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I'm doing something a little bit different than normal, this is all new and I hardly
ever speak any more. I'm going with this pro theme, normally I would be talking about technical
things, tactical things, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing and all the sort of things
that might be of interest to you but other people have covered those exceptionally well.
So what I will be doing is having a look at the going pro thing literally. It's forced
me to sit down and I learnt in the sales and marketing field when they want to know why
someone is a good salesperson they don't ask the salesperson because they don't know, they
actually go and observe and look at the history and see how they got to that point. So what
I thought would be interesting for you is to wind back the clock a little bit on my
own scenario and have a look at how I ended up going pro myself and stepping you through
some of the things that I encountered on the way that helped me shift my mind into the
place it needed to be. Would that be of interest to you? The scary thing for me is it's normally
a little bit selfish to talk about me and I wouldn't normally spend an hour and a half
on this topic, but I'm doing it for you. So for me I sort of look at it as a freedom situation.
Everyone knows that the goldfish bowl is crowded and it does take a bit of a leap to get into
the next pro field, right? This is how I see most people. This is how people should be,
no one in particular here but when you let go of those constraints you can have a very
different life, but it's up to you. When I was seven years old I got given half a boat,
not that one, the one I got sank and my parents felt sorry for me and they bought me a fibreglass
boat and I started racing and at the age of seven it was quite a big deal and I learnt
a lot of valuable things here that I think helped me later on in business. When you race
competitively there are a lot of factors. One thing is you are always against the natural
elements you don't really know what the conditions will be on any given day. So you have to adapt
to change, you have to ensure your equipment is maintained and it's going to last the race,
if it fails on you, you won't get to finish so you need the right equipment, the right
tools and it's also very tactical everyone else has the same situation more or less with
the environment but it's what you do with it that counts. One day when I was sailing
a thunderstorm came over and it got black all of a sudden and we slammed into the side
of a moored yacht and the sails came down on top of me and I had rope around my neck
and I thought I was going to die. Now I'm not going to spoil the story too much, but
I didn't die. But I went back in and told my parents I'm never getting in a boat again
and they would take me down to the beach often and they would make me look out there and
say, "Look at all of these other people doing it, if they can do this you can do it, sure
you're going to have setbacks but just push through." So that was another valuable lesson
that my parents taught me at age 7, is that if other people are doing something you can
too, more or less and we will probably revisit that. Next incident was at age 12 and I picked
up this book at an airport because I had to fly home from Perth to Sydney on a red eye
special. It was the only book left on the bookshelf and I had no idea what selling was
and I didn't realise how profound this book would be for me because I read the whole thing,
took notes, underlined it and it was an unusual thing to be reading at age 12 but I started
to incorporate some of the things that I had learnt about tie downs and tag-ons and I realised
I could actually get things that I wanted easier and as a 12-year-old that's really
valuable. Moving on a bit to age 17, this is my HSC score 227/500 which is not even
a pass which was quite disappointing for my parents and I did qualify for one university
course which was food technology at Nepean West Sydney, which I didn't even know what
food technology was I wasn't really interested in learning about how to make cereal. So I
had limited career options and I ended up in a timber yard and that was fun! To get
the timber into those little neat little stacks you have to take it out of the 20 t containers
first and quite often it was wet, it smells and when you're next to the railway tracks
it's really fun for the other workers to go and get those detonators and nail them to
bits of 4 x 2 and dropped them into the container while you're in it and if you didn't get run
over by a forklift then it was a good day. I did the sums and figured out that my wage
which was $2.75 an hour was not even paying for my fuel and lunch bill to get to work,
so I had to quit that and find something better. So I turned to labouring and I literally dug
out someone's swimming pool in Vaucluse which is an illustrious part of the eastern suburbs
where they couldn't get a crane, they couldn't get a bobcat, they had to dig it all out with
jackhammers and a shovel. It took me weeks and week's wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow and
calluses on my hand, good money but hard work. The positive in that for me was that I will
never forget what's involved in a hard day's work and I know what I could expect from someone
else if I were lucky enough to be further up the tree, so it was quite a profound moment.
Next I got a little bit smarter and I started a lawn mowing one because I had a ute and
my dad had a lawnmower, so I put two and two together and went to a real estate agent and
offered to do his lawns and that was really cool because I learnt how to price up lawns
from the size of the house I went to, not the lawn. I was mowing whole tennis courts
for $25 and little tiny handkerchief lots for $45, depending on what the people were
wearing and what car was in the driveway. So I figured out to price the job according
to the market and I also realised that when I was mowing I could go to the house next
door saying with them, "I just mowed the house next door would you like me to mow yours as
well?" And I actually built up a whole street, I had eighteen or so lawn mowing things in
one place and I could knock it off in one day and a half and I made $400 to $500 in
that day and a half and that was cool until a developer bought the entire block and I
had nothing. So I learnt a lot about eggs in one basket from the one. We move along
to age 20 and the eggs in one basket happened to my parents and they lost everything, the
house, the car and we had to move out of the family home because they said listen, "We
found a rental and it's only two bedrooms." And I said, "So there are you, me and my sister."
And they said, "Yes, sorry about that." So I actually moved in with my grandfather, we
built a one-bedroom shack at the back of his house. The most shocking thing for me was
that I went from being a spoilt rich kid to not going to inherit one million dollars and
I was at the most expensive private school and now I had nothing. I actually had to go
and get a real job. I was pretending to do accounting at TAFE at the time, but I was
spending more time in the local pool hall than going to accounting lessons and it was
a wakeup call. It was a slap in the face that really set me on a different path. So my first
real job was awesome, I was a debt collector so I had to go and repossess people's cars.
So I am dealing with that crème de la crème of society now. I'm talking about the bottom
1%, the ones that hide from you, never make payments and threaten you with guns and knives.
