A Book of Hope and Inspiration for Life and Business

IT’S OKAY TO BE SCARED – BUT NEVER GIVE UP CAUTION! JIM PALMER This Book May Prove To Jim Palmer is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and coach to Be Transformational! other entrepreneurs. A marketing and business-building expert and host of Newsletter Guru TV, Jim Each of us faces challenges in life and in business, some challenges more is known internationally as The severe—and fear-inducing—than others. The knowledge that you’re not Newsletter Guru, the go-to resource alone can be a tremendous comfort. In addition, the stories of others who for maximizing the profitability of have persevered and overcome great odds can help you surmount—or avoid customer relationships. entirely—similar obstacles. Those stories may also prove to be inspirational, even transformational. That’s why this book was written.

Marketing and business-building experts Martin Howey and Jim Palmer have come together to share with you their true stories of overcoming significant— even immobilizing—challenges in life and business. And not only theirs. They’ve interviewed a dream team of highly successful entrepreneurs—each one sharing his or her story of overcoming a significant challenge. They also reveal some incredible nuggets of wisdom on how to make your life and business more prosperous and enjoyable. Prepare to be motivated, inspired, more hopeful, and perhaps even transformed! MARTIN HOWEY Martin Howey is one of the busiest and most respected business THE DREAM TEAM: consultants in North America. He Melanie Benson Strick Vander, James Malinchak, has generated more than three Adam Urbanski, Joe Polish, Stephanie Frank, Joel Bauer, and a half billion dollars in sales Mike Koenigs, Renee Airya, and Susie Miller. for his clients, and has contributed

to the financial success of more JIM PALMER | MARTIN HOWEY than 10,000 small businesses throughout the world. “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

A book of hope and inspiration Success Advantage Publishing for life and business. www.SuccessAdvantagePublishing.com $14.95/US JIM PALMER | MARTIN HOWEY

Do you know a friend, colleague, or perhaps a group that would enjoy and benefit from the stories in this book? If so, we’re happy to extend the following volume discounts!

It’s Okay to Be Scared —but Never Give Up A book of hope and inspiration for life and business

$14.95 U.S.

Special Quantity Discounts 5-20 Books - $12.95 21-50 Books - $10.95 51-100 Books - $9.95 101-250 Books - $8.95 251-500 Books - $7.95

Call or e-mail today to order bulk quantities 610-458-2047 [email protected]

It’s Okay to Be Scared —but Never Give Up

By Jim Palmer and Martin Howey

It’s Okay to Be Scared—but Never Give Up

Published by Success Advantage Publishing 64 East Uwchlan Ave. P.O. Box 231 Exton, PA 19341 Copyright © 2012 by Custom Newsletters, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-4675-1439-2

Cover design by Jim Saurbaugh, JS Graphic Design

DISCLAIMER AND/OR LEGAL NOTICES While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. The purchaser or reader of this publication assumes responsibility for the use of these materials and information. Adherence to all applicable laws and regulations, both advertising and all other aspects of doing business in the United States or any other jurisdiction, is the sole responsibility of the purchaser or reader.

Table of Contents

Preface – Jim Palmer ...... 3 Preface – Martin Howey ...... 7 Martin Howey: Problem? Take Action! ...... 11 Adam Urbanski: How to Push Through the Mud that Life Throws ...... 29 Melanie Benson Strick: Economic Chaos? Recognize, Reinvent, Refocus, Refuel ...... 45 Susie Miller: Do the Next Thing ...... 60 Martin Howey: Develop a Winning Attitude...... 74 Mike Koenigs: Invaluable Gleanings from a Barber ...... 86 James Malinchak: Mind-Set, Skill Set, Get off Your Assets ...... 104 Stephanie Frank: Those Who Are Flexible Triumph ...... 124 Jim Palmer: Make the Most of Second Chances ...... 136 Joe Polish: A Marketing Piranha Dangles Juicy Bait...... 149 Renee Airya: You Will Sing Again, You Will Dance Again ...... 163 Joel Bauer: Identify Your Mastery and Take It to the Marketplace ...... 176 Jim Palmer and Martin Howey: Top Business Success Strategies ...... 187 It’s Okay to Be Scared—but Never Give Up...... 228

1 Table of Contents About the Author – Jim ...... 234 About the Author – Martin...... 236

2 Preface – Jim Palmer

In the best-selling book A Purpose Driven Life, author Rick Warren immediately grabs the reader’s attention with his first simple sentence: “It’s not about you.” That’s how I feel about this book. It’s Okay to Be Scared is not about me, or Martin, and it’s not about any of the very special guests that we have interviewed regarding the significant challenges they’ve surmounted in their businesses and lives. This book is about you, the reader, or someone you care for whom you will pass the book on to, perhaps to help them deal with and overcome a personal or professional challenge. It’s Okay to Be Scared was not only conceived with a special mission, the way it was produced is a great business lesson. Let me explain. My good friend Martin Howey, one of the nation’s premier business consultants, and I met for breakfast on December 2, 2011 while attending a marketing event in Los Angeles. Martin had been battling stage IV cancer, but a few months previous to our meeting, Martin’s doctors discovered that the cancer that had been so pervasive in his body was gone, nowhere to be seen! The doctors, with no medical explanation for this, called it a miracle. You can watch my video interview with Martin called “Courage, Grace, and Dignity” at www.NewsletterGuru.TV. For several months, I and some of Martin’s other friends had been urging him to write a book and share his story, because the lesson of early detection could save lives. Since he was first diagnosed with cancer, Martin agreed that sharing his story was his new life’s mission and highest priority. As we talked over breakfast that Thursday morning in December, Martin and I, who both coach entrepreneurs and small- business owners, talked about the tough economy and multiple struggles many business owners were battling. And while we’ve both authored several books, we felt that the time was perfect for a

3 Preface – Jim Palmer different kind of business book. We envisioned a book that combined stories of people conquering difficult challenges. We believed that whether the challenges were in their personal lives or perhaps their businesses, these stories could provide direction, hope, and inspiration. And since many of our potential readers would be fellow entrepreneurs, we thought this book should also include some good marketing and business-building information to help struggling entrepreneurs make the most out of the coming year. Having just finished my third book, The Fastest Way to Higher Profits, I told Martin, “You would be perfect to write such a book!” to which Martin quickly said, “No, Jim, you’d be perfect to write this book and share your own story of overcoming challenges.” As we continued our discussion and bantering, Martin shared some news with me that I had been dreading. One week prior to our meeting, Martin’s doctors had discovered new cancer in his colon. This was obviously not good news. Though not knowing what the future held, I knew immediately that writing a book was not something Martin would have the time or focus to undertake. But I knew Martin’s message regarding the importance of testing and early detection needed to be told. So it was right then, over breakfast, that I proposed that Martin and I coauthor the book. Martin instantly agreed. Within the next few hours, we had the entire book and project mapped out. Because both of our schedules were already packed and this was an unplanned event, we decided to fast-track the book and get it done massive-action style—within sixty days! The strategy we used to make this accelerated time frame a reality was to interview each other, record our conversations, and also record our expert-guest interviews, and have the recordings transcribed into a book. In addition to being the fastest way to get the book completed, we both felt that producing the book this way 4 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up would be a great business lesson on massive-action implementation and serve as an example of what can be done when you put some urgency into a situation. I’ve left out a guest foreword and the usual testimonials or advanced praise which are common elements of my other books, since these can add several weeks or months to the process. Again, my decision to do this was because of our all out effort to make this book, and its important message, available in the fastest way possible. For the record, the total time from the idea to create the book on December 2, 2011, to the book going to print, was 58 days! I could pause here and ask you: So what’s holding you up from writing your first book?! If these stories of surmounting challenges and persevering were to make even a few people more aware of early detection, recommended tests and procedures, or give a person struggling with a challenge hope or inspiration to keep moving forward, keep pursuing their dream, whatever that dream is, then undertaking this project will have been worth it. Please know that Martin and I in no way want to minimize any challenge someone may be facing in their life. Whether large or small, personal or professional, they are your challenges, and we respect how hard life can be and sincerely wish you all the best. However, Martin and I, having both faced the dreaded diagnosis of cancer, believe that when dealing with struggles, it is often helpful to know that you are not alone, and in a strange way, it sometimes makes us feel better to learn that while the challenges we’re facing may be very difficult, some folks have and are facing worse. Sometimes perspective is a good thing. Even though Martin and I are good friends with many of our special guests, the stories some revealed are truly amazing, and as you’ll hear, we were unaware of many of them. It’s fair to say that we both were deeply moved and surprised by the level of revealing and sharing. We are truly blessed to have these people as 5 Preface – Jim Palmer part of this book, and as their stories reveal, they totally understood and embraced the book’s concept and mission. One of our guests summarized it this way: Sharing is caring. And when you share, it shows you care and it can help others. Be prepared to be moved, inspired, and turn the last page more hopeful about what lies ahead. God bless.

6 Preface – Martin Howey

“So where do we go from here?” Those were the words that immediately came to my mind when my radiation oncologist, Dr. Mark Ono, told me that the cancerous tumor in my rectum had metastasized into my colon, lymph nodes, pelvis, both leg bones, and my liver, and that I had between six months and a year to live. I’ve never been one to dwell too long on the negative. I’ve never seen the value in that. Instead, my focus has always been on determining as quickly as possible what course of action needs to be taken to deal with the situation at hand. As a business consultant, I get paid for solving my clients’ problems, for getting quantifiable and measureable results as quickly, as effortlessly, as cost-effectively, and in the most risk- free way possible. It’s the way I run my business and it’s the way I live my life. So it was natural (to me) when I learned of my condition, that I immediately started to look for solutions. Dr. Ono told me what my situation and prognosis were. Now I needed to determine what options were available, what the risks of each option were, what the realistic outcomes were for each of the options, what steps I could begin taking, and how quickly I could get started. I’m convinced that I had the best and most expert care possible. But the medical care I received was only part of the picture. There is only so much a doctor, or even the best medical treatment, can do. A good portion of my recovery had to be up to me—up to my current physical conditioning, my attitude, outlook, and my determination to regain my health, at least as much of it as reasonably could be expected. I had to be able to control the controllables—those things I had direct influence over—and leave the things I had no control over alone. Over the course of twelve months and six days, I received daily radiation treatments, five and a half months of chemotherapy,

