Jay Abraham and Stephen Oliver: The Preview Call

I know sure I believe in our industry. I’m saying it’s not to be breaking up when I hear you, which is not a problem as long as I’m not breaking up when you hear me. No, you’re coming up clearly. Okay, so guys, let me be very candid, not tell you exactly how I became insightful, because it’s pretty funny. I got married when I was 18. I had children when I was 22 of them. I had the needs of somebody 40 when I was 20, and I didn’t have any really refined education, but the world didn’t care. So I gravitated to a lot of different jobs where I got virtually no compensation on a fix basis. I only shared in the profit, in the sale, in so much elite, in so much of the revenue, whatever it is. And when you only eat if you earn, you learn very quickly what works and what doesn’t and what works better.

That’s the first thing. So put that in suspended animation. The next thing is, because I had a low boredom level, I guess that’s right, or high boredom, I got bored very quickly, I found myself changing jobs frequently, not because I didn’t perform, but because I performed probably too well, too fast, and there was nowhere to go. And I went to a number of totally unrelated industries and businesses, and after a couple I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized that people in one industry tend to follow pretty much the same basic thinking, revenue generating, selling, marketing, business approaches as everyone else in their business that they’ve either observed or been trained by. And it might be better. It might be a little more innovative. Plus or minus 20%, though, they’re going to do it the same way. So they are relegated or limited to linear and incremental growth.

But I realized when I got involved in so many different kinds of businesses that there were so many different ways to skin a cat, many of which were faster, safer, more powerful, more profitable, more perpetual, meaning we have a residual or an ongoing recurring profit effect, but that most people didn’t know about it because they were limited in their scope. And so I developed what I call, for training purposes, this funnel vision, taking the business approaches from all kinds of other industries and funneling them together and combining them into hybrids that take the most universally workable, applicable, applyable approaches in teaching them to everybody. And think of it this way, and it’s a good metaphor, not metaphor, a good reference. A concept that is as common as dirt in one industry, but as unknown and unused in yours can have the power, the profitability, and the preemptiveness, meaning it’ll block everybody else, it’ll lump to preeminently to the top if you are the first and or the only one in your business to understand it and to apply it and or it along with other additional approaches from outside industries that your contemporaries, your competitors don’t know about it.

[05:16] Is that a good enough explanation, Stephen? Oh, it’s a wonderful explanation. You know, our industry, and I assume we’re not alone, but our industry is very inbred if that’s the right word or it’s assu-it, where it just seems like people sit down, look at what everyone else is doing and be copy whatever everybody else is doing. Is that typical? Yeah, and everyone thinks their industry is different, and it is to some degree, but everyone does it the same way. There’s, I mean, if you start and say, you’re going your business, no matter what it is, is number one to find the most qualified or viable target prospect list to contact them and appeal to them in as compelling a way as possible to resonate to them that you have a solution or a means to either solve a felt problem that they are struggling with for themselves or members of their family or you’ve got an opportunity that they want that maybe neither of these have ever been put into good verbiage and show you the first person to verbalize it, that you’ve got a clear path to achieving it and that you are the only viable solution that they could choose and that choosing you is a safe, secure, near certain way to get it as long as they do their part and that you are going to comfort and guide them and direct them through the process.

That’s pretty much and then when you bring them in you go to sustain them and get them Satisfact really getting results, continuing bringing on other people and being your greatest source of future business. I mean, that’s really the goal of any business, but most people don’t really sit down to that. And that may be a little as so, Terret, because I had too much coffee today, but I hope that’s clear. If I could add something to you that. I’m sorry, Rob, I couldn’t hear you. Sure. If I could add something to you that. I’ve studied Jay’s work extensively, and I know Stephen Oliver has as well. And you know, he and I were having a discussion last night that the vast, vast majority of everything Jay teaches is universal. I mean, he’s worked in over 450 industries. Is that right, Jay? I have worked in over 450 different fields.