They were my clientele, it was awesome. I was really good at this job though it was
like legally stealing cars. I have many, many stories if we ever go out to a pub or to dinner
ask me to tell you some but there were some spectacularly funny stories like I used to
take my wife, which was my girlfriend at the time on repo dates. We would have to go and
collect a car and we would go down to the worst part of Sydney, where police stations
get shot to pieces and I would give her an umbrella if it was raining and I'd say hop
out of the car, I'll be back in a minute. I'd have to go and pick up someone's car and
then I'd grab her again and it was exciting, learnt a lot about human behaviour. The interesting
thing was about half the time when I had their car on a tow truck they would come out with
the cash and that fascinated me and I realised that people just wait and wait and wait and
wait until the last point of resistance and then they come up with the goods. At age 22
things were going pretty good now I managed to get myself into Vodac which was the start
up to Vodafone in this country and digital telephones, there was some amazing technology
didn't work very well, cost a lot her phone. They were the ones that bought in these fabulous
contracts and what they did when they started up they hand-picked the elite of the elite
of the elite. They got the best Xerox sales representatives, they got the best Motorola
representatives, and they got the Hutchison telecommunication representatives. These photocopier
and high end salespeople came to the door and they brought with them the highest quality,
highest calibre training system that they had been paid for from the big multinationals
and my job was to talk between the finance and accounting departments to the sales team
and some lady profiled me and she said, "You should consider sales." I said "No, I'm not
really interested in that, I sort of sold when I did repossessions except they already
had the goods and I just had to get the money." I was really lucky I got exposed to Brian
Tracy, the psychology of selling and one of the salespeople gave it to me. One of the
sales representatives was driving home one day and he ran over a lady who jumped out
in front of him from the medium strip, she was trying to commit suicide. So this guy
was shaken up and he had no family support so my boss said, "Can you take this guy in
and look after him?" So I asked my wife, we had a spare bedroom and he started paying
rent. He lived with us for three houses because in the beginning I would charge him half the
rent, then after we moved I would charge him three quarters and then in the final move
I charged him the whole rent and we were living for free so it was a real bargain. I would
get up and go to work and I was getting $35,000 per year; he was on a $65,000 base salary,
he had a brand-new MX5 bright red, he would wake up at 10 o'clock, have a stretch, walk
down to the beach, run a few laps, have a coffee, come home and then ring me and tell
me and fax an order to a customer and find out what model they want. I was selling more
phones than him in my administration role and I said to my wife, "This is ridiculous;
I think I should be doing this rather than him." So that was really eye opening, you
could get paid a lot of money for not a lot of work, whereas I was under the impression
you had to work hard for your money. At about the same time I came second in the world titles
sailing 18 foot skips so it was a real journey, I took that sport as far as I could take it
and it taught me about commitment, habits, strategy and fitness. I had to train four
days a week for that and it was exhilarating to achieve that win and I actually believe
I started forming a habit of winning at about that point because after the race is finished
you actually realise that no one can take that away from you ever bar anyone putting
in a protest. That's locked away as a victory. But then, of course, things change as they
always do. At age 24 things were getting interesting. We found out that we were going to have a
baby and my wife and I were on $35,000 a year each and now it was going to be three of us
on $35,000 instead of two of us on $70,000 so I quickly did the maths and figured out
that that wasn't going to work. So I had to get a job, so I'll go and sell so I went to
the lady that asked me and I said, "Can I sell?" And she said, "Sure". So she went and
spoke to the general sales manager called Gordon and he said, "No, not yet you're very
good at the role you have to stay in that." So I'm like screw that I need to make money.
So I went down to the local car dealership and I got myself a job at BMW and he took
me on even though he shouldn't have. I had no experience in sales, I was an office worker
and I just said to him, "I need to make this money, that's the difference, I don't want
to I need to and I won't even take the job unless I can make $70,000 per year." So he
said, "I really like golf, why do you want to sell cars?" I said, "I really like cars,
I buy car magazines, I've been building cars with my dad as a kid, and I'm comfortable
with the product." And I figured I already bought the magazines so I'm interested and
this is when I started aligning my passion to an income. And he said, "Well, I like golf
but I don't want to sell golf clubs." And I said, "Well that's up to you but I want
to sell cars." And he said, "All right, I'll give you a job son." So I learnt a lot about
selling cars and the typical car selling approach is quite flawed. The sales people I know you
will have trouble believing this. They huddle around with the stock sheet looking for the
car with the biggest bonus and they will wait until someone walks in and they try to stun
them with it. They absolutely put a bullet into them and I realised that was wrong. I
would be the one sitting on the doorstep with my Tom Hopkins book, I had the second one
now and they would turn up to work and tell me, "Why are you wasting your time on that
crap?" They really had this attitude that I was wasting my time. It turned out that
I had a better method I went back to the Brian Tracy stuff and I really worked on my self-talk.
Out of all the slides that I have this is the one that I think you might want to pay
particular attention to because we had an outside dealership, it was just one of those
porta-shed's with four or five people crammed in and only two cars in the showroom and it
was so crappy that people would come into the dealership and say, "Where are your new
cars?" And we would say, "You're here, this is it." And they would say, "You're ***
me right?" And all the other ones are outside so when it was raining and we had to go out
with the keyboards which are really heavy and unlock every single car. This was before
remote controls were popular and I used to grab the key off the board and put it into
the car, turn the thing to unlock the car and I would say, "I'm the best" then I would
put it back and go to the next car and I would say "I'm the best" and I really believed that
I was the best. I was committed to understanding everything about the art of selling and dealing
with people and I can tell you, if you want to get your sales chops go to somewhere where
any one of seven dealers are within a fifteen to twenty minute drive could sell the exact
same car and they're working with exactly the same margin. So you learn a thing or two
about it but in twelve months I was the number one BMW sales person in this country and I
was still quite young and I felt pretty good about that. It was the second time I had that
feeling that nobody can take this away from me, this is my victory I'm forming a habit
of winning. Things started to get interesting because at about 26 years old I got approached
to sell Mercedes-Benz and I didn't really like Mercedes-Benz at the time, it was a bit
of an old man's car and I said to the guy, I'll consider it but you need to convince
me why this car is so good and he said, "You don't have to work Sundays, we will pay you
more money and you get to drive one of these." And I said, "Okay then I'll do that." It turned
out my old boss had lied to me about pay and everything I sold 185 cars in a year for $73,000.
