You’ve heard that “you can’t raise the dead.” Well, very recently, with a marketing campaign I got response from a dead guy. So I can raise the dead. Amazing. But if you were fortunate enough to be on my group call with the folks in my personal coaching groups, you heard tell of even more amazing feats – theirs, not mine.

In a mail-order business selling to hobbyists, the addition of a forced continuity program collecting 1,200…creating NEW, additional income stream of more than $200,000.00 a year, with the potential of topping $1-million.

Another, from zero to $1-million in revenue in 6 months, in his 2nd business.

Another from $1-million to $2.7-million in a one year jump.

Another used a price increase strategy to create about $250,000.00 of new, 100% profit – and on the call, we added the “what’s next?” strategy that will turn that into $1-million+ next year.

And more. Amazing? Well, not to me. Somewhat, still, to some of them. Unbelievable to “outsiders.”

At our Independent Business Advisor Thad Winston’s meeting, a fellow stood up to report on his experiences at the L.A. event, and added that it was free to get in, but cost him about $10,000.00 to get out…but that, on arriving home and implementing ONE idea heard there, he’d brought in $320,000.00. Amazing? To most people, sure. But to those who really understand, no – expected.

Other things that would amaze most, from this group’s call…. Mike Miget made the point emphatically that he’d learned to put things in motion without having figured out how everything would work out, to create chaos and messes and profit by cleaning them up.

He and others talked about “success” made in a messy kitchen; a messy business, full of uncertainties and mistakes and “clean up on aisle three” fire drills.

Our approach of implement, get in motion, get moving FIRST, worry about all the answers later would amaze (and frighten and dismay) most MBA’s — Stephen Oliver, on the call, a notable exception.

I’ve made ALL my money making messes. Starting things without knowing exactly how they’ll proceed. Applying Maxwell Maltz’ observation that you never get anywhere via a straight line. I have no fear of that. This group who shared their experiences on this call is liberated from those fears as well – and leaping tall income levels in a single bound as a result.

Kudos!

Debra LaFave, that infamous hot blonde school teacher who had sex with her 14 year old student had a “emotionally absent” father and a boring marriage.

Mel Gibson was drunk.

The Florida ex-Congressman who e-mailed sex-charged communiqués to under-age boys was (a) molested as a boy by a priest, (b) drunk, and (c) gay, and was rushed to rehab upon his outing.

Flip Wilson’s “The devil made me do it” has evolved from joke to strategy.

Unfortunately, nearly universal strategy. Everybody’s got an excuse, everybody heads off to rehab to begin their recovery. Nuts.

Let’s get something straight. There is a Grand Canyon sized difference between an ‘explanation’ and an (acceptable) ‘excuse’.

Hey, I used to booze and I did some really stupid things drunk – some I know about, some I’m afraid I don’t. Being drunk was certainly an explanation. But no excuse. Had I run over a kid driving drunk, there’d be no acceptable excuse.

Everybody’s up to their eyeballs in explanations they want accepted as excuses – they want to say “excuse me” and have that be the end of it.

Vendors: ‘I thought…”, “I assumed…”, “I was busy…”, ‘Mary was supposed to…”, “my equipment broke down.” Blah, blah, blah. It’s all irrelevant. You don’t pay a vendor to hear excuses. You pay for performance.

As individuals and as a society we desperately, urgently need to start saying, “No, sorry, but you are NOT excused.”

Teachers and principals who can’t get kids to learn, football players who can’t get along with coaches and teammates, salespeople who can’t sell, employees who can’t do their jobs, elected officials who can’t stop stealing or screwing long enough to do their jobs, etc., etc., they all need to be fired and exiled.

It starts with the person in the mirror. The elite minority of people I work with, who make big money, think, talk and act differently about this . They deliberately and simply accept responsibility. That usually works out better for everybody, by the way.

It’s the mealy-mouthing and stonewalling and lying and finger-pointing that gets everybody in trouble or worsens the trouble they’re in. Own your successes, own your screw-ups – and opt for the swift sword.

Government and big business is paralyzed by people far more interested in covering up their mistakes to cover their asses than in getting anything accomplished, but at the entrepreneurial level we need not follow their bad example. Choose thoughts, language and behavior that gives you the moral authority to demand much of everyone around you.

