makes something valuable to your clients, your customers and to your market. The last thing I will say is, that book I passed. Don't need to read the book. It's called the ultimate question. And what they found was that one of the largest contributors or predictors of growth is that if they ask your clients, would you recommend this to your friends? And scale of 1 to 10, nines and tens, there's something called the alt. Just look up the ultimate question and you'll actually find their little formula because it's 9s and 10s are plus ones, right? And I think 6 and belows are minus ones. It's like counting cards at a casino. And over a certain score and your business is going to grow. And below a certain score, odds are you're not. And online now, wow. Like understanding how connected people are even more so. So I hope that you really got value out of this presentation because this is what I do. I try and study the market, see what you guys need. And I appreciate the time. Thanks. So there you go.

That was my presentation back from 2008 at Stompernet, a blast from the past. You might have seen some people taking notes in the audience that you recognize.

I thought it was a good idea.

But that presentation hasn't seen the light of day since 2008. A lot of that stuff, as you can tell, kind of came true. And it was really, actually, now that I remember, that the report I was working on ended up becoming the Entrepreneurial Emergency. I ended up scrapping the 340 pages or so that I wrote for it and started from scratch basically and wrote a whole new report called the Entrepreneurial Emergency. And one of the reasons why was that it I had kind of forgotten as I was writing those 340 pages what I had learned from every report I'd written up until that point, which was that focusing more on the problem as opposed to the solution generated much higher sales for me. So the 340 pages was basically all.

About the solution, which was my mistake.

And when I realized that, I kind of just put it off to the side and ended up writing the Entrepreneurial Emergency Uncertainty Syndrome. So with that, I was preparing today and I needed some last minute time to prepare for another presentation that I'll be doing shortly about the Infinity funnel. And so I thought this was great as way of just showing you generally I'm ahead of the game. That was 13 years ago. I'm going to be doing another presentation in just about an hour from now on, something that I think is even more kind of future forward. And I'll be back on Thursday. I think we have a special guest on Thursday, so stay tuned for that. That's Thursday, 6pM Eastern to 8pM Eastern. And until then to higher profits beyond. This is Rich Sheffrin, over and out.