In my first year at Mercedes-Benz, I sold 112 cars for $145,000 so it turned out to
be a good deal and I really started out with the end in mind here because I thought right
I know the process, I know how to do this, I have done it before and this is important
right you lock in those wins when you make a win lock it in, you have done it before
you can do it again. I got to deal with some pretty interesting people, remember my previous
clientele were not the greatest people on the planet? Well now I'm dealing with the
richest, most affluent and interesting people around there, sports stars stockbrokers, people
in power, famous people with huge ego's. I'm not going to name anybody. Some really cool
dudes these clients invite me to a football game to their own stadium and I sold cars
to all of these people and boy was that interesting going behind the scenes and dealing with PAs,
PAs, PA and this guy here I went to his inner sanctum office. We negotiated a deal and he
said, "Will you take a personal cheque?" And I said, "I think we will be okay, but you
really wouldn't want to bounce because that would look terrible in the news." Once again
within twelve months I was number one in the country for Mercedes-Benz sales and I'm starting
to get a feel for what's working and what's not. Would you be interested in some of the
aspects that helped me to do this? Here's the truth and this is how I run my business
now. The best customer is the one you already have. I sold 40% to people that I had already
sold to before within 24 months. Half of my customer base was people that had already
dealt with me within the first two years and that was very different to the normal. If
you're in the car industry, they tend to go for the one time shot. Now I don't know if
you're on anyone's email lists but they don't seem to value a lifetime customer they could
and if they push the sale and if you take the lifetime customer, they couldn't if they
push so hard for the sale. If you take the lifetime customer approach you will make a
lot more profit, it is certainly working for me. So that was a critical point and I read
a book by Prof Houston Gleeson and I think he talks about this, I really did separate
the wood shavings from the metal filings and I powered up my magnets and I created this
black box. I had this powerful magnet that was attracting the right type of client to
me by looking after people it positions me to be able to call them again and not feel
embarrassed. I would tell people when they ordered the first car I am going to be your
car guy and I will tell you when it's time to change and just before you place this order
I want you to know that that red car that you're ordering is going to be the most difficult
car that we could ever resell and if it was silver it would probably be worth 5% more
so it's not too late to change your mind. They would say thank you for saying that but
I really want red and I would say that's fine as long as you know. And then in two years'
time when I go to trade it in and it's not worth much I would say well remember that
conversation we had? And they say yes, fair enough. So what is this black box? The black
box is what everybody wants to get out of the plane when it crashes. It's got all the
data, it's got all the good stuff all the secrets. Coca cola use it as their secret
formula, KFC use it to make their chicken so nutritious sorry, tasty. You should have
a black box in your business because if you don't you are easily replaced. You need something
that draws them to you that they can't live without and it might be proprietary information,
it could be a secret recipe, and it's got to be something individual. For me it's easy
in the Internet marketing game you simply need to have integrity, you will stand out
and that's my black box. Then you will become a genuine authority, you will become someone
that people respect, you will get referrals and people will come to you. It's what's called
a pull market and a lot of people are push marketers, they're pounding customers, they're
forcing sales, they're driving business but I'm going to tell you a little bit about my
philosophy on that later. But if you create massive value you can't go wrong so I have
a golden rule if I send someone an email it's got to leave them better off for opening that
email, otherwise I won't send it. That's why I never asked anyone to JV promote for me
because I won't be able to JV promote for them when they put out a ***. It's not fair
because you know what happens I promote for them, they take that customer and it is literally
like sending a hot girl into a pack *** because that customer is going to be pummelled and
pummelled and pummelled by every other marketer in that JV round-robin and I don't do that.
I don't think it's good for humans to do that. So let's fast forward at 28 I got promoted,
well actually what happened was my manager fell down some stairs and broke his leg. He
was off work for eight weeks and in those eight weeks I got to babysit the thing. This
was a big moment for me because I went from being a commission only salesperson to having
seven sales people that were people selling the cars and I had to help them sell the cars.
So I had to let go of that protective, territorial, competitive nature and I actually had to turn
that to the team which was very weird, one day I was sitting in my one by one cubicle
competing with the guy next to me and now he is the only way I can make a sale happen.
But we pretty much doubled the sales while he was away which made me very unpopular with
him and the boss of the dealership came in and said, "I'm going to make you the manager
of the other department." So that was my first set up for an all-out war, it was me versus
them basically, but I got to build a team. Now I had 2 1/2 people I had two people already
in the team and one that was just hired and was brand-new and I said, "Well what do you
know?" And he said, "Well not much". And I said, "Right we need to figure out what we
need to teach you and we will have to come up with some sort of documentation". And actually
at that time we created the induction training material that would one day turn out to be
the Mercedes-Benz sales training induction benchmark and I was actually training other
sales managers in the national network on how to do this properly and I started with
that instance. I was number one manager now within twelve months so you kind of get attached
to it because you feel like it's worth it. Fast forward a little bit. There was this
guy who used to send out gifts at Christmas, he used to send out a fruit box which was
very rare that someone would actually care and it would have your own name on it and
I used to send a handwritten thank you. This guy had the approved panel repair shop for
Mercedes-Benz the only one and he also had a Mercedes dealership which was very rare
and I used to send him a handwritten thank you and he said to me that I was the only
one out of 380 people that he sent fruit boxes to every year for 10 years to send him a handwritten
thank you. So if you hadn't already written that down and I don't mean to spoil Pete's
presentation but a little bit of analogue won't kill you. So I called this guy up and
I said, "You got a Mercedes Benz repair shop and you've got a dealership you're a multimillionaire
I would like to come and talk to you about how this happened for you." I'm used to talking
to rich, famous and successful customers, but let's talk to somebody in the industry.
So I went around their and it was 3:00pm in the afternoon I went around there and I was
still there at midnight and I wrote down these notes. This was in 2000, I pulled out these
notes recently and I was stunned about what was on that piece of paper 10 years later.
We now have a multimillion dollar business that is founded primarily on the principles
this guy taught me. Do you guys want to know some of the Holy Grail secrets? The first
thing he told me I will set this up for you because you have to get the atmosphere here.
It's a massive boardroom, pitch black almost, minimal lighting and he's on the end of the
table with a cigar and his boots cross legged, Kerry Packer style. He said right first thing
is, "You have come to get the Holy Grail haven't you?" I said, "Yes" and then he said, "There
is none, there is no Holy Grail". This was good for me to learn now because I think it
saved me about $50,000 worth of product launch splurges, to know that there is no Holy Grail
is a good thing. The second thing he told me was about tulip mania and this was the
first example of the bubble that burst in 1636 and a tulip bulb was worth a years' worth
of wages for a 10 ha property and the market just went crazy and the prices went up and
up and up and then they collapsed but there was no real reason for it. It was just fear
and emotion and he told me that this is pretty much how people operate they're just in the
zone of being influenced by things around them and then not paying attention. If you
like, they are in a trance, so that was also useful to know and the other thing he said
from the moment people are born they walk around with an umbilical cord in their hand,
ready to plug in to the next employer. They just want someone else to nourish them, to
feed them, to take care of them responsible and nurse them they cannot take responsibility
for their own success. I have to say having employed many people, hundreds of people and
managing teams there are a lot of people out there who really want to hand the controls
over to someone else. I hope that's not you. Well the next thing he said is really where
you're at is the train station and you need to buy a ticket you need to decide where you
want to get to you got to decide their destination and importantly he said when you get there
you've got to know there are options within that destination. You don't want to get there
and find out there's nothing there, you'd be disappointed. So he is talking about goal
setting, clarity and direction. See when you get on that train and you know where you're
going in advance everything is so much easier. You can measure how you're going, how many
stations are left, you remove a lot of distractions because you're on that train track and a lot
of my higher level students and there is least at least a dozen of them here, interestingly
have their own train tracks set. They know what station they're going to and the really
interesting thing was he said to me while this is where you're at. You're now the number
one sales manager in the network in the country for this brand and you've got a small team
would you like to come and run a big team and he said, "How much do you want?" And I
said, "Well 200,000 would be the minimum." And he said, "Done" and so he made me the
offer and I said, "Let me get back to you". He was like the Godfather in the industry
so switched on, except he didn't think the Internet would be that important, which is
fine. And I thought what am I going to do? This guy is a lunatic. He is a raving lunatic,
he's an eccentric is a multimillionaire, he wants me to run his business, it's a $100
million business a year and 100 staff, but you'll pay me a lot of money and he says James.