If you’re busy making excuses, you won’t be making much of anything else.

At least the infomercial industry’s annual awards dinner I attended was honest. Shows nominated were successful.

At the Emmys, Julia Louise-Dreyfuss won an acting award for a truly abysmal sitcom that was cancelled almost immediately upon airing. Other cancelled shows won various honors.

At the Oscars, movies the public hated won awards; movies the public loved were snubbed. All that’s fine as long as everybody admits what they’re up to; gathering in their own little clique and giving each other awards with no relationship whatsoever to the only judgement that really matters: the marketplace’s.

No, I’d rather not say that every movie has to be a blockbuster at the box office to get recognition. And there are movies that have taken off after public attention was drawn to them by such awards. But it does seem sort of silly giving awards to actresses in cancelled shows or actors in movies nobody went to see.

Hollywood, however, is supposed to be about fantasy and make-believe, so maybe none of this matters at all.

What is important is you not falling into a similar trap. In business, in sales, there is only one judgement that counts: the buyers’. Every other opinion, good, like an award, or bad, like your mother-in-law’s, can never be given even the slightest bit of attention.

In the advertising business from whence I came, agencies get away with murdering clients’ wallets and businesses, setting aside market realities, deliberately producing advertising with the top objective of winning awards – which are, in turn, given out with no connection whatsoever to the actual success or failure of the advertising.

This is sick, and sickening.

Usually, by the way, if your peers applaud what you’re doing, it’s an alarm bell warning of marketplace rejection. Peer approval and recognition ought to be AVOIDED.

At the Renegade Millionaire Retreat, a long-time Member who should be much farther head in his business than he is, finally faced the conclusion that he was being handicapped and held back by his deep involvement in his trade association, by his seeking those peers’ approval, by pursuing their awards, by hanging out with a whole crowd of people who desperately seek each others’ approval as a means of being validated and important – because their faulty approach to the business denies them the validation of marketplace success.

If you really need a trophy on your shelf, take a few bucks from the millions you make by not pursuing trophies and buy one for yourself. Your local trophy shop will “give” you whatever award you like.

The core promise of Psycho-Cybernetics is “once difficult, now easy.”

He meant that, for example, if hitting a golf ball straight and far was very difficult for you to do, presuming you were physically capable, you could re-train your conscious and subconscious minds so that doing so would be easy.

He didn’t mean you could skip playing the 18 holes altogether, relax in the air conditioned clubhouse, and have them drop the tournament prize money and trophy off at your table. He didn’t even mean you could skip the days, weeks or months of practice.

I have a lot of people in my world who’ve traveled the once difficult/now easy road, one way or another.

• One who could barely write a grocery list who is now a very capable copywriter, selling millions of dollars of his own products with his written words, and being paid princely sums by a few clients as well.
• A woman who was starving in the speaking business who is now nearing a 7-figure income and who can sell from the platform masterfully.
• A kid who pestered me and nagged me, to let him tag along backstage to a Lowe event, asked me a million questions on the flight home, kept coming back to get more and more about structuring presentations and selling from the platform. For him, it was, at first difficult. Quickly, easy. That’s Joe Polish. He gave me a new car as a gift, something of a ‘lifetime award’, thanks for contributions made.
• Another who had tried starting an information business following our models and flopped four consecutive times, then hit it big the fifth.

There are hundreds I know and work with personally who’ve gone from once difficult to now easy in something. Even more who’ve done so about making large incomes in general.

They have many things in common, but here’s one of the commonalities: they never asked that anything be handed to them or come without learning, practice, work or disappointments. They only asked to be given direction, a blueprint, a hand up. They made their own journeys from once difficult to now easy.

Jack Welch said his greatest concern at GE was trying to keep such a big ship agile. Sometimes a person, a person’s thinking, a person’s business or a person’s life is like a great big, hulking ship rather than a small, agile speedboat.

It’s hard to turn and navigate in new directions. It’s slow to get the freighter re-trained as a speedboat.

Years ago, I’d gotten so good at survival skills, it was difficult to make room for prosperity skills.

It was once quite difficult for me to make money. Now it’s ridiculously easy. My mind is agile and nimble and quick in that department.

