|
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.
VIP Member Harry Williams commented that he’d beeen
observing I was increasingly
into ‘partnerships.’ He was referring to the sale of my
product business to Michael
Kimble, sale of newsletter business to Bill Glazer, creation
of the Info-Marketing Letter
but putting that business in Pete Lillo’s hands, and master
licensing Psycho-Cybernetics
to Matt Furey.
Actually, this is not just a recent tactic of mine.
In fact, it has long been my strategy, when finding
somebody exceptionally capable,
qualified, better at certain things than I and more
ambitious than I, to transfer or even
create opportunity for that person – with some mostly
passive earnings coming to me as a
result.
This is imperfect, but it has and does work out well
for me more often than not.
RENEGADE MILLIONAIRE IDEA OF THE
MONTH:
RESTRICTIONS LIFTED
E-X-P-A-N-S-I-O-N
In the September 2004 Issue of THE NO B.S.
MARKETING LETTER, I directed
readers to this, as expansion of an article there – about
how entrepreneurs creatively
expand their businesses’ reach.
In interviews I did this month for my new book NO
B.S. BUSINESS SUCCESS, I
repeatedly pointed out that we are all sloppy in use of
language, and, as casual
convenience, use ‘business owner’ or ‘small business owner’
and ‘entrepreneur’
interchangeably, when in actuality, there are many important
distinctions.
Actually, the hierarchy of business ownership has
three main tiers.
At the bottom, in terms of size, income, wealth and
opportunity, are the “be-yourown-
boss” business owners. These are people who started or
bought, start or buy
businesses in order to give themselves a good job, without
an annoying boss. Often, this
is someone who has been working in an identical or similar
business: the employed
restaurant manager buys a sub shop franchise; a car mechanic
buys a muffler shop; a
carpet cleaner prints up business cards and starts his own
one-man operation. These
people often never expand their businesses, continuing to do
the same job they were
doing, behaving as a worker, certainly not as an
entrepreneur. In short, self-employment
is not necessarily entrepreneurship.
On the next level is the small business owner. He may
enter business with bigger
goals, and is typically quicker, even eager to have
employees doing the ground-level work
while he focuses on the marketing and management of the
business. However, if you
meet this fellow and ask him what he does, and he says ‘I
own a jewelry store’, if you
meet up with him again 12, 24 or 36 months later, his
business will still be a jewelry
store, largely unchanged. By his very definition of his
business, he rules out all sorts of
expansive opportunities. By his tunnel vision, he precludes
many activities.
At the top of the financial pyramid, the
entrepreneur. Even though he, too, might
own a jewelry store, he might say ‘I’m in the jewelry
business’, and 36 months later, he
will still own his jewelry store but may also have satellite
mini-stores in three malls, a
thriving web site and mail-order business, a high-end custom
jewelry business, a diamond
brokerage, and be selling a week-long trip to South Africa
for $25,000.00 per person,
where they pick out their diamond at the mines. Unlike the
business owner, this
entrepreneur has broad, wide, open vision, thinks bigger,
and avoids too narrowly
defining himself.
Incidentally, I’ve used a real person as example: one
of our Members, Mike
Jurado, who is in the jewelry business.
As other examples of what I mentioned in the
newsletter --- restrictions lifted….
Darin Garman went from a localized business, selling
Iowa apartment buildings to
Iowa investors, to advertising for and attracting investors
from all over America, using
national media, to “investing in heartland properties.”
Geographic restrictions lifted.
Paul Johnson of Shed Shop avoided doing full electrical
installations in his sheds for
years, due to requirements for contractor licenses. He
finally got over his reluctance,
wiped away that restriction, and now has an entire array of
profitable upsells to offer, and
is expanding into the sale of turn-key, fully-equipped home
offices. That’s product line
expansion. Nightingale-Conant was locked into a $49/$59/$69
price model for many
years, firm in their conviction they could not successfully
sell much higher priced
products to their customers. My MAGNETIC MARKETING SYSTEM
was one of the
first products N/C sold successfully outside their price
model – and the only one not to
add audio “bulk” to justify price. MMS has but 6 cassettes,
but sold for $399 to no less
than $278. Now, N/C is frequently offering higher-priced
product. Price and margin
restrictions lifted. When I worked with U.S. Gold/Gold By
The Inch, his lead generation
restriction; reliance on the small number of ‘opportunity
magazines’ was lifted by the
successful infomercial I created. The Subway restaurant
chain enjoyed such
extraordinary, rapid expansion by eliminating grills and
stoves, so no venting was
necessary, and their stores could be put into places other
fast food stores could not go,
faster, and cheaper.
This is a characteristic and a strategy of all the
Renegade Millionaires: we reject
the restrictions normally present in a given industry, type
of business or market. In fact,
we reject the idea of restrictions.
To apply this as strategy, you take the time to build
a list of restrictions affecting
your business --- legal, government imposed, economic, by
lack of resources, every kind
imaginable. What things do you frequently think or say that
state limits on your business.
For most, it is a difficult list to make. Honesty is vital.
No editing. Build the biggest,
most complete list you can. Maybe dedicate a legal pad to
it, and keep adding to it over a
month or so. Another way to get at this, is to list all the
reasons your business isn’t ten
times more profitable than it is. Restrictions will emerge
as reasons. If you belong to a
peer advisory group, make it a group activity. Once you have
assembled all the ‘facts’
you believe to be true and in control of your business,
itemized all the restrictions, you are
ready to question and challenge them one by one.
To live this as mind-set, you make a point of catching
yourself thinking, voicing
or accepting a restriction. You call yourself on this,
whenever it pops up. And you direct
your thoughts to expansion, not limitation. |
