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One of Australia’s Wealthiest Property Developers, Having Turned Over More Than $1 Billion Worth of Property Development Deals You’ve probably never heard of Bob Andersen, he’s the guy behind the scenes putting together some of the largest property development deals in the country. I’ve managed to track him down in a rare interview to get inside the mind of this real estate genius. If you’re a property investor and want to take your game to the next level, time to listen up! In this interview you will discover: – Different types of property development and which type is the best for you – The biggest mistakes made by first-time property developers and how to avoid them – How becoming a property developer can save you thousands in fees and taxes – How to build your property development portfolio in just a few hours a day – The Mindset of a successful property developer as compared to a hobbyist property investor http://www.propertymastermind.com.au/ Click Play To Hear Streaming: Download the Podcast [mp3 – 39mb – 43min] Full Transcript Click To Read Full Transcript West Interviews Bob Andersen Speakers: West: West Loh Bob: Bob Anderson West: Welcome, folks, to today’s interview. And today, I’m very privileged to have with us Mr. Bob Andersen. Now Bob has been involved in property development for a very long time, over thirty years. And he’s in a conglomerate of people who control over $1 billion worth of property. And that’s a super, super impressive stat. What’s more impressive is Bob not only has a personal portfolio but he’s also doing it day to day and he’s also teaching people how to do it. So we’re very lucky to have Bob with us today. And I want to welcome you to today’s interview, Bob. Bob: Thanks, West. Great to be here. West: Absolutely. Now tell us, Bob, when you speak to people and they ask you what it is that you do—because I know you’ve got such a range of skill set—what is it essentially that people need to know about you? Bob: Well West, primarily, I’m in the property investment, property development area. But ultimately, what I do is I use property development more as a vehicle for getting property investment at cost price whether it’s for myself or for investor clients. Property development is really a vehicle to accumulate the asset class of property, primarily residential property. So yup, I’m a developer but there’s a reason for being a developer. So what do I do? I’m a developer and I’m an investor and my clients are all investors. West: So a lot of people who are kind of thinking of getting into development but maybe they’ve only done a couple of residential or maybe they haven’t done any property and they’re looking at getting into something on a small level, is that something that you help people primarily and teach people how to do as well? Bob: Yeah. I heard Mal saying, “Never pay retail.” So myself, that’s part of the reason I got involved in property development, really. It was a vehicle for getting property investments at a—well, not wholesale price—but absolute cost price. So people, sometimes they haven’t done a development at all and they’re investors with one or two investments of their own and they see that potentially property development could be a great way of accumulating property investments fast and at cost. So with those people, I have a whole property development education program for those people who want to make the next step up from property investor to just more property developer. West: Wow. And I think there’s a perception in the public that you’ve got to be some sort of sophisticated, right up there and have done hundreds of deals before you can into development. I mean that’s kind of—when I was going through—at least, that was the perception. I mean if you look at a lot of the property work out there and books and tapes and seminars, they always show you a progression where development is like the ultimate goal. But you’re saying that people can—with some knowledge—get into property development and make it work for them. Bob: Yeah, they can. I think one of the first things that people need to do is to know why they want to get involved in property development. West: So find their reason. Bob: Yeah…and a good reason. I was talking to somebody last week. He actually wanted to become involved in property development. So I put the question, “Why do you want to do this?” And they say, “Oh, I see property developers and they’ve got big fancy houses, they drive red Ferraris. They often have young women hanging off their arms.” And I say, “Well, that’s not a really good… It makes me sound very unsuccessful.” You know, I’ve been married for thirty years. I don’t drive a red Ferrari. And I haven’t got the biggest house in the suburbs. But I think you have to go in there for the right reasons. And initially, as I said it’s a vehicle. It’s a way of accumulating wealth. It’s a way of accumulating property. So for those people, get the reason right first. And that’s important…having the right reasons. Then the next question is ‘well, how do I get involved?’ And really, just like everything, you have to be educated. You have to gain knowledge and increase your knowledge for leveraging off people with far greater knowledge. West: Absolutely. And you’ve got to learn from people who are in the industry and doing it and are the real deal. I mean, there’s kind of a lot of pretenders out there and obviously, I’m not going to name names or anything but there are people out there who don’t walk the talk and there are people out there who don’t actually do what they claim to do or say they do. And you have a record that just speaks for itself with all the developments that you’ve done: resorts, hotels, government buildings and all those kind of things that do that. So how can people, I guess, identify who to learn from and what kind of signs can they look for when looking for a means or looking for someone to actually leverage from? Bob: I think they’ve got to do a little bit of their own due diligence, really. In my case, I’m a real developer. I have a development company, Positive Property Strategies, where we’re involved in projects all the time. Even currently, you know, retirement villages, combination projects, townhouses, units—we’re always doing projects. And so I’m a real property developer, therefore, I have the ability to pass that knowledge on. We’re like talking about people who may be trying to pass knowledge on that are not property developers but they’re outs… look, you’ve got to do your own due diligence on the subject. West: So you’re a developer first and you’re teaching people afterwards. You’re not teaching people first as your core business and then kind of trying to do property development on the side. And I think there’s a big distinction, a big difference there. Bob: Yeah, exactly. And I’ve developed this course. It took me quite a long time to develop it. It’s basically the culmination of nearly thirty years of experience that I’ve put into in my course. And I think that shows for anybody who really sees it. West: Absolutely. Bob: Credibility’s everything, really. West: Definitely. And I definitely like to chat a little bit about it later because, you know, before our interview today, Bob was actually giving me a little sneak peek at the course. And it’s really exciting to see what he’s put into it. It seems like kind of a labor of love that he’s actually put almost everything into his brain that people can follow in a blueprint. But before we get to that, Bob, why don’t you tell us maybe a couple of strategies that you recommend in today’s volatile environment with regard to property development? How can someone get into property if they don’t have, you know, a million dollars in the bank? And how do you specifically help people would be a really good addition to how people get in. Bob: Yeah. Well look, knowledge is power. So first thing people need to do is actually to educate themselves—make an investment in their future. And that requires spending some money. That’s fine because the greatest asset is you have is yourself. So you need to invest in yourself. And there are sources of knowledge out there. When I started, when I originally sort of moved from, if you like, from a short period in real estate into property development, there’s nothing out there. There were no books, there were no courses, there were no mentors. I did it the hard way. I made a few mistakes along the way. So increase that level of knowledge. And then ultimately, you know, you have to make the first step. Some people keep accumulating knowledge, accumulating knowledge but they never make their step. Eventually, you have to make that move. I always say you don’t have to have an IQ of 150, you don’t have to be a multi-millionaire, you don’t have to drive red Ferraris to get into property development. So start small. You might be looking at something like a duplex, two townhouses to get or maybe a triplex of three. You can get into that fairly readily. If you have no cash at all and you’re building up this experience, you can look at more creative ways of getting into things—joint ventures. I’ve done a lot of joint ventures and there are so many different ways of structuring joint ventures. You might look at joint ventures as a way of bringing in somebody with some money… West: And you provide your time. Bob: …and you provide your time and the knowledge that you’re building. There are all sorts of things out there. There are things like using fancy stuff like call options and building equity into deals and that sort of thing. There are creative ways of getting in that requires knowledge of that. And also, look, at the end of the day you’re going to do some work. So there are creative ways of getting in. But finance wise too, on the smaller projects, some of the banks are coming back in and starting to lend retail finance going for twos and three townhouses at higher LVR’s. So there are some too good opportunities to get in on the ground floor. West: Absolutely. So even if you don’t have any money, you can still get your hands dirty and get some experience. And once you find some really good information that you can act on and find, I guess, a strategy that suits your personality, I guess—in a way, Bob—I mean, you were saying before that there are so many different things you can do but some people like to do something that’s more attuned to their personality and their risk profile I guess. Bob: That’s right. Some people are more entrepreneurial. Basically, I’m a property developer or a property investor. Also, do you make entrepreneurs… there are things to suit people’s personality. Some people are more creative than others. But, you know, there’s a deal around the corner for everybody to fit everybody. West: Absolutely. And I think, even that mindset in itself, people are saying that there aren’t deals out there. And someone like Bob who is day in and day out… there’s always a deal. Bob: Yeah. And look, if you miss out on a deal of the year, the next one’s only a week away. West: Absolutely. Absolutely. Wow. That’s powerful. So what are some of the strategies that you give, Bob, to people who may have a little bit of cash lying around and maybe come to see you for, you know, “How can you help me, Bob?” What kind of things do you say to those people and maybe if you can give us a case study of how you’ve helped someone or given someone some advice or a strategy that has saved them some money or made them a lot of money? Bob: One of the first things to do before you say, “I’m looking for a site,”—the first thing you do is not look for a site—the first thing you do is have a look at your structure. You need to get your structure right. And that will depend on what you’re going to do. Are you going to look for a site to flick. Are you going to develop something and sell it? Are you going to develop something and hold, the structure will vary. Have a look at the finance and how you’re going to fund this thing: Are you going to use your own cash? Are you going to use somebody else’s? How it’s going to be funded. But beyond that, before you start looking for a site, is to decide on the answers to those questions, then we have look at what sort of deal fits the person. West: So kind of do it like a mini business plan. Bob: Yeah, a mini business plan. Yeah, exactly. Some people come to me that they’re already into development. They say, “Look, where do go from here?” Some people will say, “Look, I want to get into it. Where do I start?” Just start with the knowledge. Once you’ve got the basic knowledge, then you can build upon that with a mentoring program or whatever’s the next step. Now at the moment people arrive with a deal and a title. They already started. It’s amazing, you know. You see something has started. It’s scary sometimes but actually some people are actually in their first project and are quite lost. And I pick up people at various stages. But as far as helping people in the deals, um, I mean you’ve met Ben Smith recently. Ben runs my portfolio turbocharger program. Ben started off basically as a mentoring student and I know he’d be right for the deal with a land subdivision, potential joint venture for a 20 lot subdivision. And I was like helping him with that in terms of how to structure the deal, how to structure the joint venture, how to make the win win with both parties. That was a great outcome. It was a great outcome for the land owner. It was a great outcome for Ben. And that was a 20 lot subdivision which actually, the way it’s financially structured, meant no money into the deal for the actual developer—it’s a 20 lot subdivision. Great outcome. West: Wow. It’s crazy. Bob: I often use that one as an example because it’s a very good deal of having… you can actually get into a deal and create at least… West: So Ben obviously didn’t know that by his own back. But he got into the game and he came and saw you because he knew you were actually, you know, you know what you’re doing and you were able to systematically look at all the different aspects of the deal and put something together that was a win. Bob: That’s right. That was a ‘no money down’ deal. West: Wow. Powerful stuff. So if someone is sort of getting—you mentioned before people kind of just dive in and they don’t really know what they’re doing. And I was also reading in your book, which we’ll talk about later, but what are some of the most common mistakes, Bob, that people make when they try and get in their first property development deal and they just, you know, they don’t know what they’re doing and they can potentially lose a lot of money? What are some of the pitfalls that people can stay away from based on your experience from the most common list of things? Bob: One thing that scares me is that often with people starting out is they don’t know that they don’t know. It’s a dangerous thing. It’s a good thing to know that you don’t know but when you don’t know that you don’t know, that is very dangerous. And sometimes I go in some of the large property forums and you go and you see people coming up with a question, “I just bought a development site. What do I do next?” They’re asking other people out there who have never done a development for advice. That’s pretty scary stuff. So where can they go wrong? Well, due diligence is a big thing when you’re looking for a site. Some people just launch out, they believe a real estate agent. Nothing wrong with real estate agents but caveat emptor: do your own due diligence. I always say, first thing, get a little team together-be it an architect, be it a town planner and do your due diligence on the site. It might be a site without a development approval. What’s the zoning? What’s the likelihood of success on the development? What’s the yield? What can we get on it—two townhouses, four townhouses? Some people just launch out, buy a property without knowing and it’s quite scary. So yeah, initially, the right sort of due diligence. Know the structure before you enter into a contract. Some people just launch into a contract signing their own personal name with intent of developing and holding and then they find out, Well, I don’t really want it in my own name after all. And it’s an expensive business to try and take it out and sign personal name back into a trust or a company—whatever the structure is. So get these things in place early. West: Absolutely. So I guess it all comes back to educating yourself and making sure that you have at least a base level of education. Personally, I actually respect people who dive in and do stuff but I think when there are things at stake, such as people’s lives and people’s families, you’ve got to actually have that base foundation. And I think a great step, as we’re talking about before, is going to Bob’s site and getting his eBook. I just spent the last few days reading it a few times and it’s an amazing, amazing resource. If nothing else, it’s free. It just teaches you everything…all the basics of property development. And so Bob, for people who want to know a little bit more about your book, how did the structure come? And I’m guessing, over the years, you’ve thought, ‘How can I Put together something that just teaches people the backbone of what I do.’ Bob: Well, I wanted to get the basics out there because I was bumping into people all over the place, I was seeing… West: You’re always getting the same questions probably. Bob: They’re all the same questions and you know, as I said, you go into some of the property forums and you see what they were really doing. So I thought, ‘Look, at least let’s get some basic information out there about the development process, the sorts of development you can do, what are the risks or basically the advantages of doing property development. It’s about a 41 page ebook and it’s free. So that helps as well. West: And it’s pretty damn good. Bob: It just gives people a bit of a feel for property development: what it’s really about, what some of the advantages are, what the risks are, how you can get into deals. Obviously, here you can get a lot of wealth from it as well. So it’s a good first base, if you like, to go to. West: Absolutely. And one of the things I noticed about it is people can start doing this in their spare time. I mean they don’t have to quit their job tomorrow and start going full—you know—full time property. They can actually learn and kind of do it on their weekends. Bob: Look, I don’t want to make property development sound like it’s really easy. But it can be. With the right help, it’s relatively easy. Look, very often people have done a course or start to mentor or have what I call a day job. And most of them are quite happy or quite comfortable to do, say, three townhouse projects—let’s say that’s an entry level: 2 or 3 townhouse project—in their spare time while they‘re currently in a full time job. A lot of that comes from two areas. It comes from getting the right help when you’re doing it. And then getting the right team of people around you. And look, the thing is, once you start doing it, once you’ve done your first project, like you might do a 3 townhouse project—let’s say it’s a moderate but a successful one—you might pull, let’s say, $70,000 profit per townhouse. At the end of 12 or 18 months, it’s $210,000 worth of profit. But it could be a cash property if you sell them. It could be even better if you decide to keep some, because then you can hold it as a long term investment. And because you don’t pay tax unless you sell it, you’ve got this accumulating asset that you can still harvest the equity of. So all of a sudden, you know, the property development part time thing is making 3x or 4x as much as the day job. So the temptation is whether to do it full time. West: For sure. Bob: Some do it sometimes. Some people are happy to do a little project every couple of years. Use that to build their property portfolio with a long term goal, whether that long term goal is…it’s usually retiring early, change their lifestyle. Some people might develop three every 12, 18 months, 2 years. Sell one, keep two. Sell two, keep one. Use the extra cash. West: I guess that’s all part of their strategy. Like the overall strategy that you were talking about before—putting down on paper what it is you want out of it. I mean if you want to travel the world for the rest of your life and drive Ferraris, you’re going to have to probably work a little bit harder than someone who just wants to be able to live and have their expenses paid by their investments. So on that note, I was reading one of the principles you were teaching Bob, (in the book) where you teach people how a property developer saves way more money than a retail investor for exactly the same deal. Bob: Yah. West: Give us a really quick summary of how that process works. I thought that was really fascinating. Bob: Okay. Let’s take a little three townhouse project, let’s say three or four townhouse projects. Just to make it easier to understand, let’s break it down per townhouse, okay? So we might be cutting a three townhouse project into three or four townhouse project into four. Looking at it on a per townhouse basis, so a typical townhouse, let’s say, might sell on completion for about $500,000—normal bread and butter townhouse in one of the suburbs. Now that townhouse is probably going to cost somewhere between $400,000 $425,000 to develop. Now what I mean by that is all the costs are going to run up to let’s say about $410,000 $415,000. That cost includes the land, professional fees of the consultants, the approval process, the finance, the counsel fees, all the bits and pieces. So what you’ve got on completion, you’ve got a property that’s worth $500,000. What you’re going to do, obviously, you can sell it at the end and you make a cash profit. You make a cash profit, it becomes income tax paid. That’s great. You get a bundle of money, you pay your tax and you move on. The other thing you can do—and you can even do a mix of the two—is to actually hold that property at the other end. Now when you’ve developed—let’s say it’s worth $500,000. Now what’s the bank going to lend you? Well typically, a bank on an investment will say, “We’ll lend eighty percent without mortgage insurance.” So they’re only going to lend you $400,000 on a property that only owes you, let’s say, $410,000. So really, all you have to do is leave $10,000 into that deal. And the other $90,000 is profit. So the bank will lend you almost a hundred percent of your cost. Now if there’s been even a smidgen of growth during that twelve month project, what was $500,000 at the beginning or say even a five percent growth, it’ll be worth $525,000 by the time you complete it. So they lend eighty percent of that and it’s all your costs. So really, all you’re doing is you’re leaving a development profit in as your deposit on the finance at the other end. So the bank is fully funding all your costs. So the equity that you put in on the front of the project to do the development, you can now take out, leave your profit in and hold that property. And really, that’s how you accumulate wealth. So all of a sudden, you’ve got a property where you’ve got a twenty percent deposit which is just your profit. You’ve got your equity back out and you’re going to do the same thing again. West: Wow. So it allows you to essentially replicate much more than if you tried to do it on your own. Bob: That’s right. The normal way is to go and buy a $500,000 property for $500,000. By the time you pay legals and stamp duty, it might owe you $520,000—it’s worth $500,000—you get a yield of negative. So you have to put in your $100,000 from some of it—often it’s equity over other projects like properties or whatever. But what you’ve got to do now, of course you’ve got to wait for normal organic growth, you’ve got to wait for the market to increase your properties in value. When they have you refinance, you harvest your equity. So you’re waiting. You’re waiting on the market. The other way you take control of and actually create that equity immediately is through property development. And that’s the principle of it. West: Just from the structure and the concept. Wow. That’s powerful. Really powerful stuff. Bob: So you accumulate a lot of property quicker. If your goal is to retire, then you’re retiring early. West: Absolutely. Wow. Bob: Or you’re retiring with more money. West: Definitely. Definitely. And I think that’s a distinction that people would do well to read about, go back to Bob’s book, check it out and really do some numbers. And for the same deal, as I said before, you can get up to twenty, thirty, possibly more percentage back on your money. And I think that’s really powerful. I want to talk about one more concept before we start telling people how they can find out more about you, Bob. Potentially, for more sophisticated investors watching this interview, maybe they’ve got a little bit more money in the bank than someone who is just starting out and they were wondering what they can do, how you can potentially help them. How do you help people with a higher platform? Bob: Well, a couple of ways. What we’re talking about, I guess, my whole thing’s property development so it’s really property investment but my vehicle of getting me faster to property development. So really, you can almost break property development into two areas: You’ve got active property development. And then you’ve got passive property development. So active property development would be somebody who wants to learn the ropes, get in to developments, do their own developments. Okay? So they have to educate themselves and need a hand on the way through. And they become property developers. They may stay small developers or they may become big developers. That’s active development. Now the other way is if you like is to get all the advantages of property development, but passively. So what that means, a passive developer, for instance, may be somebody who really doesn’t want to get involved in the day to day operation of the development. One good example could be a brain surgeon. So he’s just too busy operating people’s brains. So that’s a near enough to a 7-day a week job, 14 hours a day. West: Yup. Absolutely. Bob: So he doesn’t want to take his mind off that, thank goodness. So what he wants to do, he wants to work his money. West: Yeah. He wants to use property development as a vehicle. Bob: Exactly. So he uses that, his asset base and his cashflow, to accumulate properties passively. So some of these high net worth individuals may come into a project with us. It could be a joint venture structure. We have different structures where people can come in on a passive basis. And that way, they can get the benefits of property development almost—well, not quite as cheaply as doing it yourself because obviously, if someone’s doing it for you…in our case they pay for that, but they can get—eventually into property way below retail price. Like I say, I never pay retail. I mean I can’t pay retail for anything. Well actually, you know what? I just can’t go out, I can’t buy a car retail. I can’t buy a computer retail. I’ve got to find a deal. So I look for a deal with property. West: And I’m really impressed by the fact that Bob takes that philosophy and it’s part of his mindset, it’s part of what he believes in. One question I would ask you, Bob, is about how you continue to cultivate your mindset and what are some of the characteristics of the successful students that you have, mindset wise, how they’re thinking, how they’re building their knowledge, what kind of philosophies are they taking into their investments? Bob: Well I think, first of all, most of the people that come on and want to do a project, we only ask them why, what’s their motivation? Because if they don’t have the right motivations, it’s not going to work. And if things get a little bit tough, they’ll give up. So having an end plan to it, they may become motivated to achieve that end plan. So once the motivation’s there, that’s the driving force behind it. So it makes them a lot more motivated and open to accumulating knowledge that they need. And if there are little bushfires to put out along the way and they’re motivated, they’ve got the end goal in mind, and they’ll deal with it. It will help them deal with it. So that’s the right sort of mindset: is to go into it for the right reasons and not just for a red Ferrari. That can be a side road. A red Ferrari and a big house—that’s a side road. A little while ago, I was talking to someone about the characteristics of a good developer, okay, in terms of being able to solve problems, being a reliable thinker. But as I said, you don’t have to have an IQ of beyond 140 or 150; just an average intelligence but a drive to learn and a drive to succeed. That’s a good work ethic. They’re the basis. West: Absolutely. And I guess, obviously, when you’re looking at working with someone, you need to make sure that those things are in place. Otherwise, they’re going to waste your time and it’s not going to work. And obviously, time is money. Bob: Yeah, that’s right. You know, if people move on beyond that or go mentor with somebody, they need to have all the basics in place in terms of that initial knowledge through the course or whatever and then that are of motivation because, you know, I wear a few hats. I have a property development business to run and I can only take on a certain number of mentorees, if you like. And it’s a matter of really choosing those who really want to move forward. West: Absolutely. So on that note, Bob, I want to talk now about your mentoring programs. You actually offer a few things. We’re going to talk a little bit about your upcoming product which I’ve had the pleasure of previewing just a few minutes ago. But your mentoring program, people can actually leverage off your knowledge and have personal contact with you, is that correct? Bob: At the higher level, yes. It’s all about… you know, this whole education thing of being educated and building knowledge is about investing in yourself and then leveraging off other people’s knowledge. You can knock five or ten years off your learning curve by accumulating the knowledge of… West: Well, you’ve had 30+ years of experience and people can get straight into that. Bob: The initial thing that people need is they need to build their knowledge up of what property development is, what it’s all about. Obviously, the more technical aspects, just the processes of how it works and sort of people that you integrate with. I’ve got a little saying to ‘what is property development.’ Well, what it is, it’s about managing people and managing processes. So we’ve got the procedural part of property development. We’ve got the processes to go through whether it’s the purchase of the site, obtaining of the approval, finance, project management or sales—whatever it is—the processes. You need to know those. The other thing is managing people on the way through. You’ve got various people to work with…an architect. The good thing is, you know, property development, you actually subcontract the areas of it. It’s a bit like renovating. You can go and renovate a house. You can just get a builder in to do everything or you can go and then start organizing one trade at a time. It’s been like that with development. You get a really good architect and then if you like, organize some of the other consultants on your behalf and you just control it. But this knowledge base is the initial thing. So that’s what I call my property mastermind property development course— West: And where can people go to, to actually get into that? Is there a site or…? Bob: Well, initially, if they go to www.propertymastermind.com.au, that’s my website where you can download the free ebook. I think that’s a good place to start. West: Absolutely. Bob: Once they’ve downloaded the free ebook, then they’ll automatically be on my database. Once you’re on there, when I have a launch, I’ll start to send out a few emails. So I like to send out more content. West: Just like this. Bob: Like this, yeah. West: Absolutely. Bob: Another good, sort of, good content leading on to the course. And then the course will be available for a period of time. People, if they want to, can purchase the course through my website. It’s very easy to do. West: Now the course itself, Bob, it’s a monster, of course, I’ll be honest. It’s got twenty something CDs, one big manual and a support manual, four DVDs, software program, retails for $400. Tell us about the actual structure of the course, Bob, and how it’s going to help people take that next level from not knowing where to go into having a blueprint to get into property development. Bob: West, I built it in a sequential order I know that people need to know by now. West: You were saying before people don’t know what they need to know. You know what they need to know. Bob: Yeah, I know what they need to know even if they don’t. So what I’ve built into the Property Mastermind Property Development Course is all the knowledge that they’ll need to take the next step into property development. I keep saying, you don’t have to be brilliant. It’s all sequential. People that have done it just say, “Look, it is really easy to follow. It’s detailed but it’s not difficult to understand.” It’s built upon lessons, about forty one lessons or forty one chapters of covering everything from beginning to end. And within those lessons, I refer to a support manual which accompanies the lessons. I have a 370 page support manual. It’s all the things like check list and documents and templates of… West: Exactly the stuff that you use in your business. Bob: Yeah, but these are copies out of lots of my projects and the things that I use everyday. West: But you paid probably tens of thousands, if not more… Bob: I learned the hard way. West: To develop. Bob: Exactly. Yup. And that’s in the support manual saying Welcome to an area of lessons and say ‘refer to the feasibility template’ or ‘refer to the due diligence template.’ You go to the support manual and there it is. So we’ve got the lessons. We’ve got the support manual. And beyond that, I’ve actually recorded this set of 20 CDs which is really the whole of the 41 lessons in audio. So if you like, you can put that on to an mp3 player and play it at the gym, you can play the CDs in the car. Because some people are more audio— they like to hear, they like to read. West: That’s for sure. Bob: So one can reinforce the other. I put in as well a six-hour set of DVDs or live workshop I did with some of our investors. It was a closed door workshop. We go through the whole development process but in looking at different angles that aren’t in the lessons. Lots of Powerpoints. We’ve probably got a hundred Powerpoint slides in there in the set of CDs as well. We go through a whole heap of things: create a finance, the whole due diligence, the process. 6 hour DVD set. Now beyond that, something new is I’ve done a series of interviews lately with my inner circle of consultants. So it’s me interviewing them. So I’d interview my property accountant, property lawyer, one of my builders, project marketer, commercial finance broker, my interior designer—these sorts of people. So that’s me interviewing them. That’s in a set of 8 CDs. West: I imagine—I mean—the experience you bring to know what questions to ask. I mean you could put a newbie in front of these guys and they just wouldn’t know what to ask. Bob: No. That would be a 30-second interview. So I dragged out all the knowledge out of them. And that’s valuable. Also, in my lessons, what I plugged in to the back of those is three case studies. So three deals that we’ve done, three projects we’ve done, real offers— a subdivision and two townhouse projects. We’ve absolutely pulled the deals apart, from how we came across the deals, showed due diligence that we did, how we contracted the deals, terms and conditions in the contract, how the deal came together, how we financed them, how we got the approvals, the project management side, how it all came together, the marketing, the sales at the backend on three of those. There’s no substitute for actually going inside real deals and see how that happens. And also looking at our early bird special, for those who get in an order early, is I’ve done a series called ‘Under the Microscope.’ What I’ve done, these are sites that we’ve looked at that were on the market for sale and we got in and pulled the lease apart until about these are the things to look for in this particular deal. These are the things I liked about the site, the things I didn’t like about the site, problems that could arise… West: It’s almost as if someone was looking over your shoulder and accessing your brain. Bob: Yeah, exactly. And the things that people come back to me often and say, “What’s the hardest thing with getting in your first project?” And people that are looking at getting into their first project say, “…to know a deal when I see one. If I see a site, how do I really know if it’s a deal?” So part of that is the due diligence analysis. And the other part is the pure number crunching. So this is my, if you like, my due diligence analysis of how I look at a deal. West: Because, I mean, in thirty years you would have pretty much got it down to a fine art. Would it be fair to say? Bob: It would be, yeah. And all of that—the due diligence stuff—is in the course. So that’s called Under the Microscope. I’ve pulled out five of those that I’ve looked at probably the last six months with full analysis. Probably an early bird special. Now there’s something else I’ve put in to the course. It has to do with the number crunching. How you number crunch or feasibility analysis, all that’s in the course. We’ve got four chapters just about how to do feasibilities. But I put a software program in there. Not just a cheap little Excel that somebody has put together. I’ve seen a few of them around and they’re just full of holes. This is a proprietary software package which has been on the market for twenty years. It’s called Feastudy. The deal is called Feastudy Lite. That’s the program. It’s an excellent program. And the recommended retail price is $440. And it’s great value for $440. It’s all you’ll ever need to do to do small development projects. I’ve put it in my course because I really want people to have a professional presentation when they put it before the bank or before a valuer. And also, it really makes the number crunching easy. I mean who wants to work out interest in a deal the long way? It’s a great program. It’s constantly being redeveloped. Been around for twenty years. I’ve put that in the course. West: Wow. Fantastic. So it sounds like, Bob, you’ve literally given the entire toolbox that anyone would need to get into property development from point a to point z: everything they’re going to need, the foundations they’re going to set. And we were talking before about information and education being the first step into getting in without getting burnt massively, and there’s literally no better way to get in from someone who’s done it for so long. I, for one, am excited about the release of this product and I think it’s going to help many, many people avoid the traps and the misconceptions of getting into property development. So I guess on that note, Bob, is there any parting words you want to say to people watching the interview, a bit of a sage advice or anything you want to impart on leaving? Bob: On leaving? Uh, other than no matter what endeavor you want to get involved in, get a good ground. Look, it doesn’t matter whether it’s property or outside property, there’s just so much knowledge out there these days. Do the right due diligence but don’t be afraid to invest in yourself. The best asset you have is yourself and invest in that, increase your knowledge. With knowledge comes confidence. And with confidence comes the inner strength to take that step, that first step. West: Absolutely. Beautiful. And on that note, just really quickly, if they want to get a hold of Bob’s free report, it’s at www.propertymastermind.com.au. I highly recommend reading the free report if you’re looking at getting into property development or even if you’re just looking at learning about the industry or taking another step in the right direction. You can read more about Bob’s course from the links included in and around this interview. And I hope you’ve got something of value. Bob Andersen, thank for talking to us. Hopefully, it’s added value to the viewers and I appreciate your time. Bob: Absolutely! A pleasure, West. West: Cheers! Bob: Cheers.

Author 4 Bestselling Books, Founder Vision Publishing, Mentor To Business Owners, Board of Directors 8 Companies As you listen to this you’ll immediately feel Brian’s business acumen has come from an extensive background of experience. Sharing his insights on how to evaluate, structure and grow a business he also reveals some of the deepest traps he sees entrepreneurs make, and how to avoid them. His books are revered as business classics, and I even get time to soak up the essence of his best-selling philosophies. In this interview you will discover: – How Brian overcame incredible self doubt to launch a successful publishing company and become a best selling author – Key Lessons from being headhunted on a small business advisory board with a large network – Why everyone should ‘be in business for themselves’ – Habits of the worlds most successful business people – Why most people fall in love with their product (bad) when they should be falling in love with their market (and how you can too) – The importance of PE ratio http://briansher.com.au/ Click Play To Hear Streaming: Download the Podcast [ mp3 – 43 mb – 46 mins ] Full Transcript Click To Read Full Transcript West Interviews Brian Sher Speakers: West: West Loh Brian: Brian Sher West: Welcome to the call, folks. And today we’re very privileged to have Brian Sher on the line. Brian was born in South Africa and moved to Australia to study a degree in Marketing but he’s since gone on to grow many companies, one of the main ones being Vision Publishing, where he’s got some books—which I actually have in my personal library and I’ve been reading for a long time now and it’s been very, very useful for me. And Brian’s also been recruited as a dynamic and exciting speaker and adviser to many, many top business owners and professionals. So we’re very lucky to have Brian on the call today. And welcome, Brian! Brian: Well thanks, West. How are you? West: Very well indeed. I’m excited to speak to you today. Before the call, I was actually just reading through one of your books, How to make Money Out of Thin Air. It’s a fantastic read and I recommend people to go and have a look at it. So Brian, why don’t you tell us a bit about your journey, how you got into, firstly, running these books, that would be a good start. Yeah, what was the premise behind you being able to reveal some of these secrets? Brian: A lot of people ask that question. And the truth of the matter is, is that I don’t consider myself to be an author, I don’t consider myself to be a speaker, I don’t consider myself to be a business consultant. I just—like many other people—started life by thinking ‘What am I going to do?’ And having left university, I suddenly realized that working in a job probably wasn’t for me. So I just set out to do the best I could, you know. And what that means is that when you’re faced with the prospect of not getting a job, you have to start looking at the alternatives. And sometimes it was quite scary, quite unsure what to do. And going into business at a young age, you know, is always a great thing because you start off with a lot of energy, enthusiasm; but the flipside of it is that you’re quite naïve and therefore you do things that you wouldn’t do if you actually had some common sense. And that’s your biggest advantage, really. Because, you know, how many people have you spoken to who have been in business three, four, five years and they say, “You know, if I knew back then what I know now, I probably would never have done it.”? I’m sure you’ve heard that many times. And I was in that boat—it seemed like a good idea to go into business and I was excited about the prospect of doing that and the thrill of doing it. And so off I went. You know, I started a number of businesses in different areas and I met some great people along the way. And like everybody else, I had to learn and struggle and find the right way versus the wrong way. And there’s many, many wrong ways to do things badly but a few ways to do them correctly and pay the price like everyone else. I just learned things along the way. You know, one of my early businesses that you mentioned was a company called Vision Publishing where we used to summarize business books. And so I was in a very fortunate position that my product was ‘learning’ and my product was to be the best business books that were being published at the time. So every day, I was taking a lot of great information from some of the best minds around the world and I was applying it to my business. And I found that a lot of the stuff worked. So over a period of time, I built a lot of content, a lot of things that worked for me. Because obviously, every business is different; and some things work better in some businesses and some things work better in others. But I found what worked well for me in a business of my size. And usually small and medium sized businesses operate differently to large corporate businesses. And being in a small-medium sized business, I found that certain things worked. And I wanted to document those. So I thought the best way to do it was to just write them down. So I never set out to write the book. I just set out to document the things that I found were working for me. And that turned out to be a book that a lot of other people valued and found that something was really good. So that’s the road to becoming an author. West: Wow. I just noticed on the back of the book here you’ve got a raving testimonial by John McGrath, someone who has followed in your footsteps and written a couple of books of his own. But he’s a very successful real estate agent. And also Simon Reynolds, who’s also a very well respected entrepreneur. So yeah, you definitely had an effect on some of these guy’s careers, Brian. Brian: Well look, I mean, John McGrath and Simon Reynolds today are friends. I see Simon really and we do quite a lot of work together. And that’s one of the great benefits of achieving a certain level of success, is that you get to meet some really great people. I’m sure you’ve experienced it yourself, West. You find that people of that caliber rub off and you get to really lift yourself to level thinking that you wouldn’t otherwise achieve. So that’s a really good benefit and something which I treasure and value a lot. West: Absolutely. I want to ask you, Brian, when you were looking at starting your initial businesses as a budding entrepreneur, did you have any really critical self doubts and barriers or obstacles or self talk that a lot of people go through? First, did you have them? And secondly, if you did, how did you break through them? Brian: Well, you know, I would start this conversation by outlining for you one of the great things about being young and enthusiastic and having the great vision: the fact that you don’t see problems. You know, you just see all opportunity. And it’s only once you’re in business that you suddenly start your own limitations. So starting out, I never had any doubts, really. I was just enthusiastic and I saw an opportunity and I went for it. I didn’t have to think too hard about it simply because when I looked at all my other options, there weren’t too many. So I just thought, ‘Gee, this is a good opportunity. I liked the idea of it and I’m going to do it.’ It’s only once you’re in business—and I do remember sort of three months after I started Vision Publishing and things weren’t going so well because the thought process that I had and how I was going to grow the business wasn’t working—and it was only at that point that I really had to start the true learning process. Because I thought I knew everything before going into business, but once you get there you realize there are a lot of things that you don’t know. And I went into a bit of depression, self doubt, loss of faith in myself. And I remember sitting in my office thinking, ‘Well, how do I get out of this without looking bad?’ That was my predominating thought. But fortunately, all the money that I had was invested in the business. And that kept me going. West: So you were committed, basically. Brian: I was committed. So all those personal development things that you read about—commitment and focus and persistence—those are all the things that are nice to read about but where they really come to play is when you are forced to make some really life changing decisions. Now I remember sitting in the office here in Sydney thinking to myself, ‘I really am going to be a disgrace to myself and to my family. And I’m going to let down my partners,’ ‘coz this thing’s going to fail. And I was in a lot of pain, you know, a lot of emotional pain. And this happens to a lot of people, not only to my self. And it happened to me many times. But because of that experience and having gone through that and succeeded beyond that first experience, I know every time I go to that place of self doubt, I know the way out. And a lot of people don’t know that because they get to a place of self doubt and they never found their way out. I happen to be in that place of self doubt surely after I started my business, but the pain of it drove me to take greater risks and to try things that I ordinarily wouldn’t have thought. You know, it was a black or red scenario for me. So I decided, ‘Look, I’m just going to do this and see if it works.’ And I tried some things which worked really well. And the business dug itself out of making a loss to making great profits. And the business grew enormously as a result of that whole experience and that pain that I was in. And I value that today because every time I have that self-doubt, I remember that and I know that that’s a good place to be because the greatest innovation and the greatest breakthroughs that ever happened in your business, in your life are at a time when you are in the most pain. West: Wow. It sounds almost as if you…like expect to go into that phase whenever you take on a new venture or go through a phase in your business. And when you expect to go into that, you know that there’ll be a way out. And that’s a reassuring thought for anyone going into business. Brian: Well, that’s a very fair comment that you made. Obviously, the smarter that you get, the more you learn, the less time you spend in that period of pain. The problems just become different. And then you need to learn different things at different times. And you’re always learning lessons. You always find that there are things that you don’t know that cost you money…but at a different level. Rather than just judging success or failure, there are different things that cost you money that you still think, ‘Well, if I didn’t do that, I would have been far more successful rather than just successful,’ if you know what I’m saying. West: Mmm. Very powerful. Do you have like a certain sequence of questions that you ask yourself when you’re in that period of pain or period of self doubt and you’re just not sure where to go next? And I completely empathize with that feeling of doubting yourself and not knowing where to go next and not knowing how things are going to pan out. When you’re in that phase, Brian, what’s the process you go through to start clawing your way back on track and staying focused? Brian: The answer to that question is varied. But the basic process that I go through is I try to look at things in the simplest terms because I also think that once you get to that point, you’re not thinking clearly. You’re at a point where you’re under a lot of stress… West: Emotional. Brian: Exactly. Your cortisol levels are very high…in most people. And when you’re at that point, it’s very hard to think clearly. So you’ve got to take yourself back to a place of excitement. You’ve got to take yourself back to that experience of joy, you know, “Oh this is a great thing and this is the reason why I got into it in the first place,’ and get that excitement back. Because once you’ve got that excitement back, then you can start to see clearly again. And at that point where you can start to see clearly again, you can then start to say, “Okay, it’s a matter of just connecting these three dots.” And if you keep it that simple and you understand that business is just a matter of building a good product and selling it and you do that many times and you become successful, then the complexities are taken out of it. West: Hmm, that’s powerful stuff. So basically you need to get unclouded so you can see clearly the path ahead. Brian: Well, you need to firstly realize emotionally where you’re at. And the hardest thing to do is to do that. And a lot of people who are suffering in business just can’t see that, you know, the forest with the trees. And that’s the hardest thing. And the hardest thing is to actually get your self out of that. What I would do if I was in that situation—now I just couldn’t see the forest with the trees—I would spend whatever money I had or I had left or I could afford to get another perspective, whether it’s a friend that you trust your success on business or a business coach or mentor. But not just any business coach or mentor. Because one of the things that I find—certainly for myself—is that people go and get advice from other people that are more messed up than they are. And I can never understand that. That’s like going and asking someone who’s homeless for advice on finances. You’ve got to go to the right people. West: Exactly. And you probably have to invest in that. Brian: Exactly. Today I’m very fortunate. For me, I’ve got a circle of friends who are successful. So I can ring them up and say, “Hey, let’s have coffee later (or lunch). I need to bounce some things off you.” West: But you weren’t always like that. Brian: But I paid the price. West: Exactly. Brian: I paid the price to get those sort of people. And today, fortunately, I can call a few of them friends. So I can get that sort of advice. But you’ve always got to understand that free advice is never free. Because unless you paid for that advice, you don’t value it. And you should go and try to find the best people that you can that you can afford to help you get through that process. West: Very true. Now that’s awesome advice, Brian. Thank you for sharing that with us. That’s going to be something I think people should go back and listen to again. So I wanted to ask Brian now…with the kind of things you do today—you mentioned you don’t classify yourself as an author or a speaker—what kind of activities are you mainly involved in today? I mean, do businesses come and ask you to help them grow their profits? Or do they get you to look over some of their constraints? What are kind of the main things that you do today as Brian Sher? Brian: For the last eighteen months… I’ve just returned from the US where I grew a business over there for three years prior. And so I’m in the process now of buying into and establishing a number of businesses, new businesses in areas that I’m familiar with, some that I’m not so familiar with. But I’m also on a couple of advisory boards of about seven or eight companies. I do that together with Simon Reynolds. So there are a lot of small and medium size businesses who really don’t have anyone that they can turn to. You know, large corporations have Boards of Directors, whereas small and medium size businesses (SMEs) really don’t have that mentorship that large corporations do. So I have set up advisory boards that Simon Reynolds