So the material that he presents will work in the martial arts industry and it has already proven to work in the industry. And that’s why the upcoming teleconference in January is so critical because everything Jay teaches is highly applicable to what we do. So with one caveat, if you believe it won’t work, it won’t, you’re right. And I don’t mean that to be cynical or I mean the key to what I’m all about is suspending pre judgment number one opening your mind to Opportunities outside. I think Steven said this I did when I got into this instead of really Realizing the power of finding alternative and superior ways to do something I want to give you an education real quick an optimization to form up this call because it’s a cool concept for you to start really the demanding of yourself and your organization and your people.

But when I started doing this, I started looking at the highest performing businesses in all kinds of sectors, not the Fortune 500, but the niche market ones. And I realized very quickly that they were the ones that introduced the maximum quantity, quality and consistency of breakthroughs in four major areas. The first right up my alley is marketing. The second right up my alley is strategy. The third, believe it or not, right up my alley is innovation and I’ll explain to you why. And the fourth, which is not up my alley, is management. If you change your marketing, you change your results. cost you the same fixed amount to run an ad to send out a flyer to bring in a prospect whether you close one out of a thousand people reading it, one out of five hundred, one out of a hundred, one out of ten to visit, one out of five.

Cost you the same to close the sale to bring on a student whether they commit for a month, a quarter of a lot on on on it till further notice automatic billing basis cost the same to bring them in with a hundred dollars a month hundred fifty dollars too the perception i get five thousand dollars an hour because i understand how to value and maximize perceived value cost the same to bring on a whether you call it a customer a student whether they last uh… for five years five months where they bring you know referrals or bring you a photo every month. My goal is to figure out what it takes to maximize the closures that you want to call. For 50 people talk to or 20 people talk to whether you’re talking in person or vicariously by advertisement or direct mail to close the highest yield.

[10:15] An highest yield is not always getting the maximum out of money upfront. That’s a complex thought I’ll talk about some other time to get the maximum sustaining recurring revenue, residual value, and to get them to refer the maximum number of people. And that’s a mindset. So you change your marketing, you change your results, change your strategy, you change your results. And I’ll give you a little prelude. We’ve tested for other approaches, you know, doing a free trial like one time, two weeks, three weeks, five weeks, six weeks. We found that if you do six weeks for certain products, certain services, you’ll get up to 10 times more ultimate conversions than if you do one week or try to close them the same point. This gets into testing, which I don’t want to get into very much. But strategy is something that most people in small business, and because I do, as Rob said, deal in universal principles, most people in the martial arts field are, I mean, you teach strategies, and I already that I’d like to challenge you to.

You teach people strategy. You teach people how to basically build an understanding of martial arts from a strategic point of view. And yet in your business, from revenue generating perspective, you probably tend to be very tactical. You do not do things that are only done if they enhance, advance, and integrate into a big long-term picture. You instead probably, not all of you, but many of you do things just to pay payroll to bring in some new students to get your name out there. And it’s really a waste. I was going to talk about optimization. I’ll do it in a minute. But in order to optimize, you can’t be tactical. You have to be strategic. A friend of mine who is a marketer who also has a some degree black belt in martial arts says the difference between a first-day white belt, and I may be wrong, well I think it’s not a white belt, I mean it’s no belt.

87 degree triple grand master. They’re all working on the same 12 or 22 moves. It’s just that the latter is taking it to a science and art form. Marketing is similar. There’s only really, there’s a lot of nuances, but there’s some, the comforting part about it, it’s a science. It’s not an art. As a science, it’s very easy to learn the fundamentals. The more refined, efficient, comfortable you get with the power, the profitability, and the impact, the more current and future results you’ll get out of it. Let me talk about optimization. Then you can take me back, and I’m sorry for all of you if I take on tangent, but I got certain points that I want very badly to share, even if I don’t ever talk to you again. Optimization is a strategy of thinking. the mindset that every one of you should use probably inherent in martial arts.

I mean, if you get into an engagement which got forbid you don’t want to do, you don’t want to do a move that’s going to be an effectual. You want to pull those moves and maneuvers. They’re going to have the most effective and sustainable debilitating effect on your opponent. Isn’t that right? Rob? I would agree with that, absolutely. Okay, well, in business and marketing, optimization is an attitude that you want to get the maximum result from the minimum time, excuse me, effort, risk, investment, meaning both people or money. Thought of it differently, it’s getting the highest and the best use out of everything you do, people, time, opportunity, effort, investment. I was just thinking, I’m trying to think about it in terms of yours. If you someone started to attack you, again, you probably, those of you on this call, are pretty masterful. You go into a series of subconscious, unconscious pre-prepared moves, but they would probably be on a hierarchy that would be the highest and best to deal the most effective debilitating effect on the other person or your opponent.

