https://www.listennotes.com/e/d2a467580b864525b3fd326d4ca1bbf7
18 Mar 2023 · 14 min
Vince Reed talks about expensive lawsuits and cease and desist letters he faced in business, his first time selling from stage, and how to handle legal trouble as an entrepreneur. Mike, head of production at DM, hosts the conversation.
The lawsuit.
It cost me millions, Mike. It cost me millions. All of it's my fault. I'm joking around, but at the end of the day, as a CEO of a company, you gotta take responsibility. One piece of information can change the whole trajectory of your whole business and life. You wish you could beat me in chess.
Checkmate.
Are you good at chess? I remember one time we got a chess board when I was a kid.
Uh-huh.
And my brother, God rest his soul, started beating my dad. So my dad taught us, then my brother started beating him. My dad threw the chess board. That's the last time I ever played chess.
How old were you?
I don't know, I was little.
And that was it.
That was it. My chess career was over.
Never played chess again.
Thanks, Chad.
I mean, hey. It happens.
Yeah.
Gets the best of us sometimes.
Yeah.
But chess is cool.
Yeah.
All right. Yeah, let's get into this. So welcome, everybody, to the DM Recap Show. This is for episode eight. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Here with the star of the show, Vince Reed. I'm Mike, head of production here at the DM.
The man.
Thank you.
The myth. The lady legend. They call him your legend, Mike. Just tell them the truth.
I don't know anyone else's.
The girls are calling him a legend.
But I'll take it.
I appreciate it.
I appreciate the love. Thank you. Thank you. Anyways, let's move forward. So how's your day going, Vince?
How you doing? We got a busy day.
We do. You have a call or webinar?
I do.
Later, so we're gonna be wrapping this up pretty quick, but of course as always we're gonna get right into the episode and dig deep on what was not really talked about so we're gonna start off with the lawsuit or I guess multiple cease and desist letters that you got.
It costs me millions, Mike. It costs me millions.
Of pretty much of what you could have been.
I mean, man, man, man.
How was it going?
Number one, we, which I still own the domain, internettrafficpages.com. what a beautiful name, right?
It's it.
So they said we couldn't use that. So that, that right there just was how they do it.
We have to scrap that.
Yeah, we had to scrap that. And, I mean, oh, man. But you live and you learn. yeah, you live in your loan.
How was that whole process? Because it was funny that you said that when you called the lawyers, you know, they were clapping. You heard them clapping in the background, and they said that you're not a real company until you get sued.
Until someone tries to sue you. Yeah. Which is really messed up, man. And, and, you know, I know in the U.S. I'm sure it's different in specific states, but you can sue for anything. Right now, they can sue you for having the most popular OnlyFans in the world.
I don't have an OnlyFans. But I get what you're saying.
But I'm saying we should start one for him. But anyways, I'm trying to divert. I'm trying to divert my pain because they cost me millions, man. Yeah, so they sued for no reason, pretty much. Well, but when you're young and you don't know, you don't really know. It was just a tactic that we realized, and I think the legal team realized it too. But they didn't say anything until after they saw me getting frustrated with the same thing happening. Basically them accusing us of something, me proving that that's not true, and then them saying, oh, okay. And then that one transaction could cost five to ten grand. Just emails back and forth.
Wow.
Nothing done. No courtroom, you know.
So it was literally just like back and forth.
E-mailing and talking back and forth would cost you five, ten grand when it's all said and done.
Wow.
Yeah, it was ridiculous.
So how long did this actually last?
Months. Months. And the thing that was messed up about it was that thing was free. Like, I never planned on charging anyone a dime, which probably saved me 'cause there was no, like, we couldn't say, or they couldn't say that we made money from the tool, right? 'Cause we were giving it away for free. But it was the perfect lead magnet. you know, to give marketers this tool and then, hey, you want to get traffic, you want more leads, get our system. Now you have the tool that you can use to get the leads. That was the whole idea. That was the quote unquote genius behind the master planet. They so rudely interrupted.
Mike, they tried to.
Yeah, they tried. It was, you know, but, hey, you live in your life.
You live in your learn.
Yeah.
Do you have any advice to give to anyone that's facing a similar situation or might face a similar situation to where they know they're not in the wrong, but, you know, there's a bigger company who has a lot of capital to just, like, strong arm you and try to take you out of business and send you cease and desist letters.
You know, I mean, it happens so much, right? I mean, there's so many frivolous lawsuits. You know, the only real thing that should happen is if you when, for example, if I were to prove that I was innocent, which I was, then there should be a law or something that basically makes that person or that person suing you have to pay the legal fees and have serious penalties because, you know, these things just happen. So I guess the advice I would say is, you know, dot your I's and cross your T's, make sure you've got a good legal team and definitely be more in tune with what's going on than I was. So again, as I said in the episode, it wasn't it's their fault. I should have known and been looking at it, 'cause had I seen that before, but the problem was they didn't have it ready. So they put me in this weird situation where I had to go up on stage and show the software without seeing it. And all this could have been avoided had maybe two things. You not put them in such a tight bind to get this done in time. But at the same time, they said that they could, right? So when you're young and you're ambitious, Sometimes these things happen. So I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of things you can do here or there, but I think I chalk it up to like just experience now that I can use. But get a good legal team. I would say if you are a person creating software, make sure that you create, you know, an exact replica. Get someone that can design how you want the site to look. Each page, I mean, when they click this button, it should look like this. because these developers are going to take what you say literally. So had I had a mock-up of every page of how I wanted the site to actually function, then I wouldn't have been in that. So all of it's my fault. I'm joking around, but at the end of the day, as a CEO of a company, you got to take responsibility when you mess up. So it was an expensive lesson. Yeah. Yeah.