and myself work on, where we will become an advisory board for small businesses. Like the board of directors, we will sit with the business once a month and say, “Look, here are the five things that you need to do and here are the eight things that we feel that you’re making a mistake of.” And that’s been very powerful and very effective. West: It sounds like kind of a mastermind group where businesses that don’t necessarily have access to very large networks can access people who have experience and proven records in the industry. Brian: Right, right. But we do that on a selective basis. And we find that that’s working really well. But the main game for me is to always… you know, I’ve been in business for myself. Advising is fine and I do a little bit of that. But to be in business for yourself is ultimately where I think the value lies because the amount of money that you can generate in your own business far exceeds anything you can do by being a consultant or by being an author or any of those sorts of businesses. And in my book, How to Make Money Out of Thin Air, which you have a copy of, I’ve outlined 20 habits of the world’s most valuable businesses and 41 habits of the world’s most successful business people. And those are the sort of criteria that I try to follow myself personally as well as businesses that I look at and get involved in. Because I think that by having that checklist, it allows me—and that’s the reason I wrote the book; obviously because I like to keep a documentary of my own thought processes—is that if I’m looking at a business or if I’m consulting to business or if I’m helping out in a business, I look and compare that business against the list of the twenty habits of world’s most valuable businesses. Because if you can do that and you can say, well, this business or this potential business should add these components or should have these components, suddenly you can change your business model to be a far more successful business model than you may have started out with in the first place. West: Absolutely. It’s very powerful to see that list. And it just minimizes your risk, obviously, and it minimizes the businesses’ risks if they can follow those key criteria which have been proven time and time again. So why don’t you tell me some ingredients that if someone’s looking to build a million dollar business now no matter the economic conditions, what are some of those key ingredients that you look for? Or if someone came to you and was looking to build a million dollar business now in the current economic crisis, what advice would you give them Brian? Brian: Well, the first thing I pull out is this list of habits of the world’s most valuable businesses and say, “Look, let’s compare your business against these.” And I’ll run you through a couple because I don’t have enough time to go through all of them. West: Yes. Give us the key ones. Brian: Well, the first and obviously the most important is you’ve got to look at what market you’re in. And that sounds obvious. But a lot of people going to business, they’re really not addressing the market potential for what they have. So for example, someone might come to me and say, “Look, I’m thinking of opening up a news agency.” And I’ll say, “Well, that’s great! What’s your long term goal? How much money do you want to earn? And what do you want your business to look like in 5 years?” They might say, “Well, I want to have a business that’s pulling in a million dollars a month,” or whatever their goals are. And then I look at their business and say, “Well, the market you’re doing doesn’t match your life goals. It doesn’t match your potential. Because if they’re going to open up a news agency, the market is limited to their neighborhood. In other words, someone who lives in Perth is not going to fly to Sydney to go and buy their news agency. So you’ve got to understand that your market is probably the most important thing. And that’s why the internet is such an exciting breakthrough for many businesses because all of a sudden, the person—such as yourself, West, you’ve got an internet business—you have access to millions, if not, billions of people around the world. And you can operate it from a location in your garage or your home. And that’s why internet is such a fantastic tool. But if you’re selling widgets, if you’re selling a service or you’re selling consulting services, you can’t distribute that through… West: It’s limited. Brian: If you’re a doctor, how do you sell your services to the internet? So you’ve got to look at your market. You’ve got to look at your product first and say, “Well, does this have huge potential?” And if it doesn’t then you’ve got to realize that you’re limited to the amount of customers that you have. And you know, what’s surprising is… West: Sorry I lost you for a second there, Brian. So you were saying about people not realizing the market potential of their business. Brian: That’s right. And what’s so surprising is that people going into business or starting a business, they fall in love with their product and they don’t fall in love with their market. So they look at their product and go, “Wow, I really love this new paper that I’ve got! It’s a really different sort of paper.” And then I’m thinking, well, you know, how big is the market for this paper? They’re not really looking at the volume of business that they can generate should they be successful in their marketing. West: So when you talk to people you basically give them a reality check and say, “Let’s face the facts. Let’s take a look at your market and let’s really figure out what the true potential is. And let’s not kid ourselves.” Brian: Correct. Yeah. And you’ve got to look at every circumstance and say, “Well, look. Your market is limited.” But where I get excited is about businesses that have unlimited potential. One of my clients, she’s selling courses on how to write, how to become a screenwriter or how to become a scriptwriter. And she was just selling it in Sydney. And I said, “Well, look. If you repackage this and you make it an online course, all of a sudden you can sell this around the world.” You always have the potential to grow the business to a worldwide business. She just didn’t realize it. So that’s a success story. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who try to look at their products and want to sell it on a worldwide basis but just never will and never can because there’s no potential to do that. So that’s the first thing, West. The second thing is…obviously, I’m a big believer in selling what I call leverage products. And I think you know what that is. A leverage product is something where you’re not necessarily selling time—because time is a limited commodity—so in theory, if you’ve got twenty fours hours a day and you’re prepared to work twenty four hours a day, you’ve still only got twenty four hours a day. Whereas if you make any product that you can sell that’s made by a machine, you can sell as many products of those in as many markets as you potentially can get to. And every time you sell a product you make a profit. So if you can sell a thousand products an hour, you can make $1 profit out of every one of those products, you’re making $1,000 an hour and you don’t have to be there. West: Exactly. That’s powerful. And I think not a lot of people really maximize that concept even though they’re able to. So I guess that’s where you come in as well, as kind of a coach and a mentor to some of these people that come and approach you, to help them realize that potential. Brian: Sure. If that’s what their goals are, of course. And then one of the other habits that I’m really big on is if you’re going to make a sale, you should have some sort of residual income. And I know you guys are big believers in that and it’s become a lot more popular now with a lot of online… West: Yes, we call it a backend in the internet marketing world where we continually upsell or we try and get more out of them. But you’ve probably been advocating this type of business model well before it became popularized in the internet world. Brian: Right. I mean, the online businesses have really picked up on that and it’s become really popular. And there are a lot of guys now talking about what they call continuity programs. And then there’s new lingo out called forced continuity and volume continuity and white continuity and black continuity. There’s a lot of lingo and jargon that’s developed around this but the bottom line to keep it simple is, you know, the most valuable businesses where if you look at them, they sign you up with a customer and you end up using them every month. Look at companies like banks, credit card companies. You get a credit card every single month and you use that credit card. They don’t have to market to you every month. You buy now and you keep the credit card for ten, twenty years. That’s why credit card companies are very, very successful. You look at some companies, they sign you up—these days, everybody realizes you get a mobile phone for free because they’re not interested in selling you the phone, they’re interested in your mobile phone bill every single month. Those are the sort of business models that you need to look at and say, “Well, how do I take my business from a one time sale into a continuity sale?” West: Definitely. And I’m sure there have been many instances where people have come up to you and said, “Brian, I don’t think I can create an ongoing, continuous income,” but then you’ve been able to show them how to do that based on those principles. Brian: Well, sometimes you’ve got be creative. And sometimes it’s easier than others. And sometimes it’s more obvious than others. And sometimes there’s just no opportunity at all, in which case, you need to adjust your business model. West: Yup. Powerful stuff. Now tell us about the power of the Price Earnings Ratio, Brian, because I know that you’ve mentioned that to me in the past and how most businesses don’t even take that into consideration. So give us—for those of us who don’t understand what it is—just a quick explanation what it is. And then tell us how, as business owners, maximize our P/E Ratio. Brian: I love this topic because this is the real business end of getting rich. And when people talk about getting rich and going into business, there are so many people in businesses today that have a business that effectively is nothing more than a job for themselves. And while they’re self employed, they really don’t have much value in their business because they don’t understand the P/E Ratio and they don’t understand what that means and they don’t understand how powerful that is. And they don’t understand the fact that if you employed these 20 habits that I keep talking about—of the world’s most valuable businesses—your P/E ratio skyrockets. And if you can skyrocket your P/E, you’ll skyrocket your wealth. So let me just answer your question as to what the P/E ratio is. The P/E Ratio is basically a price earnings ratio. And what that means is that your business is valued being the price relative to its earnings. And the ratio is just the proportion between what you’re earning and what the value of your business is. Let’s take around numbers as an example. If you’re making $100,000 profit or you’re making a million dollars profit, what is your business worth? Now you can be making a million dollars profit and your business is not worth anything. Why? Because for your business to be worth anything, it’s like the real estate market, for the business to be worth anything, there has to be someone who’s willing to pay that price. West: Exactly. Brian: So for example… let’s use real estate as an example. If you have a house—and it’s a beautiful house—but that house is built on a toxic waste dump, even if it’s got harbor views, I don’t think you’re going to find anybody that’s going to give you anything for that house. West: Yup. True. Brian: But that house is undervalued to you if you’re prepared to live in it. It’s the same thing with the business. If your business is not structured properly and it’s dependent on you as an individual and it doesn’t have leveraged products and even if it’s making a million dollars profit, and it doesn’t have these twenty habits of the world’s most valuable businesses built in, your price earnings ratio is going to be almost zero. And people who sell their time, who are consultants or doctors, lawyers, those sort of businesses really don’t have a lot of value and their price earnings ratio is very, very small. On the other hand, you’ll find other businesses that are well systemized—again, which is one of the twenty habits—they have residual income, they sell leverage products, they create powerful brands, they’re not dependent on any one person, they’re usually the market leader, they attract the best and brightest people, they have few real competitors because they’ve differentiated themselves, they have high margins on their products, they don’t have a lot of real competition because they’ve differentiated themselves properly. And what they’ve also done is they’ve built an exit strategy from day one. Now, if you do all that, all of a sudden your price earnings ratio starts to skyrocket. And the value of earning a dollar is different in two businesses. So if I was going to start a business, I’d be wanting to start a business or grow a business that has the potential for a really high price earnings ratio. And the reason for that is because if I’m going to build a million dollars worth of profit into a business and it’s going to take me five years to do that, what I want to do is make sure that when I sell that business like I would want to sell a house, I want to sell it for the highest value that I could. And to get a high price earnings ratio is the way to do that. So if I was going to build a million dollars profit, I would rather try to sell my business for $10 million at a P/E of 10 than at a P/E of 1, which means I’m only going to get a million dollars for my million dollar profit. And if you try and sell your business at a P/E of 1, there’s almost no reason to sell it because why would you sell a business that you can earn a million dollars out of anyway? So there’s no point and no one will want to sell a P/E of 1. So every dollar that I’m going to earn over the next five years, I want to make sure that not only am I earning a million bucks but I’m earning a million times 10 (million X 10). Because I’m earning $1 million every year but at the end of that period, whether it be three years or five years, I’m then going to sell that $1 million for $10 million or I’m going to sell it for $5 million or I’m going to sell it for $20 million. And that’s a really incredible thought process that very few people talk about when they start growing their business. Because if you can build a business with a high P/E ratio and you can build all these twenty habits in, you become instantly rich. West: And it’s a completely different way of thinking from how most people approach business and business foundations, isn’t it? Brian: The words are: “Start with the end in mind.” And that’s one of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. West: Yes. Stephen Covey. Brian: You know, millions of people have read that book but if people take those principles and apply it to themselves on a daily basis, they can make a huge difference to their lives. So when I think about business or I try to help people, advise them, I try to think of it in those terms and I try to drum those concepts into their head because if you’re going into business, there is no point in—unless you’re doing it as a hobby—but the point of going into business is to make a lot of money and to give yourself a lifestyle that you will enjoy, appreciate and you can maximize and you can value. But the best way to do that is to earn the most amount that you can in the shortest period of time. So I would rather have a business where it’s producing half a million dollars a year and has a P/E of 5 than a business that’s producing a million dollars a year and has a P/E of 0. Does that make sense to you? West: Yes. Absolutely. Different mindset from what the masses are thinking out there. So I’m curious, Brian, with regards to online businesses…is it more difficult to determine the P/E ratio if the business is primarily online? Because I noticed you’re talking a lot also, obviously about offline businesses with staff and systemization and all that sort of stuff. I’m sure a lot of the principles will also apply for online businesses. Brian: They absolutely do. The great advantage that online businesses have is that immediately a lot of those habits are already built-in. I mean, if you’ve got an online business, the first thing you have is you have a huge audience, you have a huge market that you can access to. Obviously if you’re selling left hand knitting business or something that’s really a niche market, you might find that you’ve got a decent size business because you’re able to sell around the world, which wouldn’t succeed if you were just in Australia. However, it’s still a relatively small niche market. But if you’re able to attract a larger niche market around the world, then it’s automatically built in. So that’s the first thing. Online businesses don’t automatically have high margins. They don’t automatically have residual income. They don’t automatically have real competitors. So you still need to address a lot of those principles with online businesses. You still need to have an investor entry and exit strategy if you want to grow the business. You still need to keep innovating. Those are all the things that online businesses still need to do which apply to online or offline businesses. But, you know, online businesses have some advantages…just intrinsically. West: Absolutely. I can’t speak highly enough of online businesses. I completely agree. I love having that worldwide audience being able to purchase from me while I’m out playing golf and while I’m sleeping. So that’s an advantage that I enjoy as well. So is it an exact science, Brian, calculating the P/E ratio? I mean, can someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience or doesn’t have an MBA or an Accounting degree…are they able to pull from these factors you mentioned and get an idea of their own P/E ratio or do they need to follow some strict guidelines in order to look at how their business is currently standing if they have one? Brian: Look, the P/E ratio, the market determines that; you don’t determine it. what I’m suggesting is that if you have these 20 habits built in to your business or as many of them as you can built in to your business, then your P/E ratio will be higher than if you don’t have them built in. Now what does that mean? I mean, what does higher mean relative to your own particular business? If you go to the Financial Review and you look at a lot of the public companies that are listed there, they will have a column next to their daily price quotes which determine their price earnings ratio. Now the price earnings ratio is simply the value that the market puts on the company based on the current earnings. So for example, if the company is doing a $10 million profit as a public company and the company is valued or the company share price is, say, $10, then how do you determine whether what the price earnings ratio is? Well, you have to look at hoe many shares are issued. So let’s keep this really simple. To determine your own price earnings ratio, firstly, it’s only a calculation that you do yourself, it’s the value of your business that someone will pay when they buy your business relative to your earnings. So if you’re doing a $1 million turnover and you can sell your business for $10 million, then your P/E is 10. Now most small-medium size businesses, if they’re private, will be valued somewhere between 3 and 6. That’s a rule of thumb. In other words, someone will come along and depending on how many habits you’ve got built in to your business… By the way, when I say 3, that’s a business that already has systems or already has products developed; it’s not a service business that depends on a doctor or a lawyer because that’s virtually worth nothing. But I’m talking about a business that already has a profit, it already has systems built in, it has a customer base, it’s got a track record, it’s been going for a number of years. You’ll typically get between… today, maybe a little less because the whole market’s depressed and the recession; if you were to sell your business, maybe 2 ½ to 6 as a private company. But the idea is that if you are able to go in the right industry and you’re able to build your business where you have built in your exit strategy from day one, you may find that there’s a public company out there that has a price earnings ratio of 28 or 30. And by approaching that company and saying, “Look, would you like to buy my business?” they may offer you a price earnings ratio of 10 or 12 because they’re buying you at a multiple of 12; but for them, the value is 28. Does that make sense to you? West: It does. Brian: So they’re buying your business at, say, $12 million. At a million dollars profit, they may give you a check for $12 million bucks and they’re going to take your million dollars profit. But that million dollars profit is worth $28 million to them because that sort of capitalizes their business at. So if you understand that principle and you understand that by thinking about your exit strategy from day one and always identifying a company that has a very high P/E ratio relative to yours and making them the target of your business, then you effectively could have an extraordinary result from a very small amount of effort. West: And that’s the goal of business, isn’t it, Brian? Brian: Well, yeah. It is a goal and certainly, you know, if I was getting up in the morning and saying, “Look, I’m going to start a business and I’m going to work really hard for the next five years,” I would rather walk away with a check for $12 million than a check for $2 million, wouldn’t you? West: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So if people are looking at getting into business or selecting a business to go into—obviously we’ve talked a lot about the P/E ratio and the factors that go into that—are there any other factors that you look at apart from those key pillars? You know, maybe in terms of personality, whether it fits or lifestyle. Or are they the main things that you advise people to look at? Brian: Well, look. I’ll jump to the other list that I spoke about, the 41 habits of the world’s most successful people. Because I think if you’re not passionate about your business—in other words, if I’m looking at somebody and they’re asking me for advice and I’m talking to them about their business, they may just don’t have the burning desire to succeed, which is, I think, the very first habit that you need to have and you don’t have the energy and you don’t have that passion about your business, then it doesn’t matter how good the idea is, I just don’t think you’re going to succeed. West: Absolutely. And I strongly recommend everyone…is your book still for sale on shelves, Brian? Is it still out there in the market or can I buy it through your site or…? Brian: The What Rich People Know, I think you can get on Amazon. You can order that on Amazon. And the How to Make Money Out of Thin Air, I think you can order that through Penguin. I don’t know which bookshops have them or still have them. But Penguin Books has it. I’m sure they can order it through those two sources if they really want to get it. I think that it’s a great list to have. And it’s a great checklist. West: It is. Absolutely. Brian: I go and explain each one. And by the way, we started this conversation by saying that these things work in recessions or no recessions. It doesn’t really matter. It works equally and powerfully for you in a recession. In fact, I personally think the recession is really a good time to start a new business. West: Because things aren’t as expensive. People don’t tend to chuck their prices up so your starting prices might be a bit lower or… Brian: Well, yeah. You can get reasonable office space. You can get good stuff, you can buy desks and fans and whatever you need at discount prices. I mean what a great place to start. West: Definitely. Definitely. Cool. Well that’s been a really good content packed call, Brian. I want to thank you for your time. Actually, I want to ask you one more question before we sign off today. It’s actually about your books. I’ve been doing some courses recently that have all recommended having a book. And I was wondering for you, has it made a significant difference in your credibility, your ability to interact with people in gaining trust and building relationships? And would you strongly recommend that everyone has one? Brian: Well, look. That’s a really interesting question. I believe that books should be strategic. And just writing a book can damage you as well if the book’s no good. I mean, I’ve seen some excellent books out there obviously. But if you’re going to put a book together, my advice is this: make sure that you’ve got some really good things to say that other people will value. There’s nothing wrong with documenting. That’s what I did. I just documented my thought processes and I think that everybody should do that. But the value of your book—if it’s not well researched and it’s not well written and it’s not professionally put together, it can do a lot of damage to you. So don’t just think by going out there and writing a book, it’s automatically going to serve your purpose. Because one thing that I learned is that there are probably more people that I know that have written books than people who haven’t. And that’s probably because of the circles I sort of hang around in. But the bookshops are full of books and it’s very hard to know what’s good and bad. But writing a book is a really good thing to do to document your thought process. And I suggest that everyone at least start that process and see where it takes you. You’ll never know…you might be the next New York Times bestseller. West: It sounds like it was almost a journal of yours that you decided to share with the world. Brian: Yeah, absolutely. I must say I started this interview, again, by saying I’m not an author and I don’t consider myself one. I write that stuff down because I thought, ‘Look, I want to keep this fresh in my mind and I want to document it.’ And certainly, if someone wants to know how to do things the way I do it, well, they can just read it. It’s certainly up to them. And I’ve been fortunate that the book’s been successful. I think it’s in twenty countries now, in different languages. It’s very nice to see that happen but that’s not the ultimate goal. The goal is just to go out there and do the best you can and learn as much as you can from everybody and certainly, you can learn from someone, a person sitting next to you in the bus. You can. And you’ve just got to keep your eyes open and learn from everyone and everything around you. Use what you want; throw away the things that you don’t and I’m sure you’ll be successful. West: Sure. For sure. So if people want to find out more about you, Brian, where do they need to go if they want to…do you have like a coaching program or a website that people can sign up for a list? Do you offer anything to the public that people can benefit from your knowledge, besides your books? Brian: I’m doing some sort of advisory on a selective basis. If they want to get in contact with me, they can just go to my website which http://briansher.com.au/work-with-brian.html. Or just email me at [email protected] and let me know what they’re thinking or what they’re interested in and we’ll go from there. West: Great. Beautiful. Well thanks for your time, Brian. I really, really appreciate your knowledge and wisdom you’ve imparted on us today. Brian: You’re very welcome. And thanks for the opportunity.