It is like running a Formula One car, there's a lot of pressure. Yes, it's exciting but
when you're driving a Formula One car at 250 km/h, it's just fingers on the steering well,
there's hardly any effort that goes into the controls when you set it up properly and then
I thought that it's is actually like riding a motorbike at speed it's harder to stay upright.
That was the decision that I had to make and I took it so at age 30, I found myself running
this hundred million dollar business and it was literally like breaking the sound barrier.
It was a whole different level a massive responsibility, massive stress, massive excitement everything
you can imagine was massive. This guy taught me quite a few things I am going to go through
a few the first thing is, he was the most observant son of a *** I have met. He could
spot a dead blowfly from 100 m he had a temper on him that you just did not want to go near
if he found a sales person that had a can of Coke on the showroom desk he would go over
there, spray it over the show room and scream at them and then they ran away crying and
he told me to sort it out. If somebody bumped into something and scratched the car he would
go mental, if he was driving along and someone had parked on the streets instead of a car
spot, he would stop the car, he would get out of the car he would pull out his key and
he would walk it around the entire car. This guy was a lunatic but very observant, he knew
everything before I knew it. When you have a guy that insane, you have to be sharp, you
have to be on your toes. So I learnt the whole thing about acuity and awareness. But I still
have today I am able to spot them faster than people so it is really like that jungle thing
with the lion and the zebra you've just got to not be the slowest zebra. So this guy said
to me pay attention and that's what I'm saying to you, if you can pay attention to what's
going on, you will be able to get results. There is this other guy he used to rave on
about Max Schubert basically he used to be a Vineyard guy. He used to grow stuff and
he used to make wine but it wasn't a very good wine and his employer told him to stop
making it because it wasn't popular and no one wanted it and he still made it in secret
anyway and years later, Grange Hermitage became very popular. He said to me, I don't care
if you sack every person in this place and start again we are making Grange so what I
learnt from that was that he was the ultimate perfectionist he had such a strong vision
about the end result he knew what station we were going to and he had brand synonymous
with Mercedes-Benz. He wasn't making I've been here and it takes a while to make Grange.
Again, if you can tie this back to the idea of having a lifetime customer then you can
continually add value and you would never have to worry about promotion or scratching
somebody's bark because you owe them a favour, so make Grange so I got a bigger team and
that came with more complexities. I went from four sales people to 21 sales people to 4
or five managers, valuers it started to get big and I learnt an awful lot about managing
people, which was interesting and again I got the number one person at this new place
and the biggest thing he taught me was no compromise. This guy was all about pushing
through what he needed to get so I'm going to give you the concept that he told me he
used to say that an empty flat is better than a bad tenant he would rather have our house
in their empty than to have a bad tenant in there paying rent. He was not prepared to
compromise. He was not prepared to make a profit if it was going to causing brain damage.
One of his favourite words, the other one was oxygen thieves. He was very stubborn and
another concept that he raised on my memory was brinkmanship just a quick survey put your
hand up if you have never heard back word before. That's quite a lot. I will give you
a picture to show you what it means. He was the tugboat, brinkmanship is taking something
all the way to the edge pushing until you cannot break any further. He would turn up
to a Mercedes-Benz meeting in a brand-new Porsche Turbo, he would get his Ferrari 360
spider and park it in the basement, right up against the door, where every staff member
prior to walk past it in the morning but it was so close to the door, but if you pushed
the door you would dent the car and if you dent the car by God, that was the last time
you'd ever work at the dealership he would take things to the edge. He taught me a lot
about limits he would go down to head office and then come back and we would be like what
is he up to and he'd say, "Good news, I just bought 135 cars". So I'm like great. Now we
have to sell them and he threw the sheet down and disappear and then the next thing I've
got the other owner who is the spread sheet junkie saying what are you doing with these
135 cars and I would say while we are looking at selling them. That's what we do when a
car dealership, remember? And it was very interesting to see the tension between the
spread sheet guy and the brinkmanship guy, so it was a dangerous combo it did end in
tears too. He was a fan of the movie Patton, have you ever seen the movie Patton? So if
he found a staff member he didn't like, he would say to me, "Donkey on the bridge". Now,
if you're familiar with the movie there is this scene where they're coming into town
and all of the troops are backed up enemies on the other side of the bank and their shooting
at them and he gets down to the jeep and drives down to the bridge and on the bridge there
is a donkey in a wagon and he pours out his pistol, shoots it in the head and pushes it
off the bridge, gets back in his jeep and drives on so that donkey was holding up the
whole army and causing them to get shot at. So if you have a donkey in your business;
whether it's the person, whether it's a system or whether it's you you've got to do something
about it because it is going to impact the whole thing.
He used to talk about Captain Smith who was the captain of the Titanic and he believed
that the Titanic was indestructible. He was arrogant and he was ignorant and that's what
my friend the lunatic millionaire taught me was that arrogant and ignorance will cause
you to sink. So he was always looking for signs of arrogance and ignorance and he would
strip you down and make sure you knew that that was inappropriate. So be careful of that.
I'd say ignorance is a huge factor for most marketers totally ignorant about competitors,
business fundamentals, so I'll cover a couple of those too. So here is the most important
lesson he ever taught me and he said to me, "Look you're great racehorse you win the races
but you don't want to be a racehorse you want to be the owner of the racecourse. He said
it doesn't matter which course wins are loses, it doesn't matter which *** wins or loses
even the guy selling food or in the car park selling tickets is going to make money every
single day when you are in the racecourse you control the game." And that's why I think
it's so important with the emergence of Facebook. It's very tempting to build your whole business
on a platform like that. It's also meaning that you are the racehorse in someone else's
racecourse and if they don't like the way the way the race runs or if they decide to
ban it or it gets destroyed, you're in trouble. As someone running that business I took that
on board. So at 33 years old I started consulting I had some clients that said to me, "You're
really good at this selling, managing and leading teams could you come and teach us?"
So I went out and got a computer and that was when my Internet marketing career was
looking like starting. It was about six years ago when I bought my laptop, I didn't have
a computer at home and that's what I used to build my slide deck. I sold a half day
training for $4000 so I was a self-funded starter; I was in profit from day one and
is this interesting by the way? Good. So at age 34 I got headhunted which was sort of
a relief because the guy was wielding knives threatening to kill me by now. He thought
I had too many talents and he was making threats at me because he was having a bust up with
his business partner and he thought that I had sided with the other business partner.