But you got through it. You got through it. I mean, eventually you had to shut that down, but then Moving forward, you, we're gonna go to you selling from stage for the first time, right?
Yes.
How was that leading up to that?
So it was, it was interesting and something I didn't really mention, you know, if you, if you've ever been to an event where every speaker is pitching from stage and you feel like it's a pitch fest, right? You know, the reason the event does that is that they get a percentage of all the sales. so the speaker doesn't get up there and just make 100%. It's almost like an affiliate program live from stage, right? So everybody that's selling something splits it. Typically it's like, depending on the event, some of them will try to say, I want 50%, but a lot of times it's like a 40% or 30% split. So they'll, the person hosting the event will take 30 or 40, then you'll make like, you know, anywhere between 60 and below typically is how that worked. So they want to get people that can sell and have good things that they know their audience would, would buy. And I think In this case, my buddy who let me speak, he saw how people got results when he was leveraging the system. Right. Right. His audience, they weren't used to lead generation and marketing or the strategies that I was teaching. I hinted on like the whole, you know, running ads on TV, which we talk about in future episodes a little bit more of some of the different strategies.
Yeah.
But they were all like that. So they weren't things where you would know how to do or had heard before, which made the offer that much stronger.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, that's what it was.
That makes sense. If someone is going to speak on stage for the first time and they're going to sell from stage, how do they prep themselves?
So this was my first time. So what I always do, even to this day, is I just provide, I try to provide more value. My goal is that I want to deliver information that the person can leave the event and the information that I deliver is the one piece of information that can Make them make money immediately. Because I tell everyone that goes to an event that you just need to get one thing. One piece of information can change the whole trajectory of your whole business in life. I want to be that speaker. I want them to remember my talk. So I make sure that I give useful information that they can use right then, something that they can execute and get results. So that was my main focus. And I knew that if I could get someone to get results from whatever I was sharing on stage, that clearly they would want whatever it was that I was offering. So I would tell someone that as well. So some people speak from Sage and it's a lot of high level things where it's big picture and they'll really exaggerate problems and they'll say buy my thing and I'll fix it. So what I try to do is just solve the tell them the problem from Sage, solve the problem from Sage and then the offer would be there's several other ways to solve this problem. I can teach you those as well.
Got it. Okay, so as long as they get one thing, one important thing from that.
Talk, that they can go use immediately.
They can go use immediately.
Exactly.
That's all you're looking for.
That's what I try to do every time I speak from stage.
That's all you can really ask for, really.
Yeah, because I mean, I've been at events and, you know, and you get to these events and it's personal development. You got to work hard and people come to these things. They want, to get their investment back. Some of these people spend, you know, their last dollar getting to these events. Half the time, they really can't connect with the speakers. And, you know, they get there and they're like, man, they're overwhelmed. You know, you're on the verge of being excited. You're on one side, you're like mad because you're like, I don't really have anything that I can do. How am I get it? People are doing well, but how does that apply to me? I don't want to be that one. I want to be the guy where they're like, okay, at least I saw that. and I can go get some results.
Right. Yeah. So you're selling on stage, you see your right hand man in the back.
But I didn't actually even see him.
You don't really see him.
So I didn't see him till I left out of the room.
Okay. But you didn't know how many applications.
I saw him in the back, 'cause I was like, hey, if you guys want to get the product, what I offered, go to the back. He has the little, like, order forms or whatever. and fill those out, and then we'll get you all set up. But at that point, when I walked off, I didn't see him till really.
I left out of the room.
Right, and you didn't know how many applications you had in. And I honestly thought no one got it. I didn't see, I couldn't see any rush. When I got up and I was walking off, nobody was really going back there. I could sense that immediately. But you get caught up answering questions afterwards. Right. So that, and you don't wanna just, for me, I try to give people eye contact and really be in tune to what they're saying. So I wasn't looking back. You know, talking, I was really just focused in on them. 'Cause my thought I remember was, hey, maybe they just have questions. So let me focus in 'cause there was a lot of people at least there. Uh huh. Right? So what I think was happening is they were asking me the question, then they would go do it. They'd ask me the question and I was just talking and they would go do it. I think that's what was happening.
You just didn't see that part. I didn't see that part. Okay. Yeah. So you and your right hand man, you finally, you know, get away from the crowd. You're going to the hotel room. you're. You ask him, how is. How. How did I do? You know, how many applications we got? And he just doesn't tell you anything.
He's being all discreet and mute and smirking and, like, weird and, like, I can't tell if we didn't do anything. I think that deep down, I knew we had somebody bought. Right, right. I thought, honestly, I thought it was, like, maybe five. Yeah. I thought it was gonna be, like, five people. Yeah, but they gotta wait to the.
Next episode to see how many that was. That's true, because they. you go to the hotel room, he throws all the papers up like LeBron does with the powder. And obviously, you gotta wait till the next episode because you don't know how much you guys made. Yeah, I mean, you know, but obviously.
It was definitely a fun, that's what business is all about, that moment when, you know, you put in all the hard work and, you know, we needed that good moment because the Weeks and months prior to that.
I don't know.
Was it a good moment?
I don't know. Yeah, what's that? I don't know. Was it a good moment? Could have been a bad moment.
Could have been just one application that fell out of that backpack.
It wasn't one.
It was more than one, I'll tell you that.
He could have photocopied every single one.
That's true.
And just multiplied it by more. He could have went to Kinko's and.
Just quickly like, all right, I'll just pretend. Just to make Vince feel better.
I gotta watch the next episode to find out. And there we go. With that, that's a wrap for the recap. We'll see you on the next episode. Later.
Thanks for listening. Be sure to leave a review and if you want to watch live episodes, be sure to jump over to YouTube and check them out, Adventure TV. I'll see you there.
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