Australia’s #1 NLP Educator, Founding CEO Success Dynamics Institute Nick is all about accelerating performance and overcoming mental barriers through established and innovative techniques, and it shone through in this hour long blitz where I picked Nick’s brain as much as I could. Having seen successful results in thousands of his clients, Nick is able to quickly teach you how to overcome those mental roadblocks. Don’t miss this! In this interview you will discover: – The Three Biggest Limiting Beliefs Nick Encounters With Clients, and How To ‘Install’ new beliefs – Essential techniques to begin renewing your paradigm and creating a compelling future – The Little known NLP techniques Nick uses on his high paying clients to get the fastest result in the shortest time – Specific steps to gain emotional mastery http://nickcownie.com Click Play To Hear Streaming: Download the Podcast [ mp3 – 33 mb – 46 mins ] Full Transcript Click To Read Full Transcript West Interviews Nick Cownie Speakers: West: West Loh Nick: Nick Cownie West: Nick Cownie is the CEO of Success Dynamics Institute. And I met Nick, I believe, on the Gold Coast actually, at a seminar. And we got talking. And nick’s doing some really good things with regard to human performance and maximizing human potential. And he runs many workshops. And I thought that we could definitely add some value from Nick’s experiences. So Nick, welcome to the call. Nick: Thanks, West. Great to be here. West: And I’d like to start, Nick, with why don’t you tell us a little bit about your company and what your company focuses on doing in terms of helping people with their mindset. Nick: Absolutely. So my company’s called Success Dynamics Institute. And I started it in 2006 with my brother Andrew at the time. We’ve both done quite a lot of training in different areas. My background is as a Chinese medicine practitioner; I’m actually an acupuncturist by trade. And I ended up through some interesting circumstances getting interested in how people’s minds work and how they can learn to run their mind better to get the results that they’re after in their life, and formal studies in that area. My brother went off and did the exact same courses that I did and we thought it made only sense to team up and start a company together and take that message out to the world. West: Interesting. The major clients that you deal with, Nick, are they people from all walks of life, all professions, all socio-economic levels in terms of your client range? Nick: Our clients come from a few different target markets. We did quite a detailed market analysis when we first started the company to find out the kinds of people that are most interested in this kind of training instead of going ‘this is what we’ve got, who can we sell it to,’ we went about it another way after I spent some time with Andrew Grant at a seminar and he talked about setting up survey sites just to find out what your market wants. And I thought if we can do that on the internet why not just do that in the real worked. And I actually interviewed about two hundred and thirty-ish people and found that the people are interested in our training tend to fit into three quite broad categories: Those people interested in business communication influenced sales type skills; People who want the things that we offer just for personal development because we have quite a lot of training around wiping out limiting emotions that keep you stuck and repeat over and over again, patterns that keep coming up for people, habits that they don’t want anymore, all that kind of stuff, and really advanced goal setting procedures; And the third group would be people who either currently are a practitioner or a therapist or coach in some capacity and they’re interested in up skilling or increasing their qualifications. So we’ve got three clearly defined target markets. And we market specifically to each of those three and they tell it to different socio economic groups. So sometimes—depending on the program that we’re running—we’ll get people who are paying $10,000 a head, another time they’ll be paying $500-$1,000 per person. So it really depends on what we’re offering at the time. West: Wow. That’s impressive, Nick, in the sense that you have three clearly defined target markets. I mean most businesses kind of try to catch everyone and try to cater a little bit to a lot of different markets. So I think that’s a lesson in itself for the people in the call. But let’s talk about some specific areas that you’re an expert in. I mean, what are the biggest issues and problems that you encounter when it comes to people’s mindset and the limiting beliefs that they have on success? Nick: That’s a really interesting question. I’d say that probably the main things—when it comes to people’s mindset—is first of all, they don’t believe that what’s possible for other people is possible for them. And that’s just not true. We’re all born with the same nervous system, two arms, two legs, two eyes and nose. The only real difference between the results that someone produces and the results that you produce is what goes on inside your head. So that’s the first area. The second thing, I’d say, is that people allow their past to be a reason why they can’t achieve what they want in the future. So everything’s that come up until this point in your life—it may be fantastic, it may be terrible—but it doesn’t necessarily equal what you’re capable of in the future. And those are the two main things that I’d say if people could shift those two, they’d have much greater chance of succeeding in their life. West: That’s powerful. So Nick, I know that you approach clients on a personal level too, am I correct? Nick: Yeah, that’s right. Yup. West: And in these calls I like to obviously get as much information from you as possible… so if someone comes to you and wants your help, are they the first two things that you would try to address with them? I mean if I came to you as a client right now and I said, “Nick, you need to help me out. I’m stuck in these areas.” Will you sit down with me and try to address those issues? Nick: First, what I’d do is I’d really want to get a very clear understanding of where you’re at now, exactly where you’re at now with no what I call hiding behind the mask. Because often, the first time I see someone, they actually want me to think that everything’s okay—unless they’re really at rock bottom or they’re really ready for change. So I want to know exactly where the person’s at now… West: No sugar coating; without the fluff. Nick: No sugar coating, that’s right. It’s really important. Because until you know where you are, you can’t accurately assess how far you’ve got to go to reach your goals. So that’s the first thing: find out where they are. Don’t spend too much time focusing on what’s actually contributed to getting them there because often that’s just a story that the person tells themselves to stay stuck. The next thing that we’d want to know is where is it that they want to go. So what’s the outcome that this person wants for themselves and what’s holding them back? What is it that they need that they don’t have that, are there resources—people, time, money, particular skill sets—that they think they need or they’re not aware of that they need that are going to help them get where they want to go? And a final and really important thing in that first kind of face to face contact with someone that we need to know is what are they getting out of being stuck where they are? We call that secondary gain. That’s, in any problem or any situation that someone’s not happy with, if they aren’t changing that on some level, they’re getting some kind of positive benefit for themselves by staying stuck. And if I can identify that, that’s where we’re going to get the most leverage to get them to their goals faster. West: That’s an awesome process, Nick. How long does that initial process take usually for a client? Nick: That takes usually between 1 and 2 hours to get all of that information. So once we’ve got all that information, we just then design a plan to actually start chipping away through all those things. And it’s usually very quick. West: So it’s not a matter of you just asking them those questions and them just giving you the answer. Do you continue to facilitate? Do you continue to prod and poke and really massage them to give you the information that you really need? Or do find most people, when you ask them what’s their secondary gain, they just tell you? Nick: Uh, I don’t think anyone’s ever been able to answer that straight out. It will be great if they did. It will make my life easier. West: So how do you go about enticing that out of them? Nick: It comes down to really skillful questioning. So there’s questioning techniques that we use that help the person access this information. Because what’s really important to realize is most of the time, they don’t consciously know what this is. They don’t know what the secondary gain is. They don’t know the reason they’re holding on to their problems. So we use questioning techniques that are going to allow them to access their unconscious part of their mind—or some people call it subconscious—and bring up that information so that it becomes apparent to them. And often, that’s a big eye opener in itself. West: Can you give us some examples of some of the questions you might ask, Nick, because I know some out there are going to want to try and really suss out some of the stuff that’s holding them back and what gains they’re getting. So they can’t get it out on the first go, what else can they ask themselves or what kind of things can they do to really get to the core of it? Nick: Yup. I’m more than happy to get into that. First of all, we just take a step back. We operate on the assumption that every behavior has a positive intention either for your self or someone else. So even these potentially negative behaviors or ways of thinking—at the deepest level, way down inside—they do have a positive intention. And that’s what we try and uncover. So a lot of the time, we could ask the person ‘why do you do that,’ but then they just turn back to looking at the problem. Usually when you ask someone ‘why,’ they really get stuck in going back over their reasons and excuses and who they’re going to blame and point their finger at. So instead, we phrase the question: ‘What’s the highest positive intention of this (insert behavior here)?’ So it could be someone who’s a compulsive spender when they’re trying to save their deposit for their first home. And so: ‘What’s the highest positive intention for your self of spending that money when you tell yourself that you want to save it?’ And most of the time that we ask that one sentence, it doesn’t get deep enough because you need to ask three or four times to get past these conscious responses that they’ve—it’s the sugar coating again—they’re sugar-coated, so that it’s more acceptable to themselves. After we ask a few times ‘what’s the purpose, what does that get for you, what does that allow you to do or be or have,’ these are the kind of questions that really start to go to a more abstract level. And this is where the answer starts to come from the person’s unconscious. West: Now that’s awesome. And I guess over time, the answer will eventually come out. And as you were saying before, that’s why it’s a lengthy process. Nick: Yeah, that’s right. I mean just one of these points—like the secondary gain and the questions we’re talking about here—you can spend probably half an hour on that to really reach the point where the answer is going to shift it for the person. And if you stop—perhaps after twenty minutes—it’s still going to have an effect but you haven’t reached that leverage point that’s really going to tip the scale. West: It sounds like it’s really crucial. And the other thing I wanted to mention is many people over time have possibly suppressed these reasons so they’re not able to immediately verbalize them when you ask them. Nick: Definitely. That’s a big, big problem. I mean that’s one of the main reasons why people stay stuck is you’re fully aware that it’s all the unconscious programming and the suppressed emotions and experiences from their past. West: Definitely. So Nick, once you’ve got all the information you need from them as a preliminary stage, then what kind of things do you do with them after that? Nick: So once we’ve got the information, we turn our attention to what was it that this person said they wanted and how are we going to get them from where they are to their goals in the shortest, possible time with the minimum intervention. So we have the person asses—what do you think it’s going to be, what’s the biggest thing for you that if you were to shift that, would allow other things to begin to shift on their own. And perhaps we only need to focus on the top two or three things. And shifting these, we use techniques such as conversational hypnosis, neuro linguistics and a range of other processes. Some of them is just questioning, other times we have the person lie down and close their eyes and we use some guided processes where we talk them through specific techniques to get resolution on whatever the problem is and then turn their attention back to what they do want once we’ve wiped out those unconscious problems. West: Wow. So you’ve got a whole gamut of tools that you can pick and choose from, depending on what you’re trying to get the client to do? Nick: Yeah, definitely. I used to describe it as a toolbox. But now I think it’s more closely related to, say, a Bunnings Warehouse. West: That’s pretty significant. So would it be fair to say that someone who knows or maybe have heard some of these techniques, might be able to work through some of the stuff on their own, basically if they the general fundamentals or do they really need to work with somebody—obviously the preferable option to work with someone like your self who is fully aware of how this psychological processes work—as opposed to on their own? Nick: You’re going to get a different class of results either way. So if you work with someone like me, generally it’s faster. I’m very experienced and I train people in how to do this. So you work with me, we find out exactly what the problem is and there’s no sugar coating it from yourself. That’s the main problem with trying to do this on your own…is that, often, it’s harder to get past your own sugar coating as you’ve termed it. It’s more difficult to put that aside. It’s not impossible. Many people do it. Now, I do that with myself all the time. I very rarely actually see someone else to work on my stuff if and when it comes up. But my preferred option would be see someone for a short, sharp burst when you need it. And get the problems sorted out. And then move on to the next thing. You can learn these techniques and use them on your own. But I see that more as a follow up support for your self. West: Okay. Very interesting. That’s actually a really good alternative and a good solution for people who are looking to gain that balance. Because obviously, a lot of our listeners on the call are people who desire to improve themselves and are always learning and are always consuming information. I think, to be able to get that good balance of information that you take in and from an expert such as your self, is always the best way to go. Similarly, I used to personally train people. And it’s good to do it on your own but you’re going to get much better results in a lot quicker time when you’re working with a professional. Nick: I think of it like pushing a car up a hill, you know. If there’s one person pushing the car, you might get there. If there are two people, you’re going to get there twice as fast. West: Definitely. Great analogy. With regards to some of the modeling you were mentioning before… I’m a big fan myself of finding people who are doing what you want to do and essentially copying them, is that how you use the term modeling or…? Nick: That’s pretty accurate, yeah. The way we use modeling is it goes a step beyond just copying people. So you can look at someone, copy what they do, check out their strategies and their approach. What I do goes a step further in terms of if you find someone who’s really producing excellent results in any area—the area that you want to really excel in—the thing that I mentioned before that separates them and their ability to produce those results and us and perhaps not getting there yet is only what’s going on in their minds. So we go straight to creating a model of what they’re doing in their own conscious mind. And we do that through various means: we examine their beliefs, their values, a range of what we call metaprograms which are the unconscious programs sitting above the ordinary programs that we normally think of, and other things like how they actually use their body physically. We put all of that together in quite a specific format that is actually designed by my brother and myself and then we’ve got a reproducible model that we can directly and hypnotically install into someone else’s subconscious mind to allow them to produce the same class of results in a fraction of the time it took the expert to do it originally. West: Wow. So you essentially bottled the essence of all these successful people and created a model where you can essentially transfer it to someone so they can soak up the best bits. Nick: Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly it. We’ve got the process. West: So when you talk about modeling and someone comes to you and asks about, “How can I be successful? How can I model what someone else who I really respect has done,” you’ll essentially just tell them about that process rather than getting them to go through all the hard yards themselves and getting them to study it all themselves and try and copy things bit by bit. Nick: Yeah, that’s spot on. There’s only really two ways to learn. And one is you learn by trial and error. Or the other way is you learn by other people’s experience. And this takes the other people’s experience school of learning and just accelerates the process. West: I’m interested to hear more about how you actually go about installing that into someone’s—is it subconscious that you install it into? Nick: Yeah, that’s right. We go straight into the subconscious mind. There are quite a few techniques that we use. First of all, we can do that through conversational hypnosis. So we’ll guide the person into a trance, and through suggestion, help them shift their beliefs. We have a range of processes where we can teach the person—this is often more useful because this is something they can do afterwards when and they don’t need it, I hope—we teach the person how to identify their own beliefs and values and programming; and through particular processes, how to take their belief out and install the new belief, which perhaps come from the person they’ve modeled. It’s very similar to reordering your files in a filing cabinet, you know. If you’ve got a drawer that says ‘Great with money beliefs’ and another drawer that says ‘Terrible with money beliefs,’ you take the belief out of Richard Branson’s ‘great with money beliefs’ and put that into yours and take your beliefs from the ‘terrible with money’ drawer and stick those in the bin because their probably not doing you too much benefit. West: Wouldn’t it be easier to take the money out of Richard Branson’s account and put it into yours? I’m kidding. Carry on. Nick: [Laughs] If you find out how to do that, let me know. West: Carry on. That’s really interesting, Nick. Nick: So once we’ve told the person how to elicit their own values and beliefs in their unconscious programming—it’s really a matter of learning the really simple processes that teach you how to shift those things. And we also have processes where we look at the—we call it a strategy; it’s the order or the sequence of thoughts that someone goes through to produce a specific result. And often, we can tell exactly what that is by the words they use when they describe the process and where their eyes move, because your eyes move to different areas. For example, if you look up into your right, you tend to be accessing visually constructed images. Or, in other words, you’re making up pictures in your mind; whereas if your eyes move up into your left, with most people, then you are remembering visual images, so accessing visual memories. So depending on the order and sequence that people do these things, we can find out what that sequence is—we call that a strategy—and then install that into someone else’s mind with a really simple process as well. When they’re faced with a similar situation, they’re going to go through the same thought process as a successful person. West: That’s powerful. So you’re basically taking a lot of their nuances and little things that are not necessarily openly and widely noticeable, but you guys notice them because you’re so finely tuned into how the body and the mind works, then you can use that to their advantage in helping them. Nick: Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly correct. West: That’s good for me, to just summarize some of what you’re saying, Nick, even for my own comprehension just to make sure. Because obviously, a lot of what you’re saying is really good stuff and can be quite deep at times. It’s good that you’re able to do this as a service to someone rather than letting them do it on their own. I’d like to talk about emotional mastery and how control of your emotions really dictates your quality of life. So in your experience of emotional mastery, Nick, what are kind of the major reasons that people come to you? Do they come to you to master their emotions to get out of certain states or to control certain states? Where do you fit in, in that spectrum? Nick: That’s a great question, West. Where I fit in is… first, I don’t know about the idea of controlling emotions. I think that most people try to control their emotions and it’s really a losing battle. When they come to me and they say that they want things like control, in very subtle ways we guide them to realize that control is actually an illusion and they’re better off—I think it was Stephen Covey who said there’s only three constants in life. And that’s: change, choice and principles—so we like to get the person to the point where they realize change is inevitable, they can’t actually control anything, but they do have a choice as to how they respond. And we get them responding rather than reacting. Because when you’re in an emotional reaction, I consider that as no different than a little child’s toy where you press the button to turn it on and press the button to turn it off. So when they’re in that way of being, really, other people are just pressing their buttons and saying, okay, here’s the angry button. You press the button, the person falls off the handle. It’s not a very useful way of being. So we find those buttons, and if you like, snip the cords so that when the button’s pressed, they don’t go into that predictable response. They have a choice as to how they’re going to respond instead of being just a stimulus response robot. West: Wow. It’s a great analogy. So essentially, you allow people to not necessarily choose their reaction, choose their emotion to a certain stimulus, but you allow people to not react to a certain stimulus. Nick: We actually do both. See, if the emotional response is coming and it’s not their choice, chances are that it’s just been conditioned into them over a period of time or perhaps even in one really strong emotional event. And it doesn’t have to be that way. So what we do is we find out where and how that was created. And we don’t even need the actual content of that if the person can’t remember. If they can, it’s great; if they can’t, it doesn’t make a difference. We find out as much as we can about that. And through a really simple process, we disconnect the connection that was made at that time. And we can use the same process that set up the problem for them. We can use to create the solution. Because you can get someone into a very intense, emotional state that they choose to be in such as feeling abundance or peace, calm, happiness, in the flow, anything that they can describe, as long as they can put a name to it, we can get them into that state, pump it right up and then set what we call an anchor or a trigger so that any time they want to be in that emotional state, it’s a simple matter of pressing their own buttons to go into the resourceful state that they prefer to be in. West: That’s awesome. I was just talking to a friend today, Nick, about that very process, about anchoring. And it is very, very powerful if done correctly. So you basically teach people how to get themselves into a peak state in whatever emotion that they would like, and then obviously help them create that anchor. It’s very difficult to do on your own, would you agree? Nick: It’s difficult if you haven’t ever done it before. Once you’ve gone through the process once, maybe twice, for someone who’s guided you through it and shown you how it works, so you can hear all about it and experience it for yourself, it’s something that you can do any time you like and anywhere at all. When I guide clients or students