7 Preface – Martin Howey and was hospitalized for more than three weeks for six surgical procedures. My body weight plummeted from a rock-hard 182 pounds to a skin-and-bones weight of 134. I was a sight to see, and seriously looked like a recently released prisoner of war, with zero muscle tone and loose skin hanging from my bones. While I was undergoing my initial radiation and chemo treatments, my good friend Joel Bauer visited me from California, took me to lunch, and asked me to tell him my story of the disease and my mental outlook and steps for self-recovery. He captured my comments on video and posted it on Facebook and YouTube, and that started what turned out to be a tsunami of e-mails, Facebook posts, and phone calls from people I didn’t even know wishing me well and including me in their prayers. Then Joe Polish, another great friend, interviewed me on video for ninety minutes and sent it to thousands of people he had contact with. When things took a turn for the worse and I had to be admitted to the hospital for emergency surgery, Joe, Joel, and a host of other friends came from around the world to visit me. I had no idea of what kind of reach or impact I’d had on others. It was a real lesson to me that people are watching what you do and who you are even when you’re completely unaware, and that you can never let up being the best you can be. In his books, Anatomy of an Illness and Head First, Dr. Norman Cousins discusses the importance of the right attitude and its impact on the healing process. He says, “Patients tend to move along the path of their expectations, whether on the upside or on the downside . . . and so long as unexpected remissions occur—and the medical journals are the best places to find such ongoing evidence—both doctors and patients are justified in hoping for the best and working for the best.” Cousins continues, “Challenge creates a better environment for treatment than does a grim verdict. If the physician intends to treat a serious disease, he must convince the patient both to make a special effort and to believe that the effort is worthwhile.” 8 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Lance Armstrong once said, “If children have the ability to ignore all odds and percentages, then maybe we can all learn from them. When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope? We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up, or Fight Like Hell!” The survival rate for the kind of cancer I had is not encouraging: six months following treatment the survival rate is 80 percent; after eighteen months it drops to 50 percent; and at five years only 5 percent are still alive. It’s always been my goal to be in the top 5 percent of everything I do, and beating cancer was no exception. My friends David Frey and Ray Edwards put the squeeze on me to write a book. It seemed like a daunting task, and I kept putting it off. Finally, David said, “Martin, think about how many lives you’ve already saved and families you’ve kept intact because someone heard or read about you and what you’ve gone through and that you talked about the importance of getting the proper screening. If just one life is spared, or if one father or mother is not taken from their family because they read your story and get the proper screening, your efforts would be worthwhile.” When I told Ray about it, he wholeheartedly agreed and encouraged me even more. It was a couple of months later that I was at a seminar in Los Angeles, having breakfast with my good friend and colleague, Jim Palmer. He asked me what my plans were—if I was going to write a book about my experiences. I told him that since he was a cancer survivor and had written several books himself, that he should write a book about his experiences. Jim answered, “Well, why don’t we write a book together?” And that started the entire process that has culminated in what you’re reading now. The initial concept swiftly grew to more than just Jim’s and my cancer stories or experiences. We wanted to give the book a teaching element—make it something of a how-to book. Not just of our experiences, but of the challenges—both business and 9 Preface – Martin Howey personal—that other well-known speakers, authors, and thought leaders have struggled with, how they triumphed over them, and what we can learn from them. What we ended up with completely surprised us. The stories, experiences, challenges, and outcomes were, in several cases, deeply touching—even heart-wrenching. What’s more, Jim and I both felt inspired when we learned how each individual surmounted their obstacles, very often, thankful that they encountered those challenges because they made the individual stronger and able to see things in a new light.

We sincerely hope you find fresh inspiration, perspective, and direction as you delve into the interviews that follow. Further, I personally encourage you to get the proper screening to ensure that your good health is preserved. Just ask your family and friends—you’re worth it.

10 Martin Howey: Problem? Take Action!

Jim Palmer: Hello, everyone! This is Jim Palmer, and with me today is my good friend, Martin Howey. How are you doing, Martin? Martin Howey: I’m just great, Jim. It’s real nice to be with you today. Jim Palmer: Martin and I are going to have a lot of fun here over the next several days and weeks creating this book. First, I’d like to tell everyone a little bit about how the book you’re now holding came about, and why it’s probably different from other books you’ve read. Martin and I have been friends for about three years. We met online in the online world. We talked on the phone. Then we got a chance to meet at an event in Phoenix, and we’ve become real close. We’ve shared some really interesting things in both our personal lives and in our professional lives. Earlier this year, in 2011, I interviewed Martin on NewsletterGuru.TV about his challenge with stage IV cancer, which was, obviously, very, very serious. After a lot of chemo and some surgeries, which we’re going to be talking about, the doctors told Martin that they could not see the cancer. They described this as a miracle. Martin and I met together about two weeks ago in LA, and he shared with me that he has cancer again. I’ve been urging Martin to tell his story. When he was diagnosed, he decided to share his story to help prevent others from facing a similar situation. I know that other friends, Joe Polish and Joel Bauer, have mentioned to Martin he should write a book. Obviously, there’s a lot going on in Martin’s world right now. So I said, “Let’s do a book together.” So that’s what we’re going to do.

11 Problem? Take Action! The book’s going to be a little bit different, because, number one, we want this book to be about life in general, the big picture—surmounting the obstacles each of us encounters in life. Number two, it’s also going to be about business—trouncing the obstacles each of us runs up against there—because in our business world, Martin and I coach and help entrepreneurs and small- business owners. That’s what we do. But the experiences and coaching won’t stem from only Martin and me. We’ve also invited several guest experts who are going to come and talk with us. Because, as you know, everyone in their life, everyone in their business, faces challenges to one degree or another. And everybody also has something unique to share. This is a difficult time in our economy, in our country, for many entrepreneurs who are struggling. One thing we’re going to do here is delve into this. And, Martin, I learned about this back in my franchise days, when we’d get a whole bunch of franchisees together to mastermind. When people walked away from the table, some would say, boy, it’s nice to know I’m not alone in this struggle. Others would walk away and say, boy, it’s nice to know I don’t have that problem. So that might bring a little bit of perspective to what many of you are going through, but let me be very, very candid: We don’t want to minimize what anyone’s going through. Sometimes, it’s just downright helpful to realize you’re not alone in that and you can persevere and get through this. One of the things we want to do in this book is tell Martin’s story, because it truly is a miracle and there’s a very, very powerful lesson that we can learn from what Martin went through which can help countless other people. So Martin’s “surmounting personal obstacles” part of this book is an extension of what he’s already started doing through speaking, doing interviews, videos, teleseminars, and the like. I want to let you know right off the bat as we get going that this book is a conversation between friends and business 12 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up associates. We’re not going to spend a great deal of time on editing and cleaning it up. We want this to be more of a live conversation. Please excuse any likely grammar missteps and things that may occur and instead listen to the entire message and nuggets found within the book. Throughout the book we’re going to try and stick to a theme, if you will, which is covered by asking three questions: 1. What was your biggest challenge in life or business, and how did you handle it? 2. What did you learn that can help others? 3. Again, as I said, as we’re recording this book in late 2011, we’re in a very serious economical decline or recession, whatever you legitimately want to call it. So from our area of expertise and the area of expertise from the various experts that are going to come on and join us here, as we move forward, they’re going to share some things that we hope will make a difference in your life and your business. So now having set the table, I think we’re ready to get started. Martin, did I leave anything out? I wanted to lay out what’s going to happen here in the next couple hundred pages. Martin Howey: No, you did a great job, Jim. I can’t wait to get started. Jim Palmer: Okay. As I said, this book will be about surmounting obstacles in business, and also overcoming challenges in life, which is where we now begin. Martin, there are probably people who may not know who you are, or what you’ve done, or what you’re going through. So I want to start the ball rolling by having you describe what you faced twelve to eighteen months ago. Martin Howey: Well, you know, it was a shock to me. One day I was having a real struggle going to the bathroom and I was not sure what to do. So I called my doctor and got in to see him as quickly as I could. He told me that it sounded like we should do is

13 Problem? Take Action! get some blood work done and get a stool sample evaluation. So I went to the lab and got the tests done. When the reports came back, the doctor’s office called and left a message on my voice mail that said, “We have your results, and they’re negative.” I listened to this very impersonal message and was, to say the least, not impressed. So I picked up the phone, called the doctor’s office, and said, “I got your message that I have negative results, but I still have a problem. I didn’t come to you to find out what kind of results I had, I came to tell you that I had a problem and to find out what to do about it.” The Physician’s Assistant I spoke to said, “Well, we really don’t know. I suppose maybe what you should do is go find a specialist that can help you.” I said, “Well, what kind of specialist are you talking about?” She said, “It sounds like a digestive problem of some kind. So I’d probably look for a gastroenterologist.” I said, “What is that? I don’t even know how to spell that. How do you even spell it?” Her reply was, “We don’t have anybody that we can refer you to, so look in the phone book or on the Internet.” I thought, Well, what kind of service is this from my doctor? Now let me just pause here for a second and tell you about this doctor who I considered to be my “personal doctor”. I’ve been very athletic and have participated in all types of athletic events – triathlons, running races, and cycling events. (I hold a couple of Arizona State records in time trialing, two national records, and I won the World Games eight times.) I’ve won the triathlon championship at the World Games on three separate occasions, and I’ve placed in the top three in my age group in nearly every race I’ve ever been in. In the mid ’60s, I was a competitive bodybuilder and placed high in the Mr. California,

