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THE MILLIONAIRE APPRENTICE By T.J. Rohleder
How To Use The Success Secrets Of Self-Made Millionaires To Build Your Own Fortune!
INSIDE: A Wealth Of Information From Self-Made Millionaires Who Want To Help You Get Rich! Study this Program and hear what these experts have to say. Put their self-made millionaire techniques and strategies to work to create your own multi-million pound fortune!
Disclaimer We are not engaged in giving any professional, legal, accounting, or investing services. If professional advice is needed, please seek out the proper professional. We disclaim any loss, either directly or indirectly, as a consequence of applying the information presented herein. All rights reserved. No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an informational storage and retrieval system without written permission from the copyright owner. Any violators will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
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The Millionaire Apprentice Hello! This is T.J. Rohleder, and I want to thank you very much for purchasing this Millionaire Training program. These are the 12 proven and profitable get-rich principles that have made us rich, and they can do the same thing for you too. By the time you’re done with this program, you’ll know exactly why I said that. You’ll know exactly what you have to do to go out there and make as much money as you want to make. Even if you want to be a millionaire, you’ll know exactly how to do it because these are the 12 get rich principles that have hav e done it for us. I think it’s real important to let you know right “off the bat” that someone can only teach you what they know themselves. Otherwise, it just becomes book theory, like the kind of stuff you learn in school. You can sit down and read a lot of books on making money, but you can never really know how to do it until you get out there and use these ideas that we’re going to share with you. A lot of what you’re going to read here may sound like common sense. Some of it may sound too simple. I don’t mean to over-simplify it. I don’t want to make it seem like it’s real easy to get rich because as you very well wel l know, it’s not easy to get rich. rich . However, I want to convince you that it is simple. The principles are very simple and basic. By the time you’re done reading this program, you’re going to understand that. And hopefully, through repeated reading, you’re going to assimilate this information. You’re going to get out there and use it. And then you’re going to make it yours. That’s when these ideas, or these principles, actually belong to you. These are not ideas that we created. Much of this information we learned through actual experience and also from the help of other people who have taught us what we needed to know. We’ve worked with marketing consultants like Russ von Hoelscher ever since we first began our mail-order business back in 1988. 19 88. At that time, Russ had already been doing this for 20-some years before we met him. He gave us a guiding hand. He taught us a lot of things that he knows. He showed us what books to read. He gave us the cassette programs that we needed to listen to. He steered us in the right direction and taught us these principles. And that is what we’re trying to do in this program. Steer you in the right direction. I just want you to know - we’re not public speakers or real polished or anything like that. We are just average people peop le who learned the secrets s ecrets of making millions millio ns of dollars. My wife and an d I started our mail-order business back in 1988 with $300. We did it right from our kitchen table, working together. We did everything ourselves initially. We had no help from any outside financial source of any kind. And we parlayed that $300 into over 10 million dollars in our first 4 years. Now, how did we do it? This is what I want to teach you in this program. That was back in 1988. Since that time, we’ve brought in many, many more millions of dollars using us ing the very same principles that we’re going to teach you on this tape.
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These principles are universal. They can work in a variety of different small business and marketing endeavours. And a lot of what I’m going to teach you in this program is very simple. It’s very basic. And you’ll have to figure out exactly how to put it into effect for your own small business. That’s the real challenge. But first we just want to say this: The problem is, if you want to learn how to make a lot of money, where do you go? Who is going to teach you how to do it? Are you going to learn from some college professor? Are you going to learn from some book that you find at the library or the book store on how to make a lot of money? You know, a lot of the books that are on the shelves right now were written by people who really don’t understand how to turn small sums of money into large sums of money. Check it out for yourself. These books were written by CEO’s of major Fortune 500 or Fortune 1,000 companies. Or they were written by college professors who now are either getting their tenure (which to us is a form of socialized welfare), or they are retired now, or maybe they do consulting for large corporations. At any-rate, they might know a lot about what it takes to build a big business, but they don’t know how to use small sums and get started with next to nothing and turn it into a lot of money. That’s what we can help you do in this program. Many times, if you want to learn how to make a lot of money, you’re forced to learn everything on your own because there are no schools out there that teach you millionaire training. The schools will teach you how to go out and get a good job. You can learn everything from bricklaying to how to become a computer programmer. But you just can’t learn how to get out there and turn a little bit of money into a lot of money. There are no classes that teach that. Even the classes on entrepreneurship tend to complicate everything. I want you to know, first and foremost, that we are not bragging when we talk about the fact that we’ve made millions of dollars. When we tell you the story of how we went from just taking a few hundred dollars and turning it into over 10 million dollars in 4 years and then parlaying that into millions more, it’s not a matter of bragging at all. These are our credentials. And they’re the best kind of credentials. It’s not like some piece of parchment paper that’s hanging up on a nice oak panelled wall that somebody got from passing a whole bunch of tests. A lot of those people who go to college, like the lawyers and accountants and the “business people”, a lot of them just barely skated through college. They managed to make it through somehow. They didn’t take it all that seriously while they were there. But they managed to pass enough of their tests so 8 or 12 years later or whatever, they got a piece of paper, nice paper with some official signatures on it. And all of a sudden, they’re supposed to know a lot more than you do. What I want to share with you is that many times those people-only know what they were taught. You can only learn so much from books anyway or a college professor or by going through that general kind of education. The kind of education that my wife Eileen and I have gone through since 1988 is what we call “the school of hard knocks.” We’ve learned the hard way. We’ve struggled, and we’ve gone through the pain of having to learn all of this on our own.
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Granted, we’ve had some help, and that’s one of the reasons we’re producing this tape program right now for you to give you the hand that you need to go through what you’ve got to go through, to teach you these principles that you can use so that you don’t have to do everything the hard way; you don’t have to find out the hard way. It can make it a lot easier for you to get started. In society, it’s one thing to tell people that you can teach them how to get a good job. And basically, that’s all college really is. You go there, and you learn how to work for some other company. You go there to learn a lot of generalized knowledge. But it’s wrong in society to teach people how to make millions of dollars. Supposedly, there’s something wrong with that. I think it all stems from the fact that society teaches you from the time you’re very small how to grow up. The whole message is to go out there, get a good education, and get a good job working for a solid company. That’s what my grandmother used to say to me all the time. She used to get very frustrated with me because I could never hold a job. I was never a good employee. I hated having a boss telling me what to do all the time. I hated being ordered around. I hated all the rules and regulations. A lot of companies are like a dictatorship, and the boss is the dictator or the king or the queen. And I realize that a company has to have lots of structure. Especially now that Eileen and I have started our company and we’ve hired hundreds of different employees over the years, we know that a company has to have rules and regulations and procedures. But I was never the kind of person who could follow those, and neither was my wife. My grandmother used to get so angry at me, and she would shake her hand, and in her thickest German accent, she would say, “Go to school. Get a good job.” And that was what she believed was the way to go. And this is what so many other people believe too, even though the evidence is totally against all of that. Look at this. You see all these people out there now who followed that path. They went to a good college. They did everything they were supposed to do. Now they’re unemployed. Now they’re looking for work. Now they’re finding how little they really know. Now they’re finding that society lied to them. And that’s the truth...unless you’re using your college degree to get out there and make it on your own. Many people have college degrees and took the regular “straight and narrow path” and then decided they were going to go off and do it on their own. But unless you really do that and decide you’re going to be self-employed, you’re never going to be rich. That’s the first get-rich principle, by the way, that you’re going to hear on this tape. Our story is really simple. I’ve already told you that we were basically unemployable, but somewhere along the line we decided that we could make a lot of money. And until you decide to do that, nothing’s going to happen. But then, what did we do? What did we know how to do? We were uneducated. Both my wife and I are just high school graduates. So we got involved in lots of different multi-level marketing Companies.
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You know, if you want to get rich, there are plenty of programs out there to show you how to do it. There are lots of MLM companies and lots of companies showing you how to make money in mailorder. You can find all types of small business opportunities that you can purchase. We got caught up in a lot of that. We started doing everything that we saw in font of us or any kind of program or opportunity that was available or anything that had to do with making money - we were right there, first in line. We tried lots of different multi-level marketing companies. We tried selling all kinds of products door-to-door. We went to flea markets and set up our booth there. We finally ended up in a carpet cleaning business that was a struggle. Finally, we got into mail-order. The whole thing is: We really wanted to get rich. We kept trying all different kinds of ways to do it. And finally we found the right combination of things that really rocket-launched us to success. In four years we took in over 10 million dollars total in sales. But along the way we really did experience a lot of pain and suffering. We had to learn everything the hard way, and it was a struggle. Remember, this is the only way you’re going to learn it too. You have to get out there and learn by doing. But we wanted to put together a program that will guide you step by step. And that’s what these principles are designed to do. Ask yourself this: How are you going to learn how to make a lot of money? Remember, you can’t do it by going through a regular general education program. You cannot. The Lee Iacocca’s of this world are few and far between. And your chances of winning the lottery are - well, let’s just say this: Your chances of getting struck by lightning are 15 times greater than your chances of winning the lottery. There’s only one way to get rich: You’ve got to be in some type of business for yourself. So all the rest of these principles are centred around that #1 principle right there. We really want to spare you from having to go through a lot of the pain that we had to go through, all the frustration from wanting to be rich so badly. We really wanted to, and we believed we were just as good as all these other people. Back when we had our carpet cleaning business, we were struggling, every single winter especially. Here in Kansas nobody wants you to come into their home in the winter and clean their carpets. We could barely survive during the winter. We would clean somebody’s whole house. I remember a couple jobs we did for $20-$25, jobs that in the spring time would have cost $300 or $400, just so we could have some food. We didn’t want to go to the churches and get canned food. We certainly didn’t want to do any kind of welfare or government program. We never wanted hand-outs. Again, we got into business for ourselves because we wanted to do something on our own. But it was a struggle, and it was a pain. We wished we would have known some of the things that we know now, some of the basic get-rich principles we’re going to share with you in this program. So I want you to remember as you listen to the next 4 1/2 hours here, that these principles are all based on our proven experience .Those are our credentials. Those are the best kinds of credentials. Someone can only teach you what they know. Lots of people have their own opinions about making money. I was surprised, and so was my wife when we really got into the mail-order business and started building it up and learning some of these things we’re going to teach you. Again, this is not a program on mail-order. It’s a program on making money. We were real surprised to see all the “business experts” out there.
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I was 28 years old. My wife was 30. We were young, and we were doing well, almost right from the very beginning because we stumbled onto a couple of these principles that we’re going to share with you on this program. So many people wanted to give us advice back then when we first got started. We were young, and they knew we didn’t have a lot of experience. I was just amazed that these people had never really been in business for themselves, but they thought they had all the answers for us. The next time somebody starts giving you some opinions on making money or they try to tell you what’s right and what’s not right and what you should be doing and what you shouldn’t be doing, you should always look at the source. Who their experience? If they’ve never done it themselves, how can they possibly tell you how to do it? So, get your help from people who have been out there on the front line and won. Remember as you listen to this program that “repetition is the mother of all skills.” There are only some basic fundamentals here that you have to learn. By the time you’re done with this program you’ll realize that. In this program you’re going to hear it simpler than you’ve ever heard it before. But also, you’re going to find out how the principles inter-twine because a lot of what we have to teach is repetitious. I want to tell you this right now, up front. These principles all work together. You’re going to hear a lot of the same ideas tied together, plus you’re going to see for yourself bow these different principles all work together. They’re made to work together because there are only a few critical fundamental things that you have to know. It’s sort of like a sport like basketball or football: The best coaches in the world know that there are just a few fundamentals that they need to teach their players over and over again. And those players have to master those fundamentals and keep practicing them. They have to keep those things foremost in their minds. It’s the same way with making money. Making money is the greatest game of all because there are certain rules; there are certain principles. And within those there’s an endless array of many ways that you can actually utilize those. It’s sort of like the three primary colours - red, yellow, and blue. Within just those three colours you can find an endless number of different shades and variations, thousands of different colours within those three primary colours. That’s the way these principles are. They’re very basic, but they all work together. They tie together. So again, you’re going to hear the same things used over and over. Instead of getting frustrated because - “They already said this on principle #2, and now they’re saying it again on principle #5 get excited when you hear the same things and how they all tie together. That’s the secret. When it’s repeated on this program, you know it’s something really important. Remember, these are the same get-rich principles that we’ve used to make our fortune. We’re just regular, average people. As we make more money and learn to know more people who have made a
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lot of money, we find out that these people who started with nothing and turned it into a lot are just regular, average people. They lamed the game. They learned the rules. They got out and played it. And that’s what you have to do. So I want you to realize that this is a program that you should take with you wherever you go. You should listen to it over the next few years as you’re getting out there and using these ideas. Master these principles. Take notes on what we teach you. Remember, these principles are all pretty generic. For a million different people, there will be a million different ways of doing business, even within certain market areas where there are a lot of competitors that are all selling pretty much the same types of products and services. There are lots of different shades here. One of the ways a company grows strong is to find their own unique way or something that’s uniquely theirs that they can offer their customers that the rest of the competitors are not offering. Again, for a million different people there will be a million different small businesses. But the principles are universal. You’re going to see that in a simpler way than you’ve ever seen it before. The amount of money you can make with these principles can change your life forever. Very few jobs pay $100,000-$200,000 a year. However, lots of people who are in small businesses of their own are earning that kind of income. We’re living proof that it can happen, start experience. Believe me, we’re no smarter than you are. You’d be surprised. with almost nothing and no education to speak of and no We’re just regular, average people who had a sincere desire to make a lot of money. We wanted to have all the nice things that everybody else had. And we felt like we deserved them. We do, and so do you. You deserve all these things too. The first get-rich principle is the foundation of the whole thing. But other than that first one, none of the rest of these principles are in any kind of order whatsoever. Principle 12 might be more important than principle, 2. Or it might come sequentially before that. Principle 5 should maybe be 12. There’s no logical sequence of order after we get past the very first one. So please listen to each of the 12 principles. Each one will be important to you at different stages of your entrepreneurial growth. Remember please that we’re not public speakers. We’re not polished preachers or people who get up and do this for a living. There are plenty of programs out there by people who know how to be very eloquent. They know how to razzle and dazzle you. They know how to keep you excited. They know how to hold your attention. They’ve learned all the secrets of what it takes to be a great performer. But that’s not who we are. We are just regular, average, common people who have learned how to make millions of dollars. I want you to know that as you listen to this. Listen to the message that we’re trying to say, and don’t get hung up on the messengers as fat as our performance because we’re just regular, average people. I don’t want to be a public speaker. My wife and I are not in the business of speaking in public or entertaining or anything like that. Having said all of this, I’m going to show you the 5 key things that you need to know to make the most amount of money with this program. The first step is to just be open-minded; listen to these tape’s with as open a mind as you possibly can. Don’t be a sceptic. I know you might find that a lot of these ideas are very simple and very
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basic. You might be a little “put off” by that at first. You may have read some of the complicated books that were written by college professors or CEO’s from major Fortune 500 companies. So our message might sound too simple or too general. It has to be somewhat general because the real secret is for you to discover how to use these principles. They’re universal. You have to start a business of some kind. The first two principles are based on that. If you have a million different people who start a business, you’re going to have a million different ways of doing it. But the same principles apply. These are the principles that can actually make you rich. And you have to be open-minded to that. You have to know that we’re not fancy motivational speakers or preachers. We’re not slick-talking politicians who know just how to get those words out to make them sound like music to your ears when it comes out their mouth. We may not be that type of communicators or teachers or entertainers, but these are the principles that have made us rich. So you have to be real open minded about that. The second step is this: Listen one time through the entire tape program. Then go back and take notes. Don’t take notes the first time. Just listen to it. About 4 hours are left now. So spend the next 4 hours just listening through it one time. But when you go back through it the second time, please start taking notes. Remember, repetition is the mother of all skills. It’s through repeatedly listening to this program that you’re going to get the most impact out of it. You can’t just listen to it one time and expect to get results. You can’t even expect to get results until you really assimilate the information by going out there and putting it into action. Just thinking about it is not enough. But step three is to think about it. That’s the start. It’s definitely not enough. Just thinking about it is not going to make you rich. There’s a very popular book called Think and Grow Rich that was written by Napoleon Hill back in the 1920s.This book is responsible for lots of people becoming millionaires. So many millionaires have openly declared that they read this book and soon after that went out and made their fortune. But many people just hear the title and are turned off. They‘re not open-minded, which is what we’re asking you to do on this tape program. The title is very misleading; Napoleon talks a lot about the power of the mind and use of the proper attitudes we’re going to talk about that in some of the get-rich principles in this program. That’s only the beginning point. It’s very vital and very necessary, but it’s only the way to get started. So step three is to think about these principles and play with them in your mind. Develop some plans of actions based on these principles. Just think it all through. Remember, it is a game. But if you want to master any kind of game, you have to put a lot of thought into it. I remember there was a story about Bobby Fisher, the famous chess player. Just to show you how focused he was. There was an important chess match that they have every year where the greatest chess players from all over the world come and compete. These guys know each other - it’s a small world. They’ve developed friendships. They’re sitting in their hotel suite in between chess matches or after a long day of playing. And the subject turned to world affairs. People in the group started debating about something that was happening in some part of the world. After about 20 minutes Bobby Fisher just couldn’t take it any more. And he said,
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“Hey, what does this have to do with chess?” That was an important story because the game of business is like that too. You have to constantly stay focused on it. It’s not just something you do; it’s something that you are. These principles actually do become a part of you. So step three is to start making that a habit. As you listen to this tape the second time through and take notes, go beyond the note-taking. Develop some plans of action. And figure out how it would be possible for you to use these. Try to memorize some of these principles or key points of the principles. Start putting your own plans together in your mind. That’s where it all starts. That’s the real secret of Think and Grow Rich. It all starts in your mind. So it takes a proper attitude and a proper outlook and the right philosophy. That is, you have to make these things habits. Think about these principles and stay focused on them. Step four shows you how you can turn this program into your own fortune. Remember this.& you’re looking at this program, it looks like it’s just six cassette tapes. But that’s not true. It’s very misleading, very subjective. What you have in your hands is 4 1/2 hours worth of information that made us rich. Again, we’re just average, regular people. These are the principles that have done it for us. So remember this. It’s not just another tape program or another money-making program. What we set out to do in this program is to show you exactly what it takes for you to start with almost no money whatsoever and turn it into your own small fortune, and we have done it very successfully. So step four is to start putting these principles into action now. It all begins with the first two principles that we’re going to talk about here. They’re about getting into a small business of your own because there’s no other way, folks; you’re not going to get rich by working for someone else. Just forget those ideas. Get those silly ideas out of your mind because it’s never going to happen. The chances are so minute. Also get the other ideas out of your mind. We talk to people all the time who want to make a lot of money. And they have ideas about some rich relative, maybe a rich relative they never even knew that left the family before they were born. Or they think somehow they’re going to inherit their wealth, or they’re going to marry into it. Or they’re going to win the lottery. Or they’re going to get lucky or something like that. You know, some people really do get lucky; some people win the lottery big. Some people even go to Vegas and win a million. But for all the people who put their whole lives into those types of principles or strategies there are many, many millions more who lose. What we have to share with you is a proven formula. And the odds are totally with you if you will just utilize some of these principles. Step number four is to actually get out there and put them into action, especially the first two steps, the two get-rich principles we’re sharing with you. Begin using these on a daily basis. We’ve already gone through the first four steps. You’re in some kind of a business of your own. Some of you maybe wanted to do it for years. And for some of you, maybe it’s something you’ve tried before and failed. One of the reasons you failed is because you just missed one of the points that we have to tell you about on this program. Something was not perfectly right here. Making a fortune of your own is like a jig-saw puzzle. These 12 pieces are like 12 pieces to your get-rich puzzle.