through this, after we’ve shown them how to do it once, about ninety percent of them can reproduce that process for themselves any time that they like. West: Great. One of the things I found—and you said before—that you want to ramp up the emotion. Do you ever find that people are hesitant to play full out initially? Nick: Yeah, sometimes they are. The main time that I come across that—not so much in one on one sessions—but If I’m teaching a group of say a hundred people and we’re getting them all into that state, there’s going to be a few sharp people in the crowd who are uncomfortable or feel that they’re going to be judged or perhaps their emotional state that they want to go into is one that they’re not comfortable with in public group settings. West: Interesting. And that’s great because I had a similar experience about where I was in a Tony Robbins seminar and there was five thousand of us trying to get into a peak state. And obviously with Tony—if any of you heard of him, he’s really an awesome advocate of what Nick’s talking about—but the audio and visuals, the music, everything in the entire stadium was geared towards up when you reach the emotions that he wanted you to get into. So it’s very powerful if done correctly. Nick: That sounds fantastic. West: And I can say that the anchors that I created is still far off very well to this day, some of the powerful emotions that I wanted to associate with. Just as a continuance, Nick, how do people let their emotions sabotage their financial business and relationship success? Is that something that you deal with, with clients? Nick: I do. Definitely. Yes. Really, it all happens in the same way. So the only time emotions are ever a problem for someone is if they repress it. As long as they’re expressing that emotion and it’s not excessive or unnatural or causing problems for them, then it’s fine to express the emotion. But we’ve been told over and over again in society that there are certain emotions that are okay to feel and there are certain emotions that re not okay to feel or express or show in public. And what happens is people push these down inside themselves and it never actually gets to get out so it finds somewhere inside you that it can get expression enough and that’s through creating some kind of physical problem or it might manifest as always being argumentative. In business, perhaps it could be fear causing someone to procrastinate and not make the necessary decisions. In terms of finance, often it comes back to fear again, people not prepared to take calculated risks in terms of investments or make the right moves when everything points at the timing being right, there’s just something inside that won’t let them take the next step. So that’s a few ways in which what you’re talking about, really affects people. West: Yeah. And I mean there are obviously some telltale signs and symptoms that you must look for in order to tell that that’s happening to a person. And I’m sure you have a list of those. Would that be fair to say? Nick: It’s not so much a list. It’s more how the person is interacting with other people and how they talk to people, how they use their body. So we look at their body language. We ask them questions about the emotional states that they feel most of the time, the kind of language that they use with themselves as well, their internal self talk. And obviously this comes down to whether or not people are happy to tell us this kind of stuff. I’m sure you’ve met people who use the words ‘can’t,’ ‘don’t,’ and ‘won’t’ all the time. And those are probably not the people that are going to reach the heights of success that they’d like to. West: For sure. That’s really interesting. And I’m really curious, Nick… so someone, you find out that they have emotional repression for many years or decades or how ever long they’ve had suppressed them, do you actually facilitate them in expressing it or do you give them an outlet to open the force and not continue to hold it in? Nick: What we tend to do—it’s a very interesting approach in that it’s quite gentle and non invasive and we don’t need to get the person to yell and scream and go and kick a punching bag or anything like that. I mean, that all works and that’s fantastic. The way that I like to work is we get the person to go back—some people call that regression; I’m not real keen on that word—we get them to go back to where it started. Because when that situation first became a problem, if you think about it every single second of our lives we’re in some emotional state—so right now, you know, you could be feeling calm and happy, other times you’re grumpy—at any point in time there are three things that are possible for us to experience. And that’s the emotional state that we’re in; the actual experience that we’re having—so what’s taking place; and what we are capable of learning at that point in time. Those are the three main things that are tied up in our experience of any particular time or thing. If something has caused a problem for someone, let’s say the emotion became so overwhelming at the time that they were incapable of learning what they needed to learn at the time to allow them to move on so that it wouldn’t be a problem for them in the future, we’re not learning that lesson, they’ve created a pattern for themselves because your unconscious mind or subconscious locks those three things together: ‘Okay, this was the experience that created this emotional state where I was supposed to learn something and I didn’t get a chance to learn it; so I’m going to lock all of that together and then bring other experiences into my life, related and unrelated, where I can—and this is most important—where I can feel that same emotion again because the emotion is the key to learning the lesson.’ So we have the person go back. We find out what the lesson was that they needed to learn at the time, we help them release the emotion… West: Just for a second, Nick. Can I drop really quickly? When you say ‘go back’, do you mean you get them to like close their eyes and visualize the actual event? Is that what you mean by go back? Nick: Yeah, that’s right. We get them to close their eyes. We guide them back using our language patterns, we give them particular suggestions on where they’re going to go. We leave it quite open so they go wherever they like as long as it’s the very first time that caused that problem. And once we’ve got them there, that’s when that whole process takes place. West: Wow. So once they go back and they’ve identified that particular event, that’s obviously a very strong foundation in you moving forward with them and getting on top of that particular emotion? Nick: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And the thing is that most people, when we do guide them back, they may be expecting that they’re going to see something—and about 70% of people don’t actually see anything; 30% of people will see something and be able to describe the actual event to you—but most of the time, people are just very keenly aware of what the experience is, what they’re feeling at the time, sometimes they hear the sounds around them or they can even remember what was going through their head at the time. And this is even guiding people back to two years, six months old, in the womb. It’s incredible how far back people go sometimes and where these came from. And once we’ve wiped that out, you’re right—it’s completely foundational in being able to move forward. Because once we’ve unlocked that emotion, given the opportunity to learn what they need—and sometimes we even ask them to make a new decision about what that experience means to them in their life now—that is really powerful and creates the leverage to change. West: So they make the decision at the time that it’s happening when they’re visualizing it or they make a decision now about…? Nick: Yeah. Yup. We have them make a decision as if they were in that time right now. Because if you think about it, any belief that’s formed before it is actually solidified into a belief, you had to make a decision to accept that as true. So if you make a new decision about what that means, it’s no longer true for you and you decide that something else is now true and it changes everything. West: Powerful. So it’s a new association, new association to that meaning which will result in different behavior. Nick: Absolutely. West: This is powerful stuff, Nick. I honestly think I’m going to have to listen to this call 2 3 times with the content you’ve covered today. It’s been really good. And I’m trying to logically sequence some questions and at the same time absorb the wisdom that you’re imparting on us. So I appreciate your time. Nick: You’re welcome. West: Nick, it’s been great today. I think that’s really been a jampacked-content call. Are there any parting words you like to say for, you know, bear in mind that people at the Money Mindset tend to want to take leaps in—they might be working jobs and they feel like they’re stuck, they’ve been banging their head against the door—is there any generic kind of advice or tips you can give those people, you know, the moms and dads who have been going at it for a while and not taken those exponential leaps like they feel like they should be? Nick: So just to make sure I understand your question…is there any kind of ground level advice that I can give to moms and dads who are looking to change the results that they’re producing in their life? West: Yeah. Yup. Nick: Yeah, absolutely. First, I’d say ‘stick with your program’ because it’s going to seriously help uncover these unconscious issues that are or perhaps have been keeping them stuck. And I say that because, you know, I’ve received your program for awhile now and it’s incredible stuff. So that’s the first point, in my opinion. And perhaps, they really want to get clear on that process of where you are at now, even sit down with a piece of paper and say, “This is exactly what’s going on in my life,” with no sugar coating. Once you’ve got that down—and this is the step people miss—they go, “What do I want?” You know, we’ve all seen The Secret and we know you’ve got to put your vision board up and visualize what you want everyday but if you just don’t believe you’re going to get there because of what’s happened in the past and get clear on where you are and what’s caused your situation, then figure out what you do want. Be very serious with yourself about ‘what do I get out of staying where I am,’ because until you find other ways of satisfying that outcome of getting the good feelings or the good result from being stuck where you are, you won’t have the leverage to change. So I’d say those are the three keys. West: What’s the key to—I mean, if someone’s getting something out of where they’re at, at the moment, and they’re sort of not happy with it but it’s not enough to take them over—like leverage, as you were saying—what’s the key to really pushing them over the edge? Nick: I’d say the key to pushing them over the edge is finding something else that is going to satisfy that same—I’ll call it ‘secondary gain’ again—so it’s going to satisfy that secondary gain in a more productive way. So if the secondary gain is that they get to relax on the couch instead of spending hours doing their tax, then we need to find another way for them to be able to satisfy the good feelings they get sitting on the couch but also get the tax done. West: Right. Interesting. Nick: It all comes down to the feelings. We’re completely motivated by our feelings. West: I appreciate the summary. I guess the last couple of minutes you just summarized the whole call into a couple of sentences, which is always good to wrap up on. So Nick, I wanted to tell the listeners about what you offer. I mean, people who have resonated with what you’ve said—me, being one of them—if people want to come and learn…do people come to you to learn how to do what you do or do they come to you to actually be helped in what you offer or do you offer a combination of both? Tell us a bit about what you do. Nick: Well, I definitely do both. I offer one on one private coaching sessions where we—this is for people who really want to break through the barriers to success that are holding them back—we do that one on one, face to face for people in the Sydney area or based in Sydney, over on the northern beaches here or over the phone or Skype for people who aren’t prepared to jump on a plane and fly down to Sydney… West: It’s obviously not as effective but it’s the next best thing, right? Nick: It’s still highly effective. My opinion is if you can get ninety percent of what you would get face to face without having to leave your home, it’s that good enough. We also offer short courses. We have, at the moment, four main or key courses that we offer: The first one is called Irresistible Influence. And this is where we help people become influential and effective communicators. So how to understand the ways that people like to receive information and package your message in the exact way that the audience or even the person that you’re talking to—if it’s one on one—prefers to receive that information so you’re never misunderstood again and it significantly raises your ability to be influential. It makes sales easy. It makes parenting easy. It makes relationships easy. It’s really powerful stuff. That’s a 3 Day program, by the way. The second course that we offer is called Emotional Mastery. And that’s a 6 day program. We usually do that over two, three day weekends. And this is all the processes and techniques that I’ve spoken about that are actually very easy to do with your self. We have two types of processes. Ones where you need someone else to guide you through them and others that, once you’ve learned how, you don’t need someone to run you through those; you can do them on yourself. And we have all of those in Emotional Mastery. So that’s all about finding your blocks, getting rid of them, figuring out what you do want and getting that yourself. Mastery, this is all about transforming other people’s lives. So this is where we teach people who are interested in using these techniques in either a coaching or more therapy environment. And often, the people who attend these courses either are practitioners or business coaches, managers, life coaches, executive coaches come to our programs a lot and they want to be able to help other people shift these problems and leverage the results that they’re getting. And often, many of the techniques that we teach here are a little more difficult to do with your self. That’s why we’ve created this separate program so you can learn how to guide people through these techniques. This is the course where we cover conversational hypnosis, which is how to effectively use hypnosis, hypnotic language patterns so that you can guide someone into a trance without them needing to lie down, close their eyes and go to sleep like in direct or clinical hypnosis. And the final program that we offer at the moment is called Modeling Excellence. And I think of this as the mindset upgrade. This is where we teach the person in three days the step by step processes of identifying, replicating and installing in their own mind the success strategies, belied, values and unconscious programming, behaviors, habits of any successful person that they like. And that takes three days as well. Once someone’s completed all four of those courses, if they choose to—now that’s not a requirement, they can do anything that they like—but if someone did decide to go through all four of those courses, they’ll also get the added bonus of an international Master Practitioner Certification in Neuro Linguistic Programming because I’m a certified NLP trainer. West: Wow. That’s a huge gamut of success tools you have there, Nick. And I can understand why you described it as a Bunnings Warehouse of tools. Listen, I appreciate your time there, Nick. And it’s been certainly enlightening for me, listening to Nick talk about the mind and the foundations behind the mind and how it’s all come together and how it really works at the deepest level. So Nick, thank you for your time. Nick: Thank you, West. It’s been my absolute pleasure. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to your members and share this information.

Author, Founder ESP Coach, Serial Entrepreneur, Triathlete Tom revealed some of his greatest learnings about business, startups and the mistakes he sees small to medium enterprises make. He also shared some of his views on leadership into the 21st century, and how to attain a solid work/life balance. You’ll love Tom’s warm demeanour and sage wisdom. In this interview you will discover: – Key Mindset shifts successful business owners take vs what 95% of what other business owners do – Why most small and medium enterprise owners work way too much and how to take steps to streamline your time and maximise your profit – The Biggest Mistakes people make when looking to start a new business – Why your business should be a passionate extension of who you are – How to evaluate new business ideas – The “Conch Shell” effect and why its crucial for your success http://www.8020Center.com Click Play To Hear Streaming: Download the Podcast [ mp3 – 40 mb – 49 mins ] Full Transcript Click To Read Full Transcript West Interviews Tom Poland Speakers: West: West Loh Tom: Tom Poland West: Today we’ve got a very special guest, Mr. Tom Poland. I met Tom in one of his recent seminars and he was talking about entrepreneurship and a whole heap of things. But what really blew me away was his different approach. It’s not your conventional approach to entrepreneurship. And we’re going to explore a lot of Tom’s thinking throughout his experiences and the value he’s been able to add for his clients, and hopefully, be able to add to you as well as a listener. So without further ado, Tom, welcome to the call. Tom: Thanks very much, West. And thanks for having me here. West: It’s an absolute pleasure. Why don’t you give us a little bit of a background on where you’ve come from so the listeners get an understanding from your perception? Tom: Okay. Well, I started life as a teacher and did that for about twelve months before I quit. There wasn’t enough happening. Whilst I really enjoyed it, there wasn’t really enough autonomy. Then I started a series of my own businesses. In the middle, I had ten years in the corporate thing—very much enjoyed that. So I did a whole lot of stuff. And then I hit this—I guess you could call it a mid-life chrysalis; I refer to it as a chrysalis. You know, it’s kind of that time of life when you start thinking, well, what the hell do I want to do with my life? And what’s it all about out there? It’s sort of like going back to when you’re sixteen and you start challenging some of those values. Sometimes you have those moments in life where the lightbulb goes off. In those days, I was a tape-o-holic. I’d have tapes in the car and I’d listen to them. And someone quoted Benjamin Franklin who said, “Time is the stuff of which life is made.” And I literally pulled my car over to the side of this country road and stopped and sat and thought about that because I had—in this corporate cage—I had five leave applications declined in one year because we were always restructuring or doing something. And I thought, you know what, I don’t have a life. I want to get my life back again. I don’t have control of my time but I want to have control over my life. So I started another business. And that was back in 1995. I called it the Entrepreneurs Success Program. And I really wanted a vehicle that would add a lot of value to people’s businesses and their life. Our target market was very clearly people who owned their own business. And what we wanted to do was we wanted them to be able to grow their business but also have more free time, which meant we had to think pretty hard and long about exactly how you do that. But that’s just sort of kind of a snapshot of my business background. West: Because I noticed that you have a strong emphasis on people doing well outside of their business lives as well. I mean, they need to kind of have balance rather than, you know, everything’s about the money. And that’s one thing that I really look up to in what you stand for, Tom. Tom: Yeah. Well, if I could just reinforce that point…it’s just a whole bunch of things. Like, first of all, I think living your life that’s value-focused means you also have to prioritize those values. And when I prioritize my values, clearly, health was number one for me. If I did anything such as consistently overworking, it was going to diminish the quality of my mental energy and my physical well-being, then that was going to be detrimental and certainly not worth it. And the second value that was most important to me was my family. I have four kids. I’ve got five grandkids now. And they were number two in my life. They’re only number two, because if I was dead I couldn’t help them—and that’s with the health thing. And then the third thing was money. And that included the business. So I did things like relocated my business so I can be nearer my home. I made a commitment to my family. At that stage we had a foster kid at home. We had our own children at home. I was running two businesses; at one stage in two different countries. It was kind of busy. But I made an absolute commitment that I would only work late two nights a week, every other night of the week I’d be home by 6pm for dinner with the family and every weekend was absolutely sacred in terms of family time. And West, the thing is, the moment you limit the amount of time you put into your business, you know what? It goes up because you have to think more. And that’s what I love about the work that you do—that money mindset. If you just rely on endless hours, that’s a no-brainer. Any idiot can work long hours. And it gets counterproductive. You know, some people should go home. It’s just like their body is in the office but their minds—lord know where that is—it’s not doing anything. So one of the things I really want to strongly emphasize to people is that if you can reach an agreement, if you’ve got kids at home or you’ve got a partner—it’s different if you’re single—but even for the sake of your own mental energy and focus and productivity, if you limit the amount of hours you put in your business you’ll find the quality of your thinking will improve. West: That’s very, very powerful. And it’s a win-win both ways, isn’t it? Because they get the quality time with their family and their own pleasure pursuits as well as a better business. Tom: Exactly right, West. They get a bit of mental health. They get a bit of physical health. Their family gets to know them again and loves them and is enriched by them. And the business improves. West: That’s awesome. I love that. And I’m looking forward to hearing what you are able to share with us a little bit later on because I know you’ve got something awesome happening with one of the groups that you’re running. You mentioned before that you set two days a week to work late only and that impresses me, first off. And secondly, you have the self-discipline to be able to maintain that. And I know that a lot of the people listening to this call might set themselves goals but they just don’t seem to be able to stick to it. What worked for you, Tom? Like did you keep yourself accountable to someone or was it just something that you’re innately able to—from your training in triathlons and stuff like that? Tom: Well first off, West, I discovered recently early on that there’s one thing to have discipline to do exercise and to eat right and all those other good things that we know that we should be doing. But the greater discipline actually wasn’t the things that I needed to force myself to do. It was the things that I needed to force myself not to do…like working mindless hours. So what I did—and a lot of guys and women have a business and they have a family—so I had a conversation—we used to call them ‘family conference time’—and the kids loved it. Any time there was a serious issue like ‘are we going to move house,’ ‘are we going to move country,’ ‘are we going to start a new business,’ ‘do we need to look at someone’s schooling,’ or whatever, we’d hold a family conference. And the kids loved it. we’d get the whole family together—it didn’t matter if they were three years old or thirteen years old, with the guys this is the issue, ‘what’s important to you, Libby,’ ‘what’s important to you Loribeth,’ Lance, Rachel—whoever’s there—what’s happening. So I reached an agreement with my whole family that that’s what I do. And if you really want to leverage discipline, share that with your family because, boy, they’ll remind you about it. But the other thing, I guess, is I didn’t want to sit on my rocking chair, age 75, and look back on my life and go, ‘Yeah, I really nailed the business but it’s a shame my grandchildren don’t know me and my kids barely talk to me.’ And I guess you’ve got to start with the end in mind and say, “Well, what do I really want my life to look like?” Therefore, how do I need to behave now? West: Very powerful. And I’m sure you’ve actually set up a group of people that facilitate that way of thinking in a way that you’ve approached entrepreneurship and business, which we’ll tackle a little bit later on. Now, I wanted to make a shift to talk about…I like to talk about the mindset you were going through. Firstly…for yourself, going through your own business; and then maybe some of the top clients that you’ve worked with, some of the change in mindset that you’ve helped them to achieve later on. But shifting back to yourself, when you were launching your business—and there’s always a lot of doubts that a lot of people have that’s self-imposed, conditioning that they can’t do it and stuff like that—did you have any of these what we call ‘blockages’ (in our program) that came up before you launched your, for example, Entrepreneurs Success program? Tom: Yeah, I certainly did. And I think that’s a great question because often, what freezes people from jumping out of their corporate cage and becoming entrepreneurial is zeal, let’s face it. You know, I was…in 1995, the packages were around $200,000, there was company car, superannuation. I was pretty high up in the corporate scene. The problem was I didn’t have a life. But there was actually, relatively a lot of security there but those comfort zones can be very a insidious thing. So to answer your question, what I did is I sat down—and I did involve my wife with this. My kids at that stage were a little bit too young to understand what was going on. But I wasn’t prepared to do anything unless I had the support of my wife. And I’ve got to tell you, she was amazing…a wonderful, supportive individual. But we sat down and we did this weird exercise that I learned from I don’t know who. But what you do is you sit down and you visualize the worst case scenario. And the worst case scenario in this case was we would lose our beautiful home, we would destroy what retirement savings we had, we’d have to give up our nice three-car family and probably get a pedal car or something. We’d have to start mowing our own lawns. We have to rent a house. And we went through the whole thing and we actually visualized it. And once we had done that then all of a sudden, the motion comes up, you know, like, ‘Oh god, we’re going to die.’ And what it comes down to, it seems to me, is that we’re going to lose people we love. People aren’t going to love us anymore. But of course it was all ego, it was all untrue. But it was all unconscious barriers. And again, I just love what you’ve got West, what you do with your business because you’re smashing the stuff. And until you break the mindset, nothing’s going to happen in the physical world. So anyway, we did this exercise. And as I said, you get a bit choked up and say, “Oh god, we’re going to die and no one’s going to love us and we’ll be homeless. We’ll be living in the gutters.” We actually really went through and visualized ourselves lying in the gutter. And you know, “Where are we going to sleep tonight?” And once we went through mentally and visually the pain of that worst case scenario, we snapped out of it and we said to each other, “You know what? Even if that happened, we could handle it because we’ve still got the family. We’ve still got our health.” So that’s what we did. And I don’t know… You’re an expert on this. I’m not the expert. But that’s what we did. And it was totally liberating because we had faced our demons. West: Absolutely. I mean it sounds to me like you guys actually went to the point where you visualized it so vividly that you actually felt the feelings that you would have if that was your reality. And the fact that you guys can actually still love each other and still be together and still have your health and realize that’s a good thing, that would have been a overcoming a huge block for you. Tom: Yeah. That was certainly a breakthrough for us. And the fact that my wife was so supportive—not a lot of wife would be, I don’t know—but she was prepared to risk and to back me up. I suppose that’s the other thing. You know, you’ve got to be able to earn that trust and respect with your wife by doing, you know, if you say you’re going to be home at 6 o’clock, get bloody home by 6 o’clock. Don’t phone 5 past 6 telling her you’re going to be late or you have to do whatever. But that’s what we did and it seemed to work for us. West: Well thank you for sharing that, Tom. That’s very powerful. I think they’ll get a lot out of it. Do you actually find that when you speak to CEOs—I understand that you work with leaders of organizations and people very high up and medium to large enterprises—do they come to you for when they actually have self-doubts and they’re unsure of where they want to take things or there’s uncertainty in their company? Is that the kind of thing you talk to them about as well or do you just focus on…? Tom: No. I focus on two things and two things only: getting a better strategy in their business and executing it. I should just correct one small thing: I work for people in all shapes and sizes of businesses. With the larger businesses, I tend to do consulting work—for the Australia’s largest university, some multinationals I’ve worked with—but that seems to be strategic consulting work. I have a few clients from the old days that I do personal coaching with; and that is mindset stuff. But what you’ll quickly learn with these guys and women is that they put their pants on one leg at a time. And they have the same fears and doubts. They’re probably better at masking it than some of us, but they have the same fears and doubts and concerns as well. You know, I really don’t buy into the idea that we can get ourselves to the point where we are totally free of the stuff. I suspect that as long as we’re in a human skin, we’re going to have something that’s coming up as a blockage—which is great for you because you’re always going to have a business—and then if we didn’t, we wouldn’t even be in a human skin. That’s part of the point of being here, part of our purpose in life: is to overcome these obstacles. And again, I just like the work you’re in because you’re dealing with the reality, the mental reality that most people face. West: Definitely. And thank you for your kind words there. And I completely agree that it’s a process. And it’s kind of a journey that will never end. But as long as you’re aware of the journey and you’re always working on it and talking to people like yourself, getting a coach or getting someone that can point you in the right direction, then you’re always going to be ahead of your competitors and you’re always going to be on top of the game. Tom: Yeah. I think that really comes down to being very self-aware. My lover had to rush back to Germany. Her mom’s ill, unfortunately. And so I’m here on my own and I just noticed my mind starting to think thoughts that created feelings which I didn’t enjoy. I’m not saying I’m very good at this but I was at least aware that this was happening and then I could start doing the visualizations, the affirmations that turn the mindset around. So to me it’s not about not having the stuff happening, it’s about knowing how to handle it. West: Definitely. Another powerful analogy. This is going to be a call that I’d probably look back on and listen to a few more times before I release it to the guys to soak up the wisdom here. Now let’s take a shift now to…for the people who are looking at getting into an entrepreneur mindset, Tom. And this is where you’re a real expert at. Maybe they don’t have a huge business at the moment but they’re thinking of starting an offline or online business—maybe from a strategy perspective—do people come to you and do they consult with you for that? What advice would you give them? Tom: Looking at someone who perhaps want to start a new business? Again, my business is an extension of my personal philosophy in my life purpose and everything that I do—well I hope it does—that’s my intention at least. So the first thing that I’d want to know is, is this new business really going to add value to people’s lives—either professional life or personal life? And I know it sounds kind of like a dumb question but, I mean, if you want to start manufacturing cigarettes or any sort of… West: Just to make money. Tom: Yeah, just to make money or you just want to flood some products because there’s a big margin on it—forget it. I mean, that’s not fulfilling. And what someone like that would find is that their self-esteem suffers. They never feel fulfilled. They can have millions and millions of dollars in the bank—and I’ve met these guys—smiling happy families and inside feeling empty. So to me, it’s got to be fulfilling from a life purpose-perspective. It’s got to be able to add value. To me that’s the first one, the first P. The second thing is you’ve got to be passionate about it. Don’t just do something for the money. Create a marriage between passion and purpose. To me, that’s the best of both worlds. Look, I don’t really go to work. I go to have play. I have easy play which is my leisure time and a hard play which is my work time. But it’s still play. It’s still stuff that I enjoy doing. And I’ve long since got past the point where I’m prepared to prostitute myself just to make some money. So the first thing is: is it purposeful? Is it going to be fulfilling for me personally as an extension of my gifts and what I’m here for on planet earth? The second thing is: do I love doing it? Do I love this game—whatever it happens to be? And the third thing is: the pennies. We’ve got the purpose. We’ve got the passion. Are there pennies in there? Is there a margin in this product? Because I don’t care how much you love washing dogs, there aren’t any money in it. There’s just no money in that. So those are the three things I look at: the purpose, the passion, and then the pennies. And then once we’ve gone through those conceptual questions, I want to know what is fundamentally and radically different about their value proposition to everyone else’s in the marketplace. And so there’s only two ways you can do this. Are we going to be fundamentally different or are we going to be fundamentally both? If you’re real clever, you can do both. And I need for this person to be able to clearly articulate to me what their competitive point of difference is. In other words, why are you clearly and compellingly different? Or why are you clearly and compellingly better than other people in the marketplace? And it doesn’t have to be a product, West. That’s the thing. You don’t have to have a product that is stunningly better or stunningly different. I mean that really helps a lot, but you could have much better marketing compared to others. West: Or even the customer service. Tom: Exactly. I’ve now got eight of these things that I reckon the MBA teaches this three—I don’t think that’s true—I think there’s eight. You can have better leadership. You can have a better team. You can have a better product. You can have a better customer service. You can have a better marketing, sales, etc. You can have better money management and pricing and all those things that go with that like cashflow and clients. You can have a better digital platforms that support everything else and you’re going to have better data analysis. I think of those as like eight pillars. You know the Parthenon in Greece, this big marble Parthenon, there are always pillars? West: Yes. Tom: Think of it as like eight pillars that you can build in your business. What I suggest when I work with clients is I say to them, “Pick one. Not any one. But pick one that is going to give you the most rapid penetration into the marketplace because that’s what strategy is about. Strategy is about beating your competitors. It’s like war. It’s like a sport. There’s a scoreboard step called market share. And if you will pick the right strategy and execute it successfully, the scoreboard will work out for itself.” West: I’m loving these analogies, Tom. I’m trying to madly take notes and give a good interview at the same time. Tom: You’re doing a great job. I’m enjoying it. West: Thank you. That’s great. I love your analogy of the Parthenon and the pillars. And I’m sure that you actually teach people through your philosophies, your products, your websites, and your programs how to actually define and develop all these different pillars. My question is—for the viewers on this call and now we’ve got limited time here—talking about purpose and passion. For someone who is sort of unsure, what advice or tips would you give someone looking to find what it is their calling, so to speak? Tom: I call it your passion history. The seeds of purpose lie in passion. West, just to tell you what most people do—and what I did initially as well as I was looking at dropping out of the corporate cage—I looked back and said, “Gee, what have I done in the past that I could do in the future?” [Imitates sound of a buzzer in a quiz show] It’s like I could do consulting work. I could do management. Or I could do whatever it is I’ve done in the past. West: Because that’s a natural question to ask, isn’t it? Tom: I think it’s a very limiting perspective. I mean you can plan based on the past if you wanted but all you get is more of the same. So what I call the passion history…you know, for example, when I did this exercise myself before I started the Entrepreneurs Success Program is the 80-20 Circle. I looked back, and the moments with the greatest fulfillments for me were when I supported someone to make a shift in their business or their personal life. They were at, say, on a scale of 1 to 100, they’re performing at perhaps level 20. And through a process of working with them and their commitment and everything else as well, we can go from 20 to perhaps 80. Or we could take them from 50 to 100. Or whatever. But there was a change in their life professionally and personally for the better. So that’s what I got off on. That was my passion history. That was the moment when I felt really, really fulfilled. And it doesn’t have to be something as sort of grand as that. But to give people a story to illustrate: I sat on a ferry—this is a few years ago—and I was going to the other side. It was kind of a bit crowded so I ended up sitting next to this guy and ended up having a conversation. You know, “What do you do?” “What do you do?” And he said, “Well, I design car parks.” I said, “You design car parks?” And he went on for about—the whole ferry trip was about a quarter of an hour—telling me how you can get more cars into a car park but you could actually have the access and the exit even better and he drew some stuff. And he was getting off on this. And I thought, isn’t the world a wonderful place? I don’t like to design car parks. But here’s a guy who’s helping other people because of his passion and his capability in designing car parks. I can think of a lady in the States that I’ve just been introduced to who helps breast cancer sufferers either go through the process and to recover…guess how? By giving them fly fishing. When she looked back on her passion history—she was a recovering breast cancer sufferer herself—she loves fly fishing. She has built a $1.6 million a year business. And if anyone does this, google fly fishing breast cancer recovery, she’ll be there top of the pops. West: That’s amazing. Tom: So look at your passion history. For goodness’ sake, do not get sucked into prostituting yourself doing some multi-level marketing thing you hate. If you love it, great! If it makes a difference…great. But if you don’t like it, don’t kid yourself. You won’t stick at it. Find something that really makes a difference, that you love to do, and there’s plenty of money in it as well. And that means you’re going to have to think. West: Sit down and maybe go fly fishing is probably a good place to start. [Laughs] Tom: There was another guy—just to tell you—this guy is a stockbroker. He was a stockbroker and he used to skive off from work because he hated his job and coach his son swimming because he loved to do that. And he was approached by a little person—now I’m not talking a child, I’m talking what people used to call a dwarf—and the little person said to him, “Do you know of anyone that can coach us little people?” And the guy says, “No, I don’t.” And the little person was after a coach actually for her son. Anyway, this guy went home and had a sleepless night and thought, “I’ll set up a coaching clinic for little people.” He quit his stock brokering job. He now makes over $600,000 a year teaching little people how to swim. West: That’s awesome. Tom: And that’s the power of segmenting the market as well, which is a little byline there. That’s a strategy. Both of these people have picked a strategy which created a niche in the marketplace that was so niched, no one else was even there. They made the competition irrelevant because there wasn’t any. West: I mean the last thing a competitor would do is think, ‘Let’s set up something as obscure as that.’ If they do, at least you have such a huge first move advantage. And obviously, if you’ve done all the right strategies they’ll be hard-pressed to catch you. Tom: Absolutely. First advantage. And you’ve got your own name in the marketplace. But the point is that both of these people did something that they were passionate about. And to me—I mean, I’m real happy to work harder from winning. And I’m real happy to work harder from loving it. But I would have to drag myself into the office if you—I mean, well, I love these accountants, okay—but if you said to me, “Tom, you have to be an accountant for the rest of your life,” I’d find the nearest cliff and jump off because there’s no passion enough for me. West: For sure. Tom: But just to finish off, don’t just settle for the passion. Don’t just settle for something that’s really worthwhile. You can’t make any money out of it. Do the purpose. Do the passion. And do the pennies. You do that…the world will be yours—with a lot of hard work and thinking. But that’s the starting point. West: That’s the starting point; a very strong foundation. Now I wanted to touch on a few more things before I leave you today, Tom. And one of them was leadership. Because I know that’s an area that you’re an expert in and people from all around the world come to you and talk about it. What leadership obstacles do you see future business leaders need to address and overcome? Tom: There’s a bunch of them but there’s only two that will be critical because everything else falls under these two. What normally happens is the leader does an MBA or something ghastly like that and says, “Oh gosh! We need a mission statement.” And then they go, “Well, geez, if they want to see some cashflows, a bit of a strategic plan. We need a five-year cashflow projection. And someone—quick!—work on a spreadsheet.” And then they go, “Oh boy, it’s still not working. Oh, we need a USP (unique sales proposition).” So they whack that up on the wall and then they go, “We’ve got to have meetings. We’ve got to empower people through these meetings.” And the problem is, is that they’re all good ideas in and of themselves—most of them don’t work, by the way but that’s part of… West: Well I have to say, Tom, really quickly, that I do have an MBA and that sounds very, very familiar. Tom: Sorry about that. West: No, no, no. Listen, to be perfectly honest all the business plans and spreadsheets…by the time you finish them, your idea is already obsolete. Tom: Yeah, my apologies. West: No, no, no. I agree. Tom: I’m sure you got a lot of value out of it. But it’s just…I mean I’ve stopped teaching mission statement, I’ve stopped teaching value statements, I’ve stopped doing USPs because people don’t use them. And if people don’t use them they don’t work. I mean they might work if people use them but people don’t use them. West: It’s good in theory. Tom: Exactly. But the first obstacle is what I call the conch shell effect. And let me explain. You know a conch is a sea shell? In the Bahamas, they dive off these long boats and the pick up 5 or 6 conch shells. Someone in the boat drills a hole through the shell, they tie a string and they throw it back on the water. So there are 5 or 6 conch shells in the water. Then they go to the next site. And at the end of the day, they come back and pick all the conch shells up. Now here’s the question: Those conch shells can swim and they’re not fixed to the ocean floor but why are they still on exactly the same spot when the boat comes back just waiting to be picked up? The answer is pretty simple. One of them steps in one direction, another one in that tied bunch swims and feels it and pulls in a different direction. Now you’ve got 5 or 6 conch shells all swimming flat out, all pulling in different directions and going absolutely nowhere. And that’s what I mean by the ‘conch shell effect.’ Lots of people in the business working hard, working long, all good ideas—got the mission plan, got the business plan, got the meetings set and got the product review—but not all going in the same direction. Now the answer to that is better strategy. And that’s the thing that I bring leaders back to time and time again: “What’s your strategy?” An international property development company asked me to review their strategic plan—which I did—and it was like this small encyclopedia. So I went to the CEO—and I took a bit of a risk; and we’ll call him Sam—I said, “Sam…” He said, “Did you review the plan? What did you think?” I said, “Why, it was spectacular. Can you turn to the page that has the strategy, please?” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, can you show me in here what you’re going to do differently that’s going to kick butt in the marketplace?” I said, “Clearly you’re doing a lot of stuff that’s working because your business is growing. But I see cashflow projections, I see how many units you’re going to have, I see all these objectives…but I don’t see a clear articulation of what makes you different.” So the first problem is getting leaders to understand strategies are not objectives. It’s not mission statements. It’s not any of that stuff. It’s clearly articulating through one of those eight pillars what you are going to make to strengthen your organization that none of your competitors can match. So the first problem is ‘conch shell effect,’ and that’s overcome with better strategy. The second problem I see leaders falling into is if they have a clear strategy, they’d get into what I call pinball leadership. Now if you’ve got a pinball machine, there are basically two things in that machine: A couple of flippers and there’s a pinball. And in my experience in life and in business is you’re either a pinball or you’re a flipper. If you’re a pinball, you’ve got to work and you answer emails and you bounce off client requests and you bounce off meetings, you bounce off staff issues and you bounce off a complaint, and you bounce off a problem with the IT…and you spend your whole day and all week—and possibly all year—reacting. But the answer, of course, is to find a structure of accountability and reviewing focus. So you regularly put aside chunks of time to execute that strategy which means putting into place business processes, developing people and processes. And that’s how you execute strategy. So the two problems: The conch shell effect can bully the ship. You can overcome them with a bit of strategy and a better execution. West: I love those analogies. And I think a lot of people who’d be listening to this call and just shaking their head and thinking, ‘I’m a bit of a pinball, unfortunately.’ But fortunately for them, we’re actually going to tell them a bit more about your 80 20 Club. You got me really excited when you mentioned. But before I ask that, I’ve got this question that I really want to ask you, Tom. You were mentioning before that you did a triathlon or you have done triathlons. And I just wanted to get a sense of the mindset that that has taught you in life in general, not just for running your business, but some of the values and some of the things—because it’s not just a normal triathlon, I believe. You did like an Ironman or some crazy distance—tell us about that really quick. Tom: Okay. One of my philosophies is to set what I call Extraordinary Personal Goal or EPG. And an extraordinary personal goal has a few characteristics: The first one is that when you tell people about what you’re going to do…they’ll either say, ‘Wow,’ or ‘You must be crazy.’ The second characteristic is it has to take you a long way outside your comfort zone. And the third characteristic is your grandchildren will talk about this at your funeral. If you can go tick, tick, tick…you have yourself an EPG or Extraordinary Personal Goal. One of the ones I set was to do an Ironman Triathlon which was a 3.8k swim, 180k cycle ride and then that’s the warm-up for a full marathon 42.2k run. And that’s one tough day at the office, I can tell you. West: That’s crazy. Tom: That’s one of the bunch of other sets I’ve done. But they all really come about to the same thing: and it’s an expansion of your mental capacity. You put yourself in a situation where it’s tough or you’re scared or you have self-doubts or you run out of money or you run out of time or you don’t know what to do next—a whole bunch of things. I did Mount Cook as well, the Grand Traverse of Mount Cook. Now if anyone is thinking it’s kind of a small mountain, more people have died on Mount Cook than Mount Everest. It’s a tricky son of a b*tch. And I’m a mountaineering bunny. I’m no expert. I was pretty stupid about mountaineering but I was just smart enough to know that I was dumb at it. But I had a good guide so I managed to live. But all of these things serve the same purpose. And that’s the expansion of human potential, expansion of your mind and your thoughts. And it’s uncomfortable. I’m not an advocate of creating some sort of comfort zone and, you know, these guys that tell you to ‘come to our wealth creation seminar, you’ll have all this money, you’ll just be able to retire and do whatever you like and la dee da dee da.’ Sorry, but that’s crap. You’ve got a human spirit. You’re here to grow and to learn and to develop. It’s the conscious creation of a big obstacle that you overcome and go through. When you get through to the other side, you’re a different person. And to me, that’s a big part of what life is all about. West: And obviously it’s spread into all other areas of your life: your business, your family. It’s helped you to grow in all those years as well. Tom: Yeah. And it doesn’t have to be the outdoor stuff like I do it. You might be doing your own art exhibition or getting your book or poems published or something like that. When you get through the other side and you’ve been through all the obstacles—the internal obstacles and the external obstacles—and you still succeeded, as I said, you’re a different person. And the resilience and the persistence and the resourcefulness and the creativity and the innovation and all these other things that you develop, you can carry those over into your relationships, obviously in your mental health, into your business. Because when you hit an obstacle, hit a problem, you know you will find a way through. It might take you some time, you might not enjoy the journey very much but you don’t sit there and go, “Oh dear, I better just give up. It’s too hard.” And I also think, West, it’s a bloody great example for your kids. West: For sure. For sure. And I’m just marveling because I’m actually an exercise physiologist as well. And knowing those numbers—I’ve trained a lot of elite athletes but most of them would be absolutely crazy to tackle something like that. So congratulations from me on doing that and still being alive at the end. Tom: You’re very kind. I trust you. I mean I pretty much sucked at everything that I did but at least I did it. West: You did it and you’re still alive. Now 80 20 Club…I’m really excited hearing about it when you were mentioning it to me the other day. I want you to tell us how it was conceived, how it differentiates from other groups that are out there. Tom: I really appreciate the opportunity, West. And thank you for that. This came about as a result of thirteen years of the Entrepreneurs Success Program—1,476 clients over that thirteen years, from small business to large multinationals. And I kind of got to the point where I was thinking, you know what, I’m ready for something different, something new. So I got a clean whiteboard out and thought, ‘If I was going to start a program or experience that was going to really, really, powerfully support people to grow their business quickly and increase the value of it quickly, what would I do?’ It didn’t take me long to figure it out. I did sixty seven interviews with past clients. It didn’t take me too long to figure out that a cohesive, aligned, streamlined strategy such as what I’ve been talking about is the first step. But once people have that, they were saying, “Okay, so now I know what I need to do but, Tom, do you know what the problem is? I’m not doing what I know I need to do. So can you give me a structure that keeps me focused and honest and accountable so that I push through the barriers of pinball leadership and actually execute the strategy.” Because, you know, it’s like a rugby team or a soccer team—it’s no good having a great strategy if the players don’t execute it. West: Yes. Tom: So how do we the 80-20 Circle? Well, first of all, I work with every single client one on one until their plan is set up. I share them what they need to do, I share them how they need to do it, I listen to them intently and we create one market-kicking butt strategy. And once that plan is finished—it’s a very simple plan, by the way, West. It’s not complicated stuff. It’s just needs to be prioritized and documented—once that plan is completed, they’ve got their better strategy. And normally, they’re pretty excited about that. West: Absolutely. Tom: The next thing is better execution. How I work is that most of my work is done virtually. So it’s on the phone, over the internet, webinars, which—for people who don’t know—is an online seminar, teleconferences, and video conferencing. Every single month, a client of mine, the first week of the month they turn up at this circle meeting with their peers and colleagues and they report on their progress. And there’s something extraordinarily that happen productivity-wise. Like next Wednesday, you have to report to your fellow circle members and tell them what you did about what you said you were going to do. West: Yes. Very powerful. Tom: Absolutely. Its like if you’re going for a run in the morning and you’re going to go on your own—well maybe it happens or maybe it doesn’t—but if you’ve got a friend waiting for you at the end of the street at 6am, you’re going to get out of bed. West: Exactly. Or if you have a personal trainer who’s going to keep you accountable. Tom: Yeah. And we have a special system called the ‘yellow card system’ which really increases the intensity of accountability. If someone doesn’t make progress on their plan and at the end of the day they tell us what they’re going to do, then they get yellow carded and they go away for two months and get themselves up to date. And during that two months, they still pay their fees which we donate to charity. West: So it’s almost like taking it out of soccer where they get a yellow card. It’s almost like warning. Tom: Yeah, that’s what I call it—a yellow card. For two months, go away, get your projects up to date and then come back. In the meantime, you still pay your fees but they will go to charity. I will not collect your fees. Well, I collect them but I’ll pass them straight on and send you a receipt. So it’s that accountability thing. You know, if you just show up and say, “I didn’t do anything again,” well, sorry, you’re yellow-carded. So that’s week-1 of the circle meeting. Week-2 is I have a business growth webinar. So we empower people through education. How do you hire good staff, how do you keep them? How do you create a competitive advantage through segmenting your marketplace or repackaging your product, etc? So week-1 is a circle meeting: accountability; week-2 is the webinar: empowerment. Week 3, I do a laser-focused coaching course one-one-one with my clients. And it’s real laser-focused. They come with a question, a problem, a situation and we drill down into individual issues. And Week 4, I do an interview like this with someone. So that’s the circle. That’s the cycle. That’s how it works. West: Wow. That’s impressive. We’ve got listeners on the call who want to find out more. What do they need to do, Tom? Do they just need to go to your website or do you have an 80-20 website or…? Tom: No, I don’t because everyone else has one. West: Okay. Tom: So if everyone’s going west, I’ll go east, thank you. Pardon the pun, West. But what I do is I invite people who are interested once a month to attend a preview online. If anyone is interested, all they need to do is email me at [email protected]. West: That’s your personal email, Tom. Tom: That’s my personal email address. Well, I have a personal relationship with every client. I don’t want to lead this thing to the point where I lose touch with the client. So all they have to do is email and say webinar or interested at something like that. And as a little bit of a gift to your listeners, West, I’m really happy to offer them an ebook which is Your Extraordinary Life. It’s filled with how to figure out their life purpose and how to set and achieve goals, like there are EPG examples. It’s a 103,000 words. It took me two years to write. It’s been published in the USA, Australia, distributed in New Zealand. And I’m giving them that for free, if they’re genuinely interested in knowing more about 80-20 Circle. West: Yes, wow. Thank you for that. They’ll appreciate that. So that’s awesome, Tom. I love your strategies and I love your philosophy, what you stand for. I think you’re an advocate for personal, you know, people growing as people rather than just business. That’s very refreshing to see in the corporate arena, so to speak. Is there anything else you’d like to add, Tom, before we wrap up? Tom: If I could just say one thing, West, it would be back yourself, believe in yourself. Sure, have doubts but then act as if you’re confident anyway. I just see so many people underselling themselves. And again, I love what you do. You know, when you catch yourself doubting, when you catch yourself like, ‘Oh god, I’m a screwball’ or ‘I messed up again,’ or ‘didn’t do it again,’ hook into those affirmations, hook into your visualizations and get your mind back on track because nothing happens until you think it, until you want to make sure you’re thinking the things that you want to happen. West: Well, on behalf of all our listeners and members, Tom, I want to thank you for an absolutely mind-shifting call. It was awesome. I realized how valuable your time is so I’m sure everyone here would really appreciate it. So thanks again, Tom, and we appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Tom: Thank you, West.

One of Australia’s premier Copywriters, Entrepreneur and Speaker. Made $125,000 in his first 5 months copywriting Bret was selfless in this call when I asked him to share what he thought was the key ingredient that made the biggest difference for him. We spoke about his mindset evolution, and then got some specific tips on how to make any writing we do more powerful and get better results. If you’ve started with nothing, you’ll be able to relate closely to what’s Bret’s been through. In this interview you will discover: – How Bret went from sleeping on hotel floors to becoming Australia’s #1 Copywriting authority even though he failed english -Bret’s Key Commitment and Focus techniques that helps him meet some of the biggest projects with impossible deadlines -What drives Bret and how he fosters that motivation. – Why you don’t have to be the most educated, most prepared, most researched, most professional, best branded, …or ‘most perfect’ person (to be wildly successful. -Bret’s mindset on how to focus and persist until you are the best you can be. -Why Good Copywriting is everything. How to get good or find someone to do it for you. – 3 Keys to Copywriting Success that will separate you from the competition http://www.bretthomson.com/ Click Play To Hear Streaming: Download the Podcast [ mp3 – 70 mb – 54 mins ] Full Transcript Click To Read Full Transcript West Interviews Bret Thomson Speakers: West: West Loh Bret: Bret Thomson West: Welcome to the call, folks! And today I’ve got on the line with me, Bret Thomson. Bret’s a good, personal friend of mine. And I call him the ‘Thomsonator’ simply because he does so much damage when it comes to writing sales copy. And he’s recently had a really good workshop with the Grants. If you don’t know who they are, they’re a husband and wife couple who are making serious waves online. And they come to Bret to teach their premier clients how to kick butt online. And Bret’s been mentored by one of Australia’s most respected copywriters in his own right. And he’s now working for one of Australia’s most respected direct response marketers as his primary copywriter. I wanted to hit Bret up today for a few reasons but let’s welcome Bret to the call. Welcome, Bret! Bret: Thanks West! I appreciate it, mate. I’m going to say too that I like to call you ‘West the Lohcomotion’ because you seem to power on in everything you do. West: You do have a way with words, Bret. I actually really like ‘Locomotion’ a lot. I might steal that later on so I appreciate that. I’d really seen a shift in Bret. ‘Coz, you know, we’re buddies as well as colleagues in the last couple of years. Bret has really come from humble beginnings where he was kind of searching for different areas to go from. And we’ve got some similar mentors and a lot of similar people who we interact with work-wise. With Bret, I really saw an acceleration of his results in his professional career. And in the last twelve months or so, I really wanted to tap into some of the changes or some of the unique characteristics that have characterized his acceleration. Because a lot of people, when they get online or they look into doing a new venture, they get stuck in certain areas or they try a lot of different areas and not make real progress in any one area. So Bret, my question is…the big shift you had in the last 6-12 months, what have you identified as been—if we were to break it down—kind of the key things or characteristics that have happened to you or differences that you’ve made in your life or some of the key activities that you have done in the past that has caused this change? Bret: Very good question. The answer to that is probably not what you’d expect and probably not what I’d expect if I was listening in on this call and waiting for an answer to come. But to answer your question—what has changed the last 6-12 months to make it happen—to be honest with you, not a lot. But change actually happened many, many, many years ago when I decided to commit myself and to become successful. I developed a passion for personal development books, audios, CDs. I turned my car into a mobile university of success. I went from going through school without reading one single book. A year after school, I read an article that explained how alcohol affects the brain. So I decided there and then I would never, ever, ever drink again. West: Goodness. That’s hilarious. Bret: So the change happened many years ago. West: So it hasn’t been an overnight thing? It hasn’t been something that you’ve done immediately. It’s been progressive. But people have only really seen the results in the last 6-12 months. But the change has been going on for awhile now. Bret: It has. I’ve developed this attitude and beliefs and standards that I live by which tends to be uncommon in the average person—which is not too hard. But I guess what has changed—I jumped on a different horse. And I had all these different ideas. I went through so many years just chasing shiny light bulbs and whatever I thought could get me there. And then finally, I stumbled across copywriting purely by default actually because I had a business idea which I was trying to get off the ground. It wasn’t going too well. And because I just had a determined nature, I persisted and persisted until I finally ran out of all my money. And then I had to learn marketing and copywriting skill to try and resurrect that business. West: Wow. So you were kind of almost forced into it, in this case? Bret: Yeah. Pretty much. I remember going to my first ever copywriting seminar which is at the Grants. And that’s, I think, when I first met you West? West: Yeah. Could well have been. Bret: And I remember just sitting there, walked in as a business owner. And I drained myself there. I spent my last $500 to get in there. And those two days, I did the petty job straightaway and I applied the skills into my next promotion and saw phenomenal results. Then other people who are in my database just started seeing emails from me. And one particular marketer, he rang me up and said, “Bret, you need to stop sending me emails.” I said, “Why is that?” And he said, “Because I’m so busy. And every time I start reading yours, I can’t stop reading it ‘til right at the end.” And then he put sort of my mind to—‘listen, you could make some money writing for other people because there’s not many people who are very good in this area.’ Anyway, so word got out and I started writing for other people and they started getting phenomenal results as well. And then it escalated. Once I decided to write copy, like anything, I threw myself into it. I invested the money to learn. I put in the hard hours to craft my skill. West: Was it at that point, Bret, that you realized that that was a path you were going to go and then you just focused a hundred percent on that? Bret: Yeah, but only on a short term. I still thought that this is a means to the end. You’ve got to understand, West, I went through school and I failed English. West: And now you write for a living. Bret: Yeah. West: And get paid bucket loads to do it. Bret: Yeah. I’ll tell you that. If my English teacher knew how much money I make and how I make my money, she would roll over in her grave. But I threw myself into it because I thought, well, this is my primary source of income right now. So I did. I think I crammed about five years of education into six months. And I invested time and money in the very best courses to do that. And then I went into partnership with a friend. We bought a product that we were going to market. And I said, “Here’s a great avenue where I can pour my skills into for myself instead of writing for other people.” And we took a product which everyone else in Australia was struggling to sell for $498. And I looked at the sales copy and I knew I could improve it straightaway. So I worked my magic onto the sales material and I sold the exact same product for $1,497 and I outsold everyone else by 600% across Australia. And the only thing that changed was copywriting and some creative little added value bonuses which took nothing out of my time and things like that. West: Wow. It seems to me people are severely underestimating the power of words in marketing on a mass scale. Bret: Absolutely. I remember sitting in the seminar and Mal Emery got up on stage and said—and this was before I knew what copywriting was because three years ago, the only way you would have met me is if you went into a nut and bolt shop in Tweed Heads—and I went to this seminar and I didn’t know what a copywriter was. And he said on stage, “What I’m going to share with you now will put more money in your bank account in the fastest amount of time than any other skill you could ever learn. I was sitting at the edge of my seat, I said, “Whatever comes out of his mouth now, I’m going to do it.” And he said, “Copywriting.” And I’m like, “Nooo.” I still wasn’t sure exactly what it was but, just cos it had ‘writing’ in it. And then he introduced Pete on stage. And now, I’m Mal Emery’s personal copywriter—which is funny—how that all came round. West: Definitely. Because actually, Pete used to be Mal Emery’s copywriter, correct? Bret: Yeah, that’s right. Pete has outgrown that position. He’s doing some amazing stuff… West: On his own, yup. Bret: Well, Mal’s always got a team of copywriters doing his behind stuff but he handpicked me out to do his personal work. And that happened 12-18 months after I first started learning. West: Wow. That’s such a steep curve there. But as you were saying, from a mindset perspective, it had actually started many, many years before that. Bret: Yeah, spot on. And here’s something funny, West. I’ve gone on to do some amazing stuff, and pretty often, some amazing, incredible opportunities through my copywriting. And when I tell people what’s been offered to me, they’re just in awe. And they look at me and they say, “But you seem so stable and balanced. You don’t seem very shocked.” And I said, “Well, I’m not actually shocked. I’ve been waiting for this to happen for so long and this is only just the start.” And I know that now. West: You were expecting it to happen. Bret: Exactly. I was expecting it to happen a lot sooner, actually. West: But you’re there now. Bret: Yeah. But there’s still a long way to go and I’m really enjoying the ride. But it’s really cool. The other day—this is an interesting story, West—I think it was yesterday actually, I got a phone call from Darren Stevens, who’s… West: Yup. Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus—helped with their marketing campaign. Teaches people how to write bestsellers. Bret: That’s right. He’s very well connected around the world. To cut the long story short, I’m promoting a seminar concept for him and he’s going to take it all around the world. And they want me to be a part of it and link me into the backend and the product and talking on stage. And they’re talking to Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham and all those people. And they’re going to promote it through those lists and the Frank Kern list West: That’s crazy. Bret: Yeah, I know. And I must admit I showed a sign of weakness in my mind at that point. I thought, ‘Those guys…’ I mean, I’ve got a very high opinion of myself and vision and picture of success for myself but that scared me a little but. But I didn’t show that. I said straightaway, “Yes. Let’s do it!” West: That’s awesome, man. Congratulations! Bret: You’ve just got to put yourself out there and just clean up the mess later. West: Definitely. Definitely. And we’re going to get to some of the fundamentals in the call, on the building blocks of how you got to where you want to go. And one of those was, you know, I used to call you up months ago and you’d always be under a really tight deadline and you’ll always be out working till the wee hours of the morning. And I wanted to get into your mind during those times…what was driving you and how you kept yourself going through it because for some days you didn’t even sleep, is that correct? Bret: Yeah. This success hasn’t come by luck. West: Yes. Yes. You worked your ass off and I can vouch for that. Bret: Yeah. And I still do. A lot of people see me on stage and they think, ‘Oh wow,” say, “Great.” And it is. It’s fantastic. I work from home. I get to hang out with my kids during the day and my little baby who’s never known their dad to shoot off to work… West: Well, congratulations Bret. I haven’t seen your new baby. Bret: Yeah. That’s exciting. I sacrifice a lot and I work hard. But to answer your question what drives me, I’ve got this deep-seated burning desire to create the ultimate lifestyle of success for myself and my family. That’s a big thing. I never lacked motivation. All I have to do is think of my boys and my little girl. And also…I don’t know if it’s personality based—I think it might be—but I always, always feel I have to do a good job for someone. West: Even if that means not sleeping for the night. Bret: Yeah, that’s right. I think reputation is everything. A lot of people might take shortcuts. And it’s easy to do. Even in our industry, it’s easy to take shortcuts and just cut and paste stuff. And a lot of the time I get asked to write copy with extreme deadlines from Mal, Mal sends me all these other examples that I can get inspired from. And I look at them and I just still, to this day, I never ever cut and paste anything out of anyone else’s. Everything I do is… West: Wow. It’s from scratch. Bret: Yup. I’ll do some of my own stuff from other industries and reword it and things like that. But now I just feel obligated to do the best job for anyone. And that’s what keeps me up all the hours of the night and missing sleep until it’s done. I just don’t want to get a bad reputation of doing a half-hearted job. West: Yeah. And look, I can tell you now, I mean, if you mention the word Bret Thomson in the internet marketing circles or marketing circles or even colleagues, people who only have glowing word and compliments to say. So I can definitely vouch for Bret. And I’m a big fan myself. So it’s definitely something you’ve managed to establish. So Bret, tell me about…I know how you have to stay really focused. And a lot of people listening to the call would really benefit from knowing some of your—like time management techniques. How do you allot time aside? How do you get rid of distractions? How do you really laser-focus in on the task and not let the outside world and internet and all these other things take over what you’re doing so that you reach your outcome? Bret: A good question. And this answer might give people a lot of hope out there: If I ever, ever throw on a time management seminar, DO NOT GO. Because it’s still something I’ve got to work on. I go through ways when I come up with systems and do things and then I’ll go back to other ways. So that’s probably not a fantastic answer for you. But at the same time it says that I’m human… West: Yeah, yeah. And here’s the thing—you deliver on your deadlines, like, all the time. Is that correct? Bret: Yeah. Yup. West: So actually, whatever it is you’re doing it’s working for you. Bret: Yeah. And if I have to stay up ‘til early hours in the morning to get that done, until I’m happy with it, that’s fine. West: Because, you know, we’re talking extreme deadline. We’re talking like one day seminar having a full sales page written overnight—you were telling me about Mal Emery’s little project. Bret: Yeah. The Mal Emery Live War & Recession Boot Camp. It was actually worst of that…Mal has a program which is called The Million Dollar Makeovers where a business owner can get all his