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R D SKINNER INTERVIEWS JOE POLISH
HOW TO PUT PROFITABLE MARKETING ON AUTO PILOT

Hello Piranha Members and tape of the month subscribers, this is Joe Polish.  I want to welcome you to another edition of my Superstar Audio Tape Series.  On this tape you’re actually going to hear something that’s a little different than what you’ve heard in the past.  Which is normally me interviewing some brilliant person on marketing, management, motivation, confidence, organisation and many of the other subjects that I’ve done interviews with people on.  On this particular tape you’re going to actually hear me being interviewed and the reason that I’m sending this tape out is because my good friend R D Skinner who I’ve done a lot of work with in the past and is someone that has adapted the Piranha Marketing concepts and strategies and principles to the pest control industry actually called me up and asked me to be interviewed for her Superstar Tape Series and so of course I agreed and we actually did an interview and then I listened to the interview and I decided that a lot of the concepts and things that we talked about apply to any business no matter what you do for a living and so I actually decided to send this interview out to all of you because in the last couple of years I’ve had a lot of my subscribers that listen to my monthly tape series actually suggest that I be interviewed so they can hear more from me and so I think this will give you a real good idea of some of the things that I believe in and some of the philosophies I have on running a business and so I decided to send this out for this month’s tape series so what you’re about to hear is going to be an introduction of R D introducing me and then you actually hear the interview.  I’m just sending you the tape the exact same way that she sent it out to all of her members, other than this brief introduction that I’m doing right now so you’ll get an idea of the tape that you’re about to listen to.  So listen to it and I hope you learn some stuff and let me know your thoughts if you actually like this type of stuff with me being interviewed and if you do, then I’ll do more of this in the future and so I hope you enjoy and so again you’ll hear a brief introduction from RD talking about me which probably makes me sound better than I actually am because RD is such a very nice great person.  I really like her a lot and respect her.  She’s done a lot of great things in the marketing industry and with that then you’ll get to hear me talk for the next ninety minutes or so.  So thanks for being a tape of the month subscriber and I hope you enjoy this interview.

R D Skinner:    Hello, this is R D Skinner and this is another edition to the Pest Control Superstar Series.  Today I have one of my best friends and Piranha Originator, Joe Polish, waiting on the phone line for an interview.

Today we’re going to talk about why you absolutely must market consistently and how to put all your marketing on auto pilot, have it systemised so you don’t have any guess work or questions.

You notice we both have a great passion for what we do and we talk fast so I guess what I’m saying is you’re going to have to listen fast.  We will be changing this conversation and turn to the phones in just a moment.  But before we do I want to tell you a little more about Joe Polish.
Joe’s in Tempey, Arizona and I’m in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Most of you have read about Joe as well as myself from one of the ads from PCT Magazine or Pest Control Magazine or possibly one of my newsletters, or maybe you received a free report I sent you in the past.  But if you’re familiar with Joe Polish or it’s been a while since I mentioned him to you, let me give you some more information.

As a background Joe is not only what I consider a genius innovator and marketer as many others attest to.  He’s a master of People’s skills.  He understands human nature when it comes to the service industry.  Now to give credit where credits due, I must say that Joe has a talent of being down to earth, good with people and he’s charismatic as well, but he’s studied, invested in himself and is a student of life and a student for life which is the real reason he’s exceptional.  I think that’s important to say because Joe actually used to work for me when I was a Marketing Director for a major Health Club chain.  A few years later the tables turned, and I studied Joe and became a student of his.  I’ve seen him grow from a teenager to an adult and he’s expanded himself in miraculous ways, ways in which if I shared them all with you right now, it would take several hours.

Joe has accomplished what most would seemingly believe impossible and so as I saw this growth process, I studied him.  So I guess you could say we’ve come full circle and I decided to follow the same path as Joe and bring what we’ve discovered together and worked very hard to create to the Pest Control Industry and it paid off.

Today I have hundreds of Pest Control Companies, more than 350 worldwide.  I have clients, friends and members throughout the United States in every region, Canada, Australia, South Africa, the Philippines and am currently accepting members elsewhere.  So we have quite a bit to thank this man for and quite a bit to talk about today.

I figured this tape would give you some great information and jump start your profits, with that said let’s turn to the phones.

Ok, we’re on the phone right now and as you know I’m interviewing Joe Polish, the Originator of the Piranha Marketing System and you’ve heard about Joe from my introduction and most of you have heard about Joe anyway.  Joe’s in Tempey, Arizona and I’m in Albuquerque, New Mexico and how’s the weather there Joe.

Joe Polish:    It’s fantastic.  It’s nice and warm and it’s not too hot yet because Summer’s not quite here yet, but it is pretty nice and I’m driving around with the top down on my convertible so I’m enjoying it very much.

R D:    It’s pretty good here, it’s about 55 and I’ve just got back from a run so.

Joe Polish:    Good, staying in shape which is important.

R D:    Ok, well can you hear me ok.
Joe Polish:    Yes, I can hear you fine.

R D:    Ok, good, well let’s go ahead and get started.  First could you describe to the listeners what Emotional Direct Response Marketing is and why that’s the only type of marketing we teach and use.

Joe Polish:    Yes, actually well what I can tell people about Direct Response.  It’s kind of self explanatory if you think about it.  Direct response basically means it’s response advertising.  Whenever you do something promotion wise or advertising wise, the full intention is to get a response.  You know there’s a lot of brand building type of advertising that you’ll see.  The majority of advertising that you’ll see if you flip open a phone book or if you look in a magazine or you turn on the television is what we call image or institutional advertising in both my books and in your books and tapes and courses and teachings we describe the difference between institutional and direct response, but basically the purpose of institutional or image advertising is to get the name of the advertiser out there.  Brand building in many ways.  And that’s ok if you have an enormous budget to spend on name recognition and getting people to remember a jingle or to remember a logo or to remember a name but for small business people in your case Pest  Control Operators and in my case Carpet and Upholstery Cleaners, you know they do not have a McDonalds or a Pepsi or a Budweiser or a Goodyear budget to spend hundreds of thousands and in many cases millions of dollars in order to get people to remember their name, so when you put out any form of advertising or do any promotion whatsoever and you do direct response, the purpose is not only to get your name out there but to get a response back.  In my opinion the only reason to advertise or to promote yourself is to get a client, not to get people to remember your name or to think about who you are or attach warm fuzzy feelings to your logo.  The purpose is to get a client and so Direct Response for one, it’s trackable.  Image advertising, if there’s no trackable mechanism such as call here or this specific offer, there’s no way of really knowing if putting an ad out there with your phone number or just your logo caused x number of people to do business with you.  So Direct Response is trackable, it does get response and it’s not only intended to just get your name out there, but it is intended to get a response back and if you don’t have response mechanisms in your advertising then it’s not direct response and there’s other elements which actually let me kind of quickly go over, because I’m sure we’re going to cover this in the interview but in the case of advertising if you want to have a direct response ad and I’ll be happy to talk about any of this or you just ask me.  You need a headline and that’s the first thing you need in a direct response ad and the headline is an ad for the ad.  It’s not your company name, it’s something that actually states why someone should do business with you and the benefit of doing business with you.  There’s many different ways to do headlines.

Secondly, you need to create interest in the service or the product.  Third you need to create desire in the prospect.  Fourth, you’ve got to have a specific offer, it needs to be some sort of offer, not just your phone number, that’s not an offer and it has to have a deadline or cut off date in order to create a sense of urgency and if you don’t have a deadline or a cut off date, then you don’t have a direct response ad.

R D:    Ok, yes, that’s very good.  You know a lot of questions I get, this just came to me as I was listening to you of tracking your advertising.  This is very foreign to many people who are listening.  They say well RD tell me you know how do I begin to track and you are talking about response mechanisms but that might not be very clear to the people who are listening.  Could you further expand on that?

Joe Polish:    Ok, for instance say that you make an offer for a consumer awareness guide which we teach our members how to do.  If you put in your ad, you know call and request a free consumer awareness guide and you have 20 phone calls and ten people request a consumer awareness guide and you’re running a newspaper ad that says call and request a consumer awareness guide and this ad is costing you $200 then you know for the $200 you got ten people to respond, so basically you paid $20 per person to request the consumer awareness guide so you send out a consumer awareness guide.  How many of those actually result in jobs?  So real simple ways is you run an ad, you put some type of offer.  You can make an offer for a free trial service.  You can make a price offer if you want to do price discounting.  You can make that type of offer.  Unfortunately, the majority of the offers that most businesses make especially in service businesses and specifically for pest control and carpet cleaning, are price offers and the problems with that is if the only offer you have is a low price and you don’t do any form of education whatsoever in the ad or any form of differentiation between you and every other pest control service that they could do business with, then you know the only thing that people are going to look at is low price.  So a specific offer you can track your advertising with just something, not just putting your name, list of services and phone number out there because we call that name, rank, serial number type of advertising where people just put a blown up version of their business card in the Yellow Pages, they might put flyers together and they have all these various places that they have their name and phone number out there and if you don’t have any specific offers or any specific response mechanisms in place that you can clearly know when people call in where they’re coming from, you don’t really know what’s working and that’s how a lot of people run their business, actually that’s how the majority of people run their businesses.