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Maybe you were missing a couple of them. Maybe you were weak in a couple of these areas we’re going to talk about in the next four hours. Step number five: We’re assuming now that you’re in business for yourself, and the whole secret is this - to re-listen to this tape program as many times as you can. As you’re already in business for yourself, keep remembering the fundamentals of the game. I’ll never forget a story I heard years ago about the coach of UCLA - and I can’t even remember his name - you know how it is when you’re trying to remember. Right after the championship game the team-mates were excited because they just won some important basketball game. The next year they started the first day of practice, and he got out there in the middle of the court and stared at them for a long time - again, these are the national champions, the #1 team in the United States or in the world. And he said, “Gentlemen, this is a basketball.” And that’s where he began his speech. Basically he wanted to remind them, “Hey, you might be the champions, and you guys might be a great awesome team, and you’re #1, but practice those fundamentals.” And that’s what these getrich principles are, these 12 principles that we’re going to share with you on this program. They are the fundamentals. And you have to practice them again and again and again. As you do practice these principles, they will become a part of you. It’s going to be more than just head knowledge because you’re going to know the information. You’re going to know it in your heart. And that’s where your real strength will come from. It’s that repeated action over and over again that builds confidence. And confidence is very important. You hear lots of stories about people who have made tons of money and then lost it. A lot of entrepreneurs are more gamblers than anything. A lot of people out there take big risks - guys like Ted Turner; read his life story. It’s been one gamble after another. As we all know, they’ve paid off wonderfully. But at any time he could have lost it all. But you hear stories all the time about people who do lose everything. And then they get right back in there. Within a few years they’ve not only made all their money back, but they’re 10 times richer than they ever were. Now, why is that? Ask yourself that question often. Study the lives of these people who have done it; read the good biographies of the millionaires and billionaires. And find out how many times they’ve actually lost and all the struggles they had to go through to learn their own secrets. You’ll find that once you know something, you know it forever. For instance, let’s say you haven’t ridden a bicycle for the last 20 years. You might be 45 years old right now, and the last time you pedalled was through the college campus in your graduating year. You know, you can still get right on a bicycle and start pedalling again. And within a few minutes you’ll be just as good as you were back then because you know how to do it. The same is true when you get out there and practice step five. You’re using these principles on a daily basis. You’re finding new ways to use these principles. Remember, it’s like the primary colours. There are all different kinds of shades, and you’re finding all the different ways of using
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these principles. You’ll develop a lot of confidence in your ability. These principles will become yours. And no matter what kind of setbacks you’ll have, you’ll always know exactly what you have to do to maybe you’ll even experience more success than ever before. So with all that in mind, let’s go now to the very first of these get-rich principles. It’s a very important one. I want you to know that the very first two are extremely vital and important. They are the foundation of our entire Millionaire Training program. The first money-making principle is this: There are only three reasons that you should be self-employed, only three. 1. The freedom that you’ll get from being self-employed. 2. The passion that you’re able to experience when you’re self-employed and when you really throw your whole self into a money-making or business opportunity. 3. The amount of money that you can make. I’d like to talk about this important principle. You know, sometimes the only reason people do get into business for themselves is because of the money that they can make. This is one of the things that our clients really are “missing the boat” on because if you’re just in it for the money alone, I’m afraid that’s not enough. That’s not enough to keep you in it. Even if that would be enough to keep you in it, it’s not enough for you to get the real level of satisfaction and contentment that can come from being your own boss. Being self-employed gives you a chance to live the kind of life that other people only dream of. You can live like a millionaire well before you’ll ever be a millionaire. By that I mean this: It allows you the freedom to do what you want to do when you want to do it and how you want to do it. There are so many ways to make money. That’s not the problem. Many of our clients put all of their emphasis on: What am I going to do to make this money? It doesn’t so much matter what you do. That’s not the real emphasis, and you’re going to see that again and again throughout the other money-making principles we’re going to talk about. What you do is not nearly as important as you’re doing it. That’s the key thing that I want to share with you the why to do something is so much more important than the how to do something. So these three reasons for being self-employed, the only three reasons, are more of the why to be self-employed. Why are you going to do it? The first reason, of course, is freedom. So many ways of making money nowadays do not tie you down to one geographic location. There are so many different businesses like the mail-order business that my wife and I are in. We don’t have to be at the office. We just took a Christmas vacation we were gone about 10 days. When we came back, we found out that our business had just had one of the best weeks we’ve ever had for that time of year. In four days we took in almost $400,000 - in one 4-day period, and we weren’t even there. We had a staff of people watching the business for us, doing the business for us. This has allowed us a level of
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freedom that only multi-millionaires have, only the world’s richest people. In the past only kings and queens and people who were born with the “silver spoon in their mouth” were able to live that way. I’m not bragging about the kind of money we’re making. Believe me. As I shared with you in the introduction of this tape, Eileen and I are just average people. We’re just regular, average people who have learned these same money-making principles that we’re giving you now. So realize that there’s a tremendous amount of freedom that’s possible. Most small business owners are trapped in their businesses. They don’t actually own their business; their business owns them. But there are ways around that. By the time you’re done listening to this program, and you’ve explored all the principles we’re sharing with you, you’re going to know that. You’re going to know exactly what you need to do so you can get that level of freedom in your business. That should be one of the most important reasons why you want to be self-employed - because you want to be your own boss, because you don’t want to have somebody looking over your shoulder, because you don’t want to live your life following other people’s rules, because you want to do what you want to do when you want to do it how you want to do it. That’s the most important thing. The second thing on our list was passion. Why is that the second thing? I’ll tell you why. They’ve done all kinds of studies out there where they’ve asked people, “How do you feel about your job? How do you feel about what you do every single day?” A surprising number of people basically can’t stand what they do every day. They hate their jobs. They want to be doing something different, but they’re trapped. We’ve worked with some of our best clients for years through our consulting service. We’ve helped them get into some type of business of their own. The only reason we met them personally was because they had enough money and enough freedom and flexibility to be able to come to some of our Seminars. Most all of our seminars are held here in Kansas, and a lot of people just can’t take time off from their regular jobs. But people with the best jobs can take off - those who are making $40,000, $50,000. We’ve had a lot of customers who are making $100,000 a year on their jobs. They can take the time off any time they want so they can do things like come to our seminars. These people have what I call the “the golden hand cuffs.” They’ve got these great jobs, and they’re making so much money that they’re basically trapped in what they’re doing every day of the week. A lot of people hate their jobs. They hate going to work. That’s no way to live. A small business gives you a chance to have passion and excitement and enthusiasm and to be able to put your whole heart, your whole being, your whole spirit into what you do. And that’s exciting! That’s one of the key requisites of success. In and of itself, r that may very well be one of the money-making principles that we discuss all by itself - the fact that you have to put the passion into what you’re doing.
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The third reason is the money itself - the amount of money that you can make in your own business. I just told you that a lot of our customers that we’ve met personally have made $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, $80,000, $100,000 a year - huge amounts of money as far as being an employee, working for another company. But still, when you are your own boss, the potential for making many, many times that is so much greater. I want you to know that’s not the only reason you should be in business for yourself. But it definitely is one of the reasons. You’ll always make more money working for yourself than you would ever make working for someone else. Principle number two is what I call “the only way you can get rich.” This is real simple. You have to be self-employed. You have to be in some type of business for yourself. Now, I know that might sound like a lot of common sense, but I think also people just don’t realize the vital necessity of that. To many times, I think people don’t really think about “What does it take to get rich?” I have a close relative who made a comment to me a few years ago. We were talking about making money, and she said, “Well, I don’t want to be a millionaire.” And it just came out as a matter-offact kind of comment. Eileen and I both said at the same time - it’s funny how our minds work so closely together - “Ann, you really don’t have to worry about being a millionaire because you’ll never be one.” The reason we said that is we knew that for some reason she believed she was never going to be self-employed. She saw having a business as a bad thing or a negative thing. Far too many people have that kind of attitude. They hear these quotes from the U.S. Department of Commerce that say 95 out of every 100 businesses go bankrupt within the first five years. Or they see some of the frustrations that those of us who are in business right now have to go through. Having your own business is not like a job; it’s more like a lifestyle. Yes, sometimes you have to be willing to take on a lot more than 9-5ers, people who just have the employee mentality, people that just want to punch a time clock. And their real passion lies in what they do off the job, not what they do on the job. It’s employee-type thinking. A lot of people want to get rich, but they really don’t know how it’s going to happen. And I’m here to tell you - and this is principle #2 - the only way you’re ever going to get rich is to have your own business. Nobody is ever going to pay you the amount of money that you can make on your own. It’s just never going to happen. Earlier I told you that we do have customers who are making $100,000 a year working as employees for various companies, mostly in sales departments where they’re getting paid a percentage of the income that they’re bringing in every day. However, those jobs are few and far between. What is far more common is people who are making $100,000 a year in their own business. That’s very common. By the time you get done with this whole tape program and listen to all these principles and then internalize these principles, you’ll understand that making $100,000 a year in your own business is not that difficult. You’ll start to believe that you can do it. We’re going to show you how to get the ideas that you need to go out there, quit your job, maybe start a part-time business if you don’t want to quit your job.
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But go on your own because that’s the only way it’s ever going to happen. You must accept this. And you have to question some of the sources where some of the material about starting your own business comes from. Eileen and I spent a lot of time in the book stores, specifically in the business, marketing, sales area of the book store. And I can tell you a lot of the books that are out there right now about small businesses are just no good. They’re written either by college professors who have never actually done it themselves, never been in the “real world,” or they’re written by presidents and CEO’s of large corporations who now want to impart their wisdom and really try to help people. But the truth is: Running a small business is so much different than running a big business. Many people who have small businesses are making $100,000 a year, $250,000 a year, $500,000 a year. Eileen and I know a man who has a small business under 50 employees - whose net profit every single year - after all expenses and all taxes - is 4 million dollars. He and his wife are making 4 million dollars every year with their very small business. So, it is possible. And really, the truth is: It’s the only way you’re going to get rich. Principle #4 is something that we call “the hand.” This principle that I’m going to share with you is very powerful. I want to tell you how we came to putting this one together. It’s a very powerful getrich principle. And it came about from reading an autobiography by a man named Bill Gramm. Now, for those of you who don’t know who Bill Gramm was (he died a few years ago). He was one of the most successful rock ‘n roll promoters in the world. He promoted the biggest rock ‘n roll acts - The Rolling Stones and others from the 60s - I don’t even want to get into the names of these people. But he was one of the biggest rock ‘n’ roll promoters ever. He wrote an autobiography of his success. In it he explained how he was able to become the world’s biggest and most successful promoter. Hundreds of thousands of people would come to the shows he promoted. He had a theory that he called his “hand.” He was one of the promoters of a famous rock ‘n roll show called Woodstock. Maybe you have heard of that. I don’t want to say too much about Bill Gram . But I do want to emphasize this: He had a formula for success. Every show had to have five key ingredients. He called it his “hand.” As soon as I saw that I knew we had to have something like that for ourselves because we needed something to gauge each of our promotions too. And that’s what the hand formula is. There are five critical ingredients that every promotion you run absolutely has to have. That’s what the hand is. Again, just like I talked about in the previous principle, it’s a formula. Once you how it, you can remember it. It’s very easy. Just look at your hand. You have five fingers on your hand, and each promotion has to have five essential ingredients. Here they are. 1. You have to have the right offer. Each promotion has to have the right offer. 2. That promotion - that offer - has to go to the right person. 3. It has to go to the right person through the right media.
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4. That offer to the right person through the right media has to fit the right long-term strategy. You have to have a long-term strategy behind each promotion. 5. That offer has to have the right “hook.” The hook is the thumb. That’s how we signify it. That makes it real easy to remember. So you look at your hand, and you realize that it has to have those five key ingredients. Every single promotion has to have them. I’d like to talk about them a bit. First of all, those of you who have read a lot of books or listened to a lot of programs on direct response marketing already know a lot of what I’m going to say to you. It’s human nature to always want to hear something new, to never be 100% satisfied with things you’ve already heard. You get bored easily with things you’ve heard. You always want to listen to something new. Everybody‘s always looking for something new. Many people who have read books on direct response marketing or been to some seminars or listened to some tapes, those people already know a lot about getting the right offer to the right person through the right media. We’re not the ones who created those rules or formulas. They’re just something that every expert talks about. Every expert who is worth something tries to teach their clients the importance of those three principles - getting the right offer to the right person through the right media. These are the fundamentals that you need. You have to realize how important it is to have the fundamentals, to know what they are, to internalize what they are, and how all this works together. Again, there are some crucial elements here that most people don’t talk about. That’s step 4 and 5 that we’ll cover in a minute. Many of you already know what the right offer is. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had at actually putting this together. That’s where your real strength is going to come from. The offer is simply the product you’re selling, the price you’re selling it for, whatever guarantees you’re offering the customer. Basically that’s it: what you’re offering the customer. The right offer has to answer one important question all throughout, whether it’s a small ad or a 20 page sales letter, no matter what media it comes in. The right offer has to answer this one question throughout the offer: What’s in it for the customer, the prospect? What’s in it for them? The offer must be heavily laden with benefits. A benefit is a specific result that a prospect or a customer or a client will get or can get as a result of using the product. The benefit is the real reason people buy. It doesn’t have a lot to do with the feature. The feature is sometimes what makes the product unique. But you have to take it beyond the feature. You have to say why it’s that important. Why would somebody want that feature? What’s in it for the customer? You have to think like they think. Then you have to be able to show people. Remember, an advertising message is not like an article that someone would read in a magazine. People don’t read sales material in an active way. They read sales material in a very passive way. They just glance at it. They half-heartedly read it. They don’t put a lot of their energy or a lot of their time into reading your ad, at least initially. They’ll skim over it.
