| Only 2 seats left for my August 4-Man Intensive Contact Josh@PerryMarshall.com
Mel, It was a gorgeous afternoon in May and I was in the lovely metropolis of Peoria Illinois, attending a "SUCCESS SEMINAR" with Barbara Bush, Zig Ziglar and a bunch of other sales superstars.
I didn't know it then, but I was about to get demoted because for 18 months I'd sold next to nothing at my sales job. Even though I spent the year pounding the phone, making calls, setting appointments, seeing people, every deal went south. I was living on borrowed hope.
I had a 2 year old girl at home, Laura was a stay at home mom, our credit cards were spiraling out of control. I knew some bridge was gonna buckle soon and when it did, the cars were going to go splashing into the river. Glug Glug Glug.
That afternoon in Peoria was the day I discovered the world of direct marketing. I bought $300 of tapes and manuals on a credit card that still had room on it and went home hoping that finally, at long last, I had found my elusive answer.
The next day, when I told my boss how it was possible to use advertising to attract prospects and it was no longer going to be necessary to make cold calls all day long, he looked at me like I was the world's biggest MARK with a red bullseye on my head and dismissed the whole thing with a wave of his hand.
Shortly after that he demoted me to production manager, a job I loathed.
By day I worked my job. At night I studied that marketing manual, and listened to the tapes over and over again. Finances continued to worsen.
I applied for an evening teaching job at a tech school. I would never see my wife or little girl but maybe if I worked 16 hours a day I could stop the bleeding.
If a job like that was punishment, I probably deserved it - given my continuous string of failures. Maybe that job would teach me a lesson. Maybe that lesson would finally sink in. Then maybe I would turn things around.
I couldn't go back into engineering cuz it didn't pay enough. Everyone I talked to about a sales job asked me what my sales and commissions were. It was awfully tricky to give them an honest answer without outright admitting that I had nothing to show for the last 18 months of my life.
I didn't get the teaching job.
A few months later, a tiny company offered me a position. I'm not sure whether they could tell how bad my track record was, but I did understand their products. Plus their self image might not have been a lot better than mine was. They were barely getting off the ground.
I started that job December 1. I'd gotten fired from the previous job a week before. But because of Thanksgiving break, the new boss never managed to find out about it. So I managed to jump from one side of the buckled bridge to the other, without my car falling into the drink. (My car was a $1200 Honda Civic with a recently blown engine.)
This new company was getting leads from the Internet and they were quality leads. Plus they'd been getting 'em for quite some time, and nobody had been following up on them, so all the sudden I wasn't cold calling anymore.
Something clicked. My commission check in January was the biggest check I'd ever gotten.
By the end of my time at that company, I'd managed to apply a good deal of the stuff I learned from those Dan Kennedy and Paul Hartunian newsletters and acquire a decent reputation. Over the next four years my income doubled.
We got a ton of publicity, generated a lot of nice leads, and my boss sold his company for $18 million.
During that four years, as I cut my teeth as a direct marketer, I spent as little money on education as I could get away with. We had lots of debt and no extra money. Some months my education investment was as little as twenty bucks a month. Occasionally I finagled a trip to a marketing or negotiation seminar somewhere. Sometimes I managed to stick a product or book on my expense report.
My goal was:
GET AS MUCH MARKETING EDUCATION FOR YOUR DOLLAR AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN, AND STRETCH THAT DOLLAR AS FAR AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE.
That plan was fine for where I was at - employee with marketing projects on the side, little minnows that reel in a couple hundred bucks here and there. I'm not sure anyone squeezed more out of a twelve dollar a month newsletter subscription than I did. Yessir, I got myself a quality, economical education.
Then.... I hung out my shingle. Struck out my on own. Started servicing clients. Trying to publicize myself and my expertise and sell info products. Began running into all manner of industries and situations I'd never encountered before.
This was a WHOLE NEW BALL GAME.
The slide-on-by with as little expense as possible strategy was obsolete. I was now on a STEEP learning curve and I could NOT afford one bad move.
Suddenly I never spent less than $300-400 per month on my education. As I recall, in my first full year out of the Dilbert Cube, my total investment in all such things, including plane tickets and everything else was $11,000.
I was getting my Street MBA. I could not afford to miss any relevant insight. If I needed a skill and if someone could teach it to me, I was paying their fee. I made my purchases very carefully... but I did not hesitate to make them.
Laura and I were talking the other day. She reminded me: "You know Perry, most peoples' spouses do not have the attitude of "Honey, if that's what you need in order to do what you need to do, then GO."
Oh yeah. That's right, I almost forgot. Most people need to be sold... and sold again. And again. And again. On the necessity and value of investing in yourself. Most people stop halfway.
You must not let any lack of knowledge or skill get in the way of finishing what you need to finish. You master it... you hire it done... whatever it takes. But you don't cheat.
There's a couple of other things that really helped.
When I found a good well, I drank it dry.
I did NOT run around all over the place, sampling every free thing in the world. I kept my list of mentors narrow. It takes a brainiac superhuman to integrate the approaches of 26 different masters. I can count on one hand the people I know who can do that, and I'm not one of them.
Another thing: I "picked the chicken clean." This was a very big deal. I read and listened to things 2, 3, 4 times, not just once. In 2015 with Twitter and Facebook and the bulging firehose of information most people drink from, that almost sounds antiquated. But it's necessary.
Most folks are 10 miles wide and a quarter inch deep. Having nine communication channels just gets in the way of learning or mastering anything. There's 144,000,000 videos on YouTube and you'll learn nothing by watching 10 nanoseconds of every single one of them.
You only master by going deep.
I have friends in the marketing biz who tell me, "Perry, you sell mastery. Nobody wants mastery. That's not fashionable. Everybody wants a quick fix. Just give it to 'em."
Sorry. That's not how I roll. I think the best quick fix of all IS mastery. Always has been, always will be.
Master SOMETHING. Any skill you know will last a long time. Know how to do it backwards and forwards, inside and out, and guarantee someone a definite result.
3-step algorithm for success:
1) Find out the price
2) Pay the price
3) GETUP = FALLDOWN+1
Maybe it takes you a week.
Maybe it takes you a year.
Either way, a little bit of mastery is better than a big, half-ass fantasy.
Perry Marshall P.S.: Only 2 spots left for my August 13-14 Four Man Intensive. Apply by contacting Josh@PerryMarshall.com |
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