[14:24] If you think in marketing, you want to deal the most powerful effect. Now back to these breakthroughs, we talked about you change your market, you change your result. You can have as much as a 21-100%, 21-time improvement by replacing one marketing approach that you do because you watch where everybody else in your industry does with that of another. You change your strategy, you change your approach. I don’t have a lot of time on this call to get into it, but there’s a bunch of examples by just changing the strategy you follow alone. with double triple quadruple the revenue that business got. Now I’ll give you a simple example and I used, and this is a few years ago we worked with the Martial Arts Studio in Australia, this is like 10 years ago, and they were doing a two less in preview and I got them to test it, I said a bunch of different ones and they found that the longer out got more people acclimated, habituated, trying it and made them a ton more money within eight weeks. They didn’t make as much money up front, but you’ve got to try various experiments. I’m all about testing because when you test different ways of doing things, you will find, which most of you probably never analyze, one approach will out pull another by monstrous differences. And I guess the analogy I would make in martial It says probably, you know, maybe there are 25, 30 moves you could teach, but one move might be ten times more effective than another, Rob.

I would think, isn’t it? I would absolutely agree with that. So think in terms of your own science and mastery and translating it to the business of building a business. When I said strategy, marketing, innovation management, I can’t talk about management, And innovation is not necessarily being high-tech, it can be. All it means for your purposes is the ability to bring greater value to your intended prospect, your client, your student. That number one, they perceive as being desirable. Number two, they want the result of, and number three, they see you as the only provider. I go on and on but I probably protracted the answer to whatever question that Steven asked me so I apologize. Yeah, that’s okay. Jay, let’s, you know, a wonderful concept that I picked up at your LA boot camp many years ago. Me and my friend at Tim Cobar were there for the full weekend.

Was the concept of most businesses using the diving board compared to a parpen on it? Can you explain that to everybody? Sure. If you guys happen to have a piece of paper, think of the summer in the country. Think of a pond or a lake that somebody built a homemade diving board and there’s a plank that’s affixed to a stump. Then think of that same graphic, that imagery, and then put that on a piece of paper with the left side being the stump and the plank going across the top horizontally. That’s what I call the diving board theory of business that most people follow. The stump being the one primary revenue prospect, a student or client generating activity that most businesses depend upon. I use it. I call it the diving board theory because it’s number one reminds me of the diving board. because, number two, depending on any one single source approach to the livelihood and the sustenance and the viability and the sanctity of your business is very dangerous, a diving board has never been a permanent propellant for going up, although you do go up for a brief moment in time in the process of working down and plummeting to ground.

If anything happens, if your primary diving board, single pillar of revenue right now, let’s say, is display advertising, anything goes wrong. You saturate the market with it, your competitors start emulating you, or worse innovating me to come up with better advertising if the cost of the media changes. If anything happens and that’s your single sole or primary dependent form or source of of them to your screws. Think in terms now of what I call the Parthenon theory of business. And any of you who know what the Parthenon was and is in ancient and current Greece, it was this incredibly strong formidable structure that had multiple pillars supporting it. It’s been around for ages. It’s endured civilization changes, brutal weather elements. The reason it looks bad today is that some idiot used it as an arm storage munitions facility in World War II and a bunch of rockets and things went off and still about half of it is intact.

[19:26] It’s that strong. If you build your business with multiple pillars of revenue, then it’s almost impossible for it to fail. You reach your market from many different points of impact and then you work on what I’m all about, which is the geometry of your business. When people hear of my business accomplishments, the first inclination is to raise their eyebrows and either just believe in credulity or thinking it’s just hype. The truth of the matter is, it is none of those. I really have to have the ability to orchestrate gargantuan rapid growth in the multiples of hundreds of percent. Not because I’m that great, but because most people accept the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the impact, the results, the business, the residual or recurring business that the effort, the opportunity, the activity could deliver because they really don’t know how much more is possible.

