Planet Perry 25 Year Anniversary - Part 4

Sink is my middle name

Mel, Round 3 of our Who Knows Planet Perry Best? trivia contest is live. 5 new questions dropped today, and the final 5 come tomorrow. The top 10 scorers win a free month of RenAI. We'll announce the winners next Monday. Now, a story about a courtroom and a kitchen appliance... ~ In those first strange post-job, new-life-as-freelancer days of 2001, the most pivotal decision I made was to change my name. If you look me up on Wikipedia, it says PERRY SINK MARSHALL. Sink is my middle name, but it used to be my last name. The official name on my birth certificate is Perry Lenn Sink. I HATED it. Near Lexington, North Carolina there's a pocket of "Sinks" and it's a very common family name there. Before that it was Zink, and long ago in Europe it was Zinchk. But today in modern English, it just sounds "downwardly mobile." I was one of those unfortunate people saddled with a stupid last name. For most of my time growing up I didn't think much about it. But the older I got, the further I developed my writing skills and awareness of words and language, the more I put myself on the firing line and asserted my authority, the more I disliked my own name. Whenever I would meet someone and shake their hand, I would wince just a little in the back of my mind. Marshall is my mother's maiden name. I have a bunch of aunts, uncles and cousins who are Marshalls. My grandfather was Robert Burns Marshall, named after the Scottish poet Robert Burns. I liked Marshall a lot. When I quit my job I realized this was the one and only one time to make a name change. My inner procrastinator tried to maintain the status quo, but I thought, "I am NOT sticking Cuyler with this name. I'm going to the trouble and changing it for good." I remember questioning whether I have the authority to change my own name. My Uncle Glenn said, "Don't you tell Granddaddy. He'll throw a hissy fit!!!" I filled out the paperwork and went to court with a petition to change the names of our entire family. My kids were running around in the back of the court room. The judge looked over his bifocals at me and said, "Mr. Sink, why do you want to change your name?" "Your Honor, because it's better to be a sheriff than a kitchen appliance." He says, "I'm not going to touch that." And signs the piece of paper. From that day forward I liked myself better. Perry Sink = dislike. Perry Marshall = LIKE. I suddenly felt different about shaking someone's hand; different about being an author; different about being an influential person. I know LOTS of people who have changed their names. Many of them close friends. John McGee used to be John Fancher. He didn't like it so he changed it. Nate Jennison used to be Nate Tribble. He didn't like it so he changed it. If you don't like something about YOUR identity, you get to change it. You're not stuck. You get to decide who you want to be. The advent of Google ads came at the exact same time as my name change. And I can assure you that had I split tested Beat the AdWords System Access 100 million people in 10 min The definitive fast start guide www.perrysink.com/adwords against Beat the AdWords System Access 100 million people in 10 min The definitive fast start guide www.perrymarshall.com/adwords I know 1000% which one is going to win. Before online advertising and social media, the average person didn't give much thought to the impact of a single word or phrase. We sure do now. Names are everything. Identities are everything. If I had kept the old identity, I would NOT be where I am today. What do YOU want to change about who you are or how you show up? You get to decide. Perry Marshall P.S. Think you know Planet Perry? Round 3 of the trivia contest is live. Get today's 5 questions here:: [Click Here for Trivia Hunt Day 3]   ***NOTE: This email address isn't monitored! If you need help, please email: support@perrymarshall.com If you’d rather not receive *any* more emails from us, Unsubscribe Perry S. Marshall & Assoc 805 Lake Street #295 Oak Park, Illinois 60301 United States

