Module 2: Begin with the End in Mind with Rich Schefren

Rich Jeffron is the founder and president of the Strategic Profits and the Coach to the Internet Gurus. After graduating from Case Western Reserve University, summa cum laude, as an accounting major, Rich was recruited by Arthur Anderson's Strategic Planning Division. There he garnered several awards and then jumped at the opportunity to take over his family's struggling clothing business. When Rich turned that business into Soho's hottest eclectic clothing boutique with loyal customers like Prince and Uma Thurman, he was hooked on being an entrepreneur. Through his unique marketing ideas, the business had revenue growth from 1.5 to over 6.5 million dollars in just three years.

Next, Rich invested $7,500 to create a hypnosis center, which expanded to multiple locations and generated over $7 million a year within four years. Rich then wanted to share his success and secrets and developed a program for other hypnosis centers to achieve the success he had. Rich parlayed his offline success and marketing prowess into an information product business. Many of these marketers secretly sought out his advice to help them turn their businesses into profit-producing powerhouses. His passion was ignited to share what he had learned with struggling internet marketers who wanted to build real businesses and free lives.

That's when Strategic Profits came to be and the story continues to unfold. Rich lives with his wife, Debbie, and their daughter, Ava and Elle, in Florida. Let's have a huge round of applause for Rich. Rich is joining us live in studio. We've got Farzana and I here.

Farzana, if you've got questions for him, make sure you just chime on in. Rich, it's good to have you here, man. It's nice being here, Wilton. Thanks for having me. We're really, really glad to have you here.

I know that you have had just a tremendous amount of success, both in the offline and the online worlds. You are a special expert in helping people find their ideal customers. Can you just give us a little bit about your background? I know you just read your bio, but tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you've done. Okay, yeah, sure.

You've already covered the clothing business, the hypnosis business, so kind of pushing those aside for a second. I started coaching back online in about 2004. I had a small group of clients, about 25 clients. I got them amazing results, like truly amazing, unrivaled kind of results online. But even with that, there was no white line outside my door wanting to be coached by me.

I didn't realize yet at that point that your success came from how well you could market what you do more so than actually how good it is at what it is you do. When I went to the hypnosis conventions, when I had my hypnosis centers, hypnotists just wanted to practice hypnosis, not necessarily on how to sell and market hypnosis better. Here I was this great coach, but really not having the success that I wanted even though my clients were having the success that they wanted. I had this big project that I was going to be involved with about three months down the road while this initial 25 people I was coaching had just come to an end. I had coached them for 18 months.

The average increase was a couple million dollars per person in their business. They had all started at different levels. I had this three months where I wasn't really going to be doing anything because I had this big project coming up and I had just finished this group coaching program. I decided I was going to write a report as to what I saw as the mistakes that people were making and the problems they were having in trying to start an online business. I was hoping that I could get just a couple clients from this report in this three-month downtime.

I wrote this report. It was like 30 pages long. I put it up on my blog. Surprisingly for me at that time, because I wasn't expecting it at all, that went viral. It was downloaded about 45,000 times in the first couple weeks.

It went to being downloaded over a million in the first two years and then over two million the next four years after that. It's been downloaded a significant amount ever since. Within a month of when I released it, I had over 2,000 people that wanted to be my client. From there, it just grew and grew and grew. I then really made it a practice to figure out how did I go from having no clients to having all these clients and what was it that I did to do that.

Over the next 18 months, I wrote a series of seven reports, each really setting up the need for something that I taught. The first report that really was the one that put me on the map was the Internet Business Manifesto. The last report that I wrote was something called the Entrepreneurial Emergency. That report was all about the constraints that get in the way of achieving success and how it's more about eliminating constraints than growing your potential. I was able to sell, after that, a course on theory of constraints.

We sold millions and millions of dollars of it. Trying to compress just what I told you into a smaller soundbite would be that what I've done in my coaching business is I've consistently been able to find things that I believe that clients of mine would greatly benefit from and take that, where there's no demand for it because no one even knows that these kinds of things exist, and be able to create a strong desire in a group of people for that thing that I'm offering. That's been the main driver of my success, and I figure that's probably what we're going to be talking about today. Let's talk about that. What has your process been like for actually identifying where these opportunities lie and who you can actually serve by doing that?