I’ve been able to look at all kinds of bigger, better ways to bring people in, to close them to get them to spend more money, to get them to come back more often, to bring more people. And if they’re universal principles, is it better not that answers it or not? I’d like to add to that. I’d like to add to that. Go ahead, Rob. During your career, Jay, I understand I used added billions of dollars to your client’s collective bottom lines. Is that correct? Yeah, I have it. But the thing that’s really important is that for you, but for all of you listening to as far as embracing what I say, you know, hopefully being on the call we’re doing, but at least embracing the validity and the applicability and the translatability, what I’m saying, is the bulk of that did not come from large big companies.

It came from helping small companies get larger, mid-sized companies get really big. And it was more focused, not on increasing just the top line business, lots of revenue. It was, it was, it emanated from focusing on what’s really important to a small, medium-sized business owner, professional or entrepreneur, which is, is your earnings, your income, your, your, the profit that you, you and your, and your partners, if you have partners, take home. So, yeah, I’m very proud of that, that I, I’ve done, you know, we’ve done, we’ve lived in the real world where, where the only vote that counts is the increases we’ve added to somebody’s bank account after all the expenses were paid? Yeah, absolutely. You want to ask the next question? I’ll trade out with you. Go for it. Oh, sure. Why don’t we bring this back to some real practical implementation strategies for school.

And I know you’re a big advocate of having an ongoing system, rather than just an episode or a random idea. What one of the great tapes you played when I was at your boot camp was Patty Lundy, Australian dentist. Yes. And that has such great applicability to our listeners I think. Probably going to be closer to home, more fascinating and probably a little bit embarrassing but awkward for all of you. But I encourage you to look at the massive screening opportunity, what I’m about to say. people who render any kind of valuable business, product or service, can say that 10 to 100 percent, somewhere between 10 and 100 percent of their current business, emanates comes from either word of mouth or referrals. And I would think if you can open this line and you had everybody yell out yes or no, almost everybody, and plus they don’t render anything of any value, would say yes, 10, 30, 40, 50, 60, 80, 90, 100% right business comes from referrals or word of mouth.

[23:35] Wouldn’t you think? Robyn, Stephen, Stephen. Absolutely. Okay. But at my programs and when I work with private clients, I’ll say, okay, that’s cool. But now let me ask you this question. Do you have in place right now that everybody in your organization, yourself included, here’s two diligently 24-7 meeting every day, at least one formalized, systemized referral generating strategy, not a tactic you do occasionally, but a strategy that is implemented, executed, applied, monitored on a daily basis all the time to direct, stimulate, and generate an ongoing low of quality referrals from everyone who comes to your school whether they are active or inactive because a lot of times people who leave are an excellent source of referrals if you work them on a continuous potential basis. And when I ask if they have at least one, most people will say no and they’ll all sit down if they’re standing.

The ones that are remaining, I’ll say what do you have two more, most of them will sit down three or more, almost everybody sits down. Because I’ve done work with 450 plus over 450 industries, we’ve identified 93 unduplicated different referral generating strategies that could be used. And what’s really interesting here is that most of the people that get referrals but don’t have any referral generating strategies spend all their time, all their effort, more more than all their money sometimes on ineffective advertisements, direct mail, flyers, other kinds of promotions that bring in nothing when in fact a referral generated in your case student or client or customer, whatever you refer to them as, is going to number one, buy faster, number two, buy more things, number three, come more often, number four, stay much longer. Number five, be more profitable. Number six, be a lot more enjoyable to deal with.

And most importantly, number seven, bring and refer more people. And number eight, they’re going to cost you almost nothing in the form of advertising or marketing expense. And yet, most people, perhaps some of you included, spend all your time, money, effort on things that are far less logical and pragmatic. So I try to get people to do that. What Stephen was talking about is we had a dental client in Australia that was depressed and not doing well and he had a conventional type of a dental practice and he was making about $60,000 working about 60 hours and he converted to a bi-referral only practice. He eliminated about half of his marginal, unappreciative, undesirable patients and he switched 100% referral only in order to stay as his client you had to refer to him, three equal quality new patients within a six month period and he went from working 60 hours and making $60,000 to working 24 or 23 hours and making $450,000 and that wasn’t even the best part. His joy is passion, his fulfillment, his sense of possibility was stretched and he was very, very, I’m very happy and I thought that was a great, great metaphor for what everybody in any kind of business should be shooting for.