14 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Mr. Western America, and Mr. Pacific Coast bodybuilding contests, and I’ve always kept myself in really good shape. When I got into cycling, I joined a cycling club so I could associate with and train with other like-minded people. One of the members happened to be an MD. I considered him to be a friend. We would train together, race together, and our kids went to school together—he was just a good friend. And because of that friendship and the fact that he, too, was an athlete and understood what I wanted to accomplish, I went to him to be my personal doctor. When I was having the problem with my bowels, I went to this doctor to seek help and a solution. But what I got – and the only thing I got from his office was a very impersonal voice mail that said, “Your tests are negative We don’t know what to do, and we don’t have anybody to refer you to, so go look in the Yellow Pages or online.” I’m sure you can imagine that I wasn’t very happy. But my problem was pretty bad, and since the doctor’s office didn’t give me any help, I had to get busy and find somebody on my own. I made several calls. I did a Google search and tried to find someone nearby. Every office I called said it would take three weeks or so to get an appointment. Well, three weeks was just too long. I had a real problem and it was getting worse. After some considerable effort, I finally found a doctor who could get me in in a couple of days. He did a colonoscopy, or at least tried to, but it turned out there was a tumor in my colon that blocked his instruments from getting in very far. The tumor was around the entire inside of my colon, in the shape of a donut with a hole in the middle for the waste to pass through. The opening was so small that the colonoscope wouldn’t fit through it. So they did some scans and found out that the cancer had spread from my colon into my rectum, into my pelvis, both leg bones, my lymph nodes, and my liver. 15 Problem? Take Action! The oncologist said, “There’s no way to operate, it’s just too far gone. You probably have between six and twelve months to live. So we’re not going to operate unless it becomes an absolute emergency. Instead, we’re going to treat it with chemo and radiation to see if we can shrink the size of the tumor, and maybe keep the growth and the spread of it under control.” I went through six weeks of chemo and six weeks of daily radiation treatments. After that, more scans were done, and the tumor in the colon did indeed shrink in size. But in the process, the treatments also shrunk the size of the opening for the waste to pass through, and now I had a real problem, because going to the bathroom was more difficult now than it had been before. The doctor said, “If this opening plugs up, your colon is going to burst, and the toxins and waste will spread throughout your body and there’s nothing we can do for you. You’ll have maybe two or three days left. We have to go in now and perform emergency surgery.” So I was admitted to the hospital. During the next three weeks I spent in the hospital, I underwent six surgical procedures to remove the tumor and counteract the infections I contracted. After I recovered from the surgery, I went back for more chemo—for four more months! Following the chemo treatments, more scans. Then the first bit of good news – they couldn’t find the tumor or any signs of cancer anywhere else. I asked the doctor, “How do you explain this?” He said, “We can’t medically explain it. But around here we call it a miracle.” I said, “What do you think that means?” He said, “I think it means that the Man Upstairs says you have more time to live. It’s not your time to go, and you need to get to work and figure out what you’re supposed to be doing with the rest of that time.” 16 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Well, needless to say, that really brightened my day and my family’s day. Finally, a light in all that preceding darkness. In the process of all this, I went from 182 rock-hard pounds and being in excellent athletic shape, down to a skin-and-bones weight of just134 pounds. In the hospital, as you’re probably aware, you wear a gown that’s closed in the front, but open in the back. And in the bathroom, there’s a small mirror over the sink that’s big enough to see your face while you shave. So while you’re in the hospital you don’t really know what you look like. When I got home I took my clothes off and looked in larger mirror that reflected my entire body, and what I saw completed shocked me. I was so not prepared for the image that was reflected back to me. I had lost nearly fifty pounds. My skin and muscle were just hanging on my body. I seriously looked like a prisoner of war victim. I started crying—I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I thought, I’ve got to do something about this, but where do I even begin? The prospect of starting from so far deep in the hole was daunting, to say the least. This whole process that I’m describing—from the time I was diagnosed until I got through this and was declared cancer free—was one year and six days. I wasn’t able to work during that entire time. Fortunately, my business did well enough, and I had the money to sustain me through that time. But losing fifty pounds, all my strength, much of my hair, and being bedridden – lying on the couch during the day, all day, was beginning to get to me. My wife had a couple of two-pound dumbbells. I tried to do some curls and some presses with them, but I was so weak that it was all I could do to just pick them up. A home-care nurse came by three times a week to change the dressings and take off the ileostomy bag that was attached to the outside of my abdomen and empty the waste out of it. It was not a pretty sight, nor was the smell particularly enticing. 17 Problem? Take Action! I came to the realization that things weren’t going to get better on their own, and decided I had to begin taking control of my situation and do something. I needed a plan that was realistic, yet aggressive (for my condition), and that I could maintain and adjust depending on how my body responded and what my mind would allow me to do. I started drinking protein shakes, began eating a little more, and tried gain some strength back. I walked down the sidewalk past the house next door and back. Eventually, I walked past two houses, then three, four, and then around the block. I started going back to the gym and working out with whatever weights I could handle. Gradually, my strength started coming back. I began putting on some body weight and I got stronger by the week. At the date of this writing, I’ve re-gained 46 pounds and I’m looking better, I’m stronger, and people in the gym can’t believe I’m the same person that just a few months before could have been described as “walking death.” It’s been a remarkable journey for me and an inspiration for so many others. During this process, several things happened. One of my professional speaker friends, Joel Bauer, happened to be in town. He called and said he wanted to see me, and asked me to come to the event where he was speaking. After his talk, we had lunch on the patio of the hotel’s restaurant. Joel put his camera down in front of me and said, “Now, tell me your story.” So I told of the disease, what I went through, and my mental outlook and steps I took for self-recovery while Joel recorded my comments on video. Then I said, “I’m on my way to meet another friend, Joe Polish, who’s another speaker and top- notch marketer here in town. Joe’s asked me to do a video interview for his Genius Network. Do you want to go with me?” For the Genius Network, Joe interviews top speakers, authors, thought leaders, and influential business people such as, Richard Branson, Harvey MacKay, Bill Gates, and some of the top speakers, authors, and notable people in the business world. He 18 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up records these interviews and puts them on a Web site for his clients to listen to. Joe wanted to video record my story and include it on his Genius Network site. So Joel and I went to Joe’s office, and during the next ninety minutes, Joe grilled me. We discussed life, family, business, cancer, dealing with adversity, and a number of topics. After Joe’s interview, I had an appointment for more chemo and radiation treatments, and Joel accompanied me and video recorded my sessions. Joel then edited the videos—about two hours worth – down to seven minutes, and he put it up on Facebook. I wasn’t really going to tell anybody about what I was going through – I didn’t think anyone would be interested. But the Facebook post went absolutely viral. Then the video hit YouTube and again it took off. People were calling me – people I didn’t even know – writing me, Facebooking, and e-mailing me, talking about the faith that they had and the prayers they were offering, and all of these great, supportive things that they were doing for me. Joel traveled from Los Angeles to see me in the hospital in Phoenix on two different occasions, and again to my home after I had been released from the hospital. Joe Polish visited me in the hospital a couple times. David Frey flew from Houston to see me. Melanie Benson Strick, Ann DeVere, Erica Watson, and several other people traveled from Los Angeles to visit me at my home. Daven Michaels came from Los Angeles, and Beejal Parmer came from India! People from all over the country and from around the world were coming to see me, giving their support. I had no idea that I had that many friends and that many people out there who really cared about me, my family, and my situation. What that really said to me was this: If these people care that much about me, how much do I care about helping other people to not have to go through the same situation that I and my 19 Problem? Take Action! family have been through? It’s a teaching point for all of us. People really do care; the question is, do we reciprocate in like kind? Do we show others how much we care by what we do for them? But the letters we write? By the emails we send? By the calls we make to them? By just letting them know that they are in our thoughts and prayers? I learned a LOT from what others were doing for me. The illness that I had gone through and that I was recovering from was just a tip of the iceberg. There are more far reaching effects that most people don’t realize. For example, the bill for the last four months of chemo that I went through was $205,000. That doesn’t count the chemo prior to that, or the radiation, the three weeks in the hospital, the doctors’ visits, the surgery, the home-care nurse, or any of the other treatments or medications that I’d had. That’s just four months worth of chemo. Fortunately, I have insurance and Medicare which helps cover some that. But such costs could be a tremendous financial devastation to a family, especially if they didn’t have insurance. Cheryl and I have been married for thirty-nine years, and she hasn’t had to work during that time; she’s always depended on me for her support. If something were to happen to me, that is, if the doctor were to say, “Martin, you’re going to be gone by this time tomorrow,” there’s not much I could do about it. But for Cheryl—after thirty-nine years of being married to the same person, the loss could be significant. And for our six children and twenty-six grandchildren, the loss of their father and grandfather could be difficult to deal with. I saw what my family was going through as they watched me wrestle with my illness, my lack of strength, and my worries about them. I saw the difficulties that they would have to face if husband, dad, grandfather wouldn’t be here any longer. And I saw that for them to pick up the pieces was going to be a major struggle.

20 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up And I thought, What can I do to help not only my family, but other people to not have to go through this? The kind of cancer I have is colorectal cancer. Colorectal cancer is one of the easiest cancers there is to detect, and to cure, if it’s caught in time. A simple colonoscopy will detect whether or not you have polyps which can then be removed before they have the chance to turn cancerous. Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause-of-death of all cancers, second only to lung cancer. It’s the third most common kind of cancer, but second in the number of deaths that it takes. But its’ also the easiest to detect, the easiest to prevent, and the easiest to cure if it’s caught in time. So my thought was, I need to find some way to be able to tell other people, to make sure they get the tests and screenings done, so that they don’t go through the same situation that I’m in and that I’ve gone through. Dr. Oz had his colonoscopy done and displayed on television. His doctor found a couple of polyps in him, and Oz was shocked because he eats well, he exercises, and he’s a medical doctor and teaches good health practices. Yet, Dr. Oz had no idea that he had these things going on inside of his body. He had the polyps removed, and he’s okay. Dr. Jonathan LaPook, Dr. Oz’s personal doctor, appeared on Oz’s television show with him. Dr. Oz said, “Dr. LaPook, tell the people what the most common risk factors for colorectal cancer.” Dr. LaPook said, “If you have a personal history of having polyps, if you have a family history of having polyps, if you are over the age fifty, if you have a high-fat diet, high stress, if you’re a smoker, or if you’re African-American—those are the major risk factors.” Then Oz said to LaPook, “Now tell them what the most common risk factor is. This will blow your mind.”

21 Problem? Take Action! LaPook said, “The most common risk factor is ‘I feel great. Let’s have lunch.’ In other words, ‘I don’t feel any problem. I don’t see there’s any problem. I’m okay. I feel great, let’s go to lunch.’ And they don’t bother to get checked.” That was my situation. I was athletic. I ate a pretty clean diet. I didn’t eat high-fat, or fast foods. I didn’t have any personal history or family history that I knew of. I’m not African-American, and I don’t smoke. The only thing that I had was that I was over fifty. And that’s what got me. On his website, Dr. Oz has several testimonials where people have said, “Dr. Oz, thank you very much for putting your colonoscopy on television. Because of that, I was able to get in to the doctor and get tested, and I found that I had some polyps. Fortunately, they were removed. You helped save my life.” What Dr. Oz doesn’t have is the person who seemingly did it all right, except one little thing—he was over fifty and he got caught, even in spite of the fact of doing everything right. And that’s my situation right now. I found myself in this situation, and I’m doing all that I can to help other people avoid getting into the same trouble so they don’t have to go through the same thing that I went through. Now, right now, I feel great. I look good. I’m stronger than I’ve been in a long time. I’m not doing triathlons again – not yet – but that will come in time. So right now my time and my focus are dedicated towards helping other people. Let me rewind for a minute. While I was in the hospital, I did not want to be there, and a hospital is not the place for people to be if they’re trying to get well, because that’s where a lot of disease and a lot of germs are. And sometimes hospitals are not as sanitary as they should be. Even though the hospital I was in was a first-class hospital, it just wasn’t the place I wanted to be. So while I was there for those three weeks, I had to figure out how do I get out of here? 22 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up There are five stages of grief that people normally go through in terminal situations. The first is denial. The next is anger, then bargaining, depression, and later acceptance. Not everyone goes through all the stages, and if they do, not necessarily in that order. Personally, I really didn’t go through any of those stages of grief. When I found out that I had cancer, my first question for the doctor was, “All right, what do we do about this?” I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t in denial. I didn’t say, “Why do I have this? Why me? Why not somebody else? I’ve done everything right. This shouldn’t be happening to me.” I didn’t go through that, and I didn’t go through the depression. I just said, “Where do we go from here?” I started thinking, What can I do on my end? What do I have, or what can I have control over? There are certain things that we have control over and certain things that we don’t have control over. We can’t control the weather. We can’t control gas prices. We can’t control the economy. We can’t control what they do in Congress. We can’t control any of those things. So why worry about them? The things that we have control over are our diet, exercise, attitude, faith, our purpose, and what we do to serve other people. Those are really the things that we have control over. In my case, I continued watching my diet. I exercised as much as I could. My faith was strong. I was trying to serve in every way that I could and began trying to help other people avoid this same situation. My attitude was good; I always looked for the positive and tried to uplift others. My doctor said that while I was in the hospital, I should try to get as much exercise as I could, and that walking would be very good for me. So I would walk up and down the hall pushing my pole with the chemo bags hanging on it. In my readings and research, I learned that humor can be very beneficial. In his book, Anatomy of an Illness, Norman 23 Problem? Take Action! Cousins talks about how humor and a good belly laugh are like internal jogging. It works on the inside of your body and helps to release endorphins from the brain. Endorphins are as strong as heroin, cocaine, or the opiates, and help relieve pain, aid in relaxation and enhance the healing process. While Cousins was in the hospital recovering from an incurable disease, he had someone go to the library and check out filmstrips of Candid Camera and the Marx Brothers. As he watched, he would be laughing and carrying on and nobody could understand what he was doing or why he was doing it. But Cousins was using this laughter to help release endorphins, relieve him from his pain, and help heal the healing. Today it’s not necessary to have to go to the library and check out filmstrips. With the help of my laptop, I was able to pull up YouTube and watch some of the funniest comedians of today— Phyllis Diller, Steve Martin, Steven Wright, and some of the other greats. And I was able to be right there, in the hospital, laying in my bed laughing and having a good time. The nurses would come in and say, “What are you doing?” And I would say, “I’m just watching this. Here, have a seat. This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen.” And I would show them, and we’d have a great time together. I put a note on my door that said WHEN YOU ENTER MY ROOM, IF YOU DON’T HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO SAY THAN “HAVE A NICE DAY” OR “GET WELL” OR “GET BETTER,” JUST PLEASE DON’T SAY ANYTHING, because that’s what I was trying to do. If you don’t have something you can share with me that’s uplifting and edifying and that will help me feel better and give me some hope, then I’d rather you not say anything at all. So when people would come to my room, I would get them laughing. I would tell them jokes. I pulled pranks on the nurses, and everybody would be laughing. They would leave saying, “Man, am I glad I came. I thought when I came here I was going to