I was listening to some of the stuff you guys were talking about earlier about your unique ability and what strength you have that can really provide value. I guess what I would say is you've got to start with an understanding that every market, every marketplace, every niche is made up of a group of people who share a conflict. That's why they're in that market. They share a conflict. A conflict can be either a goal unattained or a problem unresolved.

I call it a conflict. That's why they're in that market. You have to start there. You have to recognize that what you're in the business of doing is solving a conflict, and there's a group of people who have that conflict. That's where I start.

From there, the next thing to recognize is that in any kind of personal change work or business growth or in these areas, as opposed to buying a toaster, people have had this conflict for some period of time and they've not yet been able to fully relieve themselves of that conflict. You're talking to a group of people who have a conflict who have struggled with eliminating that conflict. Along those lines, they have certain beliefs that have put them in that market and then they have certain beliefs about how to achieve success in that market. What I primarily spend a lot of my time with nowadays is how do you take the human desires that we all walk around with and how do you channel that into demand for a coaching service, a product, whatever. If we look at my market, which is more how to grow a business, entrepreneurial, internet marketing, there are three primary human desires that get people into that market.

That's not everybody, but just as a generalization, it's more money, so it's money, it's freedom and some kind of recognition status, authority, like I've done something. Those are the primary desires of my marketplace. Why they're in the business or grow a business or I'm going to be a successful entrepreneur is because they believe, so there's a belief there that takes that primary desire of money, freedom, status and attaches it to a successful online business. Along those lines, they also have beliefs underneath that successful online business of what needs to happen in order for me to achieve this thing, this online success that's then going to give me money, freedom, whatever. It's a set of beliefs that have held someone's desire in place and someone's goals in place and also hold their conflict in place.

You recognize that they've struggled with this conflict for some period of time. Then you also recognize that there is the ability to shift or alter your prospect's beliefs. That really gets into where my wheelhouse is. I'm going to let you lead me whichever way you want to go. I'd like to back you up just a little bit and say, what about somebody who's approaching a brand new market or what if you were to go into a market that you're not in right now?

Right now you're in the how to do internet marketing or how to make money online. What if you were in a totally different space? How would you go about approaching that niche? How would you start to zero in on who your ideal clients are and then where their conflict lies? It's where do I provide value?

What is my strength? What have I got that the world is willing to pay money for? At the end of the day, if you can't answer that question you take that to the logical conclusion you're hoping that you find a bunch of idiot customers to buy from you because if you don't provide something of superior value people would be stupid to buy from you. What is it that you have that allows you to solve a problem You've got to get clear about who you are and who you want to be what you have, what you know, what your experience has been For some people that's easy, for some people that's pretty difficult Once you know that then you have to target a market When you target a market what I've done and it's helped a lot of people do successfully is to look at the conflict that this group of people is sharing the beliefs that they currently have in place about that conflict which sounds difficult to do but not really because our behaviors are a display of our beliefs If I'm trying to sell someone something I can look at what else they're buying to get the outcome that I provide My favorite way and we can kind of dissect this or we can go in whatever direction we want to go is to give prospects a new perspective on their problem I want them to see that what they are currently experiencing as problems is really nothing more than symptoms of something deeper and when I can redefine the problem prospects automatically have new hope new enthusiasm because they've just learned something they've had an epiphany, an aha about what they've been struggling with I've done this in all my reports but I'll give you an example that happened to me I got screwed over horribly a long time ago in a business deal in the blink of an eye my whole personality changed I just became someone I didn't recognize I'd always been kind of low-key and mellow and then all of a sudden I was quick to lose my temper weird, right? it would still be the same way you have to be always careful if you're willing to back it up and say if you don't get the result you get your money back you might want to check the legality of that when I did this really strong it was several years ago and the FTC always changes don't take my advice as being lawyerly but you want to make that same promise which is incredibly important and then there's the marketing that precedes it in whatever format and the marketing that precedes it has to point you as being relevant to them your prospects because you understand something that they don't and they feel understood when looking at your stuff in weight loss for example if we're talking about weight loss give me an explanation of why yours is going to work and in that explanation I see the answer to why everything else that I've tried has not worked because if you can give me an answer like that then I feel like you understand me because you're now giving me more information and that has tremendous power we're very quick from a marketing perspective to mentally opt out of stuff that is not relevant to us and we all feel somewhat misunderstood if you really knew me you have to overcome that by overcoming you don't really understand me what you're doing how does your prospect go from this is something that is possible to this is something that is probable for me and there's a big leap there we all think that there's a lot more that's possible than probable for us and we want to close the gap of possible and probable for prospects in our market with our thing and generally in a new way mechanism, a new way to get to that outcome.