marketing campaign written up and done for you. And that takes a couple of writers about two or three weeks to get that back and forth, and the research and things like that. So Mal puts on these seminars and said, “As a prize, we’ll pick someone from the crowd, we’ll interview them onstage and then we’ll get Bret to write a copy overnight and deliver it to you the next day.” And he goes, “Bret you know we can pick someone from an industry you’ve written before and blah blah…” And I took on the challenge and I’ve done six of those. And basically, they pull someone on the stage, we interview them and I’ll write their sales—like long-form sales—which could be anywhere between 10, 14, 16 pages. West: And this is really compelling stuff. It’s not stuff that you just pull from other places. It’s all from you and it’s all based on the copywriting principles that you preach. Bret: The first one I did in Brisbane… I’ll tell you what I did first. I did a full long-page sales letter for the website. I adapted that so it can be an offline sales letter. I did three cover letters and a lead generation ad, a full advertorial—a full-page ad, and a full page editorial which we call a tear sheet. I did a 1-800 phone script and also autoresponder emails. Now I did that pretty much in 24 hours from scratch. West: That is insane. Bret: It is insane. And here’s what’s really surprising and I’m quite proud of. The first one I did, Mal got a copy of it, he was so impressed with it he emailed it to all the other copywriters and he said, “From now on, when you do your Million Dollar Makeovers, it needs to be at this standard.” West: Wow. Bret: So they’ve been doing it for years, a lot of them have been writing longer than I have known about copywriting, and now it has to be a template. So I’ve done six of those and some of them have been my best work. So how do I do it? For me, I break up my project into bite-sized chunks. And this is what I teach in my—I’ve got a product called the—7 Hours Sales Letter. And this is how the product came about. I developed a system where I could write a long-form sales letter in 7 hours or less. The way I did it is, I dedicated some time slots to certain components of the sales letter; because all the sales letter is, is just pieces of copy that’s just glued together and flows. West: Yah…that appeals to different emotions and follows a structure. Bret: That’s right. So I dedicate an hour on headlines, an hour on bullet points, and two hours on the offer and things like that. I got through all of that copy by doing that. West: Amazing. So your seminar where you teach people that system has come about as a result of loads of experience where you try to streamline the process? Bret: Yeah. It’s a great example of saying ‘yes’ first and thinking about the consequences later…exactly what I did with Darren Stevens. West: But the thing is, you’ve actually got it down to such a fine art where you can help people get to the same result in much less time than it would if they actually tried to nut it out themselves. Bret: Yeah, you’re right. That was very exciting, when I wrote my first ever workshop—two days. And prior to that, I was always in the crowd listening. I think I had about 130 people. It was jam-packed. They pretty much all had laptops facing me. And I was working with Andrew and Daryl. And Daryl was a big part of this. And at the start I said, “Who in the room believes or has a lot of self-doubt and think it’s possible that they’re going to write a sales letter in 7 hours?” And a sea of hands went up. I said, “Excellent!” And three days later, they all finished it and the test results were bouncing off the wall. It was incredible. West: That’s awesome. Very, very cool. So obviously, trying to pack this call with a much content as possible, would you be able to give us the essence of the 7 Hour Sales Letter in a couple of minutes? Bret: Sure. Basically, I can give you an overview of how I break it up but there are systems inside these chunks of time which make that possible. Well, here’s the thing…in a standard—when I write copy, believe it or not, but I’ll spend between eighty to ninety percent (80%-90%) of my time researching and ten to twenty percent (10%-20%) writing. Because one thing I’m recognized for more than anything—even over and above my writing ability—is coming up with the big idea, the big hook and the twist that makes their businesses jump off the page and separate them from everyone else. So that comes from research and understanding the client. So the 7 Hours Sales Letter doesn’t start at the research. You have to have already done that—that’s the key. So when it’s time to actually write—mind you, before I take on a big client, I wouldn’t do a 7 Hours. I’d spend a lot more time. This is for anyone who wants to do it in 7 Hours. I say that to cover myself in case any clients are listening. But I’ll spend an hour writing headlines. Typically, when I write a headline for a sales letter I’d write a 100-150 or more. Even if I think the third or fourth is it, I’ll keep on writing because I still amaze myself at what comes up at different angles, different twists and things like that. So I have a big brain dump of headlines. The next thing I do is spend an hour writing bullet points. And there are templates and methods which can help people get that skill quite quickly. And then I’ll spend two hours on the offer. And a lot of the time, I might actually write the offer before the bullet points because some of the bullet points would come from the offer. But the offer includes how you introduce the price, and how you structure what you’re offering, what bonuses you’re going to throw in, what kind of guarantee you’re going to offer, how you’re going to add some urgency or scarcity and things like that. So the offer is the engine room of the sales letter. So basically, I spend a couple of hours on that. Then I’ll spend a couple of hours writing the body of the copy, which is the introduction… and there are techniques and templates to teach people how to do that. West: Kind of building up the problem and, you know… Bret: Yeah, exactly. Building up the problem. West: Aggravating it, as Andrew and Daryl would say. Bret: Yeah, that’s right. That’s a form that we follow, which is: problem, aggravate, solve, prove, call of action. And that’s the basic formula which we run by. But with the 7 Hours Sales Letter, it’s a lot more in-depth than that. We write 2 hours for the body because in the body, we have to do the intro, the problem, introducing the price, introducing the product and then the close as well. And the P.S’s. So we put a couple of hours on that. And the last hour is graphics and layout. And that’s, again, winding back the clock from all the recognition and praises I got, the layout and graphic and design of my sales were commented probably more than anything else. And also the conversational copy but that’s another subject. But I mean, you can be the best copywriter in the world but if it looks messy and it looks ugly, then people aren’t going to stay on the page and read it. If they don’t stay on the page and read, they might not actually get to the call of action and order. So those are my tips on how to make that flow really well and look attractive. West: Yeah, that’s a great little summary of what you teach, Bret. And obviously, each stage you teach in much more detail in your 7 Hour Sales Letter workshop. But when people come to you and then you see them trying to attempt to write sales letters, I know a lot of them don’t want to become copywriters but to have that skill is certainly going to be beneficial for their business, what kind of mistakes do you see people making—the biggest mistakes—when they try and follow your system and try to write sales letters on their own? Bret: Well number one, weak headlines. Ted Nicholas—who’s run probably more direct mail ads than anyone else in the world—he’s tested exactly the same full page ads in the same magazines just a month or two apart and all he did was change the headline. And he got twenty more responses by changing the headline. So that’s twenty two more orders and anything else just by changing the headlines. So again, a lot of people can have a fantastic copy and body but if you don’t catch their attention and draw them in and get them to want more then all your good work and the body is just lost. So that’s one big mistake. West: I can see why you spend so much time writing headlines. Bret: Yeah. It’s critical, absolutely critical. With a good headline, you can pretty much have them nearly sold just from that. Another thing is not having identified who their target market is; they’re just writing to everyone. West: Yes. Like a general blanket. Bret: Yeah. And by doing that they’re not communicating to their ideal client and it’s just a wishy-washy message. And they’ll only get very small response. They’re just boring people. West: And this is absolutely critical in any business, would you say, Bret, any market? That when people try and market their products, services or whatever it is…no one has that one product that can fit everybody. And so you need to really decide who it is that is your market and really pull on their heartstrings. Bret: Yeah, exactly. Again, that all comes down to the research part. That’s what separates an average copywriter to a pro copywriter. The guys who are considered as pro copywriters, we know how important it is to research. I could research for—like before—up to two weeks, of just studying and I’ll interview people, I’ll go to forums, get surveys done and just get inside the mind of the clients. West: It’s almost as if you are… You know, I’m a big movie fan. And when you see exceptional roles in movies, you look back at how they prepared and you see the kind of things that they’ve done—the actor or the actress has done—in order to prepare for that role. And many times I’ve actually gone and hung out with experts, hung out with people who are doing what they want to do in order to best represent that. And this sounds very parallel to what they do. Bret: Yeah, that’s a good analogy. That’s just spot on. I mean basically, our job is to become sales detectives. And that’s coined from John Carlton. He’s one of the greatest copywriters alive. And that’s pretty much what we do: we’re detectives and we find out what the hot buttons are and what the objections are, then we get busy and… West: And start pushing them. Bret: Yeah. So that’s one key thing. And again, another big mistake is the layout. I guess—I wouldn’t say I’m lucky but—I naturally have a good flair for graphics and layout because I wanted to be a graphic artist when I was in school but that didn’t happen. Some people, they can look at something, and it can look like a dog’s breakfast—they don’t see it; they can’t see it’s ugly. West: It’s a bit like there’s a stray in American Idol, people who sing and think that they’re awesome and they just can’t sing at all. Bret: That is so true. West: And delusional, I call it. Bret: And here’s a tip for everyone. If your graphics and layout is presentably nice and looks well, you can actually get away with writing sub-average copy because you’ll get more people reading. But again, if you’re a fantastic writer but the layout looks crap, then… West: Yeah, it’s going to put people off. Bret: Yeah. So that’s another big mistake. So that’s why now, when I give people critiques—anyone who’s part of my monthly membership program—I’ll give them critiques and it only takes about ten minutes and I can just punch holes quickly than anything else and I’ll tell them to go to a graphic artist and say, “Can you make my sales letter to look like this?” And you’d want to try to find a graphic artist who has had some experience in direct response marketing. West: That’s a really good tip, definitely a good tip for the listeners out there. And myself, when I blog a page and it’s kind of not presented very well, it’s really a hard, arduous task to read on even if you like the writing and even if you want the product. And on the other hand, if it’s peppered with lots of multimedia—for me anyway—and the colors are nice and neutral and not too loud, then I’ll stick around and see what they’ve got to offer. Bret: Yeah, exactly. But again, a lot of people—you said writing, doing print ads—they’ll spend heaps of money with a graphic artist to make their ad look pretty and nice with logos and pictures, but that’s a different story. That doesn’t work. I mean basically, if you’ve got a message to get across, you need to put the word in there to compel them to take action. You don’t want to waste space. West: Especially in such a short—you know, people who are looking at advertising, in publications where they’ve only got little space, you want the words to do the damage. You don’t want to be branding yourself, putting your big logo there and stuff like that. I can never understand why people do that. Bret: Well they do it because that’s what everyone else does. It’s called ‘Me Too’ marketing. What people don’t realize—and if they thought about it for a half a second, it makes sense but—when people open up newspapers, it’s estimated that people stay on a page about 3 seconds and then flip over. So what do you think they’re doing in those 3 seconds? West: Scanning. Bret: Yeah, they’re just looking at headlines. West: Yup. For stuff that will catch their eye. Bret: Yeah. And people don’t pick up a newspaper or buy the newspaper and say, “I’m going to try and look for some advertisements or I’ll just see what I can buy,” right? The mindset that people have when they read a newspaper or magazine is ‘what can I get out of this?’ They want to be informed and things like that. Whereas the people who advertise, they’ve got the same mindset. They put their ads in and say, “What can I get out of this?” So you’ve got a GET mindset facing another GET mindset and they just clash. But if the advertisers have, ‘What can I give,’ then you’ll make some connections. West: It makes a difference. Absolutely. And that separates the top 1%-2% of results in any given publication. One or two percent will draw all the traffic and get all the responses. And the rest—the ‘Me Too’ marketing ones—just pay the publication and not get any results from it. Bret: Yeah, exactly. And here’s another quick tip on the subject: most people skim over advertising because they’re not looking to go through newspapers or magazines looking for ads. It’s different if you go in the yellow pages because you’re specifically looking for something. So if you really want to get effective with your offline marketing and you want to make your ads look like stories or articles, you want to disguise them so they don’t look any thing like an ad. West: Like a report. Almost. Bret: Exactly. So when I design advertorial, I’ll look at the publications and I’ll try and use the same font headline, same color, the same columns—everything—I’ll try and make it look like the newspaper has written it. And if you have a really compelling headline that pulls them in… West: I actually can vouch for falling for one of those the other day. I was reading a golf magazine and I ended up reading this article about this golf club that was made from materials from a tank and had this crazy titanium blend. And I was reading it and then halfway through, I thought, ‘Shit. This is an ad.’ But I really wanted the product. It had already caught me. Bret: That’s fantastic. West: So this is direct response marketing in full flight. Bret: Yeah. Here’s another similar story but to do with headlines and how powerful headlines can be with curiosity. I was at a hotel in Sydney and there was a magazine on the table. And one of the subheads on the front page—because all the front cover of the magazine is just a series of headlines—one of them was ‘What Ben Affleck thinks about rugby league.’ And I thought…I just wanted to know what does a Hollywood legend thought of rugby league. So I picked up the magazine, found the article and it was a 3-page article. And again, it was Ben Affleck, Russell Crowe and rugby league or something like that. So I started reading it. And I read all the way to the end. And the second to the last paragraph was only a couple of sentences, it said, “We heard Russell Crowe brought you to a rugby league game. What did you think of it?” And he said, “Oh, it looked fun but I didn’t quite get it.” West: That was it. Bret: That was it. And I went, “You little ripper.” It was fantastic. I said I love getting suckered in, you know. They got me to read the whole thing and that’s all it was. West: So it’s achieved its outcome—it got you to pick it up and read it. So curiosity is obviously one of the elements that you use in drawing people in to write. Bret: Yeah, that’s right. And some of my best headlines have been curiosity-based. But there is a risk for the people who are very skilled in this area because a lot of people try and be cute and fancy for the sake of being cute and fancy but they don’t work. West: So there’s a lot of testing with you guys, too, isn’t it? Bret: Yeah. West: So Bret, tell me, with people who are looking to, say, outsource a copywriter—because I know you teach people a lot of the main skills; and I think it’s actually essential to know at least the fundamentals of how a copywriting sells and how it works—but what do you tell people when they say, “Look Bret, I think copywriting’s great but I just want to pay someone to do it for me and focus on other stuff.” Bret: That’s fine. I still occasionally take on personal clients so I can recommend them to other clients. But I think you made a good point, mate. It’s a great skill to have even if you’re not going to write copy, just so you can actually identify good or bad copy straightaway. That skill, it can really alter your income so dramatically. It’s unbelievable. So it’s a skill which can pay you for a lifetime. And it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. It doesn’t matter who your market is. It’s just that powerful. West: Definitely. So for those people who don’t want to actually write themselves, they need to be able to know when they see a good one, know when they see a bad one so that when they’re working with a copywriter, they can kind of point them in the right direction and really support them. Bret: That’s right. Because there are a lot of copywriters out there but none of them are emotional direct response trained. West: Yes. And there’s a big difference isn’t there, Bret? Bret: Oh, poles apart. It’s just two different worlds. And so I learned the art of emotional direct response marketing. You really want to have that skill because a lot of people, they might try and find a copywriter on Elance, oDesk… West: Who were probably in academics their whole life. Bret: That’s right. And so you only get what you pay for. And Mal has a saying which I’ve carried through, which is, “To invest in a great emotional direct response copywriter, you should have the attitude of ‘pay once and cry once and get on with it.’” Because to get someone at a high level, you’re going to have to put your hand in the pocket and pay the big bucks. And you can never cry about it but—Pay once. Cry once. Get on with it. West: And it’ll pay you back many times over if you decided wisely and your product is reflective of a good product. Bret: Absolutely. And the good thing is it can pay you forever and a day. And that’s what Mal jokes to everyone, saying how it pays him truckloads of money for writing copy. And compared to what everyone else makes in copy out there, he really does pay me truckloads of money when I write copy. But he tells people openly that, “Bret doesn’t cost me money. He makes me money.” West: Yup. That’s such a shift in mindset, isn’t it? From what most people are thinking? And that’s why he’s on top of the food chain. Bret: Exactly. Yup. Not by accident. West: Different mindset. Wow, that’s awesome. Alright Bret, people are probably really interested in learning how to—if they want to learn the basic fundamentals of copywriting or even just to learn how to deal with a copywriter—I know you have a program that assists people on how to do that. So why don’t you tell us a bit about how it came about and where do people need to go if they want to become a part of it. Bret: Basically, how it came about is over the two years—when I was in the trenches—I would have spent close to a hundred thousand dollars ($100,000) on my education. West: I know for a fact that’s not an exaggeration. Bret: And here’s the big distinction about it. It wasn’t all on copywriting. There’s marketing too…because to be a great copywriter, you must first be a great marketer. You can be a great marketer and you can be a crap copywriter. A lot of people depend on you to come up with the hook, the angle, the twist and the big idea. I know the average person can’t really commit to put themselves on a warp speed education track that I put myself on. So what I’ve done, I’ve broken everything up that I’ve learned and still learning into little bite-sized chunks, into a $49/month membership site. West: Awesome. Now compared to what you pay for a copywriter, that’s really almost nothing. Why don’t we give an estimation for people who don’t know how much a good copywriter costs to write a long-form sales letter? What kind of ballpark are we talking, Bret? Ten grand? Twenty? Bret: I’ve never actually written just a sales letter. I generally do autoresponder emails, pre launch emails, offline/online combination, lead generation ads, Google ads, the whole lot. It’s hard to answer but I wouldn’t look at anything unless it was $15,000 or above right now. And then you can go and be put on a retainer as well. West: To get a percentage of. So people are getting pretty much the information that you use to do it for $49 a month. Bret: Yeah, that’s so low. It’s just ridiculous. But I actually quite like it. Because here’s the funny thing—you’ll laugh at this—but I not only give them every single week an email, an eclass, and they’re strategically laid out in order of what you need to get good at in specific sequence, but I also give them templates, a couple of 300 or 400 headlines which they can be inspired from, they’ve got hundreds of examples of openings, guarantees, offers, bullet points—all these things that’s a part of the membership which they can use if they have to write them. West: So they basically get an entire toolbox to pull from that has caused you tons of money and a lot of time to put together…at their fingertips. Bret: Yeah. And get this—I have to stop this soon; I just don’t know when because I’m going to get busy but—I offer everyone ten minute critiques on the phone with me. People are jumping at this. Basically, they’ve got me for ten minutes, they’ll show me their sales letter or ad or whatever and I’ll just go through it and blow holes faster than a machine gun. West: Faster than Clint Eastwood. Bret: Yeah. And that alone—I mean—what I say to people, if I’m ever talking to someone, “If you don’t think I can make you $49 in a month, Man, we shouldn’t even be talking.” Like seriously. Some of the advice I’ve given people are just going to make them so much money. So I don’t know how long I can keep on doing these critiques for. I might have to space them out but I really have a lot of fun doing it. And I get a real buzz from making a difference in people’s lives. It just drives me. I’ll be honest with you, I thought, maybe I’ll put these free critiques on just at the start to get people in. But the feedback I’ve been getting, it just keeps me going and I just love it. So I schedule it into my week all the time. And yeah, I’m creating quite a big following from this membership site. It’s very good. West: That’s sensational, Grant. And you know what? I think you also have quite a lot of free information if they actually go to your membership site page just to take a look, is that correct? Bret: Yeah, that’s right. West: You shower people with value just on your free page. Bret: A lot of people approach me and say, “Bret, how did you get so good so fast?” And for awhile I didn’t know because all I did was what I was taught and I didn’t know how to answer that. But when I really boiled it down, I identified five key things that made all the difference for me. And I’ve shared all those five things on my free content page. West: Cool. So mate, what’s the URL, because I’m actually going to go there right now and have another look? Bret: It’s www.thecopywritingsystem.com. West: Great. Alright. That’s been an awesome call, Bret. I’ve learned tons talking to you today—and I do every time I speak with you. But it’s been a pleasure having you. And thanks for sharing with us so many great tips about copywriting and writing. And if there’s anything that I think people need to learn from the call today, apart from all the great copywriting tips, is the importance of words in their business’ profitability. And many people just kind of do a lot of what Bret called the ‘Me Too’ marketing and don’t really excel from the crowd. And therefore, they get average results. So I want to thank Bret for his time and for really, really pointing that out for me. So Bret, thanks for your time! Bret: Yeah, West. I appreciate it, mate. I love talking to you. So thanks again. West: Cheers!