24 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up be cheering you up. But I’m leaving in such a better condition than when I came. I can’t wait to come back.” The nurses would have me go to different rooms and talk with people. “Martin, there’s somebody in room 418 who’s having a hard time. They’ve pretty much given up. Can you come down and talk to them and maybe kind of buoy them up a little bit and give them a little bit of hope?” And so that’s what I did. When I left the hospital, the nurses sent me cards and letters that said, “We hope we never see you again; but if you do have to come back, please come back to our ward, because we enjoy you and we need you.” And from time to time, they’ll call me and ask me to talk to somebody who’s having a struggle. The last year and a half has been very interesting, to say the least. In a way, it’s been a real struggle. But it’s also been a real journey for me and a learning experience along the way. I’ve learned first-hand that Life Is Short, and we don’t have time to waste. We need to be spending our time on things that are meaningful, in the service of other people, trying to bring as much value to their lives as we can, either to their businesses, or to their personal lives, their families, their health, or whatever area that we have expertise or experience in, to try to make things better and easier for them. Life is difficult at best. But if we can find a way to add value to other people, then we add fulfillment to a certain measure of our journey here as well. Jim Palmer: Wow. Martin, I have so many things I want to ask you and say to you. That’s just an amazing story. I actually think that if we ended this book now and put a cover on it, that’s probably the most amazing value that we’re hoping people get out of this book. So one thing I’ll say to the folks who are reading it: Please pass this around to your friends, have them read that, suggest

25 Problem? Take Action! people get the book, because what Martin just shared with you is not only uplifting, it’s inspiring. It is lifesaving. And he keeps helping others to never give up. Martin, I respect and admire you so much. I’m so proud to call you friend. The way that you handled what you went through. First of all, let me say this. So what was missing? The healthy eater, the cyclist, you’re a fitness fanatic in a way, no smoking . . . I mean you did everything right, except when you turned fifty you didn’t start getting the prostate check and the colonoscopy. Had you done those things, you wouldn’t be going through this right now. Is that fair? Martin Howey: Yes, that’s right. Let me just go back for a minute. I get my prostate checked every year, and the reason is because prostate cancer is a guy thing. It’s kind of like breast cancer or ovarian cancer for women. It’s important that they get their pap smears. It’s important that they get their mammograms. It’s important that men get their PSA test to make sure that they monitor their prostate. But I didn’t even know about colon cancer. I’d never heard of a colonoscopy. Now, a lot of people know about this and think, well, were you in a cave or something? I must have been, because I really don’t watch the news. I really don’t keep up with that kind of thing. My focus has always been on business, and personal development, and that kind of thing. And my health? I figured, I feel great, let’s go to lunch. There’s nothing wrong with me. Even if I had known that there was a test, would I have gotten that test? I’m not so sure, because I didn’t feel there was a problem. I still exercised. I still was highly competitive in my age group in all the races if I did. If I couldn’t place in the top three, I knew there was something wrong. I usually won everything or placed at least in the top three of everything that I’ve ever done. So (in my mind) I didn’t have any reason to go get checked, even if I’d known there was such a test. I learned the hard 26 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up way. You should be getting your colonoscopy at age fifty and then every ten years after that unless you have a problem. If you have a problem, you get screened every five years. Because I’ve had cancer, my children have to start getting screened at age forty, because now cancer is in the family. Jim Palmer: I had a similar situation that I’ll share in a little while. I may get charged with sexism here, but I think that’s a guy thing, the whole “It’s okay. Let’s just go to lunch.” In a way that was my situation. It finally took a bit of intervention for me to go get something checked out, which turned out to be melanoma. So I don’t know if it’s a guy thing and we just kind of go through life sometimes whistling and saying, “It’s okay. Let’s go to lunch.” But one of the things that you said while telling your story was that you didn’t go through the stages of depression. What you did—and this is where there are some lessons for people who are business owners—you asked, what are the facts, what do we do now, and let’s go. Basically, let’s take action. Let’s fix this. Let’s do what we need to do and move on. That’s pretty much how you handled this, right? Martin Howey: Well, it really was. I hadn’t really thought too much about it until I was talking to somebody and telling him what I had done and what my attitude was. It was, I’ve got this problem, so what do we do now. And he said, “What is your occupation?” I said, “Well, I consult with businesses, and I help people start and run their own consulting practices.” And he said, “So you’re a problem solver.” I answered, “Well, yeah, I guess.” He said, “Well, that answers the whole thing. You’ve got a problem – cancer. How do we fix it? You don’t have time to mess around, being angry, being upset, or being depressed. Let’s just fix the problem. And you’re absolutely right—that transfers right into business.” So, when you have a challenge in business—maybe things aren’t going the way they should, you’re not getting the leads that 27 Problem? Take Action! you should have, you’re not getting the sales, your customers are not sticking around, they’re defecting to the competition— whatever the problem may be, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to sit around and be depressed, get in a fetal position, and lie on the floor under the desk? That’s not going to help anything. We’ve got to take a look at what’s going on, analyze the situation, and develop a plan of action. And then, most importantly, take action. Not wait around, not fool around, just put the hammer down and get going, with a defined plan of action. It’s one thing to just take off and run. But if you’re not going in the right direction, you’re going to run farther away from the solution. You’ve got to come up with a workable solution, and that takes analysis and thought. Then you have to develop a realistic and workable plan. So overcoming a personal challenge transfers directly to overcoming a business challenge.

28

Adam Urbanski: How to Push Through the Mud that Life Throws

Jim Palmer: Martin, I’m so excited because our first guest expert that we have is a mutual great friend of ours, Adam Urbanski. Adam, as you know, is known as the Millionaire Marketing Mentor, one of the smartest minds. He’s a brilliant marketer and implementer. He’s very much an in-demand success coach. And so, Adam, thank you so much for being part of this very special book. Adam Urbanski: Martin, Jim, I really appreciate you having me here. Jim Palmer: Well, because of what we’re trying to do in the book, we’d like to ask, What was your biggest challenge? Whether it was something in your personal life or in your business, what’s something that really attacked your thought process, was like a gigantic speed bump, and then, How did you handle it? Adam Urbanski: You know, since I had the advantage of knowing you were going to ask me this question in advance, I’ve given it some thought, and I’ll share with you a story and a very personal failure. But before I do that, another thought came to my mind, and that is that I consider myself an optimistic realist, or a realistic optimist, which I think they’re both actually the same. But I truly believe that my biggest challenge is yet to come. I know it sounds kind of weird, but here’s the thing. I always expect to win, but I also expect that life is going to throw some mud my way. And I’m going to have to wade my way through it. Some of it will be thicker, some of it will be thinner. But I’m going to have to figure out my way to get through it.