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If something catches their interest, yes, then they will read it. And if they’re interested, they’ll read all of it. It doesn’t matter how long it is, how involved it is. But you have to get people interested. In order to do that you have to have a lot of benefits, and you have to be able to communicate those benefits. That’s all part of your offer, whatever guarantee you have, mailing it as risk-free as possible to them. The second stage is: to the right person. In get-rich principle #4 we’re talking talki ng about the importance of the market. Remember, when you’re trying to sell something to somebody, it’s just one person at a time. You have to really focus on that. Only one person at a time will read your sales letter or your ad or listen to your promotional cassette tape or watch your video or your electronic ad, however you’re reaching these people one person at a time. You have to “speak” to that person. You have to get the right offer to the right person. There needs to be a strong marriage between the person you’re trying to reach and the offer that you’re present to that person. Step 3: It has to go through the right media. In get-rich principle #4 we’re talking about the importance of having the right market. But you also have to find a way to get your offer to the right person through the right media to reach that market. The more you study markets and the more importance you place on that (which is get-rich principle #4), the more you’ll start becoming aware of the many different ways to reach these different markets. There are many different ways to reach markets - through direct mail, through magazines ... Sometimes the market that you want to reach is so specialized that you have to do it through the right ad in a right magazine. Let’s say that you have a product for haemorrhoid sufferers. Well, this could cover millions of people. But how do you reach those people? You have to put the right offer together to reach that right person through the right media. In this case, you’re dealing with a mass market. You have to run very, very, very small, inexpensive ads in national mass market publications. There’s always a right way and a wrong way to reach any kind of market. So you have to be aware of that. Step 4 is: with the right long-term strategy. You see, with every offer that you run, every promotion that you send out, ask yourself, “Why am I doing this? What is my long-term goal?” Again, there has to be some long-term strategy. If you really want to get rich, the way to do it is to develop a base of customers who continue to buy from you again and again and again. There’s no other way. I want you to remember that. So you have to look at the “big picture.” Think of it as if it was a jigsaw puzzle that was already completed. Try to get the big picture of what you want to accomplish in your mind. Then ask yourself, “Does each promotion fit into that puzzle?” You see, the whole thing is what we call “back-end.” Everything has to have a backend. You can’t just run a promotion and then let it die there. The way to make the most money is to run a promotion, make a certain sale to a certain group of customers, and then ask yourself, What next? What can I sell those people next? Where will that sale lead? What’s going to happen after this promotion? It takes a lot of thinking, but that’s necessary in order to get rich. You have to do a lot of thinking. You have to develop your thinking process.
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Step 5: is the “right hook.” A hook is just what we call it. A hook could be almost anything. But again, it takes some thinking. It could be the right timing. For instance, we ran a promotion right after the first of the year. So our hook for that promotion talked about the beginning of the year and the fact that a lot of people have new year resolutions and they want to do big things. There’s about a 14-day or 15-day period around the first of January where people are really focused on the new year. So our hook had to do with the timing. Or the hook can deal with the type of package that you’re sending to people, the printing, the type of paper you put it on, the “look” or the “feel,” the “sizzle,” or something. It’s something or anything that stimulates the whole package. Again, this takes some real thinking. And you have to study a lot of sales material that other people produce. The easiest and best way you’re going to find your own hooks is to really study hard. Look at a lot of different promotions. Save unique sales material ask yourself, “What can I do to give each promotion I run a little extra sizzle?” Maybe there’s nothing you can do. You know, this step 5 is not an absolute because sometimes you just can’t think of anything extra. But you’ll never think of anything really “hot” unless you set out to do it. That’s the point I want to make to you here. So remember, there are key fundamentals in everything. Getting rich is no exception. You have certain basic principles. The purpose of this whole program is to identify and show you what those are and teach them to you. The “hand” is a very good technique because each time you’re putting a promotion together you can look at your hand and gauge your promotion by each finger on your hand representing a certain step. And you’ll know where you’re weak. You’ll know, simply by having something to gauge your promotion by. The power of leverage. If you’re going to get rich, you have to have some form of leverage. Every single person who goes from some type of humble beginning to making a major success of any kind has used some form of leverage. You know, a lot of people don’t realize that the rich people in this world are just like you are. They’re no different. The more money Eileen and I make, the more we realize this. These people are just like us. They’re no different. They have developed certain strategies and certain formulas. They’ve learned how to apply some of the same things that we’re trying to teach you on this tape program. But these people are no different. They’re risk-takers. They set out to make something happen. They have accomplished great things. They’re learned some of the strategies that we’re trying to share with you. And they’ve found some form of leverage. When you realize that rich people are no different than you, that’s when you start developing your real awareness inside that you’re capable of making all the money you want to. Now, a lot of people just don’t believe that’s true. As long as you believe you can’t do it, you won’t do it. So you have to get that straight and understand that every single rich person in this world uses leverage.
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Rich people put on their pants the same was we all do - one leg at a time. They have no more hours in the day than you and I have. They’re not stronger. They’re not more powerful. The power they do have has all been granted to them by other people. So develop an awareness for leverage. As I’m speaking about leverage, I want you to grasp some of the ideas I’m going to share with you here and realize that it is the true secret. Left on your own, you’re only worth so much; you can only do so much. You have all these limitations of time and money, talent, abilities, energy. All of these thugs limit you. So leverage comes in all different kinds of forms. There are many different ways to use it. No two ways are quite alike because each individual puts their own unique perspective onto whatever leverage they use. The principle of leverage is the very same. And here's how we define that: Leverage is any method or strategy that allows you to do more than you would ever be able to do on your own. You can use leverage to do the work or activities of one person or one hundred people, one thousand, ten thousand .. Some of these big corporations that have 10,000 employees have all that leverage whenever they develop an idea other people doing it. It's duplicating yourself. Again, not only are there different methods and strategies for producing leverage, but also there are different variants of levels for using those strategies too. The same strategy that can be used to generate $l,000 can be used to generate $l0,000 or a million dollars. We've been teaching people how to make money since 1988. Within each of the distributorship programs or business bu siness opportunities that we've sold, s old, we have always looked l ooked for ways of o f giving givi ng our o ur customers more leverage. In 1988 we came out with our “Dialling for Pounds” program. That whole program was based on 1evenge.We devised a marketing method that allowed our distributors to use small classified ads in newspapers around the country and a simple answering machine that they could buy at K-Mart or Wal-Mart or any discount store. And we showed them how to get those ads and the answering machine to work for them 24 hours a day. Leverage can be used in all different kinds of variations. That program is a good example. We had distributors who were content with just running four or five ads a week in different newspapers around the country. And those distributors were bringing in an extra $100-$300 a week, and that's all they were interested in. They were working 30-45 minutes a day taking the messages off their machine. They just ran a very small, part-time, lucrative business. Some people are still doing it. They're still using our principles to just run small ads in newspapers. They run in 5 or 10 or 15 different papers a week. They’re making a nice, consistent amount of money that they want to make. Then we had other distributors who just weren’t happy with that; they wanted to go for the big bucks. We had one distributor in Provo, Provo , Utah who did di d over ove r five million dollars in sales sale s in his best be st year with that very same formula - running small ads in newspapers. The ads had a phone number instead of an address in them. The prospects called that phone number, listened to his recorded message on an answering machine, and ordered a book directly from the answering machine. So there’s no telemarketer. There’s no personal se- involved. It’s a great little formula that we put together.
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He had 37 answering machines all hooked up like a string of Christmas tree lights, where one light is hooked to the next light, and so on. That’s how he ran his operation. He saw bigger. He thought bigger about the whole thing. Consequently, he used a lot more leverage. On any given week he was running ads in hundreds of different newspapers. The same formulas will work at various degrees, based on what you want to do. What do you want to do? What do you want to accomplish? And I think that’s a good place to inject this idea too: This tape program is all about teaching you get-rich principles, but get rich means different things to different people. And you need to determine what it means to you. How much money do you really want to make? Then, most important, why? Why do you want to make that money? Determine the reason you want to make it; that’s what gives you the energy that you need. That’s what helps you to have that level of commitment that you need to really go out there and do big things. Without that, you really can’t hang in there when things go bad or when things aren’t working out just perfectly. In business, nothing ever works out perfectly; I don’t want to mislead anybody. But these principles can make you tremendous amounts of money. And you need to start looking for ways that rich people use leverage. You’ve heard the cliché that “money makes more money.” That’s one way of using leverage. If you had a million dollars in the bank right now or in mutual funds or whatever, you could probably safely make 25% on your investment. So without ever touching the principal, that million dollar investment that you had could be generating $250,000 every single year for you year after year after year. Your money would be working for you so that you don’t have to work, or you don’t have to work as hard. That’s the principle of 1everage.Think about hydraulics. I don’t know if you understand the dynamics of hydraulics. I certainly don’t know how it works. I just know that with a hydraulic system, one person can pick up thousands of dollars by just the push of a button. That’s what leverage is all about. It’s gaining the maximum results from the minimum amount of time, work, energy, and effort. It gives the person so much power and so much ability. We’re living in a day and age where average people have more power than ever before. Computer technology and the Internet now allow you to reach millions of people with just a push of a button, and very inexpensively. There are many different magazines you can advertise in now. Think of the offset revolution of the 1960s where the printing equipment kept getting cheaper and cheaper. And the cost started dropping lower so printers could print small quantities of magazines. Now there are hundreds of different magazines on the market, whereas 50 years ago there were dozens of different magazines on the market. This allows small entrepreneurial people to service small narrow niche markets that before would have been impossible to reach, or very expensive to reach. This gives the small average person the chance to really compete in the marketplace. I was just reading in Forbes Magazine about a small steel company that has 15 employees and is successfully competing with the large steel mills that have hundreds of employees. The only way it can happen is because of technological advances that allow it to happen. This company does not
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manufacture any of their own steel. They just broker it. They don’t have all the high overhead costs. But technology has allowed them to do it with distribution methods and communication methods that allow them to get their steel from other countries in the world where it’s so much cheaper. The small person has so many advantages now to use all different kinds of leverage. One way we use leverage is with direct mail. We spend a week developing different sales promotions, where we really put everything into the actual sales package - the sales letter, the brochures, any kind of promotional cassette tapes or video tapes. We’ll spend weeks putting all that together, working very hard, very diligently. Then we mass produce that. We might mail out 100,000 sales letters or a million sales letters. We mailed out close to five million of our best sales letter. We duplicated ourselves over and over again. Those five knocked on the prospect’s door, they presented our sales message to that prospect and did a good job of selling for us without us having to do anything, you see, except to get on the phone and call the printers, make sure the pieces were printed, call the list brokers to make sure we had plenty of good names, call the mailing house to make sure the mailings went out on time. You see, that’s all Eileen and I had to do. But million pieces of mail went to the prospect’s house, they initially we had to put a lot of work into it. I hope you understand the principle. Then I hope you’ll look for ways to go out there and use it. Find what you are best at. We all have certain talents and abilities. The main thing is to find out what you’re best at and just focus on that end of the business. For instance, my job with our company is to focus on the advertising and marketing. That’s all I do. Everybody else has different job functions. My energy is not scattered. You see, it’s a form of leverage. It’s a form of leverage that you can use too - focus on what you are best at and delegate the rest of the responsibilities to other people so that your time is not spent “putting out brush fires” all day long. Get other people to do all the daily details that have to be done. And you do the things that only you can do. Find those talents, those abilities, in yourself. That’s another form of leverage. Have other people do the different tasks so that you are able to focus all of your efforts and energy. Again, this is 1everage.There are many different ways to use leverage. It starts with an awareness. First of all, just be aware that the richest people and the most successful people in this world are no different than you are. They have just as much time. They’re not smarter. As a matter of fact, if you learn to know some of them like we have, you might be shocked to find that you have a lot more intelligence than a lot of them. They have just learned how to use these principles of finding some type of method or strategy that allows them to do more than they could ever do on their own. Get-rich principle #6 is this: There are 3 ways to build a business. This is an important principle for you to remember because many people tend to do one of two things: 1. They make business too simple. They have all these generalities - the customer is king, find a need and fill it ... They tend to generalize or make it too simple and too easy. 2. They tend to make it complex. Far too many people that we work with, fall under that second category. They make business too complicated.
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We talked about the fact that a lot of the books out there on business go a long way towards doing just that; they make everything way too complicated. Some of the books we have on making money in mail-order are full of all kinds of complicated graphs and charts and tables and kinds of ways to figure out all these complicated mathematical projections. But our experience is that none of that really means much of anything. Sure we have our accountants who do all the book work. I know there are certain figures that have to be tracked. But what I’m going to show you in this principle is about all you really need to know. Just grasp this one simple principle and really grasp it, really think about what this means - the fact that there are only three ways to build a business, and this could be any business. I don’t care how big it is or how small it is. The first way is to bring in more customers. Remember, customers are the life-blood of any business. So if you can develop strategies and methods that allow you to bring more customers into your business, it’s going to grow. The second method is to make more sales to the customers that you have now. Simply increase the frequency. If you’re doing business with your average customer two times a year, find a way to do business with that customer four times or eight times or ten times a year. And there are specific strategies to help you do that. The third way is to simply make bigger sales to the customers that you have now. By bigger we’re talking about bigger ticket sales so that you make twice as much profit on each sale or ten times as much profit on each sale. Again, there are strategies that you can use to do that. But these are the only three methods of building a business because you have to realize that there are times when you’re having principles and formulas and systems and strategies that we’re talking about on this program is important going to run into business problems. But there’s nothing complicated about these three things. Remember that there’s always a solution to the problems that you’re going to run into. The solution is this: Each of these three items focuses on what I call the “essential element” of business, which is making more sales and profits. Everybody talks about it. Well, these three ways of building a business are all focused around that. And I just want to say this: The U.S. Department of Commerce has scared an awful lot of people from becoming self-employed and getting into business for themselves. The statistics they have about 95 out of every 100 businesses that go broke, that scares people. Nobody who has held a job for 20 or 30 years is about to quit their job and lose everything, put a second or third mortgage on their home, go into business for themselves, and become one of the 95% who don’t make it. Nobody wants to do that. The purpose of this program is to teach you some of the strategies that you can use so you can experience the most success. And I’m here to tell you: No business, no company, goes out of business for having too many sales and for bringing in too much profit. However, in extreme regulatory situations, the government might shut the business down for legal reasons. Or there might be extreme personal reasons; maybe somebody dies or something like that.
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Some people quit business because they’re tired of it. One reason is because of the struggle. A lot of companies just aren’t making enough sales and profits. And they don’t understand this one simple formula. If you can really grasp it, it can be very powerful. Almost any business problem can be solved if you bring in more sales and more profits. Money equals choices. It gives you the ability to do things that you can’t do without money. So you have to ask yourself a few questions. To really use this principle, you have to ask yourself: How can I bring in more customers? That’s the first way to build the business - to bring in more customers. Ask yourself that repeatedly. The second question: How can I make more sales to the customers that I have now? The third question: How can I sell my current products or services for higher amounts of money? The truth is: The answers to these questions are all found by asking the right questions. You keep asking those questions repeatedly. How can I do these things? And the answers are going to come to you. They’re not going to come to you overnight. You’re not going to figure any of this out right away because part of all of this is that business is a game. And it’s a game that involves many different factors. This is what makes it very interesting. Your ability to play the game will determine how much money you make. Money is just a good way of keeping score, that’s all. Our whole analogy is what somebody told us when we were starting out: “Hey, don’t get all caught up in it. Money is great. You can live in a really nice house and drive a great car, take some fantastic vacations that you’ll never forget the rest of your life, eat good food. But that’s about all it does. That’s about all that money is good for.”
When ”push comes to shove,” and somebody sticks a gun in your face, you’re going to give them your money. Or if you’re freezing and you have a stack of money and a wood stove but no wood, you’re going to burn that money so you can stay alive. Money is basically only worth so much. So the real deal is to play the game, to learn the game of making money. And then just have fun playing it. One of the best ways you can play the game is by focusing on the key and critical functions of the business - bringing in more sales and more profits. In the book “The Magic Of Thinking Big,” David Schwartz tells a story about a guy who built a chain of lumber yards. I think he had 20 or 30 stores by the time David wrote about him. This guy’s strategy was so simple: Every night he came home from work after putting his whole heart and sod into the business every day, and he would take a half hour to reflect on the day, and he would ask himself one question every single day. That question is: How can I make more sales and more profits? How can I make the business more profitable? That was really the question. Then he always looked for several answers, and he found ways of putting those into his business. Not all of them were successful. We tell people that all the time. Some people like to make a big thing about Eileen and my success. They come to our company, and they see that business is good, and everybody’s happy, and we’re raking it in, and we’re doing well. And they think we have some special talents or abilities. And that is just not true. It’s not true; it never has been true.