Planet Perry 25 Year Anniversary - Part 3

the new trivia questions are up

Mel, Round 2 of our Who Knows Planet Perry Best? trivia contest is live. 5 new questions dropped today, with 5 more coming Thursday and Friday. The top 10 scorers win a free month of RenAI. We'll announce the winners next Monday. The link to today's questions is at the bottom of this email. Now, back to the basement office... ~ Yesterday I told you how quitting my job pressed me to the outer limits of my comfort zone. Post 9/11, planes not flying, business and travel frozen. But there was a happy side. For the first time EVER in my life, I had space to think, focus and create. At the job I'd just left, the only way to get 'open space' was to come in early or stay late. Otherwise, incessant interruptions. Phone calls, staff members, bosses, meetings, emergencies. Laura helped me set up a little office in our basement. Across from the washer and dryer. A table, a chair, a computer and a stereo. I could roll out of bed and be 'in the saddle' a minute later. We had a glass brick window in the corner and the sun shone in every morning. My phone was NOT ringing every 10 minutes. A crisis was not threatening every hour of the day. I remember playing the classical music station and developing my "what I can do to make money" list I'd written on the back of a business card. I needed clients. I reminded myself: "You're selling money at a discount." First client was a software company in Arkansas. Just before I left, Laura said, "You need new clothes. You gotta look the part." She took me to the mall. After 5 minutes at JCPenney, no sales person showed up so she made a beeline for Nordstrom. I gulped. I would not DREAM of buying anything at Nordstrom. But Laura knew I would look right. She told the salesman I had a client visit and he knew exactly what to do. $1200 later I was the owner of slacks, a black mock turtleneck and a fancy sport jacket. (Nordstrom was light years outside my Nebraska Engineer comfort zone.... but I secretly liked looking handsome. Laura ALWAYS got me things I would never ever buy for myself.) I go to Arkansas. I pepper the CEO with questions all morning. I wasn't used to stepping into new marketing situations every single day. I didn't think as fast as I do now. But mid-afternoon, it all snapped in place. I asked: "How much does it cost you to get a new customer?" "Fifty thousand dollars if you include airplane tickets and airports and the value of my time." "What if I had a magic gumball machine that gave you new customers for $15K instead of $50K?" "That would be amazing." "Let's do a 2 month $15K project and I'll slash your cost to get a new customer to $15K instead of 50K." He agreed. Suddenly I was paying my bills. And... the Magic Gumball Machine became Question Numero Uno of my consulting career. But a few weeks later, the client moved the goal posts. "My product was on the cover of Control Engineering Magazine in 1990. Perry, I want THAT." "Dude, I can't get you on the cover of any magazine. I never promised that. I promised to drop your new customer cost from $50K to $15K." But he had lost interest in that and seemed increasingly annoyed at my constant questions. He was irritated that his software wasn't going to be on a magazine cover. (It didn't have a snowball's chance.) I delivered everything I promised. Including a very nice article published in a magazine. I don't think he used a bit of it. (The bane of the consultant's life. Sometimes you work out how to save their entire company, then you watch them burn the whole thing to the ground anyway. Just happened again a few months ago. In fact... my son Caden is 26 and he had his very first consulting gig a month ago. Flew to the east coast and spent three days with a client. Not only was the client resistant to his advice... the guy was downright offended. At dinner I smiled at Caden. "Congratulations! You now know that you don't have the power to MAKE a client do ANYTHING!!!" Our Kindred Spirit Factor spiked.) I hustled. Picked up other projects and clients. $1000 here, $1500 there. I registered www.perrymarshall.com. I spent hours at Buzz Cafe writing the script for "Guerrilla Marketing for Hi Tech Sales People." It became a tape and audio CD. In it I said, "People are struggling because they're obsessing about techniques and ignoring principles." I promised that everything I described was a principle not a technique and therefore wouldn't go out of date. 95% of what I said in "Guerrilla Marketing" is still true. If you were to listen today you'd say that stuff is "obvious." Yep, it's obvious now because the whole world steered in that direction. It wasn't obvious then. It was revolutionary. Most books and courses I've created have been "True forever, but only bloody obvious 10 years later." We have LOTS of clients like that. And one of the things I love most in the world is: ENDURING ART. Boy George – fashionable for a brief window in the 1980s, then embarrassingly dated – I'm not interested in that. At all. Bach, Shostakovich, Miles Davis – enduring for decades or centuries – I'm SUPER interested. The only way to produce enduring art is to immerse yourself in enduring art. You make it a part of you. It becomes as natural as breathing. Ten years before 2001 I had signed up in Amway. Everyone's heard my Amway tales of woe. A 7-year detour. But my motivation for doing that was good. I deeply craved, at age 21, the space and freedom to create a world that I could be proud of. A world that somebody else couldn't destroy on a whim. I wanted to make enduring art. Lasting discoveries. Then 25 years ago this week, I finally got my shot. Dear Reader, I don't know what your life is like today or this week or this year. If you're like most people I know, you're reinventing yourself. RIGHT. NOW. And it's uncomfortable. (No matter how smoothly or not smoothly it's going.) This is your chance. TAKE IT. The more important it is... the more it matters... the more resistance you're gonna feel. If you think that somehow the stars are going to magically align and everything is just going to 'fall in place'.... you're living in a fantasy land. Today is not coming back. Be immensely grateful for whatever you have. And for everything you lack, seek wisdom. Seek wisdom. Those who seek will find. SEEK. Perry Marshall P.S. Think you know Planet Perry? Round 2 of the trivia contest is live. Get today's 5 questions here: [Click Here for Trivia Hunt Day 2] Not in the New RenAIssance Club yet? Here's where to join   ***NOTE: This email address isn't monitored! If you need help, please email: support@perrymarshall.com If you’d rather not receive *any* more emails from us, Unsubscribe Perry S. Marshall & Assoc 805 Lake Street #295 Oak Park, Illinois 60301 United States