I don’t know if that’s what you wanted me to say. Oh, absolutely. It was a very, very powerful interview that you have had with him. Go ahead, Russ. I’d like to add one thing to referrals. First of all, there is a whole chapter in Jay’s book. Jay’s book is getting everything you can out of all you’ve got. It’s a whole chapter on referrals. I have to say that’s just got to be mandatory reading for everybody that’s listening to the and secondly our NSSN faculty member for the state of New York is David Boyes and recently he and I were chatting and he said that in a one year period of time he brought his enrollment from 189 active students to almost 400 active students exclusively through referrals. How about that? That’s fantastic. There’s a lot of powerful ways you can do them and the biggest problem with referral referral generating is one of mindset.

[27:56] You’ve got to realize if you bring greater joy to somebody’s life, if you can make a child more confident, more disciplined, if you can relieve an adult stress, whatever the function that you see, the multiple functions you see your school doing, you have a moral obligation to help as many people in your community as you can bring greater richness in life to and that necessitates that you engage as many foot soldiers as you can because you can’t do much in life yourself. The key to life and success in the 21st century is your ability to really get creative collaboration of everybody out there, and the world generating is the key to this. Absolutely, absolutely. Rob, I think you had a follow-up question that I walked on a minute ago. You know, it seems to have escaped me, but I would like to ask Jay another question that I think is really important to our look at.

Sure, Rob, go ahead. Jay, can you touch upon the concept of marginal network and how that can provide Yes, sure. And can you guys hear me well because you’re a little faint. I can hear fine. And Steven, you can hear me? Absolutely. So we presume all the other people listening on can hear me. The concept of marginal at-worth and lifetime value is the crux, the core, the essence of everything your business slash school to be based on. It’s the determinant that tells you literally what you can afford to invest or spend to bring on a client. I’ll give you the greatest example, you have two simple examples. You want to teach, you know, extensive in just three ways to grow a business. And the first thing is knowing what a buyer, customer, client is worth the first time they do business with you. to knowing how many more transactions they do with you in a given period of time, I E a year, number three knowing how many years they’ll be with you so you can know the profit.

I guess the easiest way to demonstrate is to tell you how I increased a business’s profit 600% in six months because that’s very illustrative. They had salespeople doing, selling a PVC pipe, which is a plastic pipe used in industrial to carry chemicals in bottling to carry syrup for beverages and agriculture for water. They were doing very poor. They were just breaking even and needed a breakthrough and had no money. And it came to me. And I asked them a lot of questions. And the most telling was what are their lifetime value of marginal that were? And they said, we don’t even know. And I gave them a formula. They went back, they came back. It turned out they had six salespeople working their territories. The sales people were each making 10% of the profit of a sale. Upon analysis, they found that the average new buyer that came to them spent the amount that produced a $200 profit on the first sale, the average buyer bought five times a year from them and stayed about three years.

So when you calculate what the lifetime value or what’s called the marginal net worth, which is the word after all expenses and profits are paid, it turned out that they were making $200 a sale times five sales times three years or $3,000. Remember they were giving their sales people 10% commission. I said, well then I’ve got the answer to grow your business and they said, what is it? And I said, grow your sales people and tell them that as long as they keep their territory production levels from their existing accounts, at or above the levels they were at before, you will give them 100% of the profit instead of 10 on any new account they bring in. This business owner was appalled. He said, what, you think I’m crazy? I’m going to give away 90% of the profit that they’re going to bring me. I said, no, I’m asking you to invest 90% of the first sale or that you never would have that which is $180 to get the 90% of the remaining $2,800 in profit you never would have had.

[32:07] And I told him to go back and do the numbers. And by giving away $200 on the first sale, all the profit, he got his salespeople, not a little bit, but 10 times one load of the acres before they were only getting $20 for that sale to bring on new clients. One more example, we did this product called ICOT. ICOT was a product like Ben Gayer or Mental Aid, and we sold it by mail. We went out and we spent 100% of the first sale, which was about $3 to bring on a buyer. People thought we were crazy, but we had done our analysis and we found that every time we We bought 10 people on who bought a jar list. Eight of them would buy, on average, 12 jars or more a year. Every year until either they died or somebody came up with a cure for arthritis and the product was costing us 45 cents and selling for $3 a long time ago.