So, you know, in everything I've done, it's always been about bringing in something new to achieve the outcome that also addresses the deficiencies in previous stuff that they might have tried. So you're finding the secret reason why they haven't succeeded, or the deeper reason why they haven't succeeded, and then you're also bringing in a new methodology for solving that problem, and that's the basics of what you're doing. Yeah, and so it's like if we look at this live stream, you know, if it's all about coaching and how to get your coaching business off the ground, or how to be more successful in coaching, like one thing we can be pretty certain of is that nobody who's absolutely positively happy with their coaching business currently in every way, shape, or form is watching this live stream, because there's a lot of other things to do in life, and if the coaching business and your coaching life was a big check mark, yes, it's all perfect, it does exactly what I need it to be, you wouldn't necessarily be watching a live stream about how to make your coaching business better, or get it off the ground, or whatnot, and so once we recognize that, okay, there is something currently missing from our, our prospects have some kind of conflict, what is that conflict, how can we solve it better than anyone else because of what we know what we do, and then how do we lead prospects to that conclusion? You know, you were talking earlier, I remember where you said, like, you'd be talking to an entrepreneur in your office, oh, it was about, like, you know, that you don't recognize your own strengths, you think everyone can do it. When I talk to entrepreneurs sometimes, like, kind of a similar situation, except they're, like, scratching their head with some of the stuff I've just said, one of the things I tell people is, like, look, if you want to offer what it is you want to offer, because you believe it's going to help your market, then you've had certain experiences over your life that have led you to the conclusion that your prospects need this, right?

Like, you're doing this for good reason, right? You think your prospects would greatly benefit from this. Your prospects don't have those experiences, and therefore they haven't come to that conclusion. Part of the marketing process is to take your prospects through an accelerated, abbreviated version of what convinced you, so you can convince them, and lead them to the same conclusions that led you to figuring out, like, this is the thing. So, you know, to find your ideal prospects, you first have to start with everything that you were covering, like, what is it that you're great at?

What is your value? What have you got that people are willing to pay money for? And then once you know that, like, get really clear about the conflict, and then get clear about what beliefs kind of hold that conflict in place, right? Because there are beliefs that hold that conflict in place, at least in my experience. So, you know, when I wrote the Internet Business Manifesto, it was about the belief that people had was that all they needed was marketing.

Like, because the whole marketplace in internet marketing at that time was just focused on marketing. And so I came in with a bigger belief. I came in with that, not that they were wrong, like, not that marketing is not important. Marketing is very important, but marketing is a part of business building in general. And marketing is important, but so are the other elements of knowing how to grow a business.

And therefore, I wasn't making my prospects wrong. Marketing is important. But I was also explaining why they were currently experiencing the challenges that they were experiencing. And they felt understood. They felt like I understood them.

They saw my track record with the original 25, right? And the rest was history. Does that make sense? It makes perfect sense. What are some of the mistakes that you see in brand new coaches or passion-based entrepreneurs who are going out there and launching their businesses?

As you're out there, what are people doing wrong? Well, okay, so, you know, the first thing comes from my background in hypnosis, which I know you have as well, or at least I heard that. When I started learning hypnosis, the teacher told me not to practice with people I already knew. And the line that he used was, I'm Jewish, but nonetheless, it always resonated with me. He said, even Jesus didn't heal in his hometown, right?

Because they saw him as like Jesus the carpenter or whatever not Jesus the way he's looked at now. And so I think part of, some of the mistakes that people make is one, staying safe and only like trying to coach people that they know in the beginning, right? Which you never really get the same level of respect, et cetera, and nor will you get the same outcome. You know, whenever I've coached someone, even close friends, I'd be like, look, this is what I'm gonna charge and I want you to put the money up. If you get the result and you take this seriously, I'll give you the money back.

But if you back out like halfway through or you do like, then I'm not gonna give you the money back because like I'm making a commitment to you, you're making a commitment to me. It's not about the money at all. I wanna give you the money back, but I'm not gonna let you devalue what it is that I bring to the table by, you know, just trying it out. Because that's not how it's gonna work in the real world. Anyway, so I think that's, you gotta get comfortable that your knowledge has value.