29 How to Push Through the Mud that Life Throws So I think one of my personal mottos is to always be prepared, because things happen. I’ve learned that because of that failure a decade ago. I was really blessed and came to the US with very little money, and built a very, very successful business, which I sold off at the end of 1999, early 2000. I was twenty-nine years old. Sold off a business that was generating in multiples of seven figures, had a nice amount of money in the bank, and I thought that I was it. Everything I touched turned to gold. Well, not so. I was young. I was naïve. I didn’t know how to handle to money well, and I lost it all within a year. I made some really bad investments. You remember 9-11 happened. The economy—first of all, the 2000 dot com bust happened—and some of the investments I made basically evaporated overnight. Bottom line is, I was just really cocky, and I didn’t know how to handle wealth, how to handle money. I had a very expensive lifestyle and not enough money coming in, so money disappeared very quickly. Now, consider this. I had already transitioned into working as a coach and consultant. I was becoming known as a success coach or success consultant. But I had this dirty secret that I had a lifestyle which was draining, hemorrhaging, my nest, my money. And I knew that the end was coming, and coming rather quickly. The pivotal point was when I went to a networking function and met with a group of friends who always attending this function, and afterward they said they wanted to go for a couple of drinks. Just continue networking and conversation. What they didn’t know was that I had sold my house, which fortunately appreciated enough to let me cash out and cover my most pressing debts, which I had developed quite a few of at that point. I also had to turn in my dream car, my luxury vehicle— two of them, actually. I was down to one car, five- or six-year-old 30 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Ford Fiesta, which I borrowed from my brother-in-law. It was such a piece of junk that I would leave it a mile or two from where I needed to go and walk, just so nobody could possibly see what I drove. And they didn’t know that after I had paid my way to get to this networking event, I had $20 in my pocket, and no more money left. Now, Jim, Martin, this was after I’d made millions of dollars. I was down to twenty bucks. And my thoughts were, “Okay, what do I do? If I go with them, a drink will likely be five to eight bucks, plus tip. My twenty bucks will be gone. Maybe I’ll get a client out of this function, but money will likely not be immediate. Meanwhile I’ve got to go home. I likely have to bring some food home, and I’ve got to put some gas into this darn car so I can actually get back home. . . .” And it was just such a huge crisis for me. Financially one, but emotionally I also had an identity crisis. I couldn’t figure out how to break through it. To admit to the outside world I was basically bankrupt in every possible way. . . . Just crushed, crushed, crushed. And part of this whole process started because I lost my father about a year earlier, and I just couldn’t shake that off. But I called a dear friend. His name is Richard. Richard is one of the most successful people I know. Richard told me something that I scoffed at, at first, and I was just, This is impossible. This is ridiculous. Well, Richard said, “You’ve got to get on the phone, and you’ve got to continue selling your services. But you’ve got to sell them differently. You’ve got to get on the phone and tell people that you run this business-success club, and they have been prequalified, and all that’s required for them to get into the club is the final qualifying conversation with you.” In a nutshell, he was telling me to “Sell a mastermind or platinum-coaching club, or whatever you want to call it, you just call it your success club.” 31 How to Push Through the Mud that Life Throws I said, “Richard, this is ridiculous.” He said, “You know, you’ve got to ask for all the money up front because you need the cash right now. And you’ve got to charge double or triple what you’ve charged in the past.” I told him, “Richard, you’re insane. You’re ridiculous. I’m broke. I just lost all the money I’ve made. I’m crushed. I’m obviously a failure. How can I possibly get on the phone and promise people success, ask them for an obscene amount of money, ask them to pay it all up front, and pretend like I’m all that and a bag of chips?” And he just said, “Well, what’s the option? What’s the alternative? I know it works, because people can’t refuse access to what they can’t get access to. You’ve got to believe enough in me that I know what I’m telling you. Just follow the steps.” It took me a few days to just kind of mull over this, but I had no choice. I’m like, I’ve either got to get on the phone and start making those darn calls, or there’s nothing else to do. There’s no money. There’s absolutely no money. I’ve already moved out of my house. I’m living in this tiny apartment. I’ve got two young kids. I’ve got a wife. I’ve got to bring in money. So I did it. And lo and behold, what do you know? It actually frickin’ works. And people would not only schedule those calls, those final interviews with me, but I would hear it on the phone in their voice. They would like try their darndest to prove to me that they actually belong in the club. And I worked up a little description of what this club is. When it came down to prices, they were hoeing and mowing a little bit, but they would go for it. Obviously, not every single person, but it worked, and within less than a year, I was in a completely different financial situation. I really believe I would not be where I am in business today if it wasn’t for this lesson. It taught me to be humble. It taught me to reach out for help a lot faster. It taught me to learn how to manage money, how to 32 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up have different relationship with money. But most importantly—I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned from that—is that I don’t take failure personally. Whatever happens, it’s not personal. And I’ve learned to laugh at things like this even while in the midst of them. I’ve learned that comedy is tragedy plus time. Well, when you’re in the midst of something horrific, it’s really hard to laugh at it, but you’ve got to realize some perspective of time. You’re going to laugh at it anyway, so you might as well start earlier. And it just gives you a boost in energy to start focusing on what you need to do. Then just start taking action to moving forward. Jim Palmer: That’s an incredible story, Adam. Thanks for sharing that. One of the things that strikes me about that is that even at your lowest point, you never did give up. I mean, you did drive the Ford Fiesta to the networking event. And the next thing you did really smartly was you did seek out advice from someone that you trust. And then you ultimately followed that advice. And it turned your life around, which that, in and of itself, makes you worthy to be the great coach that you are, because that’s what coaching’s really all about—helping somebody see what’s literally right before them that they can’t see for themselves. Martin, do you have a question for Adam? Martin Howey: I do. I’m very impressed with what you talked about, Adam. And I learned a lot just in listening to you, because I could see some of my own story in there, of course going down a little bit different road, that of my health. And I loved the part that you talked about where you said comedy is tragedy plus time. We’ve got to laugh at it anyway, so why not start now? And when you look at life, there’s so much of what we do that’s really not important. And you really focused on some things here and said that you took control of your situation. You didn’t let life happen to you. You actually went out and happened to life. 33 How to Push Through the Mud that Life Throws And the biggest and most important fail you could make is to yourself. That’s where you were lacking that confidence. When Richard came along and told you here’s what you need to do, you realized that you only had two options: not do it, or do it. And the only one that’s going to put money on the table is the doing it. And you had to sell yourself. It’s not a matter of selling somebody else. You’ve got to sell yourself first. You’ve got to really believe in what you have, and you took control and built your confidence up from that. And then you learned from your mistakes. The other thing I really liked that you said was that you’re not out of the woods. You didn’t say that, but that was the idea, you’re not out of the woods. You had some mistakes, but you realized that more are going to be coming your way. What you’ve done now is positioned yourself to be able to handle those other situations or tragedies or circumstances. You’ve learned how to handle those in advance, so when they come up again, you don’t have to go through all the same processes that you went through before. You’re prepared for them. So I think this is very valuable. I’ve learned a great deal just in listening to what you had to say. Jim Palmer: You know, the great Les Brown says that there is no testimony without testing. So, you can count on being tested. With the challenge, Martin, that you faced, and that I faced ten years ago, I realized that one of the things I’m sure of is, I will be tested again. I’m sure that’s not all that’s in store for Jim Palmer. There’s more to come. But I know that if I just keep persevering and put one foot in front of the other, so much of the outcome is in our control. I also believe that outcomes, for the most part, have been predetermined or predestined, but you still have to show up. You still have to work hard. You still have to plow forward and do your part. 34 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up So, Adam, as we’re doing this book here in the very last stages of 2011, we’re coming into 2012. Our economy is really struggling right now. It’s been a rough road. And like you and Martin, I work with and coach many entrepreneurs and small- business owners. So I know there are a lot of people who are just struggling to hold on, waiting for better times, if you will. What piece of advice, or maybe wisdom, or strategy can you share that may shine a little bit of light, or give readers a little bit of hope as they’re reading this book? Adam Urbanski: A lot, actually. I think there’s a lot more than just one thing that I must share here. Because I truly believe that there is no one golden or silver bullet. There are a lot of moving components in everybody’s life that you have to be focused on more or less at any given time. Just looking back on the story I shared with you, one big lesson I can tell you is that we all have fantastic successes and spectacular failures. Believe it or not, the story I just shared with you I have never told to anybody, up until about maybe three months ago for the first time. It was one of those deep, dark secrets that I just chose to forget about, not realizing that I could really help a lot of my own clients, or other people who listen to me, who are really in a tough space and they think there is no way out. So, I guess one lesson is really consider the fact that you have some spectacular failures that you overcame, and share it with others. It will inspire you to really refocus on solutions, but it will give others hope and inspiration as well. The second thing that’s huge at any given point is quit worrying and do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done. Martin, Jim, I’d seen my failure coming for a year. I was sitting there on my rear end and not doing what needed to be done. I didn’t have to go back down to that $20, living in a rental apartment, and driving a borrowed car. It didn’t have to get there.

35 How to Push Through the Mud that Life Throws I was sitting and waiting and hoping by some miracle something would change around me, and I worried that the day would come when I will hit bottom. And guess what? That day came. And that day forced me to then start doing things differently. But I could have done things differently a lot sooner. So today I look at what’s in my control, what’s outside of my control, and I take 100 percent responsibility for everything that comes my way. I’m sure there are tragedies that just occur, but for the most part, I’m so consciously aware of trouble coming, I even watch my language and I watch other people, how they talk. And, Jim, you and I had an opportunity to interview somebody recently, and you heard me bring it up when I said that I heard in someone’s language when they said “someone’s decision has caused me to do this.” And I said, “I didn’t like that, because I listen for it every single time.” I get to the teleseminar that I teach, and I’ll say things like, “Well, folks. Give me a chance to get the technology started. We’ll start in a minute.” And it’s already a minute after the top of the hour. That’s nothing to do with technology. I started late. I show up for a meeting five minutes late and I say traffic was murder. You know I didn’t leave on time. Or people say the economy is down. True. But the fact is things have shifted and they refuse to shift with them. So then now they struggle. So I take enormous amount of effort and pay conscious attention to just accepting responsibility. And it’s painful, and it’s wonderful. Painful because, hey, whatever it is, it’s my fault. Wonderful because whatever is to be, it’s totally 100 percent up to me, within my control and I love that. One more conceptual, inspirational point I’m going to share with you is I truly believe that your business can only grow as fast as you grow as a human being. That turning point financially for me has made me into a better man, a better human being, a more humble person, a more 36 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up patient man. And because of that, it has allowed me to grow another business to an even greater level of success, because I became a person ready for that success. So you cannot grow a business beyond who you are as a human being. And in terms of all the stepping-stones and “failures,” I teach my clients today, forget the losses, don’t lose the lessons. Forget the losses, don’t lose the lessons. Moving into the next year and beyond. Dealing with the fact that the economy has shifted, things are being done differently than they have been up to this point. I think there are three critical points. Number one is focus on relationships. I think great businesses are always about relationships. This past decade of Internet growth, a lot of businesses have bought in this fad of business at arm’s length. We just want people to buy from us, but God forbid they want to contact us again. Just give me the money and then disappear as a customer. That’s a horrible, horrible business practice. And I think more and more businesses are reawakening to the fact that—hey, Martin, you mentioned this earlier—they need to provide more than is promised. And “I’ve got to be there for my customers, because things will get thin for my customers too at some point, and they’re going to come calling on the vendors for favors, or for more support.” And if you’re not there, guess what? They’ll go elsewhere. And when the time comes back when they have more money to spend, they will not bring you that surplus money. They’ll give it to somebody else who was there for them when they needed it. So, relationships, relationships, relationships. The second critical point is especially for people who are in a service business. They are horrible at packaging themselves into product. And I compare them to a grocery store.