But without knowing what the implications of everybody who starts a relationship with you will be over the period of time that they generate revenue for you. You don’t really know how much money you can afford to invest in advertising, in sales commissions, in bonuses like giving them a uniform with things like that. Does that explain it well? It does. So really to tie things all together, you need to know how much each of your students are worth before you know how much you can spend on your marketing to get each of those students, right? And you got to know how to, the best way to channel that, because most people arbitrarily allocate an amount to advertising or a commission, when in fact, you’re either paying too much or too little. Very rarely you’re paying the right amount. That’s what I’ve said. Unless you know what somebody’s worth, you can’t know how much you can afford to not spend, but invest.

Think of it as you would anything else you invested. You invest for a return. And the analogy that I use is some of the record of the CD or the DVD clubs that let you send 4 cents and you get 8 DVDs as long as you agree to buy 12 more at regular price. Well, they’re not that brilliant. They found how to sell 8 DVDs for 4 cents and make a profit. But they’ve analyzed the residual or the ongoing repeat value and they know that if they bring 100,000 to 10,000 people in that the bulk are all going to go the distance and they’re going to make a small profit on the minimal purchase, but many of them are going to keep going forever. And it’s converting your tactical business to a very, very financially sophisticated real marketing model and knowing going in what people are worth.

You can back it up and say, I even know that every time I get 10 prospects to try out the school or to visit the school or to call in, there’s different gradients and there’s different value that I’m going to convert those at a certain level, and then you start knowing what a lead is worth and what every time it gets real sophisticated and real exciting and really enriching. Yeah, I find over and over with karate schools is their willingness to invest in creating a new client is much smaller than it should be relative to the value. It’s amazing. They’ll invest $50 to get a new student and they think that’s a lot when the lifetime value is going to be maybe as much as $3,000 or $4,000. But it’s not their fault, Stephen. It’s that no one’s ever educated, but he’s absolutely right. The way you grow a business, if you realize you’re not playing, even though you may be starving or you may not be making the monies you want, you’re not playing a short-term game.

You’re playing a game forever and the game includes the repeat value and the strategy you use to get people to keep sustaining their membership or their monthly payments or their automatic billing. You’re playing a referral game, you’re playing a start and evolution game where you’re bringing a lot of people in and moving them through a system and all that requires a systematic strategy so you’re playing a strategic game. And when you realize this, you can run rings around the other direct and indirect competitors and direct competitors are obviously other martial arts schools, indirect or anything else buying for the time and the money from health clubs to hobbies to you. You know what? It’s pretty cool when you understand that you get it and nobody else does but it’s an educational process not your fault. You bet, you bet. You know, I think also a lot of schools fail to use direct mail effectively for that very reason.

[36:54] They think of it as very expensive, but then the result can often be very, very powerful. I know some of the martial arts school owners that have studied your methods, Keith, after a friend of mine is an example, those other people will emulate a little bit and then, you know, not follow through. the scores of some ideas of how to choose. Well, I mean, it’s a little longer explanation, but I’ll give you a couple of provocative keys. The first is direct response is salesmanship and print. It’s a communication 101, and it’s got to be based on, first of all, provoking their interest by promising a payoff, a benefit, and advantage that they desire. and then taking them on a journey to a result that will occur by calling you, visiting you, trying out the school for two or three or five or eight weeks or whatever it is.

And you’ve got to understand it’s all about them, it’s not about you. Number one, number two, the key is the headline. The headline is 80 to 90 percent of the effectiveness, and there’s a science in creating headlines. Number three, it’s being able, in any encounter you ever have with a perspective buyer, there’s There’s a certain amount of resistance risk that people are worried about. There’s lots of kinds of risk. But if you can eliminate risk, you can make it easier for people to say yes or to try you out or pick up the phone or come in by themselves or with their kids or with the group. And you’ve got to be able to understand that there is a structural format to effective direct male fliers, display ads, everything needs to be direct response and direct response is self explanatory. It’s designed to evoke a direct response. They call a visit, an email, an attendance to a lesson or a seminar, a chance to meet other people to go to your website.