And ideally, as your knowledge gets more valuable because you've been in the game longer, you've helped more people, your prices go up as well. So, you know, in the beginning, like take those 25 clients, you know, I've now coached tens of thousands of clients, but those original 25, like each of them made millions and millions of dollars more that year. And I got paid, you know, 15 grand total, right? So nowadays, like in order, I get paid a lot more, right? To kind of cause those increases because I have more confidence in myself.

My track record is bigger and better. And so I can command it. But if you don't value your own knowledge, I think you're screwed right out of the gate. The second mistake I think coaches make is that what we were talking about earlier as well, that they don't really, I don't, I was, when I was very active as a business coach, I was one of the highest paid business coaches, I guess, on the planet. I don't know whether I'm the best business coach.

I think I'm damn good, but I don't know if I'm the best. But what allowed me to charge that amount was the power of my marketing. And it's just like, no expert wants to feel like really own this, but it's the truth. That you're, look, if you're not good and you do great marketing, you will be exposed at some point. But if you're good, you're also, the world is not gonna be a path towards your door.

You have to get good at marketing what it is you've got. It goes hand in hand with being good at what it is. And that's probably the biggest mistake. And when I say that, what I mean is figuring out the message that when you share makes people lean in, wanna understand more and feel like you're relevant for them. When I talk about understanding marketing as it relates to this coach, I'm not talking about like learning all the ins and outs of internet marketing, because that's not really relevant.

It's about having a message that when prospects are exposed to it, they see you as the solution to their conflict. And when I, you know, I introduced automated webinars to the market back in like 2008, like we were the one of the first to do it. And, you know, wrote a report about it for my clients and stuff like that. But when I did that, all I was doing was taking the same message that was in my report, you know, years before, and now putting it into a webinar and doing it live on stage. It's the same message, because I found that message gets people to lean in and want to be coached by me.

I don't really know all the minuscule tactical stuff as it relates to online. I don't think it's a high value activity for anyone who wants to be a coach, but understanding the message that will resonate is incredibly important. And I think coaches have a great advantage in coming up with it, because they're talking to their prospects. And in general, they're talking in a free space where people can be honest. Right.

And so when people are honest with you and they start telling you what made them reach out for coaching, what made them realize they couldn't handle, they couldn't get this outcome on their own, that they needed help, that they picked you, like those are nuggets of information that most marketers would kill for. You get that as a coach for free in order to help your clients, and in the process, also bank up your knowledge of what's actually gonna work in marketing, because they're giving voice to that inner voice, which is what causes the purchase in the first place. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. So if you have a brand new coach and he's looking at gathering the psychology, really understanding the deep human needs of the persons coming to the table with, to be able to understand it from a marketing perspective, how would you track and organize that in a way that allows you to really identify the sore points and make sure you understand exactly what kind of messaging to put out there in your marketing?

There's a lot of ways. I'll just give you one, but there really are lots of ways. One way is that when you're having that initial conversation with someone from NLP type stuff, it's about surfacing their criteria. And so Kendrick Cleveland, I think it was him that came up with this model years ago, which is like three levels, right? So, and we used to use this in the hypnosis centers as well.

So someone comes in, and they're coming in for weight loss, for example. Well, we wanna know why now. Obviously losing weight is important, but why did you make the appointment today? Like, why are you sitting here now? And they'll give you some kind of answer.

And then you wanna take that and then ask them why again. Like that's, you know, I wanna lose it this time for good, and I'm sick of yo-yo diets up and down and blah, blah, blah. And so I wanna really work on my habits. Great, I get that. And a lot of people come here to work on their habits, but why did you decide now was the time to work on your habits?

And so you, you know, you penetrate three times basically. And when you get to that deeper reason, you're getting to what really caused them to pick up the phone, call now. And it might be that they're afraid of dying. They were having a catch with their son and they got winded. Or it could be that, you know, they're getting close to an age where their mother died and they're overweight too.

I don't know. But you start getting to the deeper reason that isn't given at first. And for them often, it's a surprise too, if you've asked correctly, like they get like, why now? And so that's one way, but what I want to kind of boldface underscore circle is that as a coach doing your job, you get the information you need. It's just a question of whether you're looking for it, you know, whether you're paying attention for it.

There is no better, like, you know, as someone who's considered like a really good marketer and a really good coach, the two are one in the same in a lot of ways. We have to, people walk around day to day in their lives with problems, lots of them. And we press them down because we don't want to deal with like we're 10 pounds overweight, something else isn't working in our life, something else. If we were to focus on all this stuff, we wouldn't be happy. So we press it down.