Didn’t used to be. Didn’t happen overnight, or easily.

It’s easy now. But getting to easy wasn’t easy.

“It’s okay to think you’re a cowboy, unless you happen to run into someone who thinks he’s an Indian.” – Kinky Friedman

Yep, just about the time you think you’re invincible and a genius….

There’s always somebody smarter, at least about something. There’s always somebody faster. Tougher. Richer. Etc. And you never really get too smart for the room or for any room.

I believe the first Platinum Members to rush in their renewal form for Platinumin , Tier 1 was Ron LeGrand. Ron has been in my Platinum group since its first year, since its inception. He’s seen others come and go.

He is, in many aspects of the information business, arguably too smart for the room – yet he knows better; he knows there are things he doesn’t know, things he knows but needs reminded of, somebody who’s smarter about some thing.

Not infrequently, somebody tells me they’re simply getting too much information and don’t need or can’t handle any more – and I’m always amused.

Zig said he (still) reads three hours a day. I get AND READ over 50 newsletters a month.

A client who said he thought he was too smart for the Information Marketing Association room had 30 questions about celebrities and infomercials that were all answered on that month’s IMA tele-seminar he missed.

Another who told me he was too busy to read a resource I’d recommended made a $30,000.00 mistake in his business he would definitely have avoided, had he but read that month’s issue of that particular publication.

In the novel ‘God Doesn’t Shoot Craps’, there’s a little riff on the subject of ‘mastery’, which the author admits cribbing from another source.

It’s a good riff. Find it and read it. And seriously, decide, if you’re just in your business or are working to master your business; if you’re just doing what you do or working to master what you do.

I had to tell a fledgling, over-priced copywriter: “You know, there’s more to getting $100,000.00 for writing a direct-mail campaign than just raising your fees!”

Just like Cavett told me about my speaking in 1977 : ‘Because you know so much about promotion, you’d better be careful about promoting yourself too much too fast, otherwise you’ll just speed up the pace at which the world finds out you’re no good.”

I’ll tell you a little secret: I’ve always been all about the Benjamins in my business activities, but at the same time I’ve been all about mastery of those activities. Not just doing them to make money but doing them so masterfully no one else could them as well, so the making of the money was easy, automatic and guaranteed.

I think most businesspeople get up in the morning thinking about doing what they do to get money. Not so many get up thinking about doing what they do to get mastery.

Oh, and there’s a big diff between thinking you’re a cowboy and being a cowboy.

One Of The Most Intriguing Questions…..

…was passed onto me by Lee Milteer; asked of her by somebody she’s privately coaching. I say it’s “intriguing” because, to me, in many ways, it is puzzling and surprising. However, it is not an unusual question. In different ways, people raise it all the time. The question as this person stated it is:

When does all this get easy and effortless?
— all the money I want rolling in without (all this) work?

Ha! I call this puzzling, because, again to me, the answer is obvious.

First, it is obvious by observation. I do not hide the fact that I work a lot and work hard. Bill doesn’t hide the fact either. Some others choose to try and hide it, but if you look, and think, they can’t.

One person we all know who seems to often be on vacation might mislead the casual observer into believing he’s not working. But the more serious, less naïve observer would note he takes his laptop and wireless internet hook-up with him wherever he goes and spends hours a day checking stats of a dozen sites, writing and sending e-mails, etc.

He may be sitting in a beach chair rather than on office chair, but he’s working. And, as I’ve often pointed out, EVERY get-rich-via-the-internet guru goes to the work of a zillion step multi-media sequence to sell multi-day seminars where they do manual labor work to sell coaching where they do manual labor work – so who’s kidding who?

Please, observe Trump. He’s working his ass off. Speaking engagements including 20+ Learning Annex events a year, a syndicated daily radio show, umpteen TV and radio talk show appearances every week, taping The Apprentice, two books a year, overseeing and selling licensing deals for the Trump Magazine, clothes, jewelry, cologne, and doing publicity work for all of them, managing his team, golf courses, casinos.

Every successful person I know works hard and works a lot and, as I’ve written in my books, blurs the line between work and play, office and home, week and weekend doing so, unless and until they stop altogether.