37 How to Push Through the Mud that Life Throws I came from Poland. I remember walking into grocery stores in Poland, if you can picture this, like supermarkets with nothing but bare shelves. The only two or three items on the shelves would be bottles of vodka, bottles of vinegar, and occasionally bags of sugar. And the rest of the store was bare empty. Most people’s businesses are just like these grocery stores. First of all, there is no specialty, so we have no idea what we’re going to find inside. And when we go inside, there are empty shelves, nothing to buy, nothing for sale. People don’t make offers, don’t package anything. So you’ve got to have at least one core item for sale. Kind of like a specialty, like a cigar connoisseur store. You go in there, you know you’re not going to buy milk, but there are going to be cigars in there. So at least have this one specialty item. Then start developing some additional paraphernalia like lighters and cigar cutters and humidors and stuff like this, so you start adding additional products. Build your service business into a store where people can come in and see full shelves of items they’ll love to buy. So the second critical point is specialize, then expand from there. And the third critical point. When you wake up in the morning and you go, “Gosh, my business is just not doing well. How do I make more money?” Yeah, it is an important question, but if you truly understand it, you’re in business to make money through serving other people, through solving other people’s problems profitability. That’s what business is all about. It’s solving other people’s problems profitably. And that’s critical point number three. The key question you’ve got to ask yourself is, “How can I find more people to be of more service to?” When you do that, believe me, money will come. And I’m not saying forget about charging money and do nothing but volunteer work. No, no. You’ve got to be a savvy 38 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up business owner. Money, profits, are important. You’ve got to be compensated and compensated handsomely for the work that you do. But don’t focus on the money. Focus on being of service, because if you focus on the money, it’s kind of like playing a game of tennis. When you play tennis, you can’t be focused on the scoreboard or you’re going to lose. You want to win, but you have to focus on the ball and on your opponent. And in business, the ball is the service, and your opponent is really not an opponent. It’s your ally, it’s your customer. So be of more service to more people, and do it in such a way that brings you joy and brings you profit. No economy downturn will be devastating to you if you just follow those principals—good relationships, be of more service, accept responsibility, and just go out there and do more. Just take action. Martin Howey: I’m thrilled. I’ve got so many notes here from what you’ve just said, Adam. And you and I’ve been friends for a long time. I always learn every time I hear you say something. I have a whole page of notes, so thank you very much for sharing those, because those were not only inspirational and instructional for me, but for everybody who listens or reads this. It will be very impactful for them as well, I’m sure. Jim Palmer: One of the things I think is so important that you said is about relationships. People may buy a product or a service, maybe out of curiosity or because it was recommended, but they’re going to stay with you and your company because of the relationship they have with you, if you focus on the value and not “How can I get more money in the checking account?” or “How can I make another sale?” Instead, “How I can I serve somebody today?” The other thing—and I think this goes way back to one of the first things you said, Adam, which I totally loved—sharing with others gives them hope. I really, really like that. 39 How to Push Through the Mud that Life Throws When I started my business, I had come off of about fifteen months of unemployment. My wife was a stay-at-home-mom at the time. We had four kids. I mean, we lost whatever savings we had. We had racked up serious debt. And I’m like, I’m going to start a business. As I share in another interview in this book, my entire first year of operations was what I call revenue free. It took me a whole year to figure it out. When I started reading some of these books, books from entrepreneurs and famous business owners—I’ve always been a learner, but then I started reading about information marketing and related topics—there’s more than a few stories of people who said they were $100,000 in debt, sleeping in their brother’s basement, and things like that. Then they talked about their success and how they grew out of it. It really gave me hope, because when you are in debt like that, and when you have a family to support and it’s not happening, it really wreaks havoc on your self-esteem. My confidence and self-esteem was powder. Dust. When I kept hearing other people share how they went through that too, it did give me hope, and day after day I kept plodding along and plodding along. So I really appreciate your sharing that. And I’ve known you for a while, but I didn’t know that story. I think both of you guys, knowing you like I do, have probably read the book Three Feet from Gold. You never know how close you are to turning your business around. Many entrepreneurs will throw in the towel, and they were literally like maybe one day, one week, or a month away from a big contract or something like that. So you do have to keep pushing forward, and hope is a big motivator. So, thank you for sharing that. Adam Urbanski: Absolutely. Do we have time for one more lesson? Jim Palmer: We sure do. 40 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Martin Howey: For you, we have all the time in the world. Adam Urbanski: I just realized something that I wanted to share that I forgot. I opened this interview with you by saying that I truly believe that life will test me to an even greater way at some point, but that I sort of optimistically expect it and I expect to win. I know it sounds good in theory, but I remembered that I wanted to give you a specific example of it. When I was just draining that savings that I had, and racking up debt, one of the crushing points was I had bought a very expensive home, the home of my dreams. Tax season came about, and taxes came due. I was already behind on the mortgage, and I sure enough didn’t have money to pay for taxes. And then I remembered when I was buying the house I had an option to basically pay a little bit more every month and accumulate money for taxes. Well, I chose not to do it. Later I realized that most people live their lives like this. They know there are certain expenses coming, but they don’t save up for it. So then it becomes a huge disaster. Here’s a practical example. You drive a car. Every year and a half, two years, you’re going to need new tires. Depending on what car you drive, it can be a big expense. My vehicle’s tires cost $2,000. So I don’t save up, then I’ve got a $2,000 disaster on my hands. If you drive a car that’s ten, eleven, twelve years old, maybe the transmission goes out. And then you’re looking at a $500, $1,000 expense, and you go, Oh my God, I’ve got a financial crisis. No, you don’t have a financial crisis. It was anticipated. Things wear out. With health things, you’re aging. Something is going to happen. Just be prepared for it. So, for example, in business, we sell things that we may not have to deliver for a few months. It would be really easy to just take the money and say, “Well, we’ve made a lot of money.” No, no, no. There are some costs coming down the pipeline. 41 How to Push Through the Mud that Life Throws The very simple way to anticipate things for me, when I run my own finances, is I have my own escrow account. For example, if I expect that I will need a set of tires every two years, then I simply put into that escrow account $100 per month. That is not my spending cash. That’s not savings. That’s escrow because I know that every two years I’m going to face the $2,000 bill for tires. So I need to save $100 a month if there’s wear and tear on my tires, so when it comes, I happily write the check. Happily because I know I’m going to make my car safer, and it’s not like I needed to come up the money right there and then. I was prepared for it. So I wanted to share this with you because it’s a really practical way to look at your life. And I do that with everything. I look at insurances. I look at any policies. I look at any Christmas gifts that come. So start saving throughout the year. Just chip a few dollars away, and put it in a self-imposed escrow account. It’s not spendable money. It’s not savings. It’s money that’s going to come due and have to be paid out one day. If it doesn’t, hey, fantastic, but if it does, it’s not a crisis. You were prepared for it. I think you’re going to sleep better at night. You’re going to feel better, have more energy, and be more excited about all the work that you do, because it provides you one of those key components that frees your mind for creativity. And that is security and safety. So, I just wanted to share that final lesson with you and our listeners and readers. Martin Howey: Well, that’s an excellent lesson, and I know we could all benefit from that. We do the same thing. It’s a good way to not have some type of a crisis hit you right in the forehead when it happens. Jim Palmer: Adam, thank you so much. We really greatly appreciate your wisdom and sharing. I knew it would be impactful, 42 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up but it’s even more impactful than I thought. And I’m sure the readers right now are looking forward to the next chapter. So thank you very much, my friend. Thank you for all your time. We’ll see you soon. Adam Urbanski: Thank you, Jim and Martin. I really appreciate you, and I think the way you go about this book and the way you go about sharing your stories and helping others is just wonderful. So go out there and do more good things for other people, and great things will come your way. Thanks for having me here. Martin Howey: Thank you very much, Adam.

Adam Urbanski, founder and CEO of The Marketing Mentors®, Inc. is a straight-talking consultant, strategist, and marketing expert who has supported, taught, and coached more than 50,000 business owners, coaches, entrepreneurs, consultants, and professionals worldwide. He is a self-described introvert craving for attention and considers himself a dedicated student of life, wealth creation, and business-acceleration strategies. For a free sample of Adam’s straight-shooting money-making tips and no- nonsense marketing tutorials, visit his Web site at www.TheMarketingMentors.com.

43 How to Push Through the Mud that Life Throws

44

Melanie Benson Strick: Economic Chaos? Recognize, Reinvent, Refocus, Refuel

Martin Howey: Welcome, listeners and readers. I’m so glad that you’re all with us today. And, Jim, it’s nice to be with you, and of course we have Melanie Benson Strick Vander on the phone with us. Melanie has been a long-time friend of both of us. And we are so thrilled to have her with us to share her insight about surmounting challenges, what she’s done, and how the audience can convert it for themselves. So Melanie has SuccessConnections.com and some other programs that she conducts. And she’s very well-known in her marketplace as an expert on avoiding and overcoming overwhelm. Melanie, it’s very nice to have you with us. Thanks for being with us. Melanie Benson Strick: Thanks for inviting me. I love this book idea and the project. If we can create a little inspiration and some breakthroughs for people, I’m on board. Martin Howey: I’m so excited that you’re with us, because we’ve known each other for some time, and I’ve watched you go through some of the challenges in your life—I know Jim has as well. We’ve both seen what you’ve done to overcome those. But let me just ask you, Melanie, the biggest challenge that you’ve had in your life or business, could you talk a little bit about that and how you handled it? Melanie Benson Strick: Well, if I had to pick one of the gazillion that as an entrepreneur I’ve had to face, I’ll talk about one in particular, because I think this is something a lot of people are facing today.

45 Economic Chaos? Recognize, Reinvent, Refocus, Refuel A few years ago, when our economy started to turn, I had what I called the perfect storm. It kind of evolved over a few months, but there was one particular, very poignant moment in my life. It was spring, and I was staying at the Ritz Carlton. I woke up in this gorgeous suite, and I remember thinking, I love this place. I looked out over the ocean, and there’s waves crashing right outside my window. And I’m walking around—it was one of those suites with the big living room in it. And so I’m making tea and I’m sitting there going, Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Just enjoy the moment. Don’t think about it. I woke up that day, and I just did what I’ve been doing every day for quite some time—I’m just putting it away. I’m not dealing with it today. I’m going to go out to the pool. I’d just wrapped up this event. But I was crushed inside. And it’s such a bizarre feeling to be wrapped in the laps of luxury, to be surrounded with this gorgeous environment, and to know that your entire financial life is falling apart and you don’t know what to do. Here’s a little bit of the backstory on that. About four months previous to that moment, I had had this nightmare unfolding where it spotlighted some of my, I don’t know, maybe we call them blind spots. You might call them a weakness. I might call it the biggest learning lesson I ever had in business. But I discovered that three things happened. One, when the vision for this event first sparked, it was while the coaches I was working with at the time on my team had this desire to really grow. We had just hit seven figures, and we had this beautiful vision for how we were going to knock it out of the park and get $2 million, I think was what our goal was. We were shooting for $1.5 to $1.8 million that year. I was so stoked. We had a great offer. But what I didn’t realize was that this growth wasn’t positioned on a stable environment. I discovered as soon as I launched this whole thing and put this big fish in motion, if you will, that the person I was 46 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up partnering with, was not as in it as I had thought she was. And about two months before this event, she let me know that she was out. She didn’t want to move forward with it. Not only was I emotionally crushed, but from a marketing perspective and a delivery perspective, I was in turmoil. Because it was not something I could teach. So I had about a six-figure backend, had probably close to $300,000 to $400,000 worth of product and delivery wrapped up in this, and I had nothing. Not only that, but we discovered also that there was somebody who was a little unhappy, and became a bit of a mole, running around expressing their discontent. The next thing I know, $100,000 worth of coaching clients all decided to go a different direction, because there was a seed of unrest that got sparked. In addition, I had discovered that quite a few of the things that I had counted on for revenue for the three months prior, a bookkeeper was not on top of it the way I thought. And I had another team member who was having some challenges in her own life. The next thing I know, when the credit cards started freezing—that was right when the banking debacle started pulling credit lines and shutting credit card companies down—we had over $20,000 in business that was frozen that we couldn’t get to. So now I’ve got a $60,000 hotel bill. I’ve got less than $20,000 in revenue coming in from that event. I have a whole six figures’ worth of business that just got washed out. I’ve got a bunch of money frozen. And my team is falling apart. And I’m just paralyzed. So the truth of it is I spent a lot of time crying. I spent a lot of time really frustrated. I spent a lot of time freaking out. And I spent a lot of time questioning who I am, and what I’m doing, was I worth anything. And it was really demoralizing for me. Because really none of what I was doing was wrong or bad.