But what we as coaches and marketers both want to do is we want to get people to take action. We want to get them out of that, right? The status quo bias. Marketing is about getting people to see that it's actually possible that, and possibly probable for them. And then the coach makes that.

But the marketing coach dynamic is one that where one really feeds the other. And if coaches can see that, that this little conversation that I'm having with this one client right now is a microcosm for the marketplace, they can get an understanding very quickly. It's generally a lot less than most people think. Five to eight coaching clients, and you can get a very clear idea of the market. What they need to know, how things need to be explained, and what message will move them.

It doesn't take a lot. The key to the many is the one. Yeah, and the way I've always shared it, in the reports that I've used from a marketing perspective, those first seven or eight, is that which is most personal is most general. And what I mean by that is that the pain that I've suffered and the things that I've done, the things that I don't like sharing and talking about are the same things that most people struggle with and also don't share. And because I can take the perspective of sharing this stuff, whether I attribute it to myself or to someone else, makes people feel understood.

And when you get that, it's quite liberating then to be able to get to the core of what someone is experiencing. So once you've got the psychology and you really understand the deeper human needs that are driving everything, you understand the client, you understand the one, and what their hidden fears are, their hidden desires are, how do you turn that back around into marketing? Like today, you've talked about reports. Is there any other ways that you deliver the content once you're turning it around to market? Yeah, I mean, well, I've done it in a lot of different formats, webinars, reports, blog posts, podcasts, I mean, all of the above.

But I do believe, I guess I have a couple of beliefs that I guess are somewhat different than others. That one, I think they've got to make time for greatness. I think that like too many people try to publish way too much. And I think that better to create like one great thing, one great blog post, have that then turned into a video and audio and have it populated all around the internet than to have 20 mediocre blog posts, right? Better to have one video.

And every one of my reports made me a minimum of like at least 2 million and so much more. So, but each of those took time. And so you have to kind of, and not crazy amounts of time, but I see too many people get fixated on like a blog schedule of every day or whatever, even when they have nothing to say, and I think it's a mistake. So I think you gotta like have a few things that are valuable. And then I also think that you have to see where the internet is going.

But if you want math, like if you want breakout success, this would be my best advice about that. And I'm not negating anything I've said because I think you need those things, period. But what will cause breakout success faster and easier is to hop on a technology early. Because- On a technology what? To hop on a technology early.

Early. Yeah, so, you know, right now, at this moment, there's, in my opinion, a great opportunity with Facebook Live. Facebook is doing live streaming. They've made it available for everyone. Facebook really wants it to work.

And I can go into a whole long rationale as to why I think it will and why I think it's good, which I won't, because that's not the purpose here. But my point of bringing it up right now is that it's a growing platform. And if you can be on a growing platform early, then it's not guaranteed you're gonna be successful, but you've just upped the odds significantly because you're gonna get exposed to a lot more eyeballs as they're growing that thing. And I've seen it, you know, I've seen it 20, 30 times in my life where when Facebook first got going, when YouTube first got going, you know, Google first got going, all the same. So when you have the right message, you have the right market, then it's just about getting exposure and eyeballs.

And one of the easiest ways to get that is, I mean, there are lots of ways to do it, but one of the easiest ways to do it is to hop in front of a format and a platform that's growing in popularity. Nice. If you had a, I think we're gonna move over to Q&A here in just a minute, if you had advice for a brand new either coach or again, passion-based entrepreneur, somebody who's fallen in their heart, what would you give them today? 2016, they're just getting started. How should they do it?

Specialized, first and foremost, doesn't matter what you do. Even if you're a life coach, in my opinion, way too vague, there's no meat on that bone. I don't know who you're applicable for and who you're not. If you're a life coach that deals with men who just like in the throes of a midlife crisis, well, that's very different. Or a woman who just got divorced and is now trying to rebuild their life, also very different.

So I think you gotta specialize, you gotta pick who's the market that you really wanna serve and who that market would really benefit from what it is you have. So that's where I would start. I would always start by specializing. I mean, I'm a generalist, but I know that my life would certainly be a lot more simple if I was a specialist and it would be a lot easier for me to provide even more value as a specialist because now I'm talking to a very micro group. So that would be where I would start.

I would start with really figuring out what my specialty is. Then I would pick a platform. Whatever platform. I just said that I think Facebook Live is an opportunity, but maybe you're not good on camera. And if you're not good on camera and you get all messed up in your head, maybe that's not the right move for you.