Planet Perry 25 Year Anniversary - Part 2

First 5 Trivia Hunt questions are up

Mel, Quick note before today's story: our Who Knows Planet Perry Best? trivia contest starts today. The first 5 questions are live right now, and 5 more drop every day through Friday. Click here to see the first 5 trivia questions! The top 10 scorers win a free month of RenAI and Planet Perry bragging rights! We'll announce the winners next Monday. Now, back to 2001... ~ When I pulled the rip cord, quit my job and struck out on my own, our finances were perilously tight. We were in debt to the tune of one year's income, paying a LOT of interest. We had gotten a 2nd mortgage to consolidate our bills a year before. Our house had an in-law apartment which fetched a few hundred bucks rent, which made it possible for us to afford a mortgage in the first place. 3 kids 4 and under. Two in diapers. 4 years before, I had been fired from my mfr's rep job which had been 2 years of baked potatoes and salsa. I had cult-deprogrammed myself from MLM.... And in so doing acquired a great deal of insight into how marketing and human beings actually operate. My current gig had been my first job that actually 'worked'. I had become "The Go To Guy" in the company – best illustrated by something Jim, one of our sales guys said to me. It was 7pm one night. He and I were working late, the only dudes in the office. Jim said, "Perry, do you realize this whole company revolves around you?" A conservative Nebraska "don't get too big for your britches" impulse zinged through my head. His remark instantly struck me as ego-stroking. I recoiled. "Now Perry... seriously. Every time I need to know something, you're the guy who knows the answer. A detail about a certain customer. The history of some email exchange. Which product to recommend for a situation. When the Goldmine database gets corrupted, you're the one that reindexes the files and fixes it. "The receptionist doesn't know all that. The COO doesn't know all that. The owner of the company doesn't know that. "Who invented DeviceNet boot camp? You did. Who went out and recruited every single one of our reps and distributors and knows all their names and which accounts they're selling to? You do. Who wrote all those white papers and magazine articles? You. "Perry, this whole company revolves around.... YOU!" Dang. He's right. I was the 29-year-old punk driving around in a rusty Toyota with 213,000 miles with a STANFORD bumper sticker on the back window from the previous owner, desperately hoping to get some kind of respect, to be taken seriously, to not be dismissed as just another ignorant 20-something nerd engineer who doesn't know how to sell anything. I had not yet learned when or how to put my cojones in a wheel barrow and assert my authority. Every month when it was time to turn in my magazine articles and get paid for them, it was a dogfight because the guy never quite adhered to our original $500 agreement and would arbitrarily say "Yeah, well that article isn't really worth $500.... I'll pay you $350." I always knew the next person I had to talk to after my negotiation with El Presidente was my wife, who was shuffling bills trying to pay the mortgage. Much as I hated it, THAT was my first serious "Learning how to ask for money" school. After I developed some callouses, I started to be good at it. I got really good at buying used $2K Toyotas with high miles and driving them another 80,000 miles. I was also good at wrapping exhaust pipes with muffler tape. And when you're "That guy" you don't have much room to negotiate. You get pushed around a lot. I knew stock option money was coming in the next few months, so if I could manage to make ends meet for the moment, I would get some more runway. I knew that I knew that I knew a few things. I knew that 1 page of advertising in our industry's trade magazines cost $3K to $6K. I knew I could write a really good 2-4 page magazine article for a client, with their byline, and get it published in one of those trade magazines, AT WILL. Because I knew the editors, they knew I was a good writer, and I met deadlines. So my client could get $6K to $12K worth of media exposure – but only needed to pay me say $1K or $2K. I knew editorial press exposure is more