RENEGADE MILLIONAIRE IDEA OF THE MONTH:

HEALTHY CURIOSITY

I find peoples’ absence of curiosity shocking. As example, last month’s Gold+ call. Several hundred Gold+ Members were on the call with our guest, Platinum Member Chauncey Hutter Jr.   This is a guy who took a 2-room “pop ‘n son” tax prep practice and turned into a 23 office chain, selling services at 100% higher prices than competitors, growing every year, employing up to 400 employees at a time, generating millions within a matter of weeks each year, and able to make all that happen based on our kind of marketing. Bill guided him through a chronology of milestones in the development of his business. He revealed a number of things he’s doing differently than most business owners. And plenty of little “hints” at things were dropped that should have aroused the curiosity of anybody listening. Yet, when it came time for question/answer, there were, I think, six.   Reverse the situation, by the way, and put Hutter and Glazer in the audience, they’d have both had questions to ask. I know that for fact, from experience. Here are just a few of the questions I’d have asked Mr. Hutter:

How do you pick the towns you open offices in?

How do you compete – what specifically do you do to compete – with the big, advertised national brand chains like H.R. Block and Jackson Hewitt?

You mentioned yours was blue collar clientele and you use direct-mail, so how do you choose who to mail to, what lists do you use?

You said you mystery shop your competitors – what do you look for? What have you learned?

You run a school to get your employees – how does that work?

You were at a 45% retention when you dug in to fix it – what percentage do you retain year to year now?  What will be your next experiment to further improve it?

What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made?

Knowing what you know now, if you had one office and decided to open 20, what would you do differently?

How do you use YOUR time?  How do you manage your time?

Well, I could go on. 

I am sometimes amused by peoples’ absence of curiosity, and I deliberately drop “bait” in conversation, just to see if they’ll respond.  The day after consulting with Gold/VIP Member Dr. Barry Lycka, I mentioned to another doctor that Barry had over 500 people at his annual seminar, and signed 180 up for cosmetic procedures on the spot. I waited for the  “holy cow, how’d he do that?” question. It didn’t come.  In conversations with numerous businesspeople about Trump’s ‘Apprentice Show’, I’ve mentioned the fact that they had 216,000 applicants for the first show. Not one person has asked me if I knew how they created those 216,000.  A few weeks ago, a client who came to me for consulting who, in part, has said he’d like to reduce the amount of travel and time he invests in going to his clients, sort of grumbled that he admired me, for being able to get people to pay and come to Cleveland, then drive an hour out into the middle of nowhere, to meet with me at my convenience. But he never specifically asked me how I do that. Since he didn’t ask, I didn’t enlighten him.  You know, I invited people to submit questions to me for my Renegade Millionaire System – only 30 or 40 out of nearly 5,000 invited bothered to do so. If that situation was reversed, I’d ask me something.

For the record, I, and the Renegade Millionaires that I work most closely with, are insatiably, aggressively curious. We want to know: how did they do that?   How did they know to do that?  Why did they do that?  How does that business work?  What are its economics? And on and on and on.  And we rarely let an opportunity to quiz anybody worthy of being quizzed slip by  The first time Joe Polish got me in private, on an airplane flight from L.A. to Phoenix after I let him tag along to a Peter Lowe event, he asked me so many questions I had to ask him to stop. Every time I’ve ever been with Fran Tarkenton, he’s quizzed me about businesses – speaking, seminars, infomercials.

One of my earliest mentors told me he couldn’t stand idle socializing or pointless conversation. He said if he opened his mouth, it was for one of only two purposes: to sell something or ask a probing question. Otherwise, he’d save his breath. He also said that you should be able to observe something, overhear something or ask about something anywhere, even at a funeral, that would be profitable. 

Jim Rohn has always told people: take a millionaire to dinner. Jim says most people respond: “Pick up the check for a millionaire? Are you nuts? I should buy him his steak?  Let him pick up my check. He’s the millionaire.”   See, most people don’t get it. At all.