So the first step though is when people call your office, you ask how did you hear about us.  I mean that’s the first step and then make sure someone keeps track of it.  You can have elaborate spreadsheets that can keep track of everything but I wouldn’t suggest that, especially in the beginning.  You can do this on a notebook just by making columns.  You know this is the ad that I got running, this is the offer, how many call.  And every time someone calls you keep track of it.  You send out a postcard how many people respond to the offer on the postcard and things like that.

R D:    Yes, that’s a good point and that’s something that I do tell my clients and members is to just you know keep a notebook by the phone and ask, simply ask, how did you hear about us?  Make it a point to have everyone who’s answering the phone to habitually ask that question.

Joe Polish:    Yes, because if you don’t ask that question.  I mean you have no idea where your business is coming from and in order for you to know what to repeat, you have to know what’s working.  It might sound like we’re overly analysing this whole issue but this marketing is a business of arithmetic.  Gary Halbert who you know many people have heard of probably through us is one of the great copy writers in the country also one of the most arrogant and expensive, but one of the most brilliant and I consider him a really good friend of mine and I’ve learned a tremendous amount from Gary, you know one of the most profound things that I ever heard him say was this is a business of arithmetic and some people will hear that and they’ll be like, ok that sounds good.  But you’ve got to really think about that.  What does that actually mean?  There’s margins in business and there’s issues that you need to look at and it is a business of arithmetic and so it’s not just how many people are responding or what percentage but it’s how many dollars are you bringing in versus what it’s costing you, so you should apply tracking and you should apply analysing numbers to every aspect of your business and to let everybody know I can’t stand looking at numbers, my eyes glaze over when I look at P & L’s.  Really I don’t have the genetic make up to enjoy looking and analysing at numbers.  But I’ll tell you what when I run an ad and I do a promotion which is what is responsible for making money come into my business, it’s the one thing that I needed to figure out in order to go from being dead broke to actually turning my business around originally, using good marketing and the stuff we’re talking about and the stuff that we teach people I had to look at the numbers and I had to figure out, you know in order to replicate something that was successful I had to track what was working and abandon what was not working in order to continually repeat the successes and you have to do it and it’s not overly complicated.  Most people make it more difficult than it needs to be, but I guarantee if you could be doing 50 things in your business and if you’re not looking in any of them.  You know, first off you should really think about what it is you’re really trying to accomplish and then isolate all the different promotions that you have and determine how much you’re spending on them, how much money’s coming in, what’s the average cost per lead, what’s the cost per sale and then determine which ones are the most profitable and keep doing those and abandon the ones that aren’t.

R D:    Yes, and it’s good to have it systemised as well.

Joe Polish:    Absolutely, because all of this type of marketing that we teach people is repetitive, systematic marketing.  It’s marketing that relies on getting business without having to send a live sales person out there in order to close the sale.  Now sales are important and yes we have our technicians in people’s homes and they’re on the phone making sales and things like that, but this type of marketing using direct response marketing delivers to us pre-qualified people and prospects that are predisposed to do business with us and that’s important to understand and all of that’s completely trackable if you’re using direct response.
R D:    Very good, very good.  I want to rewind a little bit and I wasn’t expecting to ask you this, but you said something I think is important for the listeners to hear.  You said you went dead broke before you learned this.  How many entrepreneurs do you think go dead broke before they really get it?

Joe Polish:    Actually I started dead broke.  I didn’t go dead broke.  I actually started with a little bit of money that I had saved up.  When I first started in business, it’s kind of a funny story.  I guess everybody in some ways, unless they were blessed with you know a huge bank account from their parents or something, pretty much started with nothing or at least next to nothing.  In my particular case, you know I had money saved up from being a paper boy that I saved some money from jobs going through High School.  I mean I started working pretty early.  I was selling door to door newspaper subscriptions when I was 12 or 13 years old.  I ended up saving up money and that was for the first seed capital of my business which probably lasted a couple of months.

R D:    Didn’t you win an award for that?

Joe Polish:    Yes, I mean that’s going back to me telling my story of my first selling days as a little kid.  Yes, I want a trip to Disneyland by being the top Sales person for the Arizona Republic selling newspaper subscriptions so that was actually pretty funny.  I did win a trip to Disneyland, but what I learned from getting doors slammed in my face and rejection was very beneficial and useful probably more so from the stand point of as I actually ran a real business, it really occurred to me just how much I hate doing any type of cold call selling.  I’m pretty good at it, I just don’t like it and once you learn and understand this type of marketing, you can get people to come to you and want to do business with you without having to talk to cold prospects because all of the marketing that we teach using the free recorded messages and the three letter sequences and the irresistible offers and everything that we teach our members is it’s delivering people that are welcomed guests as opposed to be an annoying pest, because this type of marketing does the selling in advance and good marketing will do the selling in advance so you don’t have to knock on doors, you don’t have to do cold call sales because through this type of marketing it actually educates the clients so they have an understanding of who you are before you get to the big question, will you buy my goods and services?

R D:    Do you have to go dead broke before you become successful?

Joe Polish:    Ok, well I would hope that we can avoid that for a lot of people.  Sometimes it’s actually a good learning experience because it gives people a dose of reality.  In many cases a lot of excuse makers that don’t go out and promote themselves or learn more effective and efficient ways to market and manage their business think that money is the answer to everything and in many cases, people that start out in business with money have a lot of disadvantages because it allows them to be promiscuous with money.  Money is just a resource.  Money is just a tool.  It’s no different than the equipment that people use to service their clients.  If you use it incorrectly you’re going to have bad results and the same thing with marketing and promotions.  Use it incorrectly, you’re going to have bad results.

You know, going back to my beginning days in business, I was so frustrated and fed up with my carpet cleaning business because I couldn’t figure out how to make it work, I was putting out all types of low price ads.  I’d advertise, we can beat any advertised price.  I just thought the business was lousy and I didn’t know how to market and advertise and I didn’t even know that I didn’t know how to market and advertise.  It didn’t even occur to me what an important part of business promoting yourself actually was, so I would just put out flyers.  I’d look at what everybody else was doing.  I’d try to copy what they were doing and I was continually frustrated because I would get a lot of consumers that you know were low priced, because that’s the bait that I was using.  I was throwing out bait that said low price and so the fish that attached themselves to that bait are people that want a low price because that’s the offer that you’re throwing out and I’d go into people’s homes and I’d be frustrated because I wasn’t making any money and I didn’t know anything about selling myself or being professional or presenting myself.  The only thing I had going for me was I was an honest, ethical guy and really wanted to provide the best quality service that I could at the lowest price which was bad.  So I didn’t have a lot of knowledge so I ended up with this story that I’d like to share with the listeners is that I went jet ski-ing with a friend of mine that I actually went to High School with and I had the opportunity to meet the guy that owned the jet skis who was a multi million dollar Real Estate Investor and I was sitting on the tailgate of a truck with him and saying, I hear you do very well and I’d like to get some suggestions from you of some potential businesses that I could go into where I can make some money because I own a carpet cleaning business and I’m not making any money.  I’m frustrated with it and I’d like to go into something else that could make me more money and his reply to me was, “well, are there are people in your Industry that are making money” and I said well yes.  In the Phoenix area there’s a couple of companies that do over a million dollars a year and to me that’s a lot of money but they’ve been in business for a long time.  They have a lot of employees, they have a well known name, blah, blah, blah and you know I don’t have any of those advantages and he said “well, all I can say if there’s other people in your Industry, the same business that you’re in making money and you’re not, then there’s nothing wrong with the business, there’s something wrong with you” and my response of course was to say no, I’ve gotten certified because I did get training.  I’m an honest, ethical guy.  I do a good job and all people care about is low price and his response to me was “well, you’re like most people, you think the grass is always greener on the other side and that you want to go into some other business because there’s no money in what it is that you’re doing” and I wanted to fight him on that and I tried to come up with every excuse that I could, but this guy who was very wealthy and very intelligent knew that people who weren’t really making any money, they were good at making excuses.  People that are really good at many excuses normally don’t have any money.  I was making all these excuses but he got through to me and when I was driving home that night, I really thought about what he was saying because he told me.  He goes you’re like everyone else, all you got is you got a job, you don’t really have a business and if you want to go into another business, you’re going to end up spending another six months, a year, two years, whatever learning the technical side of another business like you have spent learning what you have told me about how you’ve taken training in carpet cleaning.  You’re going to spend the same amount of time having to learn the technical side of another business so you can go out and repeat the same bad business habits that have caused you to be unsuccessful in your current business and so that really dawned on me and so that got me thinking, well you know, he’s right.  I don’t really know what I’m doing and so my choice is I can continue to do what I’m doing and many people have heard that the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results.  Well, that’s what I was doing pretty much every day and that’s how a lot of business people run their businesses and people have heard that quote said many different ways and many people have heard it over and over again.  You really got to think about that.  Some people say I’ve got 20 years of experience, well no they’ve got one year of experience repeated 20 times.  You know they wake up every single day and they repeat the same things over and over again and expect different results and so it occurred to me that well I can either continue to learn a few things through the school of hard knocks or there’s a better way to short cut my learning curve.  So I decided I’m going to start reading.  There’s a lot of books out there.  There’s a lot of information from people that have taken their years of experience and with the knowledge that they have, they’ve put it into a book and so I started reading.  Well the first book that I read which I recommend to all the listeners is a book called “The Emith” by Michael Gerber.  Well that book really got me thinking about systemising by advertising.  Most people will read The Emith and it’s a fantastic book.  I highly recommend it.  Actually, at this point in my career I’ve even done consulting with Michael Gerber at the Emith Academy to actually assist them with their marketing and I’ve interviewed Michael Gerber for one of my tape of the month interviews so I actually know Michael but at the time I had no idea who this person was and I was a dead broke cleaner and I ended up reading the book and the purpose of the book is not a marketing book.  The purpose of the book is talking about how to work on your business not in your business and most people don’t work on their business, they work in the business and it talks about systemisation How to create things that you can replicate and you can duplicate.  Not having to always rely on just your ongoing hours of time invested in the business and so I read that book and I put advertising and marketing in the context of what type of advertising or marketing can you do that you could replicate over and over again without having to manually manage it every minute of the day and most people’s forms of selling their services, a sale is only made when they’re out there talking to somebody face to face or when they’re out there prospecting door to door and I’ve done plenty of that stuff.  I mean I’ve sold my carpet cleaning services knocking on doors to the most unqualified prospects.  You know people didn’t hear me knocking on the door and you know that’s tough and if you don’t know what else to do, it works.  I mean it’s better than doing nothing.