credible than advertising. I knew how to generate leads from those articles. I knew how to generate leads on the web. I knew my own tiny niche. And all the various players. Deep down I knew I was a "go to guy" and there aren't many of those. So somehow... this ought to have a fighting chance. Yesterday I mentioned my friend telling me to write a business plan. At some level I knew most business plans are BS. You have no idea what's going to come up. It's mostly fiction. But the list of ways I could make money written on the back of my business card in my back pocket was real. I knew a lot of people who could help me think through situations and offer good ways to solve problems. I already had an informal mastermind group in place – which is exactly where I got the advice to "Take the money and RUN RUN RUN." (Some of the best advice I've ever gotten from anybody.) And my wife knew somehow, through her woman's intuition, NOW was the time to make the leap. Dear reader, you may be 30 years old like I was then. Or you may be decades older than I am now. You may be young and inexperienced. Or you may have decades more wisdom, experience, resources and street cred than I EVER had. But either way – WE ARE ALL REINVENTING OURSELVES RIGHT NOW. EVERYTHING is in flux. It's R E A L L Y easy to remember those times with nostalgia and NOT remember how terrified I was at the time. There was NO guarantee whatsoever that it was all going to work out. None. The other night I headed over to the Riverside City Library. It's a lovely building on a riverfront. I hadn't been there in a long time. I sat down at a desk there, which brought a flashback from that exact time in 2001, two weeks after I'd quit my job. At that exact same desk 25 years ago, I had sat there biting my fingernails, hoping to land my very first paying client. Because when I quit my job, a TINY little ripple echoed through my professional network. "Hey, Perry left Synergetic!" I received a very finite number of phone calls of possible job offers. "Hey, why don't you come in for an interview." Just a very few. One company flew me down to Arkansas. I said, "How about instead of an employment situation, we do a 2 month project." I pitched them on a 60-day $15K project with a list of deliverables. I knew I could make ends meet on $7500/month. I remember coming back from Arkansas, sitting in that library hoping they would say yes, and just WAITING for their answer. I had done everything I could. So, the other night at the same library sitting at the same desk, I couldn't help but notice how similar NOW feels to THEN. 9/11 then; war in the Middle East now. Internet then; AI now. Little kids depending on me then; big kids depending on me now. Times of great uncertainty then; times of great uncertainty now. Times of great opportunity then; times of great opportunity now. I have great affection for the young man that I was, trying to make my way in the world; I'm proud of that young man for punching through his fear, resistance, insecurity and headtrash and driving forward. I have great affection for ALL entrepreneurs trying to make their way in the world; I'm so proud of so many in Planet Perry who have overcome immense obstacles... and who believe that wisdom is always available to those who ask for it. That's why I close most of my emails with "Seize the Day." Today only comes once. The perils are obvious. The real opportunities are not. Yet they are always lurking in there. They are always present. There is ALWAYS a need, a customer, a yearning, a bleeding neck, an ache. For every problem known to man there is a solution known to God. I'm not sure I've ever told the story of how that first client turned out. Watch your email box tomorrow for Part 3. And seize the day, Perry Marshall   P.S. Think you know Planet Perry? The first 5 trivia questions are live. Get the contest details, the rules, and today's questions here: [Click Here for Trivia Hunt Day 1] Not in the New RenAIssance Club yet? Here's where to join   ***NOTE: This email address isn't monitored! If you need help, please email: support@perrymarshall.com If you’d rather not receive *any* more emails from us, Unsubscribe Perry S. Marshall & Assoc 805 Lake Street #295 Oak Park, Illinois 60301 United States