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We just work very hard at it. Also, we try lots of new things to add to our sales and profits. We tell people this: Only one or two out of ten of our ideas really work. But when we roll out with those one or two plans that work, that can be very powerful. That’s the whole secret of our wealth. We just keep trying new ways to increase our sales and profits. Before I go on to the next principle, I want to say this: Remember there are only three ways to do it; this is it. The last two of those are the ways to really get rich. Remember we talked about the 90-10 principle. We talked about the fact that most people spend 90% of their time thinking about what they’re going to sell and 10% of their time thinking about the market they’re going to sell to. That was principle #3 that we discussed. Let me add to that by also saying: Most business people spend 90% of their time thinking about all the ways they’re going to bring new customers into their business, and they spend about 10% of their time thinking about ways to make more money from the existing customers they already have. I say change it around. The only way Eileen and I have made millions of dollars in sales and profits has been from working with our customers. It’s really that simple. Of course, we always have to have some type of ongoing campaign to bring in new customers. And there are other key factors that are very crucial to the whole relationship. We’ll discuss them in some of the other principles. But the main focus for us and all of the richest and most successful people we’ve studied is: You work with your customers. Those are the people who already trust you. Getting a new customer can be very difficult. They don’t know you. They don’t trust you. The relationship hasn’t been established. They might already have relationships that they’re working with. People don’t like doing things that are new to them. However, once you do business with a customer the first time, from then on, you’ve got a real advantage. It’s an advantage to continue to go back to that customer again and again. And if you do it right and practice some of the other methods we’re going to be teaching you, you can do business with people for years and years. When it comes to making sales and profits, the expensive part is the money you spend to get that new customer, people that you’ve never done business with. Trying to get people to do business with you the first time is a lot of work. It costs a lot of money. But after several sales, you’re recouping that initial investment. And that’s where the chance is to make the really big profits. The profits will make you rich. There’s no need to complicate this thing. Business is very simple. You have products and services that cost you a certain amount of money. You mark those up. You sell them for more than they cost you. Any profit left over after you pay your bills goes right into your pocket. Business is very simple. It’s very basic. Use this principle and remember and then try to focus in on those three key strategies that we talked about. Those are the only three ways to build a business. Where it really becomes powerful, then, is working all three of them at the same time. This is where you can really make phenomenal amounts of money. By that I mean: Step 1 was bringing in more customers. So you have a plan for doing that, a constant never-ending plan. Whether you’re running ads or using direct mail, you’re just steadily running some type of an on-going marketing
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system that continues to bring new customers into your business every day and every week. That’s #1. Then #2: You have an on-going system for staying in touch with those customers and doing more and more business with them. That’s #2 - increasing the frequency of purchases. Then #3: You have some type of an on-going system. Remember, that’s what I’m really trying to get through here. It has to be something that you do continually, not just one time. This is where you get the most leverage. Remember the principle of leverage that we talked about in the last get-rich principle, #5. So the leverage comes from continuing to do something over and over again, getting it to work and then just continue to do it better and do more of it. But #3 -You have an ongoing system for separating out your best customers from the rest of your customers. And make bigger sales to those customers. You can do that many different ways. We’ll talk about that strategy in one of the principles. So look for ways to do all three of those. Then make it an ongoing system that you put into effect. And it might take you a lot of work to get it into effect. But once you’ve got it going, it takes very little work - again, the principle of leverage. Once it’s going, it works for you so that you don’t have to do all that work continually. Week after week, month after month, year after year, you’re bringing in incredible profits because you’re utilizing each of these three ways to build your business. Now we’re going to talk about principle #7, which is called “the power of the back-end.” This principle fits perfectly with everything that we’ve talked about. Let me show you how it fits in, and then we’ll get very specific on this. Principle #1 that we talked about was the reasons why you should be self-employed. Principle #2 explained to you that if you want to get rich, you have to be self-employed. Principle $3 talked about the 90-10 rule, about the fact that the market has to come first always, not the product. Principle #4 described something we call the “hand,” which is essentially what you need on every single promotion. On Principle $5 we briefly went over the power of leverage, explaining why that was important. Then on Principle #6 we talked about the only three ways to build a business. I hope this is all really tying together. I want to show you that this Principle #7 - the power of the backend - is perfectly suited with everything else that we talked about. I just want to be more specific on this principle because this involves working with customers. That’s what the back-end is. You hear people talk about the “front-end” in marketing. The front-end is all the ways that you bring in new customers. It’s all the ways you attract new people who have never done business with you to try your business one time - to make an initial purchase, to come into your store, to call you to inquire about a product or service. The list could be endless. Really, that’s determined by your marketing plan and what you’re doing to go out and reach those new customers. Remember, on principle #6, that was the very first way to build a business - to bring in more customers. But then on principle #6 we talked about the importance of then using the other two steps. The second step was to increase the frequency of the average purchase that each customer makes with you or your company. The third step was to make bigger sales, larger ticket sales, to those customers.
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It’s those principles that make you rich because those are the ones that produce the most profits. And that’s what back-end is all about. It utilizes leverage in a whole different kind of way. It’s part of the hand. When we discussed the concept of the hand, we talked about the importance of having some long term vision. One of those five key concepts is to ask yourself, “What is the purpose of this? What is the intention?” If it’s just to make money on that one promotion, that’s not enough, because the real secret is to work with your customers and to develop relationships with them. Then you can make more money by providing different products and services designed to serve them specifically. It also utilizes the 90-10 rule that we talked about. The 90-10 rule means the market comes first. And the best market is the market that’s made up of people who have already done business with you. We’ll go into more specifics about how that works. This is the secret behind all major successes. It’s real simple. On the outside looking in, a lot of businesses look very complex. And to tell you the truth: Sometimes the most profitable businesses are the ones that you can’t really explain to people exactly what you do. That’s the way it’s always been with our business. Everybody wants to know. They see us living in the home we live in, a 9,000 square foot home. And they see us driving new cars. It’s not that we try to flaunt our success or anything like that. But at the same time, we’re enjoying the money while we’re here. It’s nice to have those good things. People see us living this kind of life-style, and they always ask us, “What do you do?” They want to know the secret, how we’ve managed to do all this. We have to give people a “pat” answer, like “We sell books,” because they don’t understand the concept of selling information. They don’t understand all the different types of things we do. You see, from the outside, our company looks very complex. When we really sit down with people and try to explain to them what we do, a lot of people become confused. Actually, our whole company has been built on trying to service our best customers, trying to create all different types of products and services that they most want, need, and buy from us. And in doing that, we’ve created a company that’s very complicated to explain because we’re dealing with a very niche market. Remember, the real secret of profits is not to try to get everybody’s business; rather, it is being very selective about the people you are doing business with and trying to serve those people. Then, as I’m going to show you here, that will also help you bring in new customers. The customers are the life-blood of the business. They’re the oil that keeps the whole thing running. Without oil, an engine is basically worthless. The customers are the profits that your company can make. I know this is a bold statement, but please believe me: It’s safe to say that most businesses could double or even triple the profits they make right now - not the sales, but they could double or triple the amount of profit they make simply by going back and working with their customers and developing more and more products and services for their customers. In principle #6 we talked about the three key ways to build a business. Most businesses are trying to get new customers; that’s all they do. Many of their marketing efforts and activities, everything
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that they do around advertising and promotions, it’s all just a way to get new customers instead of spending 90% of their time (back to that 90-10 rule) just focusing on the customers they already have. Customers are also money in the bank. And you have the key. So I want to share with you four essential elements here that can help you make more money from your existing customer base. The first one is the USP That’s what we call the “unique selling proposition.” This is a term-hat was invented in the 1950s by an advertising man named Rosser Reed. He created the whole concept of unique selling positions. Basically, it’s so simple. It’s not easy. Believe me, it’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever do - to create a very powerful USP It’s trying to figure out what the best thing is that you have with your company. It’s answering this question: Why should people do business with you? Why should they spend their money with you and your company rather than with one of your competitors? Again, there may not be anything uniquely different about that your company provides. So the whole trick is: What can you do, what can you create that is truly unique in the eyes of you or the services your company provides or the products your customers? It must be something that gives them great value. What could that possibly be? It’s a question you need to ask yourself over and over again to find out the true answer. But once you do have that answer, scream it from the top of the roof. Let everyone know that’s what’s different about you and your company. Let me tell you about our USP. We discovered our USP by just examining the market that we’re in. Our company sells low-end business opportunities. We have different distributorships put together, and we have different types of business opportunities that people can start from anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars. We have lots of competitors in this market. If you take all the businesses doing this, from the small operators on up to the big companies that are in this business like ours, there are probably 2,000-3,000 different companies that are selling money-making or business opportunities that fall within the $300-$3,000 range. So we had to ask ourselves, “What is different about our company?” Or, more specifically: What is it about these other companies that they are not providing to the same type of customers that we want to reach? We asked ourselves that again and again. One of the things that kept cropping up is that a lot of the people in this market, for whatever reason (and I know some of them, but I don’t want to go into it), don’t develop relationships with their customers. They don’t even care who they are. Remember, people want to do business with other people, especially in mail-order, especially when they can’t walk into your store. But even then, they like being treated right, they like doing business with a real person. So we decided from the beginning that our USP was to develop relationships with our customers, to let them get to know us and to tell them who we were and all the things we had in common with them. Essentially, we were just real honest with them about who we are,
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where we came from, what happened. We let them know about our own goals as far as being able to help them make money. We related to them heavily, and we let them know that we related to them. This was our USP. We found several ways to completely communicate that message in almost every single sales letter that we sent out to our prospective customers. We found a way to get that message thoroughly ingrained. We have found a systematic way to get that story across to those people who have been our customers for the longest time. This helps us do the essential thing - the second key - which is to build relationships with your customers. That’s what it really is all about - building these relationships with the customers so they trust you, so they want to do more business with you, so they realize you are trying to help them. If you think about it in a very conceptual way, that’s all any product or service really is. It’s just a way of helping people. Let your customers know that, communicate that to them, that through your product and service you’re trying to help them. That builds relationships. They trust you. They want to continue to do business with you. Again, as we talked about in principle #6, every time you do business with a customer, that offsets those expensive acquisition costs to get those new customers, until finally you’re making tremendous amounts of profit each time someone does business with you. The third step here, or the key, is to separate your best customers from the rest of your customer base. There are several ways to do that. You can do it in terms of price. This is one of the ways we do it. Any customer that spends over a certain amount of money with us automatically gets kicked into a special computer file. We call it our “preferred customer” file. Those people have proven that they are more serious about making money than the rest of our customers. They have proven that they trust us, because in our particular market no one is going to spend a couple hundred dollars with you unless they trust you. In your market, it might be a couple thousand dollars. In our market, it’s a couple hundred. So you have to determine: What is that qualifying mark? In terms of price, what separates your best customers from the rest? Or it could be a particular product of yours that they buy. That very purchase means that they could be prospective customers for other future products that are along those same lines. So that might be a really good way to separate them too. You can think of many more ways. You could run special promotions. You could try to find ways of qualifying: Who are your 7 best customers? If you have a small customer base, there’s no need to separate them. The point is: After you separate them, you run special promotions that go out to just those specialized groups of people because they’ve already expressed that they are different than the rest of your customers. They’re more serious, whether they spent more money, or they bought some narrow type of segment of your product line, or whatever. Those people deserve special treatment by going back to those people with different promotions, that’s how you build your backend. That’s how you build tremendous profits with this. The fourth key goes back to principle #6.This all does tie in heavily. On principle #6 we talked about the three ways to build a business. Well, two of those ways involve selling to your customers.
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But still, you have to constantly bring in new customers all the time. There is such as thing as retention, keeping customers. The opposite would be attrition, where you lose customers for whatever reason. You have to keep bringing in new customers. Then systemize your marketing plan so you develop relationships with them. Make repeated sales to them. You’re constantly bringing in new customers too. So it’s just like a machine that runs through your whole operation. Conceptually it is a machine; it’s a money machine, by the way. So the fourth key is this: Test new ideas to your best customers first. Let’s say you decide to carry a new product. You put a promotion together, throw it out there to your best customers. If those customers absolutely love it, that means you might have a winner on your hands. With a little fine tuning, you could have a promotion that goes out to people you’ve never done business with as a way of attracting new customers. You see, you always have to have some type of front-end promotion that brings in new customers. Then you have various promotions that re-sell those people again and again. But you always have to look for new front-end offers in order to achieve the maximum profitability, especially if you’re in a small niche market. You have to always try to look for things that will be so exciting to your market that it will make people want to do business with you the first time. The hardest task is to get someone to do business with you the first time. So you need the most exciting product or service that you could possibly offer. It has to be offered to those people out there who have never done business with you before, the people outside of your circle. Then the idea is to bring those people into your circle with a really great offer, something really exciting. Within your circle, then, you have another inner circle of the best customers within your customer base. Then some companies (if they’re big enough) even have circles within the circle, then circles with those circles. They have those few customers who are the best of the best customers. And they look for the ultimate ways to help those customers get what they want. That can be very profitable. The point of *4 is this: If your best customers are not excited about some type of promotion that you’re offering, then chances are the rest of the customers that you have are not going to be too excited either. Then those people outside the circle - that you’ve never done business with before they’re not going to be very excited about it either. The whole deal is very simple, as everything that we teach is. You have to come up with new things for your best customers anyway. That’s the whole point of #2, which is building a relationship with these people. It also involved #3, separating them out with different mailing lists, different sections of your customer base so you can work with them on more of a personal level. That’s one of the benefits of being able to separate people out. That way, when you write a letter to those people trying to sell them something, you’re able to speak to them in more of a personable way because the relationship is established. Whatever you used to qualify them - a product or service that you sold those people, or a certain dollar amount allows you to know those people intimately. That’s what we’re really talking about here. That’s the key to really developing extremely profitable promotions - Get to know these people so that when you’re writing to them you’re writing to a friend. You’re writing to someone you know, somebody you have a relationship with.
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The point is this: You get something that excites your best customers. Then you fine-tune that promotion just a little bit, and you throw it out there to the rest of your customers, whether it be sending out a postcard or calling them on the phone, or any number of ways. If it’s profitable to that base of customers, you fine-tune it a little bit and put it out there as a front-end test promotion to try to bring new customers in to your business. So you’re always looking for those things that are really exciting. That brings me to another thing. A lot of people look at our business and see all the different products and services that we’re creating. For example, people like our suppliers the people who do all our printing for us, the people who duplicate our audio cassettes and our video tapes - see us coming out with all these new ideas all the time. And they say, You guys must be geniuses or something.” You see, that could not be further from the truth. The truth is that a lot of what they see us developing are things we develop for our best customers only. Then if our best customers are crazy about those items and they really sell well, we know we’re giving those people what they really want. The only way you can really determine what somebody wants is by considering what they buy from you. This is why focus groups are such a waste of time. It’s a waste of time and money to pay a group of people several hundred dollars to spend a day around some big conference table. Try showing them all these products and asking, “Would you buy this product? “They would all go, “Oh yes, I’d buy that product in a minute.” Well, that may not be true. Then you go out and spend all this money developing something that all these focus people I said they would buy. That might be the furthest thing from the truth because people spend their money on the things they really want. That’s the only way you can really tell if you’ve got something exciting. It’s not the way you feel about the product or service that really counts. Although we all tend to fall in love with whatever we sell, there can be a real danger in doing that because the key is to find out what your customers want. What are they excited about? The only way you’re ever going to find that out is by making offers to them. The way to spend the least money possible to find out what people want is to go to those smallest groups of customers that you have, your very best group of customers, which only represent a small segment of your entire customer base. So it’s extremely inexpensive to go to those groups, whether you’re sending a letter out or calling them or whatever, however you decide to do the actual promotion. Whatever vehicle you use, it’s very inexpensive to go to that small narrow group of customers who already know you. Because they know you, they trust you. They have no problem with sending their money to you. But they’re not going to buy something they don’t want. I hope you can understand the power in that. Then you test to other groups of customers that have not shown that level of commitment to you. Then go outside of those groups and start testing to the outside prospect lists or the various media that you’re using to attract the type of customer you most want to attract into your business. Believe me, it’s the ultimate way to use leverage because the people who buy from you one time have taken a tremendous step, especially nowadays. This is the age of scepticism. People are suspicious about new companies. They’re afraid to do business with a new company the first time
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in many cases. So it took a lot of guts to do business with you the first time. But people are also creatures of comfort and habit. After they’ve done it the ht time, it’s always easier to do it again. Whatever they’ve done two times, it’s always easier to do it a third time. So you’re using lots of leverage here. You spend a great deal of time and money getting new customers, getting people into your business the first time. Now you need to find ways to utilize the power of the back-end, which is get-rich principle #7, to do more business with those people who already trust you, already know you, have already shown their interest. They’ve already shown. that they are the best people by the business they’ve given you. Get-rich principle #8 is the vehicle that you use to reach the people who are most likely to do business with you. We call it a vehicle because there are many different ways of getting to the people who are your best customer. They start out being your best prospects, of course, Then they become your best customers. But there’s a vehicle, a specific vehicle. It’s the advertising method that you use, the marketing method. Let me just say this: Marketing is really only two things. Marketing is all of the things, the activities, that you do to bring new customers into your business. Then #2, it’s all of the different activities that you do to re-sell those customers again and again, to stay in touch with them, continue to contact them, continue to give them what they want, provide them what they’re accustomed to. There’s always a way to reach the people who are most likely to be your customers. Here are the ABCs. First of all, you have to ask yourself, “Who are your best prospects?” Who are the people most likely to be your best customers? What type of person am I most looking for that I want as my best customer? B, which is a natural progression from that first question is: What can I offer these people, that is unique and valuable and ongoing? Remember, that’s where all the big profits are. That’s how to get rich; it’s not by doing business with someone one time. It’s all the business you do with people over a long period of time. It’s that residual aspect, the leverage principle that we’ve already discussed. And C: How can I reach these people for the biggest profit possible? You see, A and B lead right to C. Then C is the vehicle; how do I reach these people? First you have to know whom you’re trying to reach. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that everybody’s their customer or that everyone’s a potential prospect for their business. That’s just not true. As a matter of fact, until you can get over that - that everyone is my customer - you’re never going to be able to develop a marketing strategy that allows you to make the biggest profits. You’re going to spend money on advertising, reaching people who are not your best customers. You’re not going to have a clear conception of the person who is most likely to do business with you again and again. It’s going to be wasteful, and it’s a mistake that a lot of people make who are new to business. A lot of people who have products and services that could be used by lots of different people make that mistake too. There are businesses that are very generic. The first business I ever had was a carpet cleaning company. Well, in this area of the country where my wife and I live, almost everyone has carpet. So because we were naive and inexperienced, we tended to believe that everyone was our customer. We made a lot of mistakes.