R D:    Yes, and you know, I want to interject here because that’s a biggy with a lot of people that are clients and friends of mine is that they believe that, that’s the only thing they know so that’s what they do and it’s just what you were talking about, the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results and I want to remind a little bit because what you’ve been talking about is brilliant.  You talked bout mimicking other people in your industry.  You were talking about that and it’s the blind leading the blind.

Joe Polish:    Yes, totally.  It’s business in America.  I mean I do a lot of consulting with big, big companies and this type of marketing, there might be some person listening to this interview that may have ten or twenty trucks and they might be running a million, two million, three million, five million dollar business and they’re like well this type of marketing’s good for small operators but it would never work for a big company, which of course hopefully, by the time we’re done with this interview that we will have said something that they can obviously see this applies to every business no matter what industry that you’re in.  I’ve done consulting with clients that are running companies that do over a hundred million a year and they have made millions of dollars with the same advice that we teach guys that are mom and pop operators.  The advice applies to everybody and hopefully the listeners will have an open mind as they listen to this information and it’s the exact thing that turned my business around and it’s the exact tools that I use in my current business and I’ll continue to use it the remainder of my career.

R D:    Very good, very good.  I want to mention something before I role into the next question and I think it’s something that everybody needs to really hear and you talked about the jet ski trip and the successful person that you met and what he said to you was so true and people need to rewind and listen to that person again.  I think it would be really great but what was neat about what you said is you were talking about first the blind leading the blind, following what other people are doing in the Industry without recognising that there are ways to find people who are already successful in marketing and a service organisation such as you and me.  You can model.

Joe Polish:    Oh absolutely, I mean you know I guess to make a case for why listen to somebody that’s going to teach you how to better market and improve yourself, my response would be why not?  You know if what you got is working and you’re bringing in all the business you want at a very good price point and you’re depositing lots of money in the bank and you  don’t have a lot of stress and frustration, then why listen to me why listen to you?  I mean continue with what you’re doing, you’re doing very well.  However, if there’s any room for improvement and you’d be hard pressed to show me one single company that is open minded that really does want to grow its profits, it doesn’t necessarily need to have to grow its size, some people may want to stay a small company but they may want to be just more efficient, they might want to be more effective and more profitable.  Like I said I’d be hard pressed to find a company that we couldn’t help and assist them in some way and the reason that people do business with me and the reason that people do business with you, is on some level they want to shorten the learning curve and you know if you use good marketing and you learn from other people, not only can you discover things that you will never discover on your own, but it’s an enormous time saver.  We could all make more money and once you understand how to actually make money, making money isn’t really the most difficult thing.  The most difficult for me in my life is not letting opportunities distract me from my mission, because there’s only so many things you can do well and in order to be successful you’ve got to say no to a lot of stuff and you only say yes to the few things that are crucially important to you in your life and in your business and I am always willing to know where to spend money on experts because the right type of experts and the right type of expertise will save you a tremendous amount of time.  My definition of success is absolute control of your time in doing what you want and when you want to do it and having a lot of money but trading your whole life for it is not my idea of success.  I know a lot of people that have millions of dollars and I’m not exaggerating, millions of dollars that lead very miserable lives and so that the goal of investing in marketing materials in the context of marketing is that marketing is the most important aspect of business.  I mean all of you are in business to make a profit and if you’re not making the amount of money that you want to make for the hours that you’re putting into it, then there’s something there that can fix it especially if there’s other people in your Industry that are doing it.

So going back to the original question of looking for mentors or looking for expertise elsewhere, always look at people that are doing something that you want to do and model whatever it is that they’re doing from the standpoint that you can model.  You should steal other marketing ideas from people and when I say steal, I don’t mean literally steal.  I mean look at what other people are doing that is successful.  People that literally steal are basically scum.  I don’t want to sound too bad, but people that steal from other people have to build their whole businesses around the efforts that someone else created.

R D:    You know I want to mention something there because I think what you’re saying is very valid and important and you have to adopt people who are brighter than you.

Joe Polish:    Yes, well a good rule of thumb when it comes to hiring is you hire people that are smarter than you and it shows how smart you are.

R D:    And you know, it takes a tremendous amount of self image and strong self image to do that, don’t you think?

Joe Polish:    Oh yes, absolutely and I mean a typical entrepreneur many times can be such a control freak that they have trouble letting go.  You brought up something that triggered a thought that I’d like to mention and this applies to hiring people just as much as it does to hiring expertise and in our case let’s consider me and you like the marketing expertise although we are not the end all and be all of marketing.  There’s many of great people out there that have wonderful business information and I know that you and me always do our best to where there’s areas where we’re not experts, we try to bring our expertise to our members, because the more successful that our members can be, the more successful we’ll be and the more appreciative they’re going to be of our services, so I’m not saying that you know all the marketing in the world is going to come from RD and Joe because there’s a lot of other sources.

R D:    I mean that’s why we both do the Superstar Series.  We’re bringing people that are just so brilliant in.

Joe Polish:    Exactly, that’s just what I did.  What I did I learned a lot of information from other people in the beginning and I picked the brains of a lot of people and you know most people don’t have the opportunities to go out and do that so part of my job is to bring that expertise to my clients and my members, but going back to the point I want to make.  If you’re going to go and hire somebody for instance to help you in your business, there’s three areas that you would want to hire somebody for and let’s say you want to hire an assistant.  Well, and you’re going to pay this assistant $30,000 a year.  If you’re going to invest $30,000 a year, then three things need to happen in order for it to make sense for you to invest that $30,000. Either this person’s going to help you make money over and above the $30,000 that you’re spending, either they’re going to help you save money well above the $30,000 a year that you’re spending or they’re going to reduce stress.  They may not make you any money, they may not save you any money, but they may reduce enough stress and help you out enough in your life to where you can work less hours or you can spend more time on things that your unique ability and spend less time on those areas of business which we all have that are absolute grunt work that we cannot stand.

R D:    Could you describe what unique ability is for the people who are listening?

Joe Polish:    Unique ability is a term that I actually learned from my good friend and brilliant coach Dan Sullivan who owns a company called Strategic Coach and if you break up all entrepreneurs in the four areas you got people in areas where we all operate in that we’re incompetent at, areas that we’re competent at.  So we’ve got incompetent, competent, excellence and unique ability and the majority of entrepreneurs that are not successful, they are spending the majority of their time in the areas where they’re either incompetent or they’re just competent.  They’re not excellent, they’re not unique and what unique ability is, is not only those things that you do really well.  For instance, you take technicians, there’s a lot of our members that are fantastic at delivering the service that they deliver to their clients but when they’re in the homes they’re not happy doing it.  So they could be excellent at it, but if they don’t feel good while they’re doing it then I would not consider that unique ability.

Now for me, my unique abilities are I’m great at promotions, I’m great at brainstorming, I’m an excellent net worker, I’m an excellent strategist.  I can design all kinds of marketing strategies that can improve drastically the amount of time that’s spent selling.  I can develop systems of advertising and marketing that you can set up that work 24 hours a day, seven days a week such as different ways to use 24 hour recorded messages and consumer awareness guides and all kinds of education based marketing.  Now what I’m completely incompetent at is balancing a cheque book.  I can’t stand doing it.