Now they forgot to tell me that they were having a bust stop and I wasn't aware of it
but that was beside the point. He was very manic and difficult to work for so I got offered
to work closer to home for more money, without weekend work to run the whole dealership.
It was a slightly smaller dealership about half the size and volume about 50 million
per year. Mind you I still got some good experience and the good thing was I got to take over
all the marketing and website. So now I was watching all these guys on pod casts and reading
things about Internet marketing and applying them to an actual business. I think Casey
Stevens is here and I actually did a product launch when I was at the dealership and we
sold millions of dollars' worth of cars through several different marketing channels, test
and track everything and I documented the whole thing so I had all this real world business
experience and I was learning this Internet stuff at the same time. So I really started
up my Internet moonlighting and went into the affiliate model first, that was the first
thing I had success with and I started implementing everything I knew in business as an affiliate.
I've always maintained create value and look after customers, I bought a Mercedes Benz
brand value and a lifetime approach to my business. I have a small customer list but
they're customer list they're buyers and the only role of a business is to create and maintain
buyers and customers so that is what I was doing. My wife was kind of concerned she would
say, "Are we rich yet?" And I would say "No, not yet, but we will be." As a lot of you
may have experienced it can take a while to make the first few dollars. It took me about
nine months to sell something and it was to myself by accident. Yes, I actually cookied
myself and I didn't know what cookies were. It took a while and it was hard but a few
things happened that contributed to that. One of the main things that happened, I got
my butt on a plane and I went to an online marketing event and I met people. Now if I've
been dealing with the richest people in this country, the most famous sports stars, I had
no trouble talking to strangers. I was the only person on that plane going to the conference
and I was the only person I knew at the conference but I managed to make an impact because I
took what worked for me before and I took the lot of notes and I implemented everything
into my business. I became the number one affiliate for the product I was promoting
and subsequently I become the number one affiliate for many products that I promote and that's
only about one 10th of my business now so take the win that you earned from that and
start adding it back into other areas of your business. So at age 37, by the way Leslie,
now that I'm second only to Wikipedia I'm looking forward to bumping that up if we make
that change today, so we should be able to take out Wiki right? So according to Google
I'm an Internet marketer, so I broke free, I sacked my boss, I said thank you very much
but I don't need you anymore and I went full-time so I really went pro that's like balls to
the wall I'm doing this and I managed to replace my $300,000 a year job by going out to two
clients and saying I'm doing websites for you, would you like me to do traffic and conversions
and other stuff as well because I'm doing this full-time? And they said yes and I said
okay and they paid me $6000 each and that was it because I was ready making $150 from
my other stuff. So I've got my job or I can do is work from home and make something from
this and I knew when I made that commitment that I was going to have to continually update
and continually learn and continually implement and continually refine but I look back before
and I had bigger challenges before I'd been a top salesperson, I'd been a top manager,
I turned around a business from $-1.7 million to positive $700,000 within 24 months and
I'm thinking why the heck not? But I tell you it was a bit of a shock because I went
from everyone doing everything to me doing everything that was kind of weird. I looked
at my wife and I said, "Gosh if you would get interested in this it would really help
out." And she was like, "Hello we have four kids and they need feeding our washing and
dropping off to school." And I was like oh yeah, I forgot about them. So I made a plan
for myself; you saw Dave made a plan. I made a plan for myself, I never published it until
an Internet marketer came to my house and downloaded it to his computer and stole it
from me but then I thought, dammit, I'll just publish it anyway. This turned into a million-dollar
blueprint for me this is an older version of it and I have a new version which will
probably put into my next workshop, but this was the goal and I will just take you through
some of the slides and when you're watching back on the recording you can slow it down.
I actually implemented every single thing on my 'mafia plan', I call it and one of the
greatest things I formed was my own community because remember they told me to own the racecourse?
And I was building up other people's forums and adding a lot of community information
and helping people to make affiliate sales. I was even in Lyn Terry's forum there cutting
my teeth as an affiliate. Then I got my own community and this community has received
over 1000 members and its $100 per month and it turned into a central hub for all my other
products. I got to do the same thing I did with cars. I got to meet the key players and
influential people and learn what I could and I kept taking back lessons from my old
days and putting them back into my business. The things that worked, not the lunatic stuff
the crazy stuff, I left that behind but I started building the hundred million-dollar
business from my spare bedroom and I'm not there yet but I'm definitely on the way it
won't be long and I'll be at the 10 million-dollar turnover mark in my own business and there's
not quite the same infrastructure, we don't need a 6 1/2 million dollar block of land
or 71 staff on the premises. I love catamarans, they are so clever because there's two hauls
working together and they only really use one at a the time so you've sort of got back
a backup, if one sinks you've got the other one and I thought, why shouldn't I do that
for my own business and get in some backup here? I don't want to be like my dad and lose
all my money and have to tell my kids that we're going to back trade a little bit down
to a cardboard box out the front. So I started setting up businesses that were module to
the one that I already had. I took the processes that I used to get those business clients
and I set up a development business and then I set up an SEO business. I deal with primarily
wholesalers, I resell this to people that go out and deal with the businesses because
I figured that I can't be the one doing the SEO because I can maybe do 5, 6, 10 clients
now we serve hundreds of clients and we have the capacity to serve ten times that so I
am going to give you a couple of points on that. I also grew in Orchard at home. This
is what the lab looks like now, so from humble beginnings that first little laptop that I
would wheel out the 20 m dial-up cable that I would sit on the couch with now we've got
a spaceship console there and we have gone a little bit pro we've got the green screen
and the lights and everything else. And I really started to push my own barriers I thought
I've done it before I have to have a physical product, I've got to run an event, I've got
to record it, I've got to get these things printed and sell them. So we created that
whole fast web formula brand, we recorded it, we had Ed speaking at our last event which
was fantastic and we gave away good hoodies too, that ones that don't lose the coins when
you're travelling. I then did a thing very similar to Ed, I started up a high-performance
mastermind because a lot of my students want to know this stuff but they need regular contact
so we speak every single week and we grow their business. Out of all the students we
have a high proportion of them are experiencing similar growth, in fact my business has doubled
every year for five years in a row and it's because implementing exactly what worked in
a real business to my own. I don't mow my own lawn anymore because it's five acres but
when the guys out there on the mower for a day and a half I sort of have a chuckle. We
have got weird things going on around our house. I managed to buy my daughter a horse,
I don't clean my pool or wash my car and I went into my old dealership and I bought myself
the car I really wanted and I bought my wife a car as well and we paid cash. The funny
thing is the guy came in and he said, "I know that name from somewhere, you're the Internet
marketer." And I thought that's cool. My kid had an assignment, it was to wash the car
with a parent and I thought we don't do that we don't wash our car, we'll take him to the
car wash and we'll get him a hot chocolate. I got to meet Tim Ferris, Bond Albert (the
son of Gary) and J. Abraham who was an absolute business legend for me and I spent five or
six hours with him talking about business and he went over my business and he said it
is one of the best businesses he's seen in the last year or so and the reason for that
is its under umbrella company. We don't just do one thing we run multiple businesses and
we run it like a business and then we sell bits of it off and we can replace them with
other businesses and I'm going to go one layer deep on that in a moment if you're interested.