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We tell people that if we only knew then what we know now, we would have had the most profitable carpet cleaning business in America. And I honestly believe that. The things that I’ve been trying to share with you on this tape are principles that have made us rich. Let me just tell you how we’ve used the vehicle. For each business, it can and should be unique. Our present company, M.O.R.E., Incorporated, is a company we started in 1988.We started in basically the same kind of way that most of our competitors operate their business. We ran space ads initially in national magazines that specifically sold the types of products and services that we sell, which is money-making opportunities, business opportunities, and distributorships, that type of thing. Soon we found a more profitable and better way to reach that same market of people who buy our types of products and services. That was through direct mail. It was a way for us to reach people without letting our competitors know exactly what we were doing. It was more of a private way of doing business. And it worked for us. We learned the ins and outs of that particular vehicle. Every different vehicle medium of advertising has its unique features, things that you have to learn, certain rules and certain tricks of the trade, certain ways to make it more profitable. Direct mail is no exception. It happens to be one of the most expensive ways of advertising. But it also allows us to reach so many more people within our market than we could reach through space advertising. We’re in a very niche market. In response to the first two questions that I just gave you, A, B, and C, who are our best prospects, and what can we offer them? We started out knowing the answer to B before we really knew the answer to A. We knew what to offer this market because we had an intimate knowledge of the market before we started our company. Then we learned the answer to A. They’ve got all these technical names in marketing, like demographics and psychographics and all of this really complicated stuff. But it doesn’t have to be complex at all. Psychographic means what type of psychological elements make up the person who is most likely to be your best customer. Demographics would be: Where can I most likely reach the type of customer that I want to reach? These are real simple things. Your best customers are going to come from somewhere. And you’ll find that out in the course of doing business. You’ll find out who your best customers are, what makes them uniquely different than your other customers. Through that knowledge you’ll be able to develop marketing plans and strategies that allow you to attract even more of those people. Remember, knowledge is power. But it’s not power until you actually apply it. But it is power, potential power. So at M.O.R.E., Incorporated we found that direct-mail was the avenue, the vehicle, that gave us the most profits possible. Then we developed a system of attracting the best customers from our initial list. We do everything that we tell you to do on this tape, by the way. We still do these things to this day. We have a system that brings us new customers. We use direct mail. The direct mail offer goes out to specific mailing lists that we found are the best to reach the type of person we’re trying to reach. And we make an initial front-end offer to those people. Let’s say we mail 100,000 pieces. With the marketing campaign we’re on right now, we’re mailing 100,000 pieces a month. We used to mail 100,000 pieces a week. It varies from promotion to
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promotion. Right now we’re mailing 100,000 pieces a month with an initial offer designed to attract the kind of customer that we most want to attract. Again, this all came through experience; it’s a process. You don’t know these answers right away But this is the process we have used to learn who our best customers are. We know the type of advertising that will attract those people. We run an initial front-end promotion that doesn’t ask the prospect to do very much. We have a nice lead-generation kind of system that we run where we only ask for a few dollars initially from every prospect. So out of that 100,000, as many as 7,000 new people every month will respond to our front-end offer. They’ll send us a few dollars. And we’ll send them a great front-end package that is specifically designed to eventually bring us the type of customer that we most want. We send our front-end package out to those 7,000 people. And that makes another sale to them that allows us to break even on all of our costs. So that 100,000 mailings we do every month is at a complete, total breakeven because of the initial sale we make to the 7,000 (on average) prospects who respond to our front-end offer. Then we use direct mail repeatedly to go to those people. Out of those 7,000 we’ll have a much smaller group of people, maybe 500 to a 1,000. For the promotion we’re now running, that’s about right. Five hundred to a thousand people out of that group of 7,000 every month will get kicked into another category. Remember we talked about dividing your customer list. Then we run specific marketing campaigns all through direct mail, using direct mail as our vehicle to reach those people. Then those people are kicked into other very specialized mailing lists, depending on different products that they buy, different services that they buy, different levels of money that they spend. They have to meet certain qualifications to stay on those lists. If they don’t meet those qualifications, they’re kicked back down into other lists. The mailing list is just completely divided. We talked about asking yourself: What can I offer these people, that is unique, valuable, and ongoing? On-going is the most important thing when it comes to major profits. You have to remember that. It’s all the business on an on-going basis that eventually puts those huge profits in your pocket. So this is our system. It’s our strategy. There are other people in the opportunity market who would never even consider direct mail because it’s so expensive for them. For their particular offers from their companies, just running space ads is fine. Some people just use card packs. There are all different kinds of ways to reach customers. Remember I told you about the carpet cleaning business that my wife and I started with. Yes, almost everyone was theoretically a potential prospect, although our company was unique, and we catered to a certain type of person. But we found that the best way to get prospects initially to become customers was to run contests. We would constantly have a drawing, and the customer would register to win a certain number of rooms of carpet cleaning for free. Someone would win every month. And we would go to clean their house. But out of all those people who registered but did not win, we would call them up and offer them a consolation prize.
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We used the contest boxes that we had set up around town. And we used the telephone. We found that anybody who registered to win to have their carpet cleaned for free was interested in having their carpets cleaned. We made them a great offer when we called them on the telephone. We offered to give them a consolation prize - clean the sofa for free, or whatever. It was always different. But we would provide some free service on the condition that they had to let us clean a certain number of rooms of carpet. For $100 worth of business, we would do $30 free, or whatever. It wasn’t always the same. It was a way that we could reach people initially. Then we would go back to our carpet cleaning customers throughout the year and offer them other special offers. Again, we made a lot of mistakes. We always found that out towards the end, this system that I’m describing to you with the, sweepstakes and the contest. That was only discovered in the last year that we had the business. That was before we got into our mail-order business, which then dominated everything we do. And we got out of the carpet cleaning business. I just want you to understand: There’s always a way to reach the very best people who are most likely to buy from you again and again and again. And it’s up to you to figure out how to do that. Don’t necessarily follow what your competitors are doing. The “follow the follower” kind of thing is one of the mistakes a lot of people make in business. It can get you into a lot of trouble. As you’re listening to this tape, here’s your assignment for right now: Just develop an awareness. Look and see how other companies are advertising their products and services. Understand that if they can do it, you can do it too. Use this principle of the right vehicle along with the other principles we’ve already discussed. This can make you incredible amounts of sales and profits. The 9th get-rich principle that we’re going to discuss is called “the specific money-making formula principle.” This ties in with a lot of what we’ve already been talking about. To be more specific, I want you to know this: It’s very important that every single successful business (since those are the only ones you want to model yours after) has some type of specific formula for bringing in the maximum amount of sales and profits. There’s always a best way. Look at the companies that are catering to the same market you want to cater to that are selling similar types of products and services, or just companies you admire. Maybe you know the company or the person running it. All of those companies have a formula. Most of the people who are making the most money are very well aware of what their formula is. They know it because they’ve refined it. That’s what I want to show you how to do in this get-rich principle. This is the secret that Eileen and I have used to make all of our money. I want to be completely honest with you: Many of the things we’ve learned have come as a result of being in the business, moving forward, serving customers, following some of the very same specific ideas that we’ve already given you on this tape program. However, as we learned new things, we tried to put them into formulas. Many of these get-rich principles that you’re learning in this program are part of our formulas, things that we’ve learned and simplified. That’s what a formula really is; it’s like a recipe.
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I’m not a very good cook. But if you give me a good recipe and if I follow it to the exact letter, it’s going to come out OK. It may not come out quite as good as the person who is a much better cook. But it’s going to come out alright. That’s what a formula is; it keeps everything simple and clear. It helps you understand everything. For all of our businesses that we’ve had that have been successful, we .developed some type of formula so the business actually turns into what we call a “money machine.” In other words, we know exactly how to bring in more sales. We know exactly how to bring in more profits because we’ve learned the secret of that particular business. It’s important for you to have an awareness of this when you start your business. You need to know that there is a formula. Every business that’s mailing a lot of money selling the same types of products and services that you want to sell has learned certain things. And they’ve simplified those into a formula. And that’s what we’re going to show you how to do in a minute here. The main thing is to understand and be aware that there are formulas to use. There are five specific steps that you can use to develop your own formulas. The word ‘develop” is real important because nobody has the answers right away. The best answers are the ones that always come to you as you’re moving forward. It’s a process. Remember that. All success in life and all real achievement and the monetary rewards and the personal satisfaction that comes from it, everything that we’re trying to teach you in this program is a process. You can’t expect it to just happen overnight. That’s just not the way it works. It develops slowly. But it develops as you move forward. As you’re in the arena working these ideas, servicing your customers, trying to do everything you can to put these ideas that we’ve already shared into effect, you’re going to learn certain things. Here are five steps that you can learn a lot quicker. The first one is: You have to study the market carefully. Remember, we’ve already talked about, the fact that the market always comes first. It’s the most important thing. If your market is everyone, your customer is no one. You have to cater to a specific type of customer. You have to have something unique about your business that brings in a certain type of person. Or you have to specifically know where are the best type of people that you want to reach so you can target them. We talked about the vehicle in the last get-rich principle, being able to reach the best person who is most likely to end up being your best customer. Some of that takes time too. There is a lot to learn here. We’re trying to do everything we can to keep it simple. But, yes, there’s a lot to learn. No one has all the answers. I certainly don’t have all the answers, nor does my wife or the people that we work closely with. We’re all learning as we go. Once you do learn things, write them down. Study the whole thing. The first step here is to study your market. Ask yourself questions constantly. Who are the biggest and best companies that I’m competing with in this market? Who are the biggest companies or individuals? Who is the most successful, not necessarily the biggest? Sometimes the biggest companies are not the most profitable. Just being big doesn’t mean anything. I want you to know that. What really means something is how much profits you make, not how many sales. It took me a long time to learn that because naturally I’m a sales person; that’s my background. My background is going out there and selling things to people. So naturally, when we started our business, I brought all those characteristics into our business and nearly ruined it for us. There’s a difference between sales and business. Selling products and services and running a business are two different features, two
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different functions. The main thing is making profits. A business person always focuses in on what they can do to make the most profit. Sometimes a sales person, like myself, tends to focus on all the ways we can make sales. You might make a lot of sales, but that’s not what keeps you in business. What actually does keep you in business is the profits that you can make. So don’t be fooled just because a competitor is big; that doesn’t mean they’re extremely profitable. There may be a company in your market that is very small but extremely profitable. You’ll only find it by being aware and using this first step of studying the market. The only way you’ll ever recognize those companies is by living step 1, not just following it. It’s not just something that you do. It’s something you do all the time. You constantly analyze the market. One way to do that is to become familiar with the people you’re already doing business with. Your customers already know the market. Chances are, they have also bought from other companies just like yours. And learn to know your customers real well, develop some relationships with them, get to be friendly with them. Especially learn to know your best customers, the ones who buy from you the most often. Probably before they were buying from you the most often, they were buying from other people. These people really have a feel for the whole market. Remember, that’s one message I wanted to share with you more than anything. Our success in our business was the fact that we knew the market so well before we ever got into this business. We already knew who our competitors were. We knew what they were selling. We knew the good things about them and the bad things about them. We knew the companies we wanted to emulate, and we wanted to show our customers that we are nothing like the problem companies. We had a good feel for the market. We did live step 1 .We kept what we call a “swipe file.” You want to get as much information on all your competitors as you possibly can. You want to actually become your competitors’ best customer, now maybe not you it might be a family member. What I’m talking about is definitely a gorilla marketing tactic. There’s nothing dishonest about it or immoral. But someone that you’re very close to, maybe a close relative or friend, can become a good customer of some of your competitors out there and then forward a lot of information your way. It really helps you study the market. Also become friends with a lot of your customers. “they’re really into the market. Remember, there are other people who are just like your best customers. Those are the people you want to attract. You have to have that awareness inside. Part of get-rich principle, the secret formula, is the awareness that there is always a best way. There’s a best way to attract the people you most want to attract, who will end up doing the largest amount of business with you repeatedly over a period of time. That’s how to get rich. I hope you understand that by now. Step 2 is to build an alliance with several of these competitors that you have now. That might sound like a contradiction to step 1 because in step l I’m telling you to create what we call a “swipe file,” where you take all of the information you can get your hands on, every piece of promotional and marketing materials that you can find that your competitors have, and you keep those and study them. You find out what they’re doing right, what they‘re doing wrong. You learn everything you can about the tactics they’re using. Again, no one makes money by accident. That’s what I want you to understand, please. If someone is making money, they’re doing it for a specific reason. It’s up to you to play detective and find out what that reason is.
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Step 2 is to seek out those people in your market that you can learn to know. This is a tough one because sometimes, especially in small business, many people want to hang on to their ideas. They don’t want to freely discuss anything with anyone who could be a competitor. It’s that small-minded thinking that keeps people small. Typically, the people working the smallest businesses tend to think small. I know that’s not always the case. Again, some small companies are extremely profitable. But there are lots of other small companies - let’s face it - that are struggling. You hear statistics from the U.S. Department of Commerce that 95 out of 100 new small businesses go under within the first five years, 95%. You realize a lot of these businesses just aren’t making enough money. Many of those same people, the 95% who go out of business, get right back into another company. That’s where the figures are very misleading. It almost makes it seem like they go back to punching a time clock again, and that’s just not true. Many business people really don’t become good until they’ve owned three or four businesses, unfortunately. We don’t want that to happen to you. That’s one of the reasons we’re making this program - so you can learn these principles and get it right the first time. There are plenty of people within your market area who are servicing the same type of customers that you want. The same type of people you want as your customers are already someone else’s customers. So step #2 is: Get to know who these people are. Tap into their knowledge and their skills and their experience. If you try to seek out 10 “joint venture partners,” you might have to ask 100 people. It might take you years to find 10 good people within your market area that you can work with. But these people are out there. You can share knowledge with those people. You can learn an incredible amount of information on their secret formula. The concept is: You want to find the formula that makes the most money in your particular business. The best way is to find people who have already been in your type of business for a long time, people who already know the “ins and outs,” who have already experienced all the same challenges you’re experiencing, who are already making tremendous sales and profits. Try to work out “joint venture” arrangements, where you can find ways to work together. That can be very profitable. It goes back to our whole principle of leverage. You’ve heard about this whole thing of “OPM.” That term is used in real estate all the time. It’s called “other people’s money.” There are many ways to do it in real estate, where you don’t have to put up your own money; you can use other people’s money to do all kinds of investment strategies. The same concept is true here in developing joint venture partnerships with people who are servicing your same type of customers. They already have the customer base. They’re already established. They’ve been in that market for a number of years. You can work out an arrangement where you can go to their customer base. We’ve done several of those. I don’t have a specific sales figure, but I bet we’ve earned well over a million dollars just doing joint venture arrangements with several people. Let me give you an example. We work with a man named Russ Von Hoelscher. We do all kinds of joint venture arrangements with him. We have used his knowledge, his expertise. We’ve developed a friendship with him. We’ve used his customer base and his network of contacts. We found all different kinds
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of ways to work with him. When we first got started, he had already been in our particular business for over 20 years. So think of all the knowledge and wisdom that he had to share with us. I have to also say that one of the reasons we are where we are today financially, the reason our business is so profitable, is because we did this. We did step 2; we built a relationship with someone who knew a lot more than we did, somebody who could guide us. Then we found all different kinds of ways to work with him. Since then we’ve done this with several other people too. We’re very careful about our joint venture relationships. We go very slowly in it. That’s what I’d advise you to do too because there are some “sharks” out there. A bad joint venture arrangement can really hurt you. And I’m speaking from experience there. So seek out these people. There are lots of people within your particular market who do not directly compete with you. Those are the people to start with. Buy some of their time. Very few people will turn down a sincere compliment. First of all, compliment them; tell them you’ve studied their business and admire what they‘re doing. And then you offer them $300 or $400 to spend a couple hours with you. Many of them will say, “No, I’ll do it for free,” and they’ll sit down and tell you what you need to know. Or maybe if you are in a local business, perhaps there are other business people within other market areas outside of your particular city or state. It’s a non-competitive thing. You can develop relationships, and you can learn from them. It’s a tremendous way to gain leverage. Step 3 to develop your formula is to learn how to conceptualize things. A conceptual thinker is someone who sees things from the top down. They look at the big picture of everything. They don’t get caught up in all the little details, but they try to analyze things in a more general kind of way. They try to see things from a broader scope. “hey try to look for analogies that teach them certain things. This is all part of the formula. The first idea I can give you that explains it clearly is when we built our multi-level marketing company. We looked at some of the successful companies. We also looked at a lot of companies that were not successful. And we found several companies that were using a formula that we finally called “the chain.” This is not what they called it; this is what we called it. We looked at everything they were doing right. They developed this concept. They may not have known it, but it became a formula for us. We called it our chain. It’s real simple, and it explains conceptual thinking here. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Some of the multi-level marketing companies that we studied had tried to do everything possible to help their smallest distributor succeed. Their theory, of course, was that by helping each small independent distributor succeed and by creating all different types of products and services, they would create a very strong “chain,” small distributors that are linked together, a solid distribution outlet for their products and services that would last for years. So by focusing on the small aspects, they strengthened the entire foundation. We called that the chain formula. It really helped us conceptualize the whole thing. That, then, became the fundamental principle that we used to determine every new product or service or different marketing idea or technique.