R D:    That is so funny.

Joe Polish:    You know, I mean I don’t like doing it.  Can I do it?  Of course.  I’ve done it, I’ve had to do it.  I don’t like doing it though and so my assistant does that for me.  I personally don’t clean my pool.  I don’t cut my grass.

R D:    It sounds really good.

Joe Polish:    I mean I just don’t like it and so I don’t like cooking my own food so the majority of the time I have a chef that I pay $10 an hour to cook food for me and then they put it in containers, then I put it in the microwave whenever I need to eat because I think you should eat on a regular basis.  Now this might sound like what’s this got to do with marketing.  It has a lot to do with marketing, because you know you’ve only got so many hours in the day and you know whatever you say yes to, you’re saying no to something else.  So if you say yes to spending three hours to cutting your grass, you’re saying no to spending three hours with your family, you’re spending three hours on doing something in your business focussing your unique ability whatever it is.

R D:    Yes, money making outcomes.

Joe Polish:    Yes, on things that might make you a $100 an hour.  So unless those activities that you’re doing like cutting your lawn or you know painting your house or whatever are therapeutic to you, I would say you really should think about how you can give money to people elsewhere that can allow you to better use your time.

So going back to my original statement of if you’re going to hire someone, they either better make you money, save you money or reduce stress, if they don’t do any of the above, then get rid of them or figure out how to better use them because those people are resources and they can support you and so the same thing goes back to buying a book.  If someone’s going to invest money in our marketing materials, they’re investing money in it because they’re either going to make them money, save them money or reduce stress.  Now as you know RD if they really utilise what we sell it will accomplish all three.  They’ll save money because they won’t be wasting money on advertising.  Secondly, they will make a tremendous amount of money because all our systems are replicatable and have been proven to work by thousands of people.  You know this is not something we’re talking about where we think this might work.  I mean you have very successful members.  I have very successful members all over the world.  Not just the United States, but all over the world.  I have people in South Africa.  In my last issue of my Piranha Marketing letter to my carpet cleaners I wrote about a guy from South Africa who’s making money.

R D:    Yes, I have a few clients in South Africa too, they’re great.
Joe Polish:    Yes, what’s great about them is

R D:    They appreciate it.

Joe Polish:    Exactly, what’s kind of funny is Dan Kennedy talks about this.  Dan Kennedy for those who don’t know is a very bright marketing guy and you should read every book that he’s ever written.  You can get him at any book store.  We’ve done interviews with Dan, he’s a very bright guy.  He talks about nobody wants to go and visit the Guru at the bottom of the mountain and it seems the further you are away from somebody, the more they value your expertise and if that’s what it takes in order for someone to implement something, I’m all for it.  I’ll have people in the UK that have quadrupled their income in a matter of two or three months that are just so excited and they have to convert some of our sales letters and promotions, you know, over to more fit the language that is spoken and then you have people here in America that could take a letter that works extremely well for a guy in San Diego or Albuquerque or New York City or whatever and he’ll be doing really well and they’ll be a guy down the street from him that’ll be like you know people in this town, this stuff just doesn’t work for.  It’s a mindset, it’s a total mindset.

R D:    You’re right, you’re right.  It’s amazing because I have people in the Philippines, I have South African clients, Australian clients, Canadian clients and it’s funny because it’s much more difficult to get materials to them.  They never complain, they’re really excited about everything and I was just talking to one of my clients who actually is from South Africa.  He lives in Hawaii now, and I want to interview him because I want them to know gosh! Look at the guest we have being here.

Joe Polish:    Exactly, and so you know I mean there’s a lesson there and I’m sure most people can figure it out and if they haven’t figure it out they should rewind the tape and listen to it.  I’m not saying that to be arrogant or anything.

R D:    Repetitiveness is really necessary in learning something new.

Joe Polish:    Yes, I mean all the successes that a lot of people can have is really if they’re just open to it and understand that hey, we all have a common goal here, we all want to improve ourselves and when it comes to investing and self improvement, if you’re not happy with the situation you’re at business wise, if you’re not happy with your savings, your income, your family, there’s every human problem that exists, someone at some point has either been in the same exact situation or has had a similar situation and somebody has written a book about it or there’s someone for hire that can help you with it and one of my favourite words, actually I have several favourite words, but one of my favourite words is resourceful.  People that are resourceful, when they need things solved, they say ok I have a problem here, how am I going to fix it?  And I love the word leverage.  There’s so much leverage.  You know when you can go to other people who’ve had success and leverage their skills, leverage their ability.  Do you how much leverage and resourcefulness we have to people who utilise you and me RD?  It’s tremendous and people that don’t utilise us, they’ll read like a piece of something or they’ll try something and do it halfway, they get like irritated that we claim that we can make them money and there’s other people that are so appreciative that they had the opportunity to take something that we have worked very hard to put together and developed and proved through not only our own efforts but through the efforts of other people before them and they’re just so happy to have the stuff there and I think an attribute to successful people is they’re resourceful and there’s a lot of leverage involved and my good friend Dan Sullivan says, when it comes to problems is, “if you have enough money to solve the problem you don’t have a problem”.

R D:    I love that.

Joe Polish:    It’s great and so you know not having money is a problem in many cases and having money allows you to solve problems that not having money creates which is a quote that I got from a copy writer a good friend of mine, John Carlton, and so you know people in many ways, a lot of their problems in business can be solved merely by having more money and the way to make more money is  you’ve got to focus on the only thing in your business that is responsible for making you any money which is marketing, because nothing else matters until a sale is made.  I have an overhead that I got from Dan Kennedy with his permission of course, because I do a lot of work with Dan, that says “Get this through your thick skull.  It doesn’t matter how good your product or service is or what it does until after you’ve sold it”.  So many people focus on I want to be the best pest control operator, I want to be the best carpet cleaner.  I want to have the best equipment.  I want to have all these certifications.  I want to join all these groups and do this and do that and they fail to focus on the only thing that’s going to bring in money in the door which is the marketing.

R D:    I have a question.

Joe Polish:    Yes, go on.

R D:    Do you think its avoidance.

Joe Polish:    No, no.  I just think it’s not knowing any better.  Well, there’s two things.  There’s stupidity and there’s ignorance.  Ignorance is just not knowing any better.  Like for instance I’m completely ignorant when it comes to playing the piano.  I don’t know how.  I’m not stupid when it comes to playing the piano, but I’m definitely ignorant because I don’t know any better so a lot of people in business, they’re ignorant and I’m not saying that in an insulting way.  A lot of people just don’t know any better and they want to do the best they can.  You know there’s a lot of great people out there that are just frustrated because they just don’t know any better and what me and you attempt to do is we attempt to, through our marketing efforts to attract and recruit people into our business so that we can provide them with tools and we can provide them with strategies and marketing that can allow them to make more money and if they do that in turn as people continue to do business with us.
But there’s also stupid people out there too.

R D:    Describe that, because I want to hear.  I’m sure everybody wants to know what you mean by that.

Joe Polish:    I guess when it comes to open minded and close minded, I’d say stupid could be people that are really close minded.  They think they know it all.  Somebody that got a marketing degree in college so therefore thinks that he can’t learn anything from anybody else.  I would consider that to be stupid type of thinking.

R D:    And let me ask you a question.  What about some people out there that just don’t know about marketing.  They’ve never been exposed to it.  They’re not the people who are close minded, it’s just something that I think people feel that they don’t know, don’t you?

Joe Polish:    Yes, I mean yes definitely people are in a comfort zone and they fear what they don’t know and so many people settle for situations that they’re familiar with but they’re miserable in and you know when it comes to a lot of problems, people are in denial and so it’s a lot easier just to stay in a situation that’s uncomfortable but familiar because people are afraid of failure or any numerous other things and I do believe that most human beings inherently are good.  There are some out there that are just rotten to the core, but most people I think are good.  The big problem though with many people is that what they’re not up on, they’re down on and this is one thing that has always been a continual frustration for me to see how some people perceive experts.  You know there’s a lot of people that sell How to’s information.  You know, me and you are in the How to business and merely because we’re in the How to business, we get grouped into a certain category by certain people that have been scammed by people that are in the How to business or people that hold themselves out as someone that has expertise in something but really all they have is book expertise, they talk theory, they don’t have any real world experience and so you know you get grouped in this category and I have found that what people are not up on, they’re down on.

You take our information for instance, and you have somebody that will be thinking about trying one of our marketing promotions and they’ll run it by one of their buddies who’s never read our books, listened to our tapes, done anything.   What do you think his tendency is?

R D:    Oh, they don’t understand it at all.

Joe Polish:    So how do they normally respond?  They normally respond by well if this guy’s going to claim all this, it can’t be all that good.  Not in all cases.  In most cases.  This is in my experience and again this is my opinion based on my experience.   This is not set in stone but I will say I have had enough evidence of this, that what someone is not up on, they’re down on.