So do you want to know more about that? So if you want to strain it all comes down to
doing the right things. That's what it comes down to and Ed mentioned in yesterday if you're
sitting down, keeping yourself busy that might not necessarily be the right thing, people
say action but if it's in the wrong direction it's not helping you get to where you want
it to get to. So I'm saying go to the train station buy the ticket to the destination
you want and start aligning where you want to get to and I know that sounds quite simple
but it is simple. You know how often I sit there and I praise my business with my wife
that is chairman of the board, every day. Every day we question everything because that
lunatic millionaire told me to pay attention and I say what you think about this, I am
thinking about this, this thing came up today or we have such and such, do you reckon we
should go with that? And she is like, "No that's not us all" or "You should definitely
do that" and our business is very dynamic so it's okay to be flexible on that as long
as you know where you want to get to. I know where I want to get to its simple; I want
ten million dollars. I want ten million-dollar twelve-month turnover, that's my goal. Everyone
knows that, my team knows that, everyone in my business knows, that's the goal we don't
exactly know each step or how to with minute detail and if you do that you are actually
going to sabotage yourself. Make sure you tell them what you want and why you want it
but you don't necessarily have to tell them how to get it, they'll figure it out and that's
where you get the growth. Peter Drucker said it's about marketing and innovation. If you
really get your mind around marketing and innovation then you will meet success and
where I see people go so wrong is they haven't got a clue about marketing and they're not
innovative unless you're Sam Walton, whose made a good living out of copying. He said
he is never had an original idea in his life. You might want to innovate your own business
and innovations don't have to be spectacular, they just have to be the next step always
come up always come up with something extra. Recently as in yesterday we launched a new
pod cast and it hit number two in with Harvard business and the Australian Stock Exchange
and it's a new thing. It's an innovation, it's a broadcast channel that I haven't been
exploiting that will bring me tons of new listeners to subscribe and follow and as long
as we create value then they will continue to be there and we can have customers and
move those customers into more valuable solutions. I think marketing is better than sales because
if you market well you don't have to sell and I hear flawed sales logic and you need
to understand that I've sold commission only for decades and most people have no clue about
selling. Selling is not something that you do to someone, it's not manipulation or force,
selling is the environment that makes it easy to move forward because they realise that
they're going to be better off than without making the purchasing decision. Does that
make sense? So create the environment that makes it easy for people to move forward so
I am always looking for ways to make it easier for my customer to find more value and to
make it a no brainer for them do business with me and one of the best ways to do that
is to not *** them off so they leave you because it's very easy to work with people
you know and trust and like. The example, when I released my fast web workshop last
time within 16 hours of sending out an email to 425 people I had 165 sign ups at $1000
so that's a very responsive list at a good price point and that's better than what you
could hope for with a product launch with one million other people are trying to push
a product, you create the value proposition that people are attracted to. Another thing
is assumptions, this is absolutely critical, I've delved into this, I got referred to this
from a resource called Eli Goldwrap who puts out book on this, especially if you're doing
manufacturing but you can apply this to your own business, assumptions cause things not
to be optimal and you've got to challenge all of your assumptions. Remember way back
in the car dealership where I had to make a big income and I challenged the assumptions
that I was too young, that I was too inexperienced and I just decided that if it was up to me
I can do this because I am responsible for myself. So I say to my students think way
bigger you're probably playing too small of a game. That's the fact and the only thing
you need to know is like when I went down to the beach and I looked out at the other
boats and they said they can do it, why can't you? If I can build a business from my bedroom
up to a million-dollar business which I believe I can and I really do believe I can do it,
then surely you can earn a couple of hundred grand, is that a fair assumption? If you were
to follow the same material, if you were to take in some of the same experiences I've
had and adapt them to what you're doing in your own innovative way, not in a carbon copy
way and you will end up getting a different result. So you need to understand selling
if you don't understand selling, then at least start with something like spin selling because
that deconstructs a lot of traditional sales stuff and it may not be the newest thing.
The other thing is do things faster, people are way too slow. I like to do my things just
in time which means that if I'm speaking now, I would've done my slides last night I wouldn't
have given it too much thought until last night because it's wasted if I did them last
week I forget what they are right now because I'm doing other stuff so that's my way of
enforcing deadlines. I commit to something and I'll do something just before I need it
and I don't waste a second of it and as soon as I've hopped down from this and move on
this will get leveraged in other methods which I'll explain in a little bit more but just
move a bit faster the goal of course is to make yourself redundant. By the time I finished
my last job they didn't really need me. The only reason they needed me was because I had
something special that they couldn't do without do you remember what it was called? The black
box, the mother of all black boxes very easy as an employee to create a black box but you
can also do it as an employer and that is; keep a few things to yourself, don't give
everything away, don't surrender all of your IP. Someone said it this morning it was that
you don't have to tell people your niches and your markets. I can ensure you that more
than half my income isn't coming from Internet marketing money stuff its coming from real
businesses are in real markets that have an online component that I can easily leverage
because I'm taking all that I know to work and doing good stuff with it. Helpdesk was
the first thing I got that freed me up, just set up a domain with a helpdesk on it and
even if it's you responding to the tickets, bring someone in and get yourself out of because
helpdesk is one of the two top things that will slow you down. In leadership, most people
are clueless about leadership and quite frankly if you haven't run a big team before, how
else would you learn? From listening to a book or a pod cast or something and that's
great but it's like learning how to ride a bicycle by reading a book about it, there's
a limit to how much you can figure out. So as you get your feet wet with this outsourcing
concepts pay attention to some of the fundamentals, I'll give you a couple, would that be alright?