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For anything we developed for our multi-level marketing company, we asked ourselves, “Does this fit the chain formula?” If it didn’t fit, we threw it out. So, you see, by conceptualizing, we were able to develop a very clear specific formula that has helped us build our business. I hope you understand that conceptual thinking is different than the way most people think. Most people, especially employees, people who have never worked for themselves, get bogged down in their job thinking. We call that “thinking from the ground up.” They don’t have a big picture about how the whole business concept works. They work for companies, and they just do their own small thing within that company. They don’t really have a clue as to what’s going on overall. This is usually the job of the people who are higher up, the president and CEO. When you’re working for yourself, you are the president and CEO. You have to think conceptually. You have to look for analogies like the chain concept that we just talked about, or the “funnel” that we’re going to talk about later on. It’s another get-rich principle we’ll talk about. Step 4 is called “creative borrowing.” I just told you about the multi-level marketing company. We looked at hundreds of different companies that were out there. We looked at what was right and what was wrong. And we borrowed all different kinds of ideas. We had the benefit because our company has a lot of its mail orders in a multi-level type of opportunity. We had the benefit of being able to borrow a lot of different mail order techniques because of our experience. We looked at a lot of different Companies outside of mail order and MLM. We borrowed a lot of ideas from a lot of different places. This is the concept of creative borrowing. Again, there’s nothing illegal about it, as long as you don’t steal somebody’s idea word for word. You use things that are working for other people and look for ways to make it better. That’s the whole concept. You don’t just take things. You look for other kinds of ideas that are working for others. At first, you might not even think they apply to your particular business at all. I can think of a good story right off the top of my mind to illustrate that. Nowadays there are all these drive-through banks. Well, the person who initially got the idea for a drive through bank copied it from the fast-food businesses. They looked to see how McDonald’s and some of these early fast food chains were selling their hamburgers, where the customer could just drive up and place their order. That was how the banks initially got their idea. So you have to be a conceptual thinker to learn how to hook different ideas together that may seemingly be unrelated. That’s what creativity is all about. It’s taking all kinds of little pieces, almost like a jigsaw puzzle, where you look at each small piece and you can’t really tell exactly how it all fits. But you figure it out one piece at a time. It looks like I just came up with a great analogy there to explain this. That’s what it’s all about. People are not born creative. Being creative is something you do. This is what you have to do to develop your own formula. You have to borrow from lots of different places, maybe even outside of your own market area. The last step that I want to share with you, which is a get rich principle in and of itself, is: Test like crazy. Testing just means trying lots of different ideas. Have some fun with it too.
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I’m not talking about some- that’s boring. I’m talking about trying all different kinds of ideas and keeping it fun, seeing what works the best. Many times you don’t know if it’s going to be good or not. The only way to really know for sure is to throw it out there. We talked about that already. First, you throw it out there to your best customers. Then if they love it, you throw it out there to the test of your customers, and on down. Then, if it’s a good enough idea, if it’s powerful enough, you make it part of your front-end offer. This whole concept of the front-end and back-end - that’s a formula. We talked about the concept that there are three different ways to build a business. That is a formula. We talked about the importance of the vehicle. We talked about the power of leverage. We talked about the power of the back-end. All of these things are formulas that we’ve already shared with you here. The hand was a great formula, get-rich principle 4. Take them and realize those are general formulas. Get-rich formula 9 is to do everything you possibly can to seek out those very specific formulas that work perfectly for the business you’re in and the market you sell to. The 10th get-rich principle is called the “millionaire mindset.” This is something that a few of you who are listening to this program might have a problem with because it involves the right type of thinking. This is an area that’s real grey. Sometimes people have a lot of problems with the motivational speakers or the religious leaders around the country or the world who talk a lot about the magic of believing, the power of prayer, the importance of the right attitude. I’ve been around this kind of thinking for a long time. It was 15 years ago that my wife and I first got a copy of the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. A lot of Napoleon’s ideas are so metaphysical in the sense that they’re nothing that you can really put your finger on. They’re not real tangible. They’re about having the right attitude, a solid belief, a strong desire, a powerful commitment to do whatever it is you want to do. They’re about believing big and getting big dreams and goals. A lot of times people have a problem with that because they realize the truth. And the truth is simply the fact that none of that stuff really means anything. None of that stuff by itself will fill your wallet. You can sit around all day wishing and praying and dreaming and desiring to make a lot of money, and that’s not going to do anything. However, that’s the first step, and that’s what I want to share with you here because the millionaire mindset is very important. Believe me, I’ve been as big of a sceptic as anybody about all this. I’ve gone back and forth with realizing the importance of all this because sometimes things I can’t see, touch, feel, smell, and taste - things that are beyond my five senses - I have a real problem with that. Like Missouri is the “Show Me” state. Kansas is right next to Missouri, and my wife and I often go to Kansas City, Missouri. You see all these license tags around that town. It’s the show me state prove it to me. That’s the kind of person I am. I like things that are quantifiable.
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Many of the get-rich principles we’ve shared already are totally quantifiable if used properly; you know exactly if they’re working or not. And you know exactly how well they’re working. So you have one thing that you can gauge against another thing. There’s no guess-work. there’s no magic. These are all proven formulas that we’ve talked about. Now we get into the 10th get-rich principle, which falls into a little bit of a Gray area. You can’t really quite put your fingers on it. You either believe it, or you don’t believe it. It’s sort of like a religious kind of thing in a way. I don’t mean to offend anyone. But there are people who are atheists who absolutely do not believe in God or anything spiritual. Then you have the agnostics, people who some days believe and some days don’t believe, or they’re not really too sure exactly what to believe in, or if they even believe at all. They’re unsure. Then you have the true believers, the people who are dedicated to spiritual kinds of things - prayer, meditation. They believe in God. They believe in the power of prayer, this type of thing. The believers will all tell you how they became believers. It was the fact that they had a lot of faith initially, and their solid belief came through a process. It didn’t all happen overnight, at least not for most of the people I know who are very religious. Some of the people who are the firmest in their religious beliefs that I how have told me they had times of doubt too, which I found bard to believe, because I assumed they never went through any of that. Again, I don’t mean to offend anybody. The only reason I’m pointing to religion here is that the millionaire mindset does involve thinking. It involves thought. And thought is something that’s not real tangible. For instance, one of the principles of the millionaire mindset is that you have to have a strong desire to become a millionaire or to make the amount of money that you want to make. First, you have to have that powerful desire. Well, you can’t really quantify some of that. I know it’s important. What I’m going to share with you in this get-rich principle is all taken out of the book “Think And Grow Rich”. We feel so strongly about this book that we made it the official success guide to our multi-level marketing company that we started. Many of the things we’ve read that have been written about this book have told us that many millionaires were created from studying the principles in “Think And Grow Rich” and then applying them. So this book has a “track record.” I would just encourage you to go get a copy and read it. Try being open-minded about it. Read it through and keep it around. Pick it up every now and then. Before Napoleon Hill wrote this book, he had spent many, many years interviewing over 500 millionaires at that time. He wrote the book in the 1920s, and he had already interviewed over 500 millionaires and gathered all the principles that were most responsible for these people’s wealth. Then in a 15 chapter book he laid those principles down, from step 1 all the way through to step 15. Some of this is very metaphysical. I also want you to believe that some of it is also extremely practical too. First of all, you’ll never get to be a millionaire if you don’t want to be. Doesn’t that make sense? How can you ever expect to get rich if deep down in your heart you don’t want it? Or maybe deep down you have other thoughts that kind of conflict, or whatever.
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I want to share this with you: If getting rich was easy, every park bench bum in America would be driving a Mercedes Benz. It’s just not easy to get rich. But sometimes it can be very simple. In this program, we’ve tried to outline some of the specific principles involved. They’re really simple principles. I hope by the time you’re done listening to this program you realize just how simple these ideas that we’re sharing with you on this program actually are. But they’re not easy. You see, they take a lot of time, work, effort, and energy. Nothing that’s worthwhile in this world comes easily. Some people look at the book “Think And Grow Rich” and are turned off instantly just by the title because they know, as you well know, that just thinking about getting rich is not enough. It has to go way beyond that. Here are the 5 steps on how you can develop a millionaire mindset. There are 5 steps altogether. The first step is: You have to dream big dreams. And you have to believe that you really can do it, that it’s really possible for you to do it. That was the whole secret of our success. Somewhere along the line back in 1985, I think it was, Eileen and I first got this tape from a motivational speaker at the time. His name was James Tollison. He had a company, and he was selling a course that we couldn’t afford to buy. But he put out a promotional tape just to give people an idea of who he was and the kind of material you would be getting in his course. This tape was a one-hour speech that he had given. It was called ”Why The Free Enterprise System Still Works.” It was a speech that inspired us. We couldn’t afford his course; it sold for over $5,000. But we listened to this tape over and over and over again. It was the first time in our lives that we really understood or accepted or believed that we actually could get rich. That’s the first step, of course. Little did we know that taking just that one step really changed our lives forever. Somewhere along the line you have to know in your heart that it’s possible. That’s what we got from listening to that tape. I hope that by the time you’re done listening to this program you have that belief. Start to develop that belief. Dream big dreams. Realize that you can get rich. You don’t need to possess some kind of a college degree. You don’t have to be super-talented or super-smart. That’s one thing Eileen and I have noticed so much.& the years go by and we meet more and more people who are millionaires and multi-millionaires and they’ve made it using many of the same principles we’re sharing with you on this program, we find that these people are no smarter. They’re no more talented than we are. As a matter of fact, it’s really shocking, and you’ll find this out for yourself just how much smarter you are than so many people out there right now who are multi-millionaires. You see, the secret is: These people who have made it started somewhere along the line. They took that first step in developing a millionaire mindset. They actually believed that it was possible. That’s what I want you to do. I want you to take that first step. The second step actually may help you with the first step. The two go hand-in-hand. The second step is: Decide why you want the money. What is the purpose? Why do you want to be rich? I’m here to tell you that money does not buy happiness. You’ve heard that; it’s a cliché. All that glitters is not gold. Right now Eileen and I are living in a 9,000 square foot mini mansion (as we call it). We’ve got the thing completely paid off. However,
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it’s costing us about $4,000 a month just to do the upkeep on this place, to pay all the utility bills, and to pay taxes on this place. It’s all costing us about $4,000 a month, and we’re moving out. We’ve got a couple ads in the Rod Report right now, which is a magazine that goes out to affluent people. We’re selling this place. Not all that glitters is gold. Having all kinds of nice things the big cars and the big homes and the jewellery and all of that still leaves a lot to be desired. Eileen and I have been “kingdom builders” in the past, where we wanted everything. We found out that sometimes there’s a real price to pay for having all these things in life. And we’re scaling our operation down. I want you to think about it too. Think about why you want to have all the money. I know some of the reasons Eileen and I wanted all the money were wrong. We were trying to make up for something we felt like we lacked inside, just the wrong reasons. So we’ve had to re-evaluate. And that’s what the second step is all about. The truth is this: The way you want something, or the purpose, is more important than the - you’re going to get it. I want you to remember that. The how-to always comes after the why-to. First, figure out why you want to or you have to make all the money. What’s the purpose? What are you going to do with the money? What kind of life-style do you envision for yourself? That will also help you get your first step down pat, which is believing that you can do it. Step #3:What are you going to give in return for the riches that you want? That goes right in line with Napoleon Hill’s thinking. All these concepts do. I think Napoleon puts it down in a six-step formula. I’m giving you a five-step formula. But this is basically the same idea that you’ll find in the second chapter of Think And Grow Rich. What are you going to give in return for the money? You have to give something; that’s the whole secret to getting rich. In the movies, rich people are often depicted as greedy, kind of selfish people, who just want to take everything and not give anything in return, sort of like the Ebenezer Scrooge kind of character. But the truth is: All of the millionaires that Eileen and I have met are people who are givers. They were involved in companies, and they were trying to do everything possible to give to their customers, to try to help their customers by creating a wide variety of different products and services. They really reached out. That’s how they got rich; they developed as many products and services as they could that went out to serve all their customers in the largest degree possible and in the most unique way possible. That’s what you have to do in order to get this millionaire mindset. You have to realize that there’s not something for no-. You have to give if you want something back. Remember, the market always comes first. Then think about all these other business-type principles that we’ve talked about already. But you have to understand that in order to gain the right mindset - the state of mind, the way of believing and thinking about things. You must have a clear idea of what you’re going to give in return for the money. Number 4: Start developing a clear and solid plan, a business plan. Then start taking action. Remember, nothing whatsoever will replace the action step; it’s absolutely necessary. That’s step #4, when you get the clear plan and you start putting that plan into motion.
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Step #5, the final step: Stay focused on the plan at all times. Keep it in your mind. Keep going over that plan again and again and again. That plan includes everything we just talked about, the four previous steps. It includes the belief that it is possible for you to get rich and to have all kinds of good things in life. It includes the reasons you want to have the money and what you’re going to do in return for it. Then it includes the specific plan, which is going to change. The plan always changes because remember, the focus is on the market. The focus is on the people that you most want to Serve. That market is going to change. As it changes, your plan will change. But step 5 is to stay focused on the plan because there are all kinds of distractions out there that could rob your time and your energy to do what it takes to make the money. Let’s face it: There is no magic formula for getting rich. And there is no easy way to do it. But there is a simple way. And there are easier ways. You have to understand: There is no easy way, but there are easier ways. And I hope we’re making that very clear on this program. You have to decide what it is you want to create, that strong desire. Come up with a lot of reasons for wanting it. Develop a solid plan of what you’re going to give in exchange for the money, who you’re going to serve, what you’re going do. Constantly stay focused. Cut out everything else in your life that is not centred around your plan. Just cut it out. Stay as completely focused as you can. A lot of people talk about a “well-balanced life.” You see a lot of material written about the importance of having a well-adjusted, well balanced kind of life. The people we’ve met in this world who are most successful are totally focused on what they’re doing. They’re totally committed. Their whole life is wrapped up in their ideas and their plans and goals. And it’s not a drudgery kind of thing. It’s fun. It’s where they put their passion. It’s where they put their energy. It’s what they love doing every single day. If you come up with enough reasons why you want to make money, that will help motivate you and help you decide what you’re going to give in return. You know, it’s not a matter of taking or being greedy or anything like that. Greed is bad. But it’s what you’re going to give in exchange for the money that’s so important. I just want to say: Until you really develop the millionaire mindset, none of these other principles will work effectively for you. You’re not going to get the same level of joy and enthusiasm from what you do as you will when you work this very specific five-point formula. So right now I want to just advise you to please go out and get a book. Get this book, Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Read each chapter as carefully as you can. Study what this man has written. Although it was written back in the 1920s’ all of the principles apply just as much today as they ever did. And remember how important the millionaire mindset formula is developing that solid belief, getting a plan of action, getting the desire in your heart that you really want it and all the reasons for wanting it. Then just go for it!
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Get-rich principle 11, begins basically where principle 10 leaves off. So this is kind of an extension of the millionaire mindset, but it’s very specific. It’s also very important. It’s called “the entrepreneur principle.” I’m going to show you in this principle why most small businesses just don’t work. This is something we learned from a little-known book called The E Myth. It was written by a small business consultant whose name was Michael Gerber. He wrote this book in 1985. It shows exactly why most small businesses don’t work and what you can do about it. It really opened our eyes to this whole concept that Michael shares, this e-myth concept. The emyth is simply this: It’s the belief that most small businesses are started by entrepreneurs. That is a myth. Michael shows why it is based on this principle that we’re going to show you here. It’s a very important one. If you understand this principle, you can increase your chances of business success by up to 1,000% or more. Also, if you really understand this principle that I’m going to share with you here, you’ll be able to use a lot of the other principles that we’ve already covered on this program in a much better way. The whole e-myth concept is very simple. It’s the myth that people start businesses because they’re entrepreneurs. Michael shows that’s just not true. He says there are three different kinds of people. Sometimes we all have these three characteristics. There’s the technician inside of us, the manager, and the entrepreneur. The technician is the person who wants to do the work. The manager is the person who wants to manage. The entrepreneur, which is the heart and soul of the entrepreneur principle that I want to share with you, is the one that really puts it all together and sees it all in a different way than both the manager and the technician. Michael said that most businesses are started by technicians who have some type of an entrepreneurial siege. That’s what he called it. The entrepreneurial spirit hit them for a brief moment, and they decided to start their own business. But in their heart, they are just technicians. Most small businesses are owned by people who are not entrepreneurs. That is a very important principle because you want to try as hard as you can to think like an entrepreneur, to be like an entrepreneur. We’re going to show you how in this get-rich principle. It’s very simple. Most small business people work their businesses, not on their businesses. There’s a very important distinction here. If you can really grasp this, it’s the distinction that can mean the difference between you mailing tremendous amounts of money, or ending up like most small business people. The odds against making it in your own small business are very much against you and me and everyone else who sets out to start a small business. The Department of Commerce says that up to 95 out of 100 businesses that start this year will be out of business within the first year. Out of those that make it past five years, I think it’s 90 or 95% of those people will be out of business too within 10 years.