Maybe pick something else. But you gotta pick a platform because you gotta be able to put out into the world your perspective. And it has to be a new perspective. It can't be, you know, I wrote a series on my blog, geez, I don't know, like maybe eight years ago, seven years ago or something about counterintuitive. Like how do you develop counterintuitive ideas?

Because your marketplace, your people are not gonna wanna hear the same old, same old. Like if someone's interested in losing weight and your advice is eat less, exercise more, like they've already heard that. There's nothing exciting about that. You have to give them something new. And so you have to have something that's counterintuitive.

Some type of advice that they would have never thought of themselves, never come across. And those are the kinds of ideas you wanna share. And when you share them, if you share them in the right way where they actually have some value, they will be passed along. And you know, the whole idea there is social currency. It's like, if I tell you a joke and it's a good joke, it makes you laugh, you wanna remember it so you can tell other people, I've given you something that makes you more valuable with other people, social currency.

So if I can also redefine your problem, if I can talk about your challenges in a way where you feel understood, where you also know other people who might be struggling with you, you pass it along. And that's why my reports have always been passed along. And so that kind of gets the process going. And then, you know, you have to move prospects each step of the way until they're knocking at your door saying, I need you to coach me. And the best way to do that is through an education-based kind of content that in your preferred channel.

And that would really be how I would get the ball rolling. I would, you know, it depends on the person of whether they feel like they can create something that really is a mind blowing kind of thing. That's generally been my strategy, but that's a little bit more challenging. And then I would say they need to do something that gets them attention. And that could be anything, but something that allows you to rise above the clutter for some short period of time, so that, you know, people can become aware of you.

So, and I've done lots of things to do that, but it just is, it's founded by your own creativity. Awesome. I think we're moving over to a Q&A section. Let's go ahead and take some Q&A from the audience. Awesome answers.

Everybody, round of applause for them. Is this good stuff? Woo! Just by a show of hands, who's learned something just by listening to them today? So we thank you, Rich, just for what you had so far.

But from a Q&A, let's go ahead and read these. Farzana, you wanna take the first one here? I'd love, this is from Roberto. I'd love to hear a practical example about how Rich found the right customers. Okay.

How I found the right customers. I'll give you, well, I'll just give you some examples of what I've done. I think that the, I just wanna, I wanna give you the best answer I can here. There's something called the prospect pyramid. Prospect pyramid?

Yeah, it's like a pyramid, and it's something that Chet Holmes came up with a long time ago. And it's about the percentage of people in the marketplace that are looking to buy right now, right? So it's like 3% are like, they wanna buy right now, like another 6% are open to buying, and then the next 30% are not thinking about buying, and the next 30% are sure they don't wanna buy, and the next 30%, I don't know what, okay? And most people make the mistake of focusing on just that top 3%. This is my opinion, not, it's Chet's pyramid, now me just talking about it.

Most people make the mistake of just kind of talking to the top 3%, people who are interested in buying right now, and I don't. Because most of the time, what my prospects want are not in their best interest, right? They don't really know what's gonna help them achieve success, and so they get marketed to a bunch of BS. But that's what they want. I don't play in that world.

I play in the world where people aren't necessarily looking for something right now, but they still have that goal, they still have that outcome. So when I released the Internet Business Manifesto, the reason it's been downloaded over 2 million times is not because we advertised it, because we hardly have. It's because when people read it, it resonated deeply with them, so much so that they wanted to share it with other people. So what I talked about in that report was how most internet entourage are doing it wrong, and they're doing it wrong by trying to buy certain types of marketing-type products as the answer, and I walked people through that. Now, that resonated with a group of people who saw themselves doing that, right?

And it was passed along from one person who does that to another person who does that, and then passed along from there to there. So a lot of my stuff has gone viral over the years, but it's gone viral not because of the clever tactics that I had behind it, although I had some. It was more about the message inside. And so I like to have a message in my marketing that gets the right people to raise their hand and say, he's talking about me, I'm interested, and I'm totally cool with a lot of people seeing it and saying, no, this is not me, I'm not interested. So I know what it is that I'm looking for, and my message gets people to raise their hand out of it, and I go after everyone who's in that space by passing along, by making noise, by rising above the clutter.