47 Economic Chaos? Recognize, Reinvent, Refocus, Refuel We launched something really big at a really bad time that we couldn’t have possibly anticipated. We were overly vulnerable on a coaching program. And I had some weakness in my team. Any of those things on their own, I could have handled. But all of them colliding with the banking shift, everybody having their credit cards frozen, people dropping left and right, and some of the other stuff that was going on, it caused what I call the perfect storm. So it was one of the most humbling, the most frustrating, and the most anxiety-producing experiences I ever had in business. I wrestled with it for quite some time, and I realized I was probably over $200,000 in debt by now—because the other thing about playing big is you’re willing to really invest in your growth, right? I knew that if I wanted to grow, I had to be willing to invest in my team. I had to be willing to invest in the marketing. And I was doing all that. But what I really didn’t have a clear picture on was how quickly that debt was racking up. And how vulnerable it left me when this program didn’t produce the way I thought it could and should. So now I’ve got a lot of debt, and I’m trying to figure out what in the world to do, and I feel like I’m sinking faster than I’m swimming. So my approach to turning this around was to take a step back and really figure out what was broken. What had left me vulnerable? And I realized that what I was building was topsy-turvy because it wasn’t built on my strengths. It was overly dependent on other people. And I realized that I had a weakness inside of my leadership skills, which was that I like to do things to make everybody on my team happy, everybody except for me. So I had created a business that, even though I wanted to pretend it was really sexy and exciting and we’re making seven figures and oh yes, we’re at the top of our game . . . what we were really doing was creating a business that I hated. And so sooner or later, that was going to come and confront me anyway. 48 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up The second thing I did was that I realized I was creating a very vulnerable approach to growth. I do believe that investing in your business and your growth is important, but you have to do it in a way that doesn’t produce the level of anxiety it was producing for me, and in a way that doesn’t leave you so vulnerable. So I needed to have a more diversified approach to how I was going to grow my business, if I was going to grow at that pace, and I needed to make some better decisions about how I was managing my team. I had a great team. I don’t want to say that I didn’t, but there were some things going on that I wasn’t addressing as a leader. I was holding back. And I was minimizing my interactions, in a way, because I was so scared to confront the holes that were there because we were moving so fast. I didn’t want to slow down. And that made me realize that other people are doing the same thing too. So that whole debacle really enlightened for me how I could be not just a better business manager inside myself, but how could I be a better mentor and a coach to the people that I was serving. So I basically had to unravel a business and reinvent myself. And the way I reinvented myself was to come back to some of the strengths that I really loved and were my power in the first place, which is helping to liberate change agents, thought leaders, and visionary entrepreneurs from the daily grind that they create for themselves. Because they love what they do, but they don’t necessarily know how to run a business. I had started to depart from that and create things that were maybe pieces of it, but they were more about my coaches being able to make good money. Well, that didn’t really serve me. It wasn’t exciting me, and I was getting a little unmotivated anyway. So bringing back the strength of my offerings, bringing back the strength of my business, and bringing back me—as an authentic, transparent, powerful catalyst for other people to step 49 Economic Chaos? Recognize, Reinvent, Refocus, Refuel into their vision in the biggest way possible—brought the fire back into the business. It brought the life back in. And in the face of a lot of coaching programs and transformational programs where people are starting to discover that their mentors were a little bit of a fraud, and maybe things weren’t as juicy inside their business model as they wanted people to believe, I got to be in a space where people could say, well, at least we know Melanie’s going to be direct and tell us the truth and she’s not going to sugar-coat things. And so it gave me an opportunity to do what I love the most, which is to bring back that level of authenticity and power. It also helped me be able to walk away from some programs, offerings, and strategies that I didn’t really like that much. I didn’t want to be doing them. It essentially gave me a big fat permission slip to say, “Let’s throw out what’s not working. Let’s make better what is working. And let’s bring forward some of the things that I wanted to do for a really long time, and do them in a way that can position us again in that void where people are struggling and suffering because they don’t have anyone saying ‘you don’t have to do it that way. You can do it this way and you can thrive.’” So I would say that is probably the biggest challenge I’ve experienced up to now. It’s one thing to be starting out and struggling. It’s another thing to create it all and feel like you’re watching it crumble and fall apart. I know other people have faced that too. And I think the most humbling thing I had to face in all of that was How in the world did I let all that happen? But you have two choices. In that moment, you can say, “I’m screwed up. I’m a failure. I’m wrong. I’m bad.” And I did go through a phase of that. But at a certain point—and here’s the second choice—you have to pick yourself up. You have to dust off and ask, “Who am I, and what do I want to create from this?”

50 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up And you have to be willing to take control of your mind. Make sure that the inner game that you’re showing up for every day is in pristine condition to rise above the problem. See, what happens for so many people when they’re experiencing their challenges is they let the challenge be bigger than them. And that was not a very fun place for me to be. The minute that I rose above the challenge and knew I was bigger than that and I was not going to let this challenge define me or conquer me, everything shifted. Friends came out of the woodwork. Both of you, Martin and Jim, and other people stepped in and said, “Here’s what I can do to help you. Let me support you. Let’s talk about it. Let’s get you on a track.” Getting out of my own way and getting back into having mentors gave me ideas that I couldn’t see for myself. So I think the number one thing anybody has to do in that situation is you have to be willing to rise above the problem. And that’s what I did. I had to be bigger than it, and I couldn’t let it define me. Jim Palmer: What an awesome story, Melanie. Thanks. And the thing is we all do go through those times eventually. I refer to it as my season of crisis. While it’s ugly and unpleasant when you’re going through it, if we’re open to the lessons learned, we can become stronger for it. And one of the lessons, and you kind of said it there at the end, is that it is humbling. Sometimes we do start believing some of our own marketing. We fall into that trap of super successful entrepreneur, indestructible, and that’s really not the case. The other thing I think is an important lesson is we always all need a coach. Somebody said, I never hire a coach unless I know they also have a coach. When you work with coaches, they can help you steer clear of the wrong track. And as you said, you started getting some wisdom and advice and even some comfort from some very smart people that helped you get back on the right track. So, it was a really, really great story. Go ahead there, Martin. 51 Economic Chaos? Recognize, Reinvent, Refocus, Refuel Martin Howey: Melanie, I remember when you went through that situation. And I remember the conversations we had and how down and devastated you were. You and I had talked several times, and I watched you go through maybe a four-step process, I suppose. The first thing is you recognized where you were. And that’s really big, because you recognized that you had a challenge and it wasn’t working for you and you knew that your team was not on board with you the way they should have been. And you weren’t working in your comfort zone. The second thing I saw you do was you reinvented yourself. You recognized, then you reinvented. You decided, okay, what is it that I really want to do and how do I take it to another level? Third, you refocused yourself on what you were trying to do, what you were trying to accomplish. And then after that—fourth—you refueled yourself. You got a new energy, and then you resurged and you went out and you put another program together and went after it. I really was impressed with what I saw, and this wasn’t an easy process for you. It didn’t happen just overnight. It was a long process for you, and I remember the many conversations that we had as you were going through that. And I’ve watched you go through some other struggles and challenges as well. But you’ve got this way to come back, and I always enjoy what you say. I’ll always learn from this: “Make sure you show up.” And “It’s your inner game; you have to show up.” I hear you say that often, and it’s been an inspiration for me to watch how you’ve bounced back from some of the pretty devastating struggles that you had. I remember you had that hotel, and the expense for the hotel was huge, and you didn’t have the turnout that you wanted. Melanie Benson Strick: What was I thinking? Martin Howey: It was like, what’s going on here? 52 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Melanie Benson Strick: A five-star hotel at the beginning of the economic crisis. Not the best choice. Jim Palmer: Melanie, we have about nine minutes, or ten pages, however we look at the book. As we’re completing this project, we’re in the final days of 2011. Our economy is struggling. It’s kind of crappy for a lot of people. It’s been a rough road for entrepreneurs and small-business owners, of which we all, in our own businesses, interact with. So, from all of your experience, and maybe even your particular area of expertise—which is helping people, especially highly successful entrepreneurs, get to that next level by fixing their inner game—what’s one piece of advice or wisdom or strategy that you can share that might either give people hope, inspiration, help them grow, become more profitable, or we can wrap the whole thing up, all in one. Melanie Benson Strick: First of all, let me share one thing that I learned from that experience that was really strengthening for me. And I think I always had it in me, but it was almost as if I had to get to a certain level of mastery to fully understand it. And that was this. As entrepreneurs, we have three jobs in one. First, we have to have courage. Courage is the number one thing that gets us up on those days that we’re feeling confronted with our demons, and courage keeps us moving. Second, we have to have confidence. What happened with me was that I lost my confidence. And it wasn’t anybody’s fault. I didn’t do anything bad or wrong. No one else did anything bad or wrong. It was just too many things happening at once. But losing that confidence was something I was supposed to go through in order to have more compassion. I had actually lost a little bit of my compassion. I started—and I’ll say it straight out—I started to get arrogant. It wasn’t that I was really demonstrating arrogance, but deep inside of me, I was starting to cultivate this, Oh my God. I don’t have patience for this!

53 Economic Chaos? Recognize, Reinvent, Refocus, Refuel This perfect storm brought me through that place. As a coach, I realized that if losing confidence is what someone is experiencing on any level, I have to shift the way I’m coaching people to better understand what they’re dealing with right now. Temporarily losing my confidence brought a level of compassion that made me a better coach and a better mentor. But you have to have that confidence. If you’re losing that confidence, you can’t see the forest through the trees. You can’t have the energy inside of you to come back up. And I think the third thing is we have to be willing to lead when we don’t really know what the path looks like. And what that means is, even when there’s times that we don’t know what stuff’s supposed to look like, we have to be willing to trust our intuition. We have to be willing to trust that there’s something bigger going on here. And we have to be willing to tap into the intuitive piece of us that leads rather than the analytical part that has to have everything perfect or mapped out. I had no freaking idea what anything was going to be, or do, or how I was going to make money. There were times when I didn’t even know how I was going to pay my bills. But I had to be willing to lead myself and others, even when I didn’t have all that stuff figured out. And it made me stronger on a level that can’t be shaken now. So that one piece of advice and wisdom that I would offer is this: It’s okay to be scared. But don’t give up. Be willing to surrender what you think things are supposed to look like when you’re in the middle of an evolutionary process. Entrepreneurs are particularly wired to evolve at the speed of light. We may be more introverted or extroverted. We may be more of a visionary or more of a methodical person. We all have that little difference in us, but when we’re entrepreneurs, we are wired to constantly generate new ideas based on who we’re becoming and how we’re evolving.

54 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up But we have all these people who surround us—typically people who are not entrepreneurs, who are stable and need stability—and they will try to make us wrong or bad, because we’re constantly evolving. And so we start to doubt ourselves. We start to have fear. We start to question what we’re doing. Or we compare ourselves to others who are actually riding the height of their evolution and are not in that phase of their growth right now. Then we lose our confidence. So you have to be tuned into your journey. You have to recognize where you’re at in your stages. There are high points of our evolution where we ride on the wave and things are good. And there will be low points of our evolution where we question ourselves and we experience hard times. Or we’re confronted by something in life or our business that is really challenging. You have to remember—these are all stages. We all go through them. No one is immune to them. Just not very many people talk about them. And so you have to get yourself some support. Get yourself a coach. Get yourself a mentor. Get in a community that can believe in you and support you no matter what’s going on. And if there’s nothing else you do, that in itself will help you raise above anything you’re dealing with, then have the courage, the confidence, and the wisdom to lead yourself through it. Martin Howey: Well, I don’t know how you could say it any better than that. Jim Palmer: That’s awesome. That is so awesome. Melanie, we want to thank you so much for your time and being part of this book. It’s Martin’s and my goal that with so many of our products or programs, we’d like to reach hundreds, if not thousands. I think our goal with this book, especially, as we listen to what you and 55 Economic Chaos? Recognize, Reinvent, Refocus, Refuel some of the other experts have to say, is, man, if we can just touch one person, or maybe two or three, give somebody hope, really make a positive impact, it’s going to be an awesome book and an amazing experience. And you’ve been a huge part of that. So thank you very much. Melanie Benson Strick: Do I have time to say one more thing? Jim Palmer: You sure do. Melanie Benson Strick: Okay. Here’s one other thing that I learned from this experience. Many times in my life I’ve been through those challenges, but I didn’t realize how, oftentimes, when people experience a failure or a moment when things aren’t going well and they’re challenged or they don’t have the answers, instead of talking about it, we kind of take it personally, and we shut down, and we isolate. And I did that for a while. I had so much pain and so much shame, that I only talked to maybe two or three people for a very short period of time, just my closest inner circle. But what I realized is that was actually the wrong thing to do. Why wrong? First of all, you start to believe your own crap. As you said earlier, there’s nothing wrong with you. Secondly, when you isolate yourself, you actually cut yourself off from the life force of people who do believe in you and do support you. So I would say, you know what? It’s okay to not know all the answers. It’s okay to be scared. It’s okay to be confronted with your stuff. But the worst thing you can do is to isolate yourself, to shut down from everyone else, especially those who care about you and can support you. And it’s okay to talk about it. Now, I don’t think you should be blasting it to every freaking blog and Twitter and Facebook post on the planet that you’re going through rough times. But I want people to know that the more you are willing to talk about it, the more you’ll realize you’re not alone. 56 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up And that has been probably one of the single best decisions I made—to start talking about it—because afterward people came out of the woodwork and asked me to help them. Because they felt safe knowing that someone else had been there before them. So know that you’re not alone. Know that everybody goes through it, and if you’re willing to talk about it—if not with everyone, at least with the people you can turn to safely and with confidence for help—that will help you move through it so much faster. I am so grateful for friends like Martin and Jim and Adam Urbanski, who I know and who is also in this. People who literally gave their heart, their soul, their time, their love, and even just a shoulder to cry on, when I was at the worst of the worst. Those are the types of things that cultivate a level of relationship that goes beyond business. It creates a whole other dimension of support in a business world. Jim Palmer: Yeah. You know, you reminded me of something. Back when I was in my season of crisis and long-term unemployment, there was this local support group for people unemployed. And that’s the last thing in the world I ever saw myself going to. But my wife kept pushing me there and pushing me there. One time I said, “Oh, yeah. What am I going to do? Stand up, ‘Hi, I’m Jim. I’m unemployed’”? I mean, I had real shame issues. And she said, “You know what? It’s not about you. Maybe the reason you need to go is so you can support somebody else there.” And that was such a slap, but it was the slap of reality, and it really hit home. I did go there, and it was a good experience for me personally, but I also made some connections. Actually, after I started my business, I ended up supporting this organization. But what you said, Melanie, is you’ve got to talk to other people. You can’t just withdraw into your own cocoon, and I have found and believe that when you’re out there caring and sharing, it really,