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The fact is: The odds are significantly against most of us who want to get out there and make it in business. That’s not to be a negative statement because there are things you can do. This program was put together to show you all the get-rich principles that we’ve learned since 1988 in our own small business. This is one of the most important ones. If you can grasp this concept and work harder at becoming an entrepreneur, and less as a technician or manager, then you’re not going to have to worry about the success of your small business enterprise. Entrepreneurs are people who work on their businesses. Technicians and managers are people who work their business. The secret to becoming an entrepreneur is to see your business differently. It’s just a different mindset. Again, this principle is a close relative of the last principle we just talked about, the millionaire mindset, thinking big, creating desire to make a lot of money. All of that is very important. But you have to understand the things that hold most people back from making their business. They are technicians at heart. I just want to share a little bit about the technician and the manager to show you what being an entrepreneur is all about. First of all, I don’t believe that entrepreneurs are born; I believe that if your father was extremely entrepreneurial or somebody else you were very close to when you were young, maybe some of that rubbed off on you. But I don’t believe that some people are born entrepreneurs at all. You have to be able to see yourself in this light because, unfortunately, true entrepreneurs are not born this way. I believe it is easier for some people to be entrepreneurial. But I also believe that entrepreneurs are made, not born. We’re going to show you what you have to do to become one here in a minute. So being a technician and being a manager are based on all of this. First of all, it’s being caught up in the work that you do, most. Most small business people are simply technicians or managers who just want to left alone. your specialty, whatever that might be, or the area you enjoy. They worked hard for a company before, probably. They were very good at what they did; don’t get me wrong. A lot of people start their own businesses for the wrong reasons. They might be a very skilled printer. Or they might be the best dog trainers in the world. Or they might be the greatest cooks, and they think they can have a restaurant. You see, they make the fatal assumption that the work they do is the same thug as the business they’re in. And it’s not. There’s a big difference. I can look at my own story here, how I started business for the wrong reasons. I really wanted to get rid of my bosses in the past. I hated authority. I was a salesman. I thought I was an entrepreneur when I started my first business, but that’s just not true. I was just a sales person. So all the decisions I made in the business all evolved around me being a salesman, not a business person, but a sales person. That’s where all my focus was. That’s the way it is so many times for small business people. They’re very good at what they do for a living. Therefore, they believe that it’s just all going to happen for them. They’re going to be an instant success because they can bake better donuts than anyone else. So they start a donut shop. Or maybe they’re the greatest printer in the world, so they think everyone’s their printing to them. Or they have these delusions that what they do and what the business does are the same things. You see, that’s the one thing that hopefully you’ll be convinced of in a minute, that’s just not true. I was tired of having a boss. I was tired of giving up commissions. I was working for a carpet cleaning company, and I was booking all the jobs and they owned the equipment. They owned the name of the company. They were handling all the tax end of it and keeping the bookwork together.
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But I was going out there and bringing in my own work, doing the job, hiring my own subcontractors to work with me, doing all of that, and I had to give the company owners 40% of every single dollar that I made. Forty cents out of every dollar had to go to them, and I felt like I was doing all the work. That’s the way a lot of people are. I think you might be able to relate to that as you’re listening to this tape because I assume you’re a very ambitious person, or you wouldn’t be listening to this at all. But maybe before, you felt like you were doing all the work for the company that you were working for. This is how I always felt. So I had to go out there and start my own business, thinking all the time, being caught up in the delusion that I was some kind of an entrepreneur. That’s not true at all. I was a sales person. I was a carpet cleaner. I knew how to do my job, but I didn’t how to do the business end of it. So many people are just like that. They’re technicians, and they always think they know better. Eileen and I have had several employees like that - very talented people (don’t get me wrong about that at all). We’ve had people who were extremely talented in what they do, and they thought our business just couldn’t make it without them. ”hey thought they knew things better than we did. They thought they were running the business. It’s just not true. Many times there’s a false belief that the owners are just lazy people and that the workers are the ones doing it all. I used to think that way too. But that was before I knew everything that I know today. And I know now how wrong I was in my thinking. I would just like for you to be able to question that yourself if you’ve had those thoughts too, that your boss really doesn’t know what he or she is doing or whatever. If it’s a business that’s been in existence for a while, and if it’s a profitable business, then maybe you better re-examine that because again, most businesses just don’t make it. If you’ve worked for a company and you thought the boss was crazy or what-ever, and they’re managing to be very profitable and stay in business, you better re-examine that.
Here’s why technicians and managers are lousy entrepreneurs. You have to understand this. First of all, they believe the it’s not. Just because they’re turning out the best printing, better than any other printer around doesn’t mean that they’re qualified to own a printing business. Or just because someone makes the greatest wedding cake better than anything else in the store, it doesn’t mean they can go into the business of making wedding cakes. The business is much different than the products or services that it sells. It’s a whole different set of dynamics. We’re going to show you more of that in some of the other principles too. Technicians and managers typically see everything from a now focus. They see the business as it applies to them and their job. It’s what I call looking at everything from the bottom up with no real ability to conceptualize. So this is what happens: They go into business for themselves. Again, we’re talking about people who are technicians and managers - something we all can relate to. These three qualities that I’m trying to express to you are behaviours; they’re ways of thinking. But most people tend to dominate in the technician and manager side. So all the decisions they make in business are based from that one perspective, by looking at everything from their own perspective, which is limited.
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They make the fatal assumption that the kind of a work a business does and the business itself are one and the same. But they’re not; they’re two entirely different features. All their decisions are oriented around the work they do instead of the things the business has to have in order to survive. Consequently, they make the wrong decisions. The decisions are not well-founded, and they tend to be wrong decisions. And those people tend to go out of business. They end up actually creating what we call “the worst job in the world.” I want to give a good example. Let’s look at the carpet cleaning business. That’s closest to my mind right now. I was a good carpet cleaner, and I was very good at selling the jobs, booking them, and supervising the work to be done. However, that and running a company where you have all the book work to do, where you have the increased responsibilities with legal issues (you know, sometimes you ruin someone’s carpet, furniture), there were those issues that we always had to deal with too. My boss always took care of that for me. Then there was all the advertising and the marketing. Some of that was done for me. So what happened when I had my own carpet cleaning business? All of that fell on my shoulders. Instead of just being really good at what I was doing, I was having to do all kinds of things now and “wear all the hats.” You see, that’s not what entrepreneurs do. I’m going to show you a little bit about entrepreneurs in a minute. But entrepreneurs don’t try to do everything themselves. Anyway, the technicians and the managers will end up owning these small businesses. We’re talking about the majority of people who are self-employed; they’re mostly technicians and managers. They’re not necessarily entrepreneurs. I want you to be very aware of that. They end up defending what they do know rather than admitting that they don’t know enough. It’s something we see all the time in trying to work with people and trying to help them break outside the box of their thinking, to get outside of their own limitations and to accept the fact that they are not true entrepreneurs. They also need to accept the fact that there are so many different things they could be doing rather than the way they’re doing it now. They start defending that. They feel threatened, and they start defending their position instead of admitting there are lots of things they could be doing differently. There are things they should know more about that they don’t. There are ways to increase their sales and profits using some of these very same principles that we’re sharing with you on this program. These are the same principles we teach our clients on a daily basis. Many of them want to fight with us rather than accept these things and figure out how to make them work in their business. They would rather defend their own position and what they know and their own limitations. They would rather make excuses for all the reasons these things won’t work rather than trying to accept some new ideas. Like they say, you cannot graft a new idea on a closed mind. People get locked into their way of thinking. Their way of thinking or their state of mind or their attitude is all centred around the work they do. This is the problem with most small businesses.
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The vision of technicians and managers is that of being at the bottom and looking up rather than a conceptual view of being at the top and looking down. hat’s the real difference between technicians and managers and entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs look at everything from the top down. It’s sort like they’re a general in an army. That’s one of my best business analogies that I like to use a lot. So many times when we try to help people with their small businesses, we try to show them how to get past those limitations. Although their title might be CEO or president, the truth is: They’re more like sergeants at best. They’re in the trenches with their troops. They spend all their time doing what we call “putting out brush fires.” You know, in business there’s constantly something new that you have to deal with all the time. There’s always some new challenge or some new opportunity or some new crisis or problem or situation. There are all these things that demand your attention. Most people in the technician or manager mode of thinking spend their whole day doing things that could better be done by other people from the time they go into their business in the morning until the lights finally go out and they close the doors at the end of the day. Entrepreneurs are different in their thinking about this. They are more like generals. You’ll never find the general of a winning army down on the front line with the troops. The general is such an important position that they have to be away from the front lines. They have to be protected. They have to have that strategic viewpoint of everything. They’re working on the entire warfare instead of being the warfare. You don’t see a general running around with a rifle or anything like that. They are very well protected. They’re at the very top, and they have systematized everything. It doesn’t always work right. But if it does, all the people have duties to do, tasks to perform. The only things that filter up to the top to the generals are things of primary importance. So their time is more focused and centred on winning the war, not on fighting each battle independently. Their focus is on the big picture. That’s kind of like the millionaire mindset we talked about. But this is more specific now. So here are the steps necessary to becoming an entrepreneur. There are four steps altogether. The first step is to be aware of the e-myth concept that I’ve just shared with you. Once you’re aware of this you’ll start to see all these small business people. Talk to them and listen closely to what they’re saying. You’ll find that these people are very centred in the actual work that they do every single day, whether that be managing or somehow being involved in doing the actual work that the company sells, the products or services or whatever. You’ll find that they are more on the front lines than they are back away up at some place very high above, very safe, calling the shots, planning it out. You’ll find that they’re working their businesses rather than working on their businesses. So the first step is: You have to develop the awareness because until you can do that you’ll never admit that you’re just as capable of making these mistakes as anybody else. Again, most businesses are started for the wrong reasons. This is one of the reasons they fail - because the people want to be their own boss so badly. They want to be independent. They want to be free. And they’re deluded because they do such great work. Again, just because you do great work and you’re super talented, and you’re very intelligent, and you know all the ins and outs of what you do, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re qualified to have a business that does all those things. If you are
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qualified, you still have to take that first step; you have to be aware. You can’t be spending all your time doing the things the business does. Rather, you need to work on it in a more strategic kind of way. That’s really step 2: Begin thinking about working on your business, not your business. Just start thinking about what that means. What would it mean for you to work on your business rather than in your business. You might be guilty of doing what most small business people do. Instead of defending your position and saying, “Well, I have to spend most of my time doing this because there’s nobody else who can do it. Or nobody else will ever do it as well as I will. Or it takes me longer to explain to somebody, to teach them how to do it. It’s easier to just do it myself.” All of those excuses might be true. Now we come to the third step, and I’ll show you how to eliminate those excuses. The third step is: Systematize your business just as if it was a franchise. Now, they say that 95 out every 100 small businesses go out of business definitely within the first few years. However, franchises are totally unique in that sense; out of every 100 franchises, 80 of them end up making it past the first five years. A franchise is just a small business owned and operated independently by average people like you and me. This is the difference: The people who buy the franchises are no different than all the people who go out and start their own business. But the parent company of a franchise has figured a lot of this out already. They have systematized their entire operation. Everything has been reduced down to a fine science. Look at a company like McDonald’s. Each McDonald’s restaurant is an independent small business. They‘re owned independently. McDonald’s hires a lot of teen-agers. Now they’re hiring retarded people to work in their kitchens. They use lots of senior citizens. They’re just a regular small business getting their labour from the same pools that other businesses in that area are getting their people from. But they found a way to systematize everything so that everybody knows exactly what they have to do. McDonald’s has a 300% turn-over ratio. They go through lots of different employees every year. But they’ve found a way to systematize it. That’s the same thing you can do to your business. Yes, it might take you 10 times longer to show someone else how to do what you do. But once they know it, then you’re able to use the leverage principle that we talked about earlier. Then you can turn it over to them. With just a minimum amount of supervision, you know they’re able to perform the task. You have a series of checks and balances. Everything can be reduced down to its finest form and simplified. I’ll admit this: There are things that only you can do. But those are the things you need to be spending all of your time on. The rest of these tasks need to be systematized. Step *4: You have to develop your ability to think conceptually. We’ve already talked about this a lot. Rather than thinking in terms of implementation and the individual tasks that have to be done, learn how to see things in a bigger, broader, more general sense. We talked about using analogies and trying to put things into a system in order to understand the big picture. This is something we all have to fight, now. We all have to fight that person inside of us, that technician that wants to just do the work, and everybody should leave him or her alone. They don’t want a boss telling them what to do, breathing over their back. You see, that’s the wrong reason to be in business for ourselves.
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The right reason is because of all the things that the business can do for us - the level of freedom it can give us, the amount of money it can give us, the sense of real security that it can give us. The ability to think conceptually is so vitally important when it comes time to try to be the general of your business, not the sergeant or one of the people on the front line. You have to learn how to get past all the things that your business does and be able to see it in a much broader sense. Again, we’re just talking about an attitude, very much like the millionaire mindset. It’s a way of thinking, a group of ideas, a difference in the way you tend to view things. But this is so important. Remember, entrepreneurs are made, they’re not born. And you can, in fact, be an entrepreneur. If you do become one, you’ll increase your chances of success by up to 1,000% or more. The 12th get-rich principle is called “the reference library.” This ties in with the last two principles we talked about - the millionaire mindset and the fact that you have to think like an entrepreneur. This involves knowledge that you develop yourself by creating a library filled with books that are full of the things it takes to make money. This is not a new get-rich principle for you if you’ve listened to a lot of success and motivational tapes. They all tell you that “Whatever you put in comes out.’’ I want to share this with you: Thousands of books have been written about what it takes to become successful. Each author has their own “colour” of an idea. There are three primary colours. But from those three primary colours you can come up with hundreds and thousands of different shades or variations of colours, just from the three primary colours - red, yellow, and blue. Just those three colours create an endless array of different colours, actually endless if you count the microscopic shades of the different colours. All the books written about success are a lot like that too. They all have the author’s opinion. They all vary. We’re all unique and different. But basically, you have to look for the similarities in what these people are saying. The strongest common denominator that we’ve seen, is about success and making money. And it’s the fact that you become what you think about all day long. That little phrase was first given by James Men, who was a professor at a college. He wrote a book called “As A Man Thinketh” in the early 1900s or right at the turn of the century. He was the one who said that. But even before that, you can find Biblical traces. There are things in the Bible that basically talk about that. You'll find it in all world religions. From the earliest writings of the earliest philosophers, like Plato, they all talked about the importance of thought. Our thoughts shape us. So building your reference library is a way for: 1. Staying constantly focused on the things that are most important to you. 2. It's a way of actually developing your thought more. It's what you do every day that counts. I'm here to tell you this: If you think about making money every single day, that's going to affect you. It's going to change your life. That was one thing that changed Eileen and me. First, we subjected ourselves to some programs that were put together by people who actually went out and made a lot of money. Then they created programs trying to show other people how to do it. We eventually developed that belief - that we could go out and make a lot of money too.
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That belief was reinforced through other books and training materials. Then we put the specific steps of those things into action. Just thinking about something is not going to do it. And we did manifest riches in our lives. We did become what we thought about all day long. We thought about making money and business. All the things that we're sharing with you on this program stem from our own experiences. We started dirt poor. If there was every anyone who couldn't have made money, it was my wife and me. When I first met her, she was worm as a cashier at a filling station, and I had a carpet cleaning business. Well, it was more just me and my carpet cleaning truck at the time. There was no business about it. I was self-employed but barely making it. We were dirt poor. The first winter we were together we could hardly even put food on the table. A couple times we were almost forced to go to a church and get some canned groceries or something so we could feed ourselves. In the winter time nobody wanted their carpets cleaned. Eileen had a family already, and there were a couple kids. When it was just me by myself trying to take care of myself, I could get by in the winter with my carpet cleaning business. But I just want you to know about the struggle. That’s OUT background. But somewhere along the line we really believed it was possible to make a lot of money. One thing that has always helped us the most is to constantly read and subject ourselves to good information. Ideas can be found in many places. That’s what I’m going to be telling you about here in a minute. Basically, there are two kinds of money- making information. You probably already know about the first kind. That’s all the how-to books and tapes and programs that are on the market. Lots of good books were written by people who went out there and made a fortune. Now, they have spent an enormous amount of time trying to formulate their ideas, plans, strategies, and systems, just like we’re doing in this tape program. They tried to share it with other people, just like we’re trying to do, in an attempt to help other people, and of course help themselves too. The best way to help yourself is to help others. The second way is something that a lot of people are not aware of. I certainly wasn’t aware of it either. I sort of discovered this by accident. You can learn so much about making money by studying the lives of people who have already gone before you. You can read about them in biographies or autobiographies that they have written. Many people put their best money-making formulas on paper, on video, on audio cassette tape. There’s an endless amount of information out there on success and what it takes to go out and make a lot of money. Having your own personal library that’s built up over a period of time is definitely a positive thing for you because you can constantly subject yourself to these ideas. Then you can transfer these ideas to make them your very own. That’s the secret: Taking money-making ideas that have worked for other people, or success principles that have worked for other people, learning them, and then digesting that information and practicing those very same kinds of things until they become yours. That’s when they actually do become yours, by the way, when you transfer those ideas, and you put them into effect in some type of way for yourself. Then all of a sudden you own those ideas; they’re yours. They‘re a part of you. It’s not just some idea in your mind, or some idea that came out of someone else’s book or something that worked for someone else.