Whatever the goal is, you got to have no very strategic of what you’re trying to accomplish. Number two, direct marketing is the best thing about it is everything you do can be measured, quantified, compared, projected, improved. You can test many different assumptions against another and one will outrule the other by really meaningful to tremendous to gargantuan differences. As I said, it’s not uncommon to get three, five, ten times, not ten percent, ten times greater response. And it’s not just a direct response. It’s to how you greet them when you come in contact, whether they call on the phone, whether they walk in your studio, whether it’s a cover letter, you send them back if they ask for free information. tested tens of thousands of variations. For example, I have a former client who is a clothing, I mean at furniture store, and we tested 30 different ways to greet people when they came in the door, and we found one way that out produced all the rest by 300% on closing them. I had a client, we added $5 million to the bottom line. This was very impressive just by changing the headline in the ad.

The headline is the opening you use in an ad, an email for the subject line, in display ads, first line of a letter. It’s the first paragraph you utter on the phone. The first, it’s the sign you hang outside your studio. If you do any kind of group programs, or you do shows or community events where you have a little booth, it’s the booth signage, changing what it says or what you say from what you’re doing out is something which understands selling an advantage, a payoff, a benefit. It’s a mindset. It can improve and increase your results from the same time, the same effort, the same opportunity, three times, five times, ten times, that’s on the front end. When you factor in what people are worth, if they keep coming back and sustaining month in month out and bringing in other referrals, it gets very lucrative. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I think we’re about to run out of your time. I’ve got to go. I hope this was helpful. If there’s something I can interject real fast, on January 24th, 25th and 26th, Jay will be hosting a a teleconference here, it’s three 90-minute phone calls exclusively for the martial arts industry.

[41:49] And this call series has been getting tremendous support. So far, organizations like PPS, United Professionals, Educational Funding Company, Independent Funding Company, ASF, Web Nation, big organizations overseas in Europe and so forth, have all stepped up to the plate to support this. And we’re talking with about 40 other industry leaders now. This is going to be an unprecedented event. Three 90 minute telephone calls, teleconference calls January 24th through 26th. Jay, what is your vision for this teleconference series? It’s really simple. I want to try to take not everything I know, but the most universal things I know and summarize and simplify them and put them into a very pragmatic, a very logical, you know, do this first do this, second to this third order that translates them specifically to the martial arts industry. I want to try to show you how to attract the maximum number of prospective students, the easiest, the safest, the most consistent and the most profitable.

I want to show you how to convert them to paying students, clients, customers, the quickest, easiest and the most profitable way. I want to show you how to sustain them. I want to show you how to get other organizations, other individuals, other entities to refer and endorse you. I want to teach you how to develop at least three to five appropriate and easy to master referral generating strategies. And then I want to take the biggest problems, The biggest questions, the biggest issues, the biggest challenges and the biggest overlooked opportunities that face you or that are available to you and I want to try to deal with them in general first and then specifically with interaction. And I think that, you know, you know, and I want to do to see if there’s a really good mesh between your industry and me by me, first of all, contributing very generously and thoroughly and hopefully making a big difference to everyone’s business, to their sense of what’s possible, to their strategic understanding, raise the bar on what the sites they set, give them some really major breakthroughs, engineer for them some meaningful short-term financial windfalls and whatever else we can do in three calls.

And I might add as well, when you do sign up for the teleconference here is what you received is the martial arts business building bonus package that Jay has generously put together. And thanks for sending this Jay as a sneak preview for myself. And I’m looking at it now and you get an audio program by Brian Tracy, how to set and achieve your goals. There’s Fran Tarkenton, interviews Jay, winning in business. There’s like an 800 page document here, a PDF, about 502 incredible case studies. Jay’s strategy of preeminence, which by the way is mandatory here at NAPMA for everybody ready to learn and live by. We have the Tony Robbins interview. I mean, this is just a legendary interview. It’s perhaps the best interview I’ve ever heard. It’s two hours of Tony Robbins. Oh, really? He’s just grilling, Jay, with every question you can imagine.