So, second, the answer is: when the interest and dividends from your entirely passive, conservative and secure investments (plus planned spend down of principal) provides 100% of all the current income you desire, you can, if you wish, switch to the No Work Plan. Then it’s easy and effortless. (I could do so now if I chose. I soon will.)

But until then, you work. And harbor no silly illusions that there is, somewhere, the easy, effortless, no work business.

They ALL require an honest day’s work and then some. Of course, there’s different kinds of work. Once, mine include a grueling travel schedule; now it does not. Once Trump’s didn’t; now it does. And I remind you all, you could be really working for a living. Try a week in the barns at the track. I doubt you’d last from Monday to Sunday.

The all time best script for switching an inbound caller from price to preferences was presented by Sydney Biddle Barrows at a past Super Conference. I’ve heard a lot of sales training, but never anything that good.

I’ve also listened to Jim Rohn enough to have much memorized, but his story of the woman in Mexico was new, thus the succinct wealth advice he gave her something I had not heard him say that way before: don’t buy a second car, buy a second house.

It troubles me nobody can seem to get their 20 to 30 year old sons and daughters to delay some lifestyle gratifications in favor of investing. This is a good way to say it. Anyway, any opportunity I had to be in the seminar rooms, I heard something worth writing down, mulling over, discussing with someone.

But let me point out something you could not see or hear. Not one of you begrudges us the harvest from our efforts nor questions the value delivered for the dollars you invest with us, so it is safe to joke about the registration fee being insignificant compared to the cost of getting out. But I’m sure some folks do count heads, multiply heads times dollars they guess are spent, let out a whistle, and envy what they see.

As you probably should. It is enviable. But, as with so much, the harvest is visible, the planting unseen; the outcome impressive, the investment and preparation invisible.

The lesson here is one of preparation. Years of herd-building and skill-building. Months of planning, organizing, marketing. Days of discussion of each and every painstaking detail. Hours upon hours upon hours of preparation. The multi-million dollar weekend in the seminar business is like the overnight success in any field – it isn’t.

All you observed and were part of was the collecting of the money; the making of that money required hundreds and hundreds of hours of patient planning.

This is what so few are willing to do: prepare to be fabulously, exceptionally successful. They do not invest sufficient time, money and effort in preparing themselves. They go into business situations insufficiently prepared. They are not strategic, methodically laying the groundwork today for the success of tomorrow. Everybody wants the harvest. Only a few get it, only a few earn it.

All attendees returned home, with fresh ideas, fresh inspiration, new resources. Undoubtedly with lots of good intentions. We need those big ideas and big goals and motivating pictures.

But they are but castles in the air unless you get up a little earlier in the morning, work a little smarter, harder and faster, and more diligently lay the bricks day by day by day.

Castles are built of bricks, by brick-layers, not with the ideas of visionary architects.

That’s another book title I hereby officially reserve.

It came out of discussion at a meeting. An astute observation about how I handle coaching the majority of the time (and same with consulting) – and it is an accurate assessment of how progress occurs, how hidden opportunities are found, how breakthroughs are made, how bad mistakes are often avoided.

A speaker I worked with years ago, Dorothy Leeds, did entire seminars on asking questions. She said that the quality of your life is largely determined by the quality and quantity of questions you ask yourself and others.

A business question I like to ask, for example, is: what is the actual size of this opportunity? For example, somebody has an 8% refund rate when the best known rate in his field is 6%. He does $1-million in sales. He has a 2% of 1-million dollars opportunity: $40,000.00. And that’s all he’s got. And he should decide whether to bother working on it or not based on how many other opportunities at hand he might work on instead, and how big they are. That’s just one example of hundreds of questions I try to ask, that apparently most business owners never ask themselves.

Bigger questions have to with why am I doing this at all?….why am I doing this again?…because we are really creatures of habit, so we unwittingly develop patterns of thought and behavior that lead us to the same outcomes we don’t like over and over again. The old story of the hard-hat worker opening his lunch and howling “Cheese sandwiches again. All I ever get is cheese sandwiches.” Worker next to him asks: “Why don’t you ask your wife to make you something different?”

Mournfully he answers: “I pack my own lunch.”

And so this week I find myself again pondering such questions. I have a couple profound annoyances in my life. I don’t like them. They are not brand new; I’ve had their cousins come around before. Most would merely whine, “Why me?” – but the real questions are: what did I think or do to attract these problems? What do I keep doing? What is the different approach?