It's different than picking a group of people and just advertising to them specifically. And I find that when you give really good content and you do it in the way that I'm talking about, the right people show up wanting to be coached by you. So that's how I would kind of, what I would say though is this. So the people I was talking to in the Internet Business Manifesto were people who had that primary desire of money, freedom, recognition, but had already attached that belief to an online successful business. The manifesto has been knocked off a bunch of times, sometimes by friends of mine who asked and sometimes not, but it was knocked off in the real estate niche and it was knocked off in the stock trading niche.

And both of those, it did extremely well as well. And if you understand, and the reason why it did extremely well, with very minimal changes, except the names of what you would be doing and stuff like that, is that the same, their belief structure is the same. Those people want money, freedom, and recognition, but the belief below it is it's not gonna be an online business that's gonna give it to them. It's real estate investing or it's stock trading. And then the beliefs below that about how to achieve that were the ones that my report reshifted based on what I offer.

And these people that knocked it off did the same. And so it was that lower level of belief that we shifted. So my point in bringing that up is that once you have the right framework, once you're clear about the underlying problem that your prospects have that they are not aware of, you've really got the message that will get people to raise their hand to you. And I don't know if, Will, if this has been your experience, but my experience when I first learned hypnosis, my, one of my, I don't remember which teacher told me this, but they said, okay, when the patient walks into the door and they're telling you what's wrong, just nod your head. But if they really knew what was wrong, they wouldn't be sitting in front of you.

So recognize that the truth is partial. And your job is to get to that deeper truth. And that's what I do in my marketplace too. So, and when you get that right message, you cause an epiphany. And when you cause that epiphany, there's nothing more powerful.

Super, super powerful. So you're looking at shifting that third layer underneath of a belief. Yeah, I mean, if that's where your product goes to, right? And so, and once again, their current beliefs about it are not getting them the success they want. So they're open to something being added to it.

Absolutely. It's not like I'm getting the result every which way backwards and forwards. So I really don't care what your thought is. It's more like I'm doing everything I can. I'm not getting the result.

What am I doing wrong? Is there something wrong with me? Is there something I don't know? Is there, you know, this is where people are at. And so when you give them something that's bigger, it's powerful.

Excellent, thank you. Let's move to the second question here. We've got, I'm not sure I'm pronouncing the name right, but Silindi Kolakot. My profession is a gemologist. I love learning about online marketing.

However, some people in the trade think that online marketing is a bad thing. Is there a way that I could do both without the risk of damaging my name? Do you have any idea what she means by a bad thing? By what? By a bad thing?

I'm assuming that, really, honestly, I have no idea. But I'm assuming maybe there's some people inside of our industry who frown upon online marketing. Do you have any insight? I think there might be concerns about counterfeiting and cheap quality and things like that. Okay.

On some of the, that there are companies out there that do that. Right. And that exclusivity and high-end gemologists would never do that. I think there's a bit of a standardization thing. That makes sense.

And so then what I would say is that has to be an integral part of your marketing process. And just to be clear, like I might take a step back here, but I think the question is a good one. There's a big difference between marketing and selling. And most people don't separate the two. They kind of combine them in one.

And it's really, they're different activities. The goal of marketing is to make selling superfluous, to get someone to want something bad enough that you don't even have to sell it. Now, most marketing doesn't accomplish that feat, but that's the goal. And the goal of marketing is to help your prospects value what you offer, right? To, we value what we think is relevant to our goals.

And so marketing is about getting someone to value what it is you offer. And, you know, we talked, I guess you guys talked about Apple at some point earlier, because I heard the name. Apple does a great job of that. Like you don't walk into an Apple store to be sold. You walk in generally knowing what it is you want.

And that's why Apple is such a great marketing company. And just in my reports, the report that did the worst of all of them was a report where I combined the marketing and the selling. So the marketing was the front of the report. And then I had a sales letter at the back of the report. And that got handed off the least because people were embarrassed.

They didn't want to pass along my sales message, but they were more than willing to pass along my marketing. When I had my retail store, when I first took it all over, it was losing a million and a half dollars a year. No good vendors would sell to us, et cetera. And we had like an image of what we wanted to make this store. And we knew we wanted to be the hottest store.

And so we knew that if we wanted to be the hottest store, we were going to have to do certain things so that our prospects would believe we were the hottest store. And that came down to what does it look like inside? What do the salespeople say to the person, et cetera, et cetera. Like in having hang tags on the clothes of where it came from to make ourselves different. So if I had the gemstone business and I want to appear different, then my marketing is going to talk about what people need to be careful of and why they can always trust us.