R D:    But you know it’s interesting though Joe, is that if that same person receives something like that in the mail, what would happen?
Joe Polish:    Yes, in many cases, they could respond.  But to answer your original question.  What do you do about people that don’t know about it?  I mean we do what we’re doing.  We continue to target market and understand that in order to reach the people that can be reached, we’re going to have to continually promote the people just like any of our clients listening to this tape.  You’ve got a wonderful product or service and it can help a lot of people.  You know the three reasons people won’t buy, going back to basic selling.  Three reasons won’t respond to what you have to offer is for one, they’re not interested and if they’re not interested, there’s nothing you can do about it and there may be a point in time where they become interest.  Two, they can’t afford you and three, they don’t believe you and so if people aren’t interested, there’s nothing you can do except understand that this is a cyclical type of business, it’s seasonal in many cases and if someone just had their home treated yesterday, they’re not going to be interested in having it done next week.  But a month or two months or three months or six months or whatever from now they may, so interest levels change.  They can’t afford it, well many people do have a lot of money that can afford your services, but they don’t, but they aren’t interested and that will normally fall into the third category which is they don’t believe you.  So if they don’t believe you, what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to be able to communicate to them in a way to where they understand and believe what it is that you charge and what it is that you’re offering is true and legitimate and you do that through making irresistible offers using emotional direct response copying, making a strong, powerful guarantee, creating a sense of urgency and developing these types of things.  Educating your client into all the promotions that you do so you stand out over and above other people in your area that are offering similar or related services as you and the people that are the best marketers in business are the ones that make the most money so I believe it’s extremely important that if money is important to you which is the only thing that I can see as to why you should be in business or even focussing on all of this, is that you want to make a profit.  I mean the purpose of business as profit is to really get skilled in that area that is responsible for all that which is marketing.  Marketing, Management and technical competence are the three things you need in business.

R D:    Can you expand upon that.

Joe Polish:    Yes the three things you need in business to be successful are you need technical competence, you need management and you need marketing.  Technical competence basically means that when somebody hires you and you go and provide the service that they are happy with the service, you gave them a fair exchange of value to the point where they were not only happy with what they paid you for but they also would do business with you again and refer you to other people.  Now as long as you’re providing that level of service and you’re doing a good job sincerely, even if they don’t know it’s a good job or not, that you actually are providing a good job and you actually know enough about the service that you do to where you’re providing a good job and good value, that’s technical competence and knowing a lot about the product or service that you sell is crucially important however it’s not the most important thing for making money.
The second thing you need is you need management, you need to be able to get up in the morning, you need to be able to get out of bed, you need to be available to answer the phone and communicate with clients and deposit money and certain things you need, there’s hats that you need to wear in any business being an entrepreneur and if you can’t wear certain hats, then you don’t have what it takes to be an entrepreneur and you’re better off working for somebody.  If you do take on being an entrepreneur you’re going to have to manage certain things and so you need management.

So the third thing is marketing, you need to be able to generate clients.  You need to lead generate.  You need to convert prospects into paying customers and preferably turning them into clients because I make the distinction that you don’t refer to customers as customers you refer to them as clients because the word customers is somebody that buys from you and the word client implies somebody that you have a relationship with and so you want to do relationship marketing.

Now taking all three of those you could be the most technically competent person on the plan, you could be the best Manager in the world, you could be great at motivating people you could be a Wizard when it comes to setting up a database that stores all kinds of wonderful data information about your clients, you can have the nicest desk in the world, not a piece of paper out of place, everything nice filed and organised, you know, you could just have the smoothest running operation but none of that will exist for the long term if you don’t have revenue coming into your business and the one thing that generates money and revenue is marketing.  So if there’s any area of business where I think is the main focus of business, it should be the marketing because that’s how you grow a very profitable business as you focus on the marketing and people that try to avoid marketing or make comments like “well, you know I’m no good at marketing” well, first off they haven’t learned it or understood it and it is one aspect of business that you need to oversee.  If there’s two things that you should not delegate in business, at first, I mean as you develop a really sound operation and you put the right people in place due to having enough money to get the right people.  In the beginning there’s two things you shouldn’t delegate and that’s the marketing and also the cheque book because those are two areas that you can get into a lot of trouble if you don’t pay attention to and you know you can get assistance in both of those and the great thing about that type of marketing that we teach is that it’s replicatable, it’s systematic.  I mean we’re not teaching people how to go into someone’s home and do high pressure closing.  We’re not teaching people how to call on the phone through telemarketing cold prospects that they’ve never talked to and try to talk them into pest control services because we’re in your area this week and there’s a really low price on it.  I mean we don’t teach that stuff.  We don’t teach high pressure.  We teach very ethical, very non-threatening forms of robotic marketing that people can replicate over and over again and in many cases you don’t even need employees to have these systems working for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week and that’s the reason I created these things because trying to sell without marketing, not only is it difficult and drudgery in terms of work, it takes an enormous amount of time and truth be know I work pretty hard but I’m lazy.  I mean the working hard that I do is mental work.

R D:    I want to interject here.  I hope you don’t mind.  But what you’re saying and everything you’ve mentioned sounds very appealing to me and I would guess and this is just a guess that  most of the people that are listening it’s very appealing to them too when you were talking about what you want to delegate, what you hate, what you don’t want to do.  Entrepreneurs are like that.  I mean we’re a different creature.  And we’re a unique creature, that might change in the next decade or century but we are fundamentally lazy.

Joe Polish:    I mean actually fundamentally lazy in terms of this is the way I would put that in the right context.  I understand what you mean but I want to get it clear to the listener because I know there’s people out there that are working their butts off and they don’t have any money and they’re frustrated and they wake up every day and they work 12/14 hours a day.  They have families to support and they’re living lives of frustration and then we have other members who are listening to this that are doing fantastic and they’re like hey that’s not me at all, but just speaking to the people out there for, you know, the moment that might be in a situation to where they’re just at their wits end.  They have worked so hard and tried so hard and so the choice is they can either continue to do what they’ve done and most likely get the same results or they can change things, so what they need to do is put themselves in the right frame of mind and realise what has ever happened to them or what they’ve done at this point is all the new things that could potentially come their way or based on the choices that they make and the behaviours that they have and where they’re going to spend their focus and their time.  And so, what I would suggest is that everyone should read the book “Who moved my Cheese”.

R D:    I love that book, I just picked it up.  It’s funny because I was in the airport in Chicago from Strategic Coach and I picked it up before I went there and they mentioned the book at the session.

Joe Polish:    Actually, it’s a great book and so if you’re in that state of mind, this is what I want you to do and I’m deadly serious about that and this may sound funny, but if you’re at a point where you’re just in a frustrated state of mind.  Sometimes when I get overwhelmed and it happens believe me, it happens to everybody and you got so many things going on and there’s so many things you feel like you should do and you’re feeling guilty with all you should do this, should do that, got to do this, got to do that, you know, there’s a lot of power that comes from options and people have a lot of options available to them especially in a country like this where the Economy’s great right now and we got a lot of freedom.  There’s a lot of things you can complain about but we do have a lot of freedom and if you’re in a state like that right now, I’d like you to go down to the book store and you can wait a day, you know go to Amazon.com or some online book store and get the book “Who moved my Cheese” by Spencer Johnson.  It’s a great book, it’ll take you no more than an hour to read it and you don’t have to be a speed reader either.  This book is designed to be read in an hour and it’s a great story, puts you in a completely different mindset and I’d like everybody just to read that book if  you’re in that state and if you literally do this, drive down to a book store and get this book or have someone pick it up for you or order it online whatever, believe me it will give you a new outlook to start from and it’s a great little story and then read that book and then think about, you know,  the purpose you became an entrepreneur in the beginning is that you wanted freedom.  Most people do not become entrepreneurs so they can spend sixteen hours a day working and never take vacations and not have any money.  People become entrepreneurs because they don’t want to work for anyone, in many cases they don’t want to work for anyone because they like being in control which it has advantages and disadvantages at the same time.  Other people are completely unemployable, they can’t work for anyone, they just don’t have the make up and I really like and appreciate entrepreneurs.  My goal in my business is to help as many entrepreneurs as I can because I really respect entrepreneurs.  I feel that entrepreneurs are the hardest working people in the country, I believe they support the whole system because of the jobs that they provide and the services that they provide and good entrepreneurs create value and the only way that you make any money in this world is by creating value legitimately.  There’s illegitimate ways to make money and you can rip people off and scam people and in my industry and your industry there’s a lot of sleaze bags that are out there ripping people off and misleading them with their advertising and things like that but you know they’re the ones that have to go to bed at night and know what they’re doing and really, their punishment is their own existence.  I’m not too concerned about those people, however, when it comes to making money, you do it by creating value and there’s people out there that create an enormous amount of value and work hard and provide a good service, but they just haven’t learned how to go out and communicate with their client base in order to generate business and they’re working in so many areas that they’re not skilled at.  So you need to go through a process of elimination and you determine what activities generate money and what activities waste money and if you want a real simple kind of get your mind in the right place type of exercise, get out a piece of paper, whatever, put it on a flipchart, write it on the wall in your garage, I don’t really care, have your assistant do it as she helps you write this out whatever.  Have a category of activities that make you money and activities that waste money and what I’d like you to do is list everything that you do in your business that makes you money and those could be activities like writing a sales letter, prospecting, setting up a joint venture, putting together a certain type of promotional ad, sending email thank you’s to all your clients, calling up all your clients that haven’t done business for you in a while, sending a I miss you letter like the cash flow surge letter we use to clients like that.  You know that are all activities that can make you money.  Activities that will waste money would be maybe cleaning your truck ten different times, going down to office max to find the best price on paper clips, spending all day doing busy work.  There’s a lot of people that think they work hard but if you’re a fly on the wall and you watch what they do, they don’t spend any time on anything that generates money and they’re broke and they’re like well you know this is so hard to run a business and a lot of this is purely focus.  Successful people and unsuccessful people from the context of financially successfully is a few human behaviours.
R D:    You said something that really sparked something in me and it has to do with paradime and all that paradime is basically a thinking pattern that still instilled in you but it becomes real.  And a good friend of both of us, a dear friend Dave Kekidge came up with the concept that I thought was so profound that I put it into place here and I taught it to some of my clients as well and that was to hang a stopwatch around your head and touch the stopwatch when you’re doing money making activities and stop it.  He was like one of the top producers in Real Estate.