There’s wealth reports, the power of Parthenon principle of geometric growth. Jay’s book, there’s a chapter here from that, 25 ways to outmarket your competition and more. When you sign up for this, you’ll get this incredible bonus package sent to you. So even tell us about the link you had posted up on the NAPMA squared website to make it easy for everybody to find out more about this. Yeah, there should be a link directly to the letter about the program at NAPMA squared all one more dot com. And that will take them directly to the… One final point is that as I mentioned all those different organizations like United Professionals and PTF and WebMation and EFC and more, if you are a client of these organizations, you will receive preferential pricing on the teleconference here. I mean, it’s ridiculously inexpensive at $495. But if you are a member of one of the organizations I mentioned, and there’ll be plenty more to come, you’ll be able to take advantage of the 390-minute call series and get all the bonus items.

[46:18] And you’ll get one of the best guarantees I’ve ever heard for $395. It’s something that you just got to get involved with if you’re serious about running your martial arts going, taking this to the next level in 2005. You bet. Before we wrap up, Jay, I think you’ve had probably the most impact in marketing to the martial arts of anybody in the industry. Just a phenomenal impact on several of the top school operators that I know that, of course, I want to take it time to just thank you for your brilliant contribution. You’re very gracious and I’m very flattered that everyone took time to listen. Because I said, I think that of all the industries and the groups I’ve met, there is no group of people who are striving to make a bigger and a better and a more meaningful difference to people’s lives than people in this field.

And I think you deserve to do two things, to reach as many people and impact as many and to be rewarded fairly and generously for your life’s work. If I can make a difference and make that easier and faster and richer for you to accomplish, it would be my pleasure. And I hope today has had some stimulating effect. Thank you both. Thank you so much. Thank you. It’s been wonderful. Bye. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye. Rob, anything else for the teleconference series for everybody? Well, I think Jay said it best. I’m just really excited about this. Here we are. We have the world’s greatest marketing mind, the marketing coach for people like Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Fran Tarkenton, Vic Conan from Nightingale-Conant, Mark Victor Hansen and so many other millionaire and billionaire business leaders who have literally come into the martial arts field to share his unprecedented knowledge to the instructors out there.

And it’s so inexpensive. I mean, Jay charges $5,000 an hour, $40,000 a day. And the fact is that his material works from in all industries, pet shops, Harris, Martial Art School and even some of the biggest businesses in corporate America. And here we have this gentleman who’s coming in here to help Martial Art’s instructor January 24th through 26th for $395 and you get these hand incredible bonus items. I’m telling you, this one CD here alone that I have in my hand has like an 800 page PDF on it. It’s incredible. So I really hope that everybody supports this and so many organizations have stepped up to the plate to support it because they recognize that one of the keys to growing any business is that you have to be up to snuff with your marketing. It’s like Peter Drucker said, the only thing that matters in business is marketing and innovation, everything else is an expense.

And Jay is going to teach you all of the important fundamental about marketing that are universally applicable. And I really hope that everybody is there. If you want more information about the Jay Abraham teleconference series, go to the namisquared.com website, click on the link, or just check out the current or next issue of martial arts professional magazine. You’ll see an eight page ad in there. But folks, step up to the plate and support this thing. We don’t know when JL actually would be back with an offer like this. And of course, Rob, one of the things that we’re going to be doing is after that teleconference through the NAMMISquared program is translating a lot of the content that the follow up for immediate application in direct marketing as well as going to be a one-time thing for everybody but it’s going to be an ongoing development where this is.

Well without a doubt and I know one of the things I really enjoy about working with you Stephen is not only do you have a double MBA, not only have you studied guys like Jay Abraham for decades but you know you’re also one of the most successful school owners in the country so with that kind of well-rounded knowledge you can tie all this information together presented to the NAPMA Square clients in a very usable form. You bet. Well, this has been a great call. It’s always fun to talk to Jay. He’s so creative. An idea a minute. Yeah, that’s the deal. I really look forward to the teleconference series and look forward then to being able to expand and translate on that throughout 2005. Sounds good to me. Okay. Have a great afternoon. You too. Thanks, Steve. Thanks for listening. Thank you. Bye-bye.