So I have my own team, they are the original Ninjapinos, there are quite a lot of them
now and they've helped me get to a situation where my inbox looks like this. They don't
do my inbox, but they do all the other things that normally I need to do. The only emails
I need to see our things where I need to take action and remember my goal is to make myself
redundant so if I have to do an action then I haven't effectively got someone else to
do something or outsourced, is that right? So yes, I need to know if a domain is expiring
or if I've got an interview or something but I like to run my inbox with nothing in it
and that's where you should get to. I would bet that many of you have hundreds, thousands
and ten thousands of messages in your inbox that are eating your brain and are causing
you to not create, you are consuming, you are reading, you are following rabbit holes
and you are not creating because you are too busy reading emails for four or five hours
a day. Is that right? So you've got to set up a filter or a label when you go home tonight
and call it crap or something and move everything out of your inbox and start again and I will
put up a product on this called inbox relief because this is the number one killer of any
student I'd ever mentored we spend the first hour talking about the inbox, because until
you get that sorted, you aren't going anywhere. Communication is critical when you are talking
with your team or communicating the most important thing you need to communicate with your team;
by the way, they're not outsourcers, that's not right. They're teams in your business,
that's why they get an email address, that's why their partner just like you. I actually
picture my Ninjapinos in my office and I treat them as if they were in my office because
they are unbelievable but you tell them what the results are you, you tell them what kind
of results you are trying to get. When I go over there and speak with my team I say this
is what our business is, let's decide on our values and this is the goal that I'm interested
in getting and let's talk about how we get there. I don't have all the answers, but I
know that you are talented and have the ability to step in where you'd like to and we talked
about the three circles and the hedgehog principal. This is me taking a photo of my Ninjapinos
in Manila it's going to be the most popular discussion this year because I've been talking
about this and it generates out but if you have not met your team you're doing at the
most 50% of what is possible from that team because you will find out extraordinary things
when you sit down and share a bottle of Jack Daniels with them. You take them out for a
meal, you talk to them and find out their real talents you generally find they are quite
shy, one of mine was a Walt Disney animator, I found out one of them was a radio DJ. They
have talents they're hiding from you, you've got to go and find out as soon as you can,
and I'd say as soon as you hit five get on a plane it's worth every cent. It's great
to have processes but avoid processing people no one likes to be processed, ever feel processed
at the bank or the café? It's not nice, people talk about outsourcers and O desk and things
like that. Do you know I have never used one of these job boards yet I haven't had to because
they are attracted to me, they come to me, I started with one a year ago and I have quite
a lot now and they have all been word-of-mouth because we are the best employer, we are the
employer of choice. We are somewhere you would rather be given all other options, including
doing nothing, they would rather work for us. I have to go into base camp and archive
it if I want to stop working on the weekend because they are unbelievable. It's great
to measure stuff but please as soon as you struck trust them lift the restrictor off
enough with this nonsense about I want to know what you did every five minutes or send
the screen share or whatever who likes working like that? Seriously, they're not battery
hens they're people and their amazing people. Let the restrictor off a bit and you will
be stunned at what they can do. I said to mine I don't want to know what you do every
five minutes, I couldn't care less but I know what the result is you know what the result
is let's work on it together. You can spend that fifteen minutes or half an hour, whatever
it would take you to tally up or make a spread sheet that I'm not going to read anyway and
go and hug your kids or take your partner to dinner or something instead. And if you
look after your team, they will look after you. Reward the behaviour you want. This is
essential so many leaders are looking for what is wrong, you stuffed this up, you need
to change this, make sure you're looking for what's right. There is a great book called
The One-Minute Manager, I recommend you read that if you're new to this but reward the
behaviour you want and catch it early and reinforce it. Of course you're going to have
to have systems I have lots of systems, but they can be basic systems. My system is that
I've got six resources on my browser that I need to check every day. That's it; base
camp, my shopping cart, my Gmail account, my PayPal and my community and I'll just click
on the link and do what I need to do and then turn it off. I try not to work more than four
hours a day because I really don't want you to start feeling like it's a job I love what
I do and I do it seven days a week but I also love my family and having experiences and
at the moment I have it to half a day. If I have something big like a new product that
I have coming out at the moment, then I will ramp it up to do ten or twelve hours a day,
and I love it but I want to stop doing that after a while. It's good when you can control
it. I'm going to give you a productivity hack that is very rarely talked about I pretty
much use this in my production line with the staff, the three bins system and you can look
it up, it's on Wikipedia. It's also called kanban; it comes from automotive which is
where we get all the other stuff production line, Henry Ford, W Edwards Deming's saving
Japan that sort of stuff is good stuff to follow. Most of you have a to-do list and
then maybe your team put it in the done thing when it's finished right? Pretty standard.
I'm going to encourage you to add a doing list so in our base camp we have to do, doing
and done and when I need to know where the business is at all I have to do is look at
the doing because that's what my team are looking at right now. That's what they're
doing, they haven't started the to-dos is yet and they haven't finished it, so it's
in the doing and I can regulate how many things are going into that to do and how many things
they've done by checking out what's in the doing and the goal is I want them to have
a focused thing, as soon as the doing gets too big I say stop, finish what you are doing
and then when you're finished, put it into done and then go for the next thing. That's
my productivity hack for you to start implementing the rest of it I'm not going to talk about
sorry. Traffic grab will be the best way to get access to our internal process. We will
be publishing our spaghetti bowl which is the most amazing way of linking up web properties
to get results. We talk about the systems we use, the tools we use, the process flow
and every type of traffic. What we have used to generate well over one million dollars
in our shopping cart using these techniques and it will be priced at under 100 bucks,
including a month's access to my own community. It's going to be something that people talk
about because it's great value, not because I have asked someone to promote it, I haven't
asked a single person to promote it. You're going to have to adapt to change because change
is inevitable, I first cottoned on to this with Mercedes-Benz all of the high level managers
had change management workshops. Change is something that I have become exceptional at
whether it's because my parents lost everything or whether it's because we were having a baby
and I needed to double my income. Things change, get over it you are going to cop a few little
incidents along the way, you might try some stuff that doesn't work. Encourage your team
that things might go wrong from time to time. Occasionally, it's not going to work out the
way you want, but that's okay. You need to be like water and water is remarkable. You
can freeze, burn it throw it at logs. It gets around it gets on and whenever something is
not quite right I say it's fine I'm going to flow around like water, transform and all
come back to it later and that's become a great technique that I have used in some of
my hair raising scenarios when I was dragging someone's car out of their driveway and they
were running at me with a shotgun. I would say be like water and I would say I bet you're
wondering why you got your car towed away well let me explain. Another thing this absolute
lunatic taught me he said age equals experience as you get older your brain has the ability
to remove useless information from it. So as you have more experiences you know what
works and what doesn't work and if you know something doesn't work, stop doing it and
leverage everything. This is another valuable lesson this guy would leverage everything
he had a car dealership and a repair shop, so he put the car dealership newsletters in
the panel repair shop. He put the panel repair shop things in every glove box. That's basic
business isn't it? So few businesses leverage the assets they've got and you know this whole
new ascension model crap you know free, small prize that's not right. You go to a big business,
go to a one hundred million dollar business and have a look at their ascension model.