Joe Polish:    Yes, actually I know this story.  Dave Kekidge is a brilliant guy.  He’s a good friend of both of ours.  He’s a man that’s been in a wheelchair for over twenty years, he’s very wealthy, not only financially but mentally also and you know when he actually did have use of his legs, he actually had a spinal chord injury while he was working out which was very unfortunate.  He was in perfect health.  Was a health food nut, exercised regularly, made a lot of money and went into the gym one day and was working out and he doesn’t blame this on working out.  He still very much works out every day because he does have use of everything from his chest above so he luckily has use of his arms but everything below his chest he has no use of.  He hasn’t walked in 20 years.  He has no feelings in his legs in spite of that he’s a very successful upbeat individual that has changed the lives of lots of people and is just fantastic and when he was selling real estate, he decided he was going to analyse how he used his time and so he and I didn’t even know you were bringing this up RD so the for the listeners, this is not a scripted interview, I mean we’re kind of going back and forth and there’s no script.

R D:    I just wanted to tell the listeners about Dave Kekidge in general what you were talking about is recently I talked to him about exactly what you were talking about and you know about the spinal chord injury and everything and how it happened and he doesn’t blame it at all on working out, but go ahead.

Joe Polish:    Yes, anyway so when he was selling real estate he decided that he wanted to see how much time he actually spent on the activity of making money which in his case was prospecting and actually talking to people that had the potential to buy something from him and I think the first time he did it he timed in a week how much time he actually spent working on activities that were selling and it was like five hours is what he spent the week that he actually did it and he used a stop watch.  Every time he was doing something that was selling he would click the stopwatch and every time that he would stop he would click it off.  In an entire work week where he would work 40/50 hours, he’d spend like five actually doing something that was income producing or leading up to something that could produce income so at his best week he got it up to I believe 17 hours where he was actually doing money making activities because he was focussed on it because of this little stop watch exercise and at that point I believe his income had quadrupled and he wasn’t putting any more hours in, he was just putting more hours into the activities that generated money and he blew everyone away in the office.

Now I have a concept that I again learned from John Carlton who’s the one I first got the term from and I’ve added my own little flair to it and it’s called Operation Money Suck and I believe I’ve actually heard you talk about it to RD.  What operation money suck is and going back to the initial question you had that prompted this whole discussion is about people that are frustrated and sitting there and thinking they’re working hard but they’re not getting the results that they want and again we’re talking in the context of making money here and I always try to make these distinctions because I want people to understand that the purpose of making money is truly to buy yourself independence.  All of you became entrepreneurs because you wanted, at least, most of you wanted, at least most of the people I meet became entrepreneurs because they wanted freedom.  They don’t want money, they wanted freedom, they wanted independence but in this country you need to have money in order to have independence because things cost money.  Money does buy a certain amount of happiness.  So people that say money doesn’t buy happiness normally don’t have any money and money can allow you to have a lot of things are enjoyable and so if you enjoy jet ski-ing for instance you can go out and buy jet skis or rent jet skis with money and you can spend an afternoon jet ski-ing and if that’ll make you happy then you bought yourself a certain amount of happiness.  Now money won’t buy you good health.  You’ve got to go out and exercise, Money is not going to develop wonderful relationships with other people.  You know you’ve got to do other things in order to do that.  You can’t buy everything but in the context of a business the result of running a successful business is that you get money and I like to refer to money as fun tickets.  Because what it is, is that it allows you to live a certain type of lifestyle so it’s very important and so going back to operation money suck, you’ve got to look at what do you do with your whole day.  When you wake up tomorrow morning, if you’re going to work ten hours tomorrow morning, how much do you want to make per hour tomorrow.  Let’s just think about this.  You want to make a certain amount of money tomorrow per hour.  I want you to track your time tomorrow and determine hour to hour what are you spending your time doing.  Every hour is an activity that’s making you money or is an activity that’ spending money because those are the only two types of activity that you’re going to work on while you’re working and then I want you to determine how much money do you want to make and if you want to make a $100 an hour you can’t spend your time $10 an hour activities and if you do you’ve just hired yourself for $10 an hour activities and since you’re the entrepreneur, you are the rainmaker you are the one that brings in all the cash, you’re the one that’s responsible for it and if you spend your whole day doing $10 an hour activities, not only did you work for $10 an hour which you could have hired someone for $10 an hour but you also ripped up $90 if you want to make a $100 an hour that is in that example,  you also ripped up $90 for every hour that you spent investing on those types of activities and not only that,  you’re probably the worst person for the job.  These entrepreneurs they can construct these brilliant business ideas and concepts and they want to go out and they want to tackle the world and grow a business and service all these clients and do a wonderful job and they’re there trying to file paperwork and answer the phones, they absolutely suck at these activities but they’re trying to wear all these hats, working 12/14 hours a day doing all this stuff and they’ve got to get their priorities straight and so the first place to start is look at how you actually spend your time, because where you’re going to be at today versus one year from today is going to be based on one thing and that is how you spend your time between now and then.  Do you spend it on market?  How is it focussed?  Are you looking at activities that make you money?  What are you actually doing?  This doesn’t just go for your business, this goes your whole life.  I mean you want to make more money, take care of yourself.  Work out, exercise and you want to work out how to bring in the most revenue, study what we teach you.  Run some ads, understand these types of promotions.  Why don’t we talk about some of those?  So, we actually give these guys a lot of good marketing tips as opposed to just the Joe Polish philosophy on business and life.  Some people can get annoyed with it.

R D:    I think that everything you covered is so powerful.  In fact any time you interject you also answer the question I have in mind.

Joe Polish:    Good, thanks.  Hopefully that is occurring here for you RD.

R D:    No, I think it is for everybody.  Ok Joe, when it comes to marketing, what would you suggest to get better, for instance the three letter sequence.

Joe Polish:    Ok well, let me kind of explain about letters and stuff since you mentioned three letter sequence.  I believe most people that are studying what we teach should be familiar with it.  If they’re not they either haven’t read it or they just for some other reason, they don’t know about it so let me explain.

Three things that you need in order to sell anything.  This applies to any business but you need three things.  You need a product or service and there are cases the listeners, you know pest control services, my cleaners have their carpet cleaning services and any other products that they might sell.  You need a sales pitch and you need a delivery system.  What most people in business focus on is they focus on what it is that they sell and how to deliver that message to people and there’s all kinds of advertisers out there that would be happy to take your money in order for you to put information out to the public about what it is about the product or service that you sell.  They Yellow Pages is a delivery system, Val pack type coupons is a delivery system.  A sales letter be it mailed or hand delivered is a delivery system.  Brochures, you know, it’s a delivery system.  The internet it’s nothing more than an electronic delivery system.  In many ways you could look at the internet as an electronic brochure.  Television, radio all delivery systems, so if you focus on what it is that you sell and how to deliver that message to people, well that’s important because you need to get information out to the public and out to your target audience about what it is that you sell.  You know you can have the greatest service in the world but if nobody hears about it, then you know, no-one’s going to hire you and no-one’s going to give you money for it.  Build a better mousetrap, biggest nonsense on the planet.  Ralph Waldo Emerson I believe is the one that did that quote, unfortunately, he died broke.  Very bright guy though.

R D:    I’ve used a lot of his quotes but did not know he died broke.