Whatever’s bugging you or disappointing or not working as you’d like or expect, the answer is to start asking questions.

Lesson#1: I cut my teeth in the Amway business, and at age 16, had a fairly large retail business, doing about $2,000.00 to $4,000.00 a month, all with customers acquired ‘cold’. What I quickly discovered was that it was more efficient to expand usage of each customer than to get more customers.

We had about 150 home care and personal care products. The average customer, left to her own devices, used and repeatedly purchased 2 to 5.

When I surveyed other distributors upline and, sadly, my downline, I found the typical distributor’s customer was buying 5 or fewer products. My average customer used 15 to 25.

Why?

Because I relentlessly pushed what they weren’t yet using. Giving free samples, demo’ing, incentivizing; every delivery of what they used brought with it promotion of what they didn’t.

I constantly reminded the customer of everything we offered.

Over the years, I’ve learned all businesses are the same. Most businesses’ customers use only a small portion of everything the business offers – in some cases, splitting business up only because they are not aware that Business #A does it all. And the business owner NEVER monitors EACH customer for what they do and don’t use, in order to talk to each customer about what they don’t.

Once, consulting with a big printing company, I analyzed their top 200 accounts. One leapt out: with them 7 years, buying large quantities of letterhead, #10 envelopes, and 9×12” envelopes. Nothing else.

I asked: what are they mailing in all those 9×12” envelopes? Dunno.

Hey, let’s ask. Turned out it was catalogs.

And they said “Never asked you to quote on those. Didn’t think you printed catalogs.”

Printer said: “Idiots. The big sign right behind my counter has a list of what we do and Catalogs is right up there.”

In the 5 years, the account had bought 500,000 9×12” envelopes so 500,000 catalogs not printed there, at estimated net of 30 cents per: $150,000.00 missed.

And who’s the idiot? See, you gotta tell ‘em constantly about everything you offer. Over and over again. Take a look at who isn’t buying what and find out why. Acres of diamonds underfoot.

Lesson#2: This hot, popular nightclub I frequented years ago started selling membership cards that let you stand in the shorter line at the back door and get in ahead of the big line of mopes at the front door.

Card cost $300 a year. But once you were in, nobody could tell you were a VIP instead of a schmuck. Until they gave you a nice VIP pin to wear. Which let them charge $600.00. Pin cost $1.

Point: status. People want it. Usually, giving status costs little, or selling it offers highest profit margins imaginable.

Is it possible you are working on the wrong “thing?”

Whenever I send out a mailing or run a magazine ad for retailers to request information about my Business Building Marketing System, I always ask one question on the response form. This is a very simple question, but quite informative. The question is…What is the biggest challenge you face in your business?

As you can imagine, I get many answers. Here are some of the most common ones:

1. Being able to pay bills on time
2. Tough price competition
3. Big competitors stealing all of their business
4. Finding good employees
5. Getting merchandise shipped on time
6. Customers moving away or dying

Do you know that the #1 answer that I get to the above question? In fact, it is on over 66% of all of the forms that are mailed or faxed into my office. The #1 answer that I get is…..THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE FACING MY BUSINESS TODAY IS GETTING MORE ‘NEW’ CUSTOMERS.

I’m always amazed about this. Let me explain:

As a GKIC Member, hopefully you are already familiar with the “3-Step Business Building Formula.” I have been teaching it for years and it is definitely worth repeating here. There are three ways and ONLY three ways to grow any business. Here they are:

1. Attract MORE new customers
2. Attract the customers you already have to buy from you MORE OFTEN
3. Have your customers SPEND MORE each and every time they shop with you

As I teach, not all steps are created equal. In fact, Step #1 (more new customers) is typically the most expensive step. Or in plain English, it costs much more to attract a new customer than it does to get a previous customer to buy from you again. Further, Step #3 is the least expensive step, since it requires NO additional marketing costs….the customer is already buying. (Note: That’s why you always see keen online marketers offer additional products on their ‘Thank You’ for ordering page.)

So, let me ask you a question. What are you focusing your business growth on? Or in other words, are you working on the wrong thing?