I used to sell cars to people who came in to get a new petrol cap and they would come
in and say, "I'm looking for parts". And I would say, "What do you need?" And he would
say, "A petrol cap." And I would say, "What for?" And he would say, "An E320". And I would
say, "Right have you seen the new one?" You don't need an ascension model you need a chocolate
wheel that's round, they can come in anywhere. If you haven't already done this put up a
high priced product from now. Go and put your coach in if you're confident, go and put your
master mind in if you're confident, put together a few of your things and package at a higher
price point and you may be surprised, my very best community members came in at a higher
priced workshop price not a free report but I've got the game covered. I've got free pod
casts I've got high-priced one-on-one consulting where I actually help other people build their
multimillion dollar businesses where I literally speak to their team every week and project
manage their team because they can't so I've got every part of the game covered. And you
should probably be covering different parts of your game because you can probably bring
people in higher price points than what you think straight away. All right, so what could
this possibly mean? This was taught to me by an investor a very successful property
investor and he said, "James the wake doesn't drive the boat face the front, it doesn't
matter what you've done up until now, it doesn't matter what websites you've got, it doesn't
matter what tragedies you've had it doesn't matter that your mommy didn't kiss you enough,
it's old news just face forward to make sure you're not about to run into an iceberg or
something. Pay attention and ultimately enjoy the lack of drama when you have it. There
may be drama from time to time but this guy was adamant he would love moments where there
was no drama, he would take in the serene nature of things working well when you make
Grange when you sit back and take a slip from the glass, you've done a good job and he said,
ultimately, everything comes down to no or yes. So you're now at a position you're at
the training track were you have to make a decision. Are you going to go pro? No or yes?
And that's it. I hope to see you at my event in October and I'd love you to be my friend.
Selling is what you have to do if you haven't marketed properly but I take the view that
marketing is just making people aware of what you have and creating an environment where
it's obvious that's a good choice for them. Sales is the little tip over the edge once
you get them there. So let's say we're a car dealership and we're marketing, that's doing
our press releases that's doing our advertising channels, bringing people into the dealership
and then there's a sales process where you take them from that prospect through to a
buyer. The better job you do with the marketing and a good example would be Apple, they market
very well. You don't have to do much of a sales job if you're an Apple sales representative,
the guy a McDonald's doesn't have to sell you too *** ordering a meal when you're
standing at the counter because the marketing has been done and by the time the buyer has
arrived there the sale is easy. I had created that environment in the car dealership, I
had 71 staff and had a quiet room with no distractions and I was working on autopilot.
I had created a redundancy for myself by identifying every task that needs to happen in the dealership
and finding the person that needs to do it recruiting them properly training them on
to making them clear of the objective, giving them the power to do the job and doing it.
The other thing we did in the dealership we had a daily reset, I got this from Jack Welsh,
every day first thing well not first thing because I'm not a morning person so after
coffee time we would have a whiteboard session and we discussed, what are you doing today?
Then I would write it down for everyone to see. Now automatically everyone in the team
knew what everyone in the team was doing today, so there was no overlap, there was no miscommunication.
We could announce things, we could say today were getting a pallet load of new key rings,
so stop using the old ones. So we could announce things and make sure that everyone turned
up, where is Sue she hasn't showed up so we knew who was there, what we were doing, what
was happening and guess what I've done with my own team? Now we have a daily meeting and
I can tell you if I don't go to log on to meeting at the right time if I am two minutes
late, it's gone, it's like a thunder strike. These people are like ninjas they are on,
they all know what they're doing, they all work from home, they are remote but the same
processes super super powerful daily meeting doubled our productivity, meeting face-to-face
doubled our productivity. They are two simple things that I had overlooked but as soon as
I bring in those good things that worked for me in a real business into my business they
worked for the new business. So I thought, what else can I do that I used to do that
was good that I should bring into the new business and I thought we used to do direct
response mailers, we used to do telesales, we used to do radio well I should be doing
all this stuff and that's exactly what I'm doing and that's how I will take my business
to the next level is by doing exactly what used
to work before. I like money and I'm very clear on that and it keeps me going to the
next objective. I don't think you can motivate someone, I think you can demotivate someone
I believe you bring to the party whatever coal is in the train I can take logs off the
track for you but I can't speed up the train I've tried before. You have to make the result
meaningful to you, make it worthwhile for you. I would say read ? because it will have
exactly the same lesson in it about how to get yourself doing the right habits; it's
really not so much about the process. It's more about habits and routine because I have
a routine and I have winning habits but I really resist over systemisation and over
processing and that sounds quite weird because I am quite organised and systemised but I'm
like Sputnik you know they beat the Americans with this simple little ball and stick on
it to do the first satellite run because it was simple and it worked and that's the system
that I had. So the best way that I found was make sure you put your email on a different
computer. I have two different computers that way if one dies I work on the other one. If
I'm watching a video I can let it run on the other one. If I want to do work there is nothing
else on it except screen flow, conversion software and Skype for me to do interviews
that was a media computer. As soon as they went to two computers I was able to turn off
and don't ever have chat, I don't even have Skype on unless I'm doing an interview or
have a call. So just turn it all off just go Black Ops on it, you don't need it all.
I think the biggest productivity killer after Gmail would be Facebook; people seem to be
on there a lot. I get in and I get out, my time is too valuable I don't want to waste
it. Here's a simple technique I would tell you if you were a student of mine. I would
say what would Richard Branson do? Would he sit down and play Farmville for three hours?
I don't think so. I don't know, maybe he does but I don't think so. So when people are unsure
about what decision to make with their time I say what would Richard Branson do? If a
billionaire wouldn't do it then maybe there's a reason for that. There are some good books
you can read about that there is plenty there is 'E- Myth' and there is also 'How to get
rich' by Felix Dennis a few other ones. I would say a very simple technique is to set
a re-occurring event because that's a forced deadline that helped me a lot. Every Tuesday
I do coaching calls and its every Tuesday, it's what I do Tuesday is for coaching calls.
I have to turn up its planned and they turn up and it works very well. If I said call
me whenever you want, I would feel like I'm always on call, it's more difficult, so create
a routine is the key that works for you and remove destructions be ruthless with distractions.
I know Dean Jackson, has a room that has nothing in it, it's through two locked doors. So remove
things that might tempt you. I don't have my TV in my lab, I just have work machines.
I also make sure that I don't spend time on my computer that is not productive if I don't
want to be doing work, work then I'll go play PlayStation or have a game of pool or something
because I want to be away from the area, when I'm in that area I'm a work machine.