Joe Polish:    Yes, yes so he may be a smart guy but he didn’t know much about making money.  So, but hey, money’s not everything but since our clients are hiring us because they want to make more money, that’s at least what we want to teach them how to do.  So you have to get information out to the public, so if there’s something you want to focus on though that can change all of that it’s the sales pitch and what the sales pitch is, is what is the message that you are communicating to people about your services, so you can have a great product or service.  There’s all kinds of great wonderful ways to deliver a message to people but if you have a lousy sales pitch, no-one’s going to call you.  It’s just like advertising.  If you could spend a $1,000 a month on an ad and you can get one call or you can get 1000 calls it’s still going to cost you the same amount of money and one thing I always talk to people about when it comes to the message is that the difference between a $1 bill and a $100 dollar bill is the message on the paper.  Same type of paper, just a different message so when it comes to constructing advertising and promotions, you want to put together a great sales message so when people look at our consumer awareness guides, our consumer awareness scripts, our sales letters, those are all ways to create and construct an actual sales pitch and that’s what Direct Response Advertising is, it will have a very good message.

So let me explain to you about a belief that I have.  There’s a lot of people that us letters and there’s a lot of people that use brochures.  I really don’t believe in using brochures.  There’s a time and a place for them, but I’m a big fan of really inexpensive, really compelling powerful sales letters.  Brochures don’t work most of the time and the reason they don’t work is for one, they immediately yell out this is a sales message and once someone thinks you’re trying to sell them something, there much less receptive and there’s a cartoon that I write about in my course about General Patten.  Patten is in the middle of a huge battle and this man comes up to him with a boxful of guns and Patten says “You know I don’t have time for a salesman right now, I’ m in the middle of a way” and so if you ever approach a prospect and they think that you’re a salesman, it’s difficult to get through to them and so the same thing goes with your sales message.  A brochure is immediately recognised as a sales message.  It’s fancy but it’s still boring and so with brochures you can’t cheaply and easily change your message.  Things can change quickly, you can decide to offer or worse like discontinue a particular service and then you know you can’t change the brochure, so you either have inaccurate information or you have to spend a ton of money on it to get it over, redone again.  Another thing, you can’t test it cheaply, so what you want to do is you want to have devices that actually will generate business for you that you can change all the time, you can test inexpensively and one of the most effective, powerful ways to generate business is using letter sequences, and so letters get better response in all of my testing and all of the testing of our Piranha clients over brochures and other forms of things that they’re going to go directly to an audience with, better than flyers, not that you can’t use that stuff, and I’m not suggesting that if someone has a flyer or a brochure or anything if it’s working, continue to do it, but you want to test other things to see if you can actually beat the response that you’re getting.  So going back to letters.  Letters look and feel personal and people think of letters as personal and brochures and glitzy things like that as sales.  Secondly, letters, they’re very inexpensive.  You can get a few done at a time. You won’t have money tied up in inventory and you’ll be able to put that stuff out there and have all those marketing dollars working for you and letters are easy to change.  If there’s something about your business that changes or if you want to make a different offer or if there’s something seasonal or some event that comes up, you can always change that in the letter and it’s very hard to do that with brochures or things that you mass produce and if a letter doesn’t work very well the first time, you can easily improve it or test it.  Add testimonials to it and things like that.

So one of the strategies that I would suggest because, you know, we could spend two weeks talking about all this stuff and there’s plenty of materials that people have that we’ve provided them with and my suggestion is, kind of hear what I’m saying but then go back to the materials that we provide them with, read through what they have and what I would recommend is one of the first things you do if you have done it, is you focus on the three letter sequence and that’s where  you put out the offer for a trial service so people can basically see how well you do and the law reciprocity is if you target this to the right types of people and they’re interested in your services, most of them will end up doing business with you long term.  There’s something that everyone needs to be aware of which we teach which is called lifetime value of a client and what that means is how much is somebody worth to you over the lifetime that they’ll end up business with you and if you know that a particular client’s worth $1,000, $2,000 or $5,000 or whatever dollars to you in terms of business that they can give you over several years.  How many referrals they can give you etc, then you can establish how much you would be willing to pay in order to get that client and so that’s why offering a free trial service is such a great offer because for one, it’s irresistible and as long as you’re honest and ethical about it meaning that if somebody does not want anything other than the free service you still provide it and you provide it cheerfully because you understand that as long as you provide a good service and you impress them and you wow the client, that most of the time they wind up not only doing business with you but referring you to other people then you can make that type of offer and if you put that out in the form of a three letter sequence then your response can be tremendous and you can test that in certain target areas in the neighbourhoods where you want to do business in.

R D:    A couple of questions for you.

No.1 a lot of clients are really afraid of offering a free service and they say, well a lot of people have taken advantage of me in the past before I became a Piranha member or a member of my Organisation, what would  you say to those people?

Joe Polish:    That they’re afraid of giving away a free offer well,

R D:    Maybe because perhaps they have been burned by doing it without all the mechanisms in place.

Joe Polish:    Yes actually, that’s the distinction right there.  If you have tried something but you tried it a certain way, you can tweak things minorly sometimes that can completely change it.  Dan Kennedy has a great quote that I love which I have hanging on the wall which says “little hinges swing big doors” and sometimes you just make minor tweaks in the way you do things and they can make all the difference in the world and to give the listeners an idea of that type of tweak.  You can learn a tremendous amount from infomercials.  There’s a lot of goofy nonsense being sold on infomercials, but it’s a huge multi million dollar business and are you familiar with Victoria Principal’s skin care.

R D:    Yes, I am.

Joe Polish:    Ok, I don’t even know what the products called.  Dan Kennedy whom I good friends with and I meet with on a regular basis, he was telling me about one thing that they did.  A minor little tweak that increased their profits dramatically with their phone up sales.  When people were calling from the infomercial to order the skin care product, they had a phone script which is an up sale script and they would ask the people basically would you like this to be shipped to you regular or we do have the rush delivery which will get to you in a day or three days or whatever for an additional $10 charge something like that and they would get a certain amount of people that would take that option and they made money off that added shipping charge that they had but they changed the script and this has been running for years and some smart individual decided after these hundreds of calls that were coming in daily ordering this stuff decided that they would change the script to say “You have your choice of delivery of how quickly we can get it to you, most of our clients choose the rush delivery service for an additional $10, would you like that also”? and just saying it like that and the tweak most our clients prefer this service.

R D:    Yes, assuming the sale.

Joe Polish:    Exactly, well to give you an idea of how well that minor little verbage change worked, it increased their up sales of rush deliver which they make profits on by thirty per cent.  Now when you’re getting thousands of calls a week and this is a big business for them, trust me.   That ends up making a lot of extra money and so little tweaks.  For instance if someone is, going back to your question, someone’s tried a free service and haven’t had much luck, well it all depends on how they’ve actually done it.  The chain is only as strong as the weakest link and you cannot show me anybody, anywhere in the world where they’re targeting pest control services or carpet cleaning services to people that are interested in the services and have enough money to afford it and own houses or businesses that have a pest problem or a dirty carpet problem that this concept had not been proven to work on if they do it the way that we teach it.  First off, you’ve got to do it exactly like we tell you how to do it and you’ve got to understand the law of reciprocity and the reason that free works so well in this context, there are certain contexts that free does not work well like in the information business.  I won’t give away by consultancy services for free, absolutely not.  I won’t send somebody my marketing course or any of my tapes for free unless there is an isolated situation where it just makes sense.  Well I’m not going to take the time to go into that on this interview.

R D:     Do you mind if I interject because I just had a phone call about two days ago and it was a person who’d just enrolled as a member and he had offered a free service with no conditions whatsoever and it was just a small one-third page ad and he thought that the law of reciprocity would automatically pay, but he had no marketing mechanisms in the ad.

Joe Polish:    Well if you’re going to make an offer to the unwashed masses, then you’ve got to be willing to get abused.  If you do free services to people, you take my carpet cleaners, for instance.  When I have a guy that will do a Val pack coupon offering a free room of carpet cleaning, it’ll go out to everybody including people who live in apartments.  They’re not cleaning because they care about the carpet, they’re cleaning because, well not all of them, but many of them are cleaning because they want their deposit back and this is a great way to get free cleaning, so you’ve got to specifically say this offer’s available only to home owners, you’ve got to put up barriers so you just can’t have people abuse you, but that’s were target marketing comes in.  I mean it’s real easy for pest control people and for carpet cleaners to know who their ideal clients are in many cases, because all you need to do is look at what neighbourhoods they’re in.  Does this neighbourhood have any money or does it not?  So you can pretty much drive down the street in many cases and find certain targets that you could specifically make that offer to.  You could make the offer available only to home owners.  But going back to if you put no conditions in there, you’ve got to understand that if you make a free offer, you’ve got to go into somebody’s home and you’ve got to educate them.  You’ve got to let them know what it is you’re actually providing them with.  A real simple way to do that is before the service send them pre confirmation letter.  If the service is immediately right away, ask them if they have email.  If they do have email, send them an email letting them know that I’m going to show up at your home, this is exactly what I’m going to do, these are the additional things that we do offer in case you’re interested, but this free service is just to show you that we will provide a wonderful service for you and if you’re happy with it, then hopefully we’ll do business and if not, I’ll say thank you and you prepare the people for  your arrival so they understand the value that you’re creating because if people don’t place any value on it, and it’s not their job to understand the value that you’re going to give them.  It’s your job to communicate it to them and so as long as you educate them, give them a consumer awareness guide explaining your services, impress them a little, explain to them the consequences of not hiring you and not doing business with you and if they do have a need for your services and you properly communicate it to them, don’t you think most of the time they’re going to end up doing additional business with you as long as you completely explain the benefits of your service which can all be done through recorded message, consumer awareness guides, doing a pest control audit, doing a carpet audit.