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Now all of a sudden you have that extra benefit of really knowing deep down that this works. Then you develop the confidence and your skills increase. That’s how ideas can be transformed into serious amounts of money. In and of themselves, the ideas are worthless. Some people do sit around all their lives and plan to go into some kind of business for themselves. Nowadays there are all kinds of computer software programs that allow you to run elaborate spreadsheet programs and say, “Hey look! Here’s what would happen if I just change this number.” You can sit behind your computer screen all day long every day, week after week, year after year, and plan to go into business for yourself. You can create reams of data that support all your different business theories. You can learn all this complicated nonsense. I want to tell you right now, there are lots of books about business and making money that are written by people who have never really done it themselves. Remember, you can only teach somebody something that you yourself know. And you can only really know something that you experience for yourself. So, in creating your reference library, it’s a good idea to try to determine who the author was or is before you actually somebody who teaches at a business school, or the CEO or president of a large Fortune 500 company, they never really ran a small business. They never started from the bottom up. Then maybe you better think again about purchasing that book because those people can only teach you what they know. College professors only know theory. You’ll find books at the library written by people who have run Fortune 500 companies, multi-million or even multi-billion dollar businesses. Those people can only teach you what they know complicated formulas that may definitely apply to a Fortune 500 company or a Fortune 1,000 company. But they don’t apply to small businesses. So there’s a danger in feeling too secure about your library and getting caught up in the complicated ideas. Really if there’s one thing we want to teach you more than anything else on this entire program, it’s that making money is very simple. It’s very easy. There are just specific getrich principles that you need to learn and then adopt for yourself. Then you have to go out there and try those ideas; put them into effect so they‘ll become yours. And they will work. A lot of people make it way too complicated. Building a reference library is a great way to turn your desire to make a lot of money into a distinct reality. I’ll never forget one time several years ago when my father was over at our house. It was the first time he ever looked at our moneymaking library. He spent about 10 minutes going through some of the books and flipping around the different titles. We have thousands of books that we’ve been collecting over the years. After about 10 minutes, he looked at me, and there was a confused look on his face. And he just said, ‘Where in the world do you get all this W” It all comes about as a result of seeking. If you have a strong desire, and you understand the principle of building a moneymaking library, you’ll go out and find all these books. You’ll rummage through the used book stores and pick up some gems of books for 10 cents or even a nickel. You’ll send away for information, like Popular Mechanics or Popular Science or other types of mail-order publications.
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You will find all of this information out there if you really seek it and if you really understand the importance of it. It is important. It’s important to read the how-to books. Sometimes those can be a little “stale,” to tell you the truth, especially if you’re used to reading fiction. This is one thing Eileen and I believe with all our hearts: We believe that fiction is basically a waste of time. Most fiction books can’t really teach you very much. But a lot of the how to books that are on the market are real stale; they’re hard to read. They’re boring. They don’t have anything that really captivates you. Sometimes the best business people, the best entrepreneurs, those who write the greatest books on making money are not very good writers. They might be terrific business people. They might know how to create huge fortunes. Some of the best books we have on making money are boring to read. So here’s a suggestion we’ve found that is very helpful. It was the second way to learn how to make a lot of money. That was: Study the biographies that were written about people who were successful. I made a small list here of some of the great people that we’ve studied just in the last couple of years. We have read books on: •
Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart.
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We have a book here in the library about Ray Crock, the founder of McDonald’s.
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And we have a book about Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s.
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•
•
•
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We have a great book here in the library about Bill Gramm, who was the world‘s most successful rock ‘n roll promoter. We have a book on Ted Turner. Everybody knows who he is; he’s the man who started CNN. We have a book on Bill Gates with Microsoft. Bill is the richest man in the county right now at the present time. And he has just turned 40 years old - the richest man in the country, one of the richest in the world. Steve Jobes, who started Apple Computer Company in his garage. I’m so excited about a book that I’m reading right now, a book about PT. Barnum of Barnum and Bailey Circus. Everyone still remembers PT. He’s almost a household name. He lived over a hundred years ago. By the way, PT. Barnum never did say this whole thing, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” He was never ever quoted as saying that. I want everybody to know that about PT. Barnum.
I just described eight people here. I just want to let you know this: All of their stories are different, but all of them are the same too. This is the fascinating thing. When you study the lives of successful people, you’ll find all kinds of common denominators. There are all kinds of things that these people are doing, these eight especially because they’re foremost on my mind - the way they lived their lives, the way they thought about things, the way they ran their business, the way they
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treated their customers, their total commitment for the companies that they formed. These are the common denominators these people had. Study the lives of these people, and you’ll find that a tremendous mount of struggle had to take place in order to get where they are today, a tremendous amount of risk-taking, and some amazing marketing strategies. Again, these are books that are fun to read because they almost read like fiction, especially the good books. You can hardly put them down. They start at the beginning of the person’s life. I’ll use the book on Ted Turner as an example. Everyone has told me throughout the years that Ted Turner was born a wealthy man’s son, and everything was “spoon-fed” to him. He was born “with a silver spoon in his mouth.” But if you read the book on Ted Turner, you’ll find out that’s the biggest joke around. Ted Turner got where he is today because he’s a visionary he’s a risk-taker. He almost went bankrupt so many times it’s not even funny. He was always trying to “bite off more than he could chew.’’ He had big ideas and big dreams, and he was totally committed, and he enjoyed every single minute of the game. The same thing was true of Bill Gates. He dropped out of college his first semester; he dropped out of Harvard. His family told him he was going to amount to nothing the rest of his life unless he went back to school immediately. Now. he’s the richest man in the country at the present time. Steve Jobes was a visionary. PT. Barnum was one of the greatest visionaries ever. P. T. Barnum was one of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. His life is just extremely fascinating. He started his first business when he was 12 years old. He was in business for almost 70 years when he died. The circus only represented the last 20 years of his business career. There’s so much you can learn from these people. The idea is to constantly read about them. Constantly study the moneymaking principles they used. Then look for ways to transfer those to your own business. Think it all through. Constantly think about it. That’s what this is all about. There is a third place that you can get very good money-making information. I have to share this with you. It’s books that have nothing to do with making money at all, or books that have nothing to do with the people who are making money. I want to share this with you. I don’t have a lot of books in the library that aren’t about making money. But I have read couple. Eric Hoffer wrote a book in the 1950s called True Believers. He studied what makes people join different groups. What makes people join different political causes? What motivates people? You’ll find several books in the psychology department of the book store or library that can be truly fascinating. They can give you some real ideas about human nature. Another book that helped me tremendously was a book on survival. It’s totally unrelated to making money. This book was written by a former military man whose job was to train people in guerrilla warfare tactics. He wrote a great book on survival. I read it, and it taught me so much about success and about life. And his book had nothing to do with making money or business in any way, shape, or form. It was just a philosophy, a philosophy of survival. It greatly helped me. So you might look there too. Always be on the lookout for different ideas and the way they can affect you.
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Here are the steps for building and using your own library. We wrote down 5 steps. The first step is: You’ve got to build it. You have to be aware of the importance of having your own library that you can go to again and again. You can read these books constantly, and reread them. You have to go out there and actually start buying some books. Go to the used book stores. You’d be surprised at all the books that other people have discarded. The books were totally worthless to them, and now you can buy them for 10 cents on the dollar. Send away for all kinds of information. Wader is a fascinating thing. All kinds of people specialize in specific money making information. Our library has grown tremendously from sending away for all kinds of books and tapes. The second step is: Actually use your library. Build a collection of audiocassette tapes from companies like ours, from Companies like Nightingale Conan. There are all kinds of companies that have put good cassette programs together. So you can turn your “down time” every day into success time. Every time you’re driving in your car you can be listening to a tape. You can be learning new information. Keep your books in the bathroom. Keep your books on the couch next to you. Keep your books everywhere you go. Keep them in the car so the next time you’re stuck in a traffic jam or you have to wait for your wife whose shopping in the store or wait for your kids from school, or whatever, you can be studying. Use your library every day. Just read a little bit every single day. That’s all. That’s the real secret just a little bit every day. The third step is: Keep notes. Keep a yellow marker around, and mark those books up like crazy. Mark the parts that are real important to you so you can go back to those books without re-reading the whole thing, but just those parts that you marked. Also, keep notes. Keep a journal. Formulate your ideas. Think about all these moneymaking ideas and how they can affect you. Write down your formulas. Develop your thinking. When we talk to people who have never been in business for themselves or people who just have some ideas about making money, many times we can tell by talking to them that their ideas are not very well formulated. The way to really formulate your ideas and develop your thinking is to attack your ideas. Don’t just fall in love with your ideas. But start attacking them; start looking for all the shortcomings, all the hidden problems within every one of your ideas that you might really be in love with. Don’t shoot it down before you first fall in love with it. What I’m saying is: This is a game. It’s all thinking. Making money is just the greatest game of all. And you have to really think about everything, just like it was an important chess games where there are many, many different moves that can potentially be made with any one piece on the board. The fourth step is called: RST. RST stands for “Reading, Studying, and then Transferring the knowledge.” Transferring is step four. It is putting the information you learned into action. Remember, that’s the whole secret. And you know in your heart that just thinking is not enough. I hope that by the time you’re done with this program, you really understand the true nature of thought itself and how vitally important it is to have the right type of thinking. We’ve talked about that a bunch on this program. And it’s so true. Nothing happens without step four. You have to find a way to transfer all these ideas into your own small business.
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Step number five of creating your own powerful reference library is to constantly upgrade it. Don’t just keep buying more and more books. Start throwing away those that aren’t as good as the rest. Start trying to recycle your library by keeping a very special shelf just for your best books. And keep rotating those best books. Try to narrow your library down to the best of the best of the best. Then when you really need a “jump start” or some new ideas, or you need to motivate yourself, or you just need more information, you can go back to those best of the best of the best that you have put in a special place on your shelf. You can gain those specific ideas. Whenever you’re faced with a specific business or marketing problem, or if you just want to sharpen your knowledge about all this, you have a place to go. Some of the books that are real important to you one year may not be important to you the next year. You’re always going to be growing and expanding and developing your ideas and concepts. Some books that I read four or five years ago were so important to me at the time, and now I get bored with reading them. It’s almost like going from baby food to hard food; you don’t want the baby food any more. So I just want to stress again the importance of having a reference library’ building it, using it, applying that information, looking for ways to transfer proven and profitable ideas that have worked for others to your own business. Make them yours by using them. Then you’ll have true knowledge, which comes from actually applying these ideas and owning them. This is a good place to end this program because owning these principles is really the key to getting rich with them. Otherwise, they’ll just be a bunch of ideas. We talked about that in the introduction of this program. I hope you know by now that ideas alone are not enough. You can’t depend on luck either to make it through. These are the 12 principles that have done it for us. They will do it for you, just like they have for us. The secret is to find a way to get out there and use these ideas. Use these principles. Study them. Remember, at the beginning of this program we talked about the 5 steps that you need to take to make the most money with this program. I need to remind you of that right now. The first one was just to be open-minded about everything. I hope by now you realize that we are just average regular people. We’re not motivational speakers; no one would ever want to put us on the circuit. We don’t know how to move and motivate crowds, or anything like that. We’re just people who had a sincere desire to get rich. We learned what it took, and now we’re trying to teach it to you. That’s our purpose in life, to help as many people as we can make the most money possible in a small business of their own because of all the struggles we went through in the beginning. So remember, success is really easy, just like the game we talked about earlier, of playing basketball or chess and learning all the rules and ways of making it all work. That’s what this program is all about. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I hope you’ll follow step #2:
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Now go back and start all over again. Start with tape 1 and listen to this program again. This time take some notes. Then go to step 3: Start thinking about some of these ideas. Think about how they apply to you. Memorize the formulas. It’s really an important part of learning and assimilating the ideas we talked about. Remember, a lot of it is repetition. A lot of these ideas and principles and strategies and methods all tie in together. I want you to know that. You don’t have to be a genius to make a lot of money. You don’t have to have a lot of complicated things either. As a matter of fact, the more complicated you make it, the harder it will be to put it into action. I want you to know that. Complicated ideas are worthless. A lot of big businesses do get complicated; I certainly don’t know anything about that, nor does my wife Eileen. All we know how to do is make the most money with the least overhead possible. I think the most employees we ever had was 35. Even then it was a headache. A lot of consultants publish information with graphs and tables and charts and all kinds of analytical nonsense. And it falls into one of two categories: 1. These consultants are writing complicated technical books so huge companies with hundreds of employees can learn how to run their organizations. Or 2. They’re just trying to prove everything they know. Remember, sometimes it’s good business for these people to make it all complicated. The more confusing and complicated they can make it seem, the more you’re going to need them, the more you’re going to be intimidated. You won’t want to make a decision without them. But be way of advice from those people, especially people who have never done it themselves. They might have a fancy degree hanging up on their wall. They might have a power office, and it looks like they know what they’re doing. But they’re just taking money from people, convincing other people that they know what they’re doing. The truth is: How can you really know something unless you’ve done it yourself? So remember, simplicity is power. The simpler an idea is, the easier it is for you to understand. Then it’s just that much easier for you to follow the fourth step, which was to take these ideas and make them yours. Get busy. Follow the get-rich principles #l and #2. Start a business of your own. Then utilize the rest of these principles as you already have a growing business. Experience really is the greatest of all teachers. But experience can also be the hardest way to learn, going through all the struggles and a lot of the stress and pressure and agony that many times you have to go through. The best way to learn is to get in there, start your own small business, learn as you go, and practice these principles as you go along. And remember, it’s all just a game. Keep it fun. Don’t take it too seriously. It’s a great game. It’s the best game to play because it forces you to you be your best. Isn’t that what a game really is all about? If you’re just into the money or something like that, I’m afraid it’s not enough. Money is great. It’s nice to have good things. But you can only eat so many good dinners and live in so many nice houses and drive so many nice cars. And the material things really don’t fulfil. It’s great for keeping score, by all means. I don’t think poverty is in. I think the root of all evil is in poverty, not in wealth. But I also know that you need to really focus on the bigger picture of things and try to make it an internal game that you play.
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I want to leave this whole program with one more get-rich principle, a little extra here for you because I do believe in giving more. So does my wife Eileen. That principle is: Get a partner. If being your own boss is something that really frightens you and you just can’t seem to take that plunge, do it with somebody else. Do it with a friend of yours. Do it with a relative. I’m the first one here to tell you that whoever came up with the phrase, “Business and friendships don’t mix, that family and business don’t mix,” those people were probably right. But at least it will help you get a good start. I think the best friendships are the ones that are developed through business, through your best customers, through your best suppliers, through your best joint venture partners (which could be competitors that maybe are not competing directly with you). Business is more like a life-style than anything else. So develop friendships out of business. The “lunch bucket mentality” people work at a job for a long period of time. At 10:15 they take a coffee break. At noon they go to lunch. And it’s all organized around some clock. At 5:00 it’s quitting time, and that’s it. You don’t have that with business. Business is more of a life-style; it’s with you all the time. This could be a real positive thing if your business is good, it’s fun, and it’s bringing you lots of good rewards in money and personal gain and emotional well-being and that type of thing. Or it can be a real hell-hole when business is bad, and you’re going through the problems. A lot of times a good partner can make all the difference in the world. Maybe I didn’t stress it enough on this tape program because my wife Eileen was not here with us in the studio. She is my partner .And she is the one who has been responsible for a great deal of our success. As long as a partner has something to offer that you lack within your own self, that’s the secret. You don’t want a partner who is just like you. Let’s say you’re a sales person and your partner is a sales person too. But both of you lack any kind of management or organizational skills. Then you’re going to have a terrible partnership. It might be a great thing because it will help you get started. That’s important; remember that. That’s why I suggest you go out and get a partner; it could really help you get off to a good start. It may not last, so pick your partnerships carefully. And go in with an open mind. If it’s a friend of yours, have an exit. Let them know that, “Any time I think our friendship is suffering I’ve got to get out, Bob, because we’ve been buddies for years. And I just don’t want to do anything to destroy our friendship.” So you write the business plan in such a way that both of you have easy exits, and you figure all that out before you ever get started. Many times, just having somebody there to help you can make all the difference in the world. It’s very important. Many times husbands and wives can work together. The secret, again, is that both of you can’t run the same ship. You have to do different things. My wife Eileen is the business person in the family. She’s the one who runs the company while I handle my end of it, which is in the marketing, the sales, and putting some of the strategies that we’ve talked about on this program into action for our company. But she’s the one who shows up at
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