And if there's skepticism, like how can I way overcome that skepticism? Through testimonials, through any other kind of proof, there's lots of ways that you can show proof, but that would be some of the criteria that I would try to establish like in my marketing. Like if you're ever going to buy gems online, like here are the things that must be true about whoever you're buying from. And those things being stuff about me and why. It's really easy to get ripped off.

It's really easy, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't think that marketing needs to be looked down upon and it certainly isn't when it's separated from selling. That was where I was going with that. And then in your marketing, you want to establish the criteria of how you want to be judged. Like what they need to know about you and why buying gems from you online is the smartest decision they could make.

And then it goes from there. But I think you always start with, okay, what are we trying to achieve here? And the way I like to look at it is that when I'm working on it is that, okay, prospects have a certain set of beliefs right now. What are they? And I figure them out based on how they're trying to achieve the outcome.

And then I say to myself like, okay, what beliefs and feelings would prospects need to have to make buying my thing like an absolute no-brainer? Okay, that's the end point of my marketing right there. When I define like what they need to feel and what they need to believe to make buying my thing like the default decision, that's the end point of my marketing. And then my marketing is all about getting people to that belief, getting people to those feelings. And I can do it through education.

I can do it through entertainment, but ultimately I got to get people moved to that new belief. And I'm going to do that in my marketing. And so if other sellers think gemstone selling online is whatever, well, who cares about them? But if your prospects do, you got to address that and you got to show them why it's even smarter to buy it online because you can source from all over the world, what happened? I mean, it really is an amazing time.

I mean, I hope it comes clear that like, even in us talking about it, that I'm so thankful for like where my life has gone and there's no other time in history where someone could have written a 30 page report and just put it up on a blog and it just went around the world and built me an eight figure business, like literally overnight, that can only happen now. And I guess this is more than what she's asking, but I think it's so important. One of the biggest changes the internet has made to the way business is done is that it's changed proximity, which is the way we used to make decisions to relevancy, which is how we now make it. So proximity is the old way, relevancy is the new way. So about a year ago, I got really into UFC and it just so happens that there's two huge UFC training camps, like within eight miles of this place.

And so a hundred of the top fighters in the world train at this place. And I got interested in it and I'm fighting, right? The old way of buying gloves was to go to my local like sporting goods store and buy some gloves, right? From their limited selection. And there was a sports authority, like about a mile down the road and they're going out of business.

They're actually going out of business now, sports authority, all their locations are going out of business, but that's proximity. I was only able to buy what was close to me. Now I can go online and find like the person who has the widest selection of gloves, right? And I can pick the gloves that are most relevant for who I am in the fighting that I'm doing, et cetera. And more and more, like that is what the internet has done.

It's taken proximity and pushed it aside and made relevancy. And so, I'd like to think of myself as a world-class coach. I've got a track record that's insane that I'd put up against anyone. And yet, even with all that success, even with the amount of success that I've achieved for my clients, if someone on this live stream was watching right now and they were deciding whether to pick me or they were going to coach, I don't know, insurance salespeople on how to maximize their sales. And they found a coach that helps people coach a certain salespeople that has a track record of just that, that person's more relevant than I am.

So no matter how great I am, that person is more relevant. And the internet allows you to market to the whole world. So you've got to find just some small group of people spread out over the whole world that agree with your philosophy and you are most relevant to. And it's when you really grasp how many people there are online and how possible that is, it's mind boggling, right? So you just got to figure out who can you be most relevant to and how can they get the message?

And I think from there, like everything else is downhill, it becomes a lot easier. I think a lot of people think too much about trying to figure out the perfect way as opposed to just getting going. Awesome. Really appreciate you, Rich. We're coming down to the end of our time here.

And so we probably need to wind up this next segment. But I just wanted to thank you for coming out and sharing your expertise. Again, who learned something just from the Q&A? Awesome stuff. A huge round of applause for him.

And Rich, why don't you tell us just briefly, how would people connect with you if they wanted to connect with your product services? You can just go to my website, strategicprofits.com. Strategicprofits.com? Yeah, strategicprofits.com. You can find out all that you want about me.

Okay, one more time. Huge round of applause. Standing ovation for him here. Let's go ahead and put yourself on your feet there. There we go.

Okay, good. All right, guys. Thank you very much, Rich. And we look forward to having you back again sometime soon. Cool.