R D:    Yes, it’s all been done for them too.
Joe Polish:    Yes, I mean this is all cookie cutter stuff.  I mean it’s not as if they need to create this stuff from scratch.   They’ve got the template right here.  I mean we aim the road map.  It’s much harder to climb up the mountain if you don’t have a map.  They got the map.  Do they have to do some work?  Absolutely, they’ve got to provide a good service, they’ve got to communicate with their clients, they’ve got to get some printing made up, they’ve got to have some stuff typed up.  But, what’s the alternative?  If you don’t do that you can continue to do whatever else it was you were doing.  So, there’s really not a lot of real difficult things they need to do. They just need to assemble them together and they need to do it.  But the most important thing is you’ve got to have a good attitude about it.  If you really believe deep down inside that your clients are too sophisticated for this type of marketing or whatever, you’re going to figure out all kinds of excuses in the world that it’s not going to work and believe me, your clients are not too sophisticated for this type of marketing.  Another thing that we hear all the time RD is that my clients in this area won’t respond to this type of stuff.  In my response to anyone that believes that.  You know, you bought my stuff, you bought RD’s stuff, you responded to it, you live in Oklahoma, so if there you are in Oklahoma, you’re one of them, those people that are not like anyone else in the rest of the country that won’t respond to this stuff, you’re one of them, you responded.  Believe me people respond to this type of stuff because this is down to earth communication that talks to people like human beings talk.  When you read my letters, when you read RD’s letters, we write like people talk.  We communicate.  We take the risk away from them by being very non-threatening.  We teach you how to use testimonials so people believe you.  When I said the reason why people won’t buy from you is they don’t believe, a way to overcome believability is get your clients that think you walk on water that wonderfully love your services that would do business with you and refer you, get them to give you a testimonial about how great you are because you can go out all day long and tell the public how wonderful you are and why you’re great and that you’ve been in business for 20 years and blah, blah, blah, but believe me, it’s a lot more believable when you get one of your happy clients to do it for me.  That lends credibility so much more than you just talking about how great you are and tooting your own horn.  Toot your own horn.  I’m a big fan of publicising yourself.  But believe me I like publicity, I’ve been on Twenty Twenty, I’ve been on television several times, I’ve done National Radio interviews, I mean, I love publicity, however when I get other people to say great things about Joe Polish, it always holds more weight than me talking about how great I am.

R D:    Yes, exactly.  Everything that you’ve said has been so powerful for everybody that’s listening.  Do you have any famous last words to wrap this up?

Joe Polish:    Well, I guess my famous last words would be that there is a lot of opportunity out there and going back to how you spend your time.  I kind of touched on it and I’m hoping that everybody found this interview useful.  I’d like you actually to have your clients RD fax you or email you feedback on this interview if they enjoyed it.  If they found it useful then we’ll do another one.  We do a lot of work together and I’m more than happy to help your people and it helps me by teaching it to people and continuing to spread the word about the type of marketing that we do because there’s a huge amount of business out there.  Most of it is virtually untapped.   The biggest competitor that you have is not the guy down the street, the biggest competitor that you have is yourself.  The limitations and the hurdles that people put up are mostly self imposed.  There are certain situations where you could have a real competitor problem, but you can always beat competitors with good savvy marketing if it’s a sales issue and so focus on that and going back to the time issue, if all of you track your time for a week, hour by hour and focus on what you actually spend your time on.  I can say this, people can mentally think to themselves yes, that would be a good idea, but I tell you RD five per cent of the people listening to this interview right now, if we’re lucky, will actually do it and those that will do it will be successful.  I don’t mean totally successful for life, I just mean that they will have knowledge and information that they can then implement and make changes in their business that could get them more success and if they continually stick to it, they will become more successful.  The successful people in this world are willing to do the things that the unsuccessful people are not willing to do.  In any industry five to ten per cent make all the money, the other ninety per cent scrape around for the crumbs.  The people that scrape around for the crumbs are the people that don’t figure out how to sell their services.  They’re not continually on the road to self improvement and they’re not creating value and properly communicating that to their clients and if you want to be successful in this business, learn as much as you can about marketing, go out and do the right thing, treat people well and continually improve yourself and always, always focus on how you’re spending your time and realise that it’s more important to what you say no to than what you say yes to, because you want to constantly eliminate the things that are not bringing you results just so you can take the things that you do say yes to and make sure the things you say yes to are the most important activities that you could be focussing on and I don’t just mean this in business wise, personally too.  Realise that the purpose of your business is to fund your ideal lifestyle and they way to find your ideal lifestyle is to make as much money as you can as quickly as you can with the least amount of effort and exertion and we hope that the tools and the things we discussed with you will give you a little bit of insight on how you can do that better and that’s really about all I have to say.

R D:    Yes, what you said about time is really good.  Dave Kekidge, we mentioned him earlier in this interview says “treat time like water across the desert and that’s a great metaphor.

Joe Polish:    Let me say this to all listeners since you brought that up.  Read the 100 Credos by Dave Kekidge.  You can get them from RD, you can get them from me.  Just read the 100 Credos. We have sent them out to a lot of our members and I read them almost daily.  I’m writing a book on them right now with Dave Kekidge and I know RD that you’re contributing to this book also, and I believe it’s going to be one of the biggest, bestselling books probably in the Country after we complete it and we start doing promotions for it and it’s got a lot of lessons in it and many of the things we talked about in a lot of those teachings have allowed me to mould and understand business and understand that School is never out for the pro.  I’m continually learning and sometimes I say stupid things and I make dumb mistakes and I fail but the fact is you’re going to fail in business.  Successful businesses are the result of people that have made mistakes but have learned from them and continue to go out and do better and to think that you’re ever going to have a perfect business and never make mistakes, never going to happen.  You’re going to fail, you’re going to make mistakes, but you’ve got to have the right attitude.  The way to get the successes is to have some failures.

R D:    Oh exactly, you know it’s funny we were both on a brainstorm called together with our colleagues and Glen Donaldson from ATG said “make a new mistake every day” and that was just engraved in my heard and in my mind.

Joe Polish:    Yes exactly, and this is a guy has a hundred and something employees.

R D:    Yes and we were laughing because I said oh I make mistakes all the time, I must be successful.  He said no, make a new mistake every day.

Joe Polish:    Yes exactly, there’s a distinction there.  So people are like well I’ve been failing for 50 years, this has not got be anywhere.  Well, you know, what have you done with the failure?  If you get good feedback and it changes your behaviour and your decision so you get better results, then you really haven’t failed at all and one thing that I’ve learned from Dan Sullivan is the only areas of improvement come out of those parts of your life that don’t work.  Life is broken up into two things, things that work and things that don’t work and you will learn how to make things work only by those area of life that things don’t work.  All good growth comes out of exertion and effort to a certain degree and so don’t beat yourself up if you’ve made a lot of stupid mistakes or things haven’t worked.  You know, wake up tomorrow, it’s a brand new day.  The goal is not perfection, the goal is progress, get out there and just spend your time on the things that are important to you.  It’s your life, you write the rules, you make your personal rules, you make your business rules as long as what you’re doing, you’re doing it with integrity, you’re doing it with honesty.  Who cares what anyone else thinks.  If you want to read an interesting book, “The Millionaire’s Mind”, these are the guys that wrote “The Millionaire Next Door” and they analyse the biggest trait of a survey of millionaires that made them successful and it was really surprising what they all said was the highest trait was integrity and people think that millionaires are these scummy people.  It’s a good book to read but everybody doesn’t have to go out and read a million books.  They’re helpful, I do it all the time, I happen to like it.  But the fact is you’ve got plenty of resources and tools through RD and through Piranha Marketing so.

R D:    Yes, it’s a filtration system.

Joe Polish:    Yes, we’re out there spending all the time and money to hand deliver to people on a silver platter.  It’s the smart ones that will take advantage of it and you don’t have to like me you don’t even have to like RD, just look at the concepts.  People could think this Joe guy, he’s a big mouth, he’s spewing his philosophy, he’s about everything, whatever, look at the marketing principles we’ve got evidence of success through the ying yang that this stuff actually works and go out there and use it and I wish all of you listeners tons of success and just stick with it and keep doing it and that is it.

R D:    Well, thanks Joe, this has been incredible thanks.

Joe Polish:    Well thanks RD, I appreciate it and we’ll do it again.