57 Economic Chaos? Recognize, Reinvent, Refocus, Refuel really nurtures your own soul in such a way that you can’t do to yourself. Melanie Benson Strick: Yup. Not only connecting, but also giving. When you’re feeling at the worst of the worst of the worst. When I was having those days, when I got on the phone and I coached—even though I might have been crying for an hour before I got on the phone—it transformed me to give back to someone else. So I think you just have to remember you are not your problem. You are your solution. You are bigger than your problem. Surround yourself with other people, give back, and remember that there is something inside of you that you are on this planet to do. If you don’t know what it is in that moment, it’s okay. But don’t make the problem your reality. Just know it’s a moment in time. Martin Howey: Jim, how many ideas I’ve gotten from Melanie just like those. Just in conversation. And I have pages of notes here that I’ve taken in our brief conversation that I know are going to help me and help the people I talk with as well. Melanie’s been a great example, watching her go through her challenges and struggles, and how she’s come out victorious every time. And it hasn’t been easy for her. It hasn’t been easy for any of us watching her, but to see what she’s been able to do and how she’s turned it around has been a real inspiration for a lot of people. Melanie Benson Strick: Thank you. And thank you both for doing this project, because it’s extraordinary to be able to help people when they’re experiencing the biggest challenges. Most of us are rewarded by being part of their lives when they’re making big money and big transformation and big impact. But if we can just inspire one person to keep going when they’re confronted by a really challenging time, I think that’s the most meaningful, valuable thing we can do on this planet. Martin Howey: Well, just your sharing—being so open and so transparent and sharing your ideas and your struggles and what 58 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up you’ve gone through, which a lot of people wouldn’t bother to do, by the way—shows just how much of a giving person you are. And I know it will come back to you manyfold. So we sure appreciate you’re being here with us today, and thank you so much for your time, and for you expertise, and—most importantly—your friendship and your love for us and for the work that we’re doing. Jim Palmer: Thanks, Melanie. You’re awesome. Melanie Benson Strick: All right. Thanks, guys.

Melanie Benson Strick is America’s #1 Optimum Performance Coach; Melanie Benson Strick has been a catalyst for many six- figure entrepreneur successes. Melanie’s clients (thought leaders, visionary entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, authors, speakers, service professionals, and information marketers), want proven strategies to monetize their big ideas and catapult their success without giving up their life, and typically add at least six figures to their bottom line while creating more time for living their dream. Melanie’s free resource to re-energize your business in seven days or less is available at www.SuccessConnections.com.

59 Susie Miller: Do the Next Thing

Jim Palmer: Martin, I am super excited to introduce our next special guest. Susie Miller is a good friend of mine, and she is a living example of exactly what we’re writing about with this book, It’s Okay to Be Scared, but Never Give Up. Susie, welcome! Susie Miller: Thank you, Jim and Martin. I’m just thrilled to be here. Jim Palmer: You have such an awesome mission, Susie. So I want to ask you to share that with us as we get started. Susie Miller: Sure, Jim. I believe that women have an incredible sense of influence and power, and I think that when we empower them to be the best that God created them to be, we can change the world. So my work and mission is to lead women through faith in intentional growth. Jim Palmer: How exactly do you do that? Susie Miller: I help them to discover and define their divine design and embrace their uniqueness, so that they can not only create, but live their best life. Jim Palmer: I love that. Martin, don’t you love the sound of that? Martin Howey: I really do. I like the whole concept of that. It’s taking coaching in a new direction from where a lot of other people are taking their concepts. So I’m excited to hear what you have to say. Jim Palmer: Good. Well, Susie, one of the reasons that I’ve asked you to be part of this really special book is that you, among so people that I know, have had more than ample reason to be scared in your life or to get down, because of challenges, speed bumps, whatever you want to call them. And while Martin and I have asked most of our guests to name their biggest challenge, I’d actually like to go a little bit different. I’d like to give you a few minutes here and ask if you

60 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up could share some of the, I’ll just call them mini challenges, that you’ve faced over these last few years. Because one of the things that we’re trying to do with this book is to give some perspective. We’re not here to minimize what anybody’s going through. We’re not here to be judgmental, but sometimes when you’re reading about what other people are going through, you may have one of two reactions. You can go, “Wow, I’m glad I’m not going through that.” Or you can say, “I’m glad I’m not alone.” I think whatever we’re all going through in our lives, the challenge we encounter is important and it is big for us. I’d really have to rack my brain to think of somebody that I know well and care about that has gone through more than you have. So, having set the stage for that, why don’t you share a little bit about the last few years and what you have faced? Susie Miller: Sure, sure, and I do think I’ve had people react both ways, “Thank goodness I’m not you,” and “It’s so nice to know that someone’s been where I am.” And if I can offer one thing, I hope it’s some perspective. I’m not sure where to begin, so the best way I’ve learned to talk about this and describe the challenges that I’ve faced in life and business is with a story. A number of years ago, we were at church, and it was around Christmastime. The pastor was using the movie It’s a Wonderful Life to teach about how much we have to be grateful for in the midst of difficult times. As he was talking, he listed ten different situations that the congregation may have faced. He talked about cancer, the death of a parent, the loss of a child, financial difficulties, fire, tragic accidents, abuse, divorce, and others. He listed about ten of them. As I sat there pondering it, I leaned over to my husband—I had some tears well up in my eyes—and I said to him, “You know, we really do have a wonderful life.” And all of a sudden my fifteen-year-old daughter (she must have heard me), she elbowed

61 Do the Next Thing me and said, “Mom, how can you say that? We’ve had eight of the ten things he just listed happen to us.” That was a wake-up call. Oh, my gosh, we really have lived through some very difficult things. And so I think it was at that moment I realized that we’ve had a house fire. We’ve buried a parent. We’ve lost a child. We have lived through some very difficult things. And I don’t say those as a laundry list. I have learned that these things have come into my life so that I can learn from them, grow from them, and really be involved in helping others see that there is more to life than the circumstances. So I think that’s when I knew that it wasn’t the challenges of life that define us, but what we do in the midst of those challenges, and as a result of those challenges, that really shapes us. Jim Palmer: Boy, I can’t imagine dealing with even one two of those. Well, I have dealt with one or two of them, but not all of them in the short time frame that you have. Well, let me circle back now. Susie, can you say what maybe your biggest challenge has been? And I’ll even broaden it for you. In life or in business, what do you think the biggest challenge has been for you, and how did you handle it? Susie Miller: Gosh, Jim, I would say I’m going to go with the most recent big challenge, because I don’t that anything could compare with the loss of a child. One of my daughters is a twin, and her sister died before birth. So that’s a very personal challenge that really challenged my faith, and I really had to grow from there. But I think that set the stage for dealing with what has felt like an ongoing challenge, and that is cancer which began in 2003, and I have faced seven years of chronic and debilitating illness, an illness that took me from being a very active wife, mom, and businesswoman to basically a couch potato. And really not knowing what the morning would bring in terms of if I could

62 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up breathe. I had lung issues. If I could move. I had all kinds of autoimmune muscle issues. And trying to live as a high-achieving Type A personality with a chronic illness that was unpredictable has probably been the hardest thing I’ve lived through, because it was ongoing and I watched it impact my family. Watching it impact my kids and seeing them lose the activity and the involvement of me as a mom, and watching my business have to take a different turn. Then be willing to live well and work well and struggle well in the midst of that, that would be my biggest challenge. Jim Palmer: Wow. Martin, do you want to pick up here? Martin Howey: Well, I just can’t imagine going through the number of things that you described in just the couple of minutes that we’ve been talking, the listing of all of the different challenges, or several of the different challenges, you’ve faced. As Jim mentioned, any of those would be enough to test anyone’s faith, I suppose. I can’t imagine anything worse than a parent having to bury a child. We just have not gone through that, and I hope we never have to. I’ve lost both of my parents. I lost a sister just last week to cancer. Susie Miller: I’m sorry. Martin Howey: Those things are devastating in themselves, but to heap on all the other things that you’ve mentioned . . . I can’t wait to hear how you’ve gone through this. You mentioned the testing of your faith, and I’ve never had my faith tested. I’ve gone through some struggles, but my faith has always remained strong. I’m sure yours has too. And that’s probably one of the things that have brought you through this. But I can’t wait to hear what you have to say and how you’ve accomplished, or gotten through, those things, and what I can learn from it to help me in some of the struggles that I go through. Susie Miller: Wow, thanks. I’m so sorry about the loss of your sister, and I know that no matter how old we get, we always need our parents, and it’s hard when they’re no longer with us. 63 Do the Next Thing I think, on a very serious note, I had somebody ask me why I went into the field of psychology. I looked at her and I said, “You know, do you really want to know?” And she said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Most people who enter this field of psychology have a story.” And it’s the story that led me really to what I do, and what my life purpose has been, and I’ll share a little bit more about that. On a more levity note, we psychologists tell people they should be friends with us because we reduce their odds. If one out of three people are going to have cancer, we’ve got that. If one out of three people are going to have a house fire, we’ve got that. And so keeping a sense of humor without diminishing the hardship of it has sustained us. I would say the other thing is, of course, my faith. And yes, it has been challenged. I think there are times when we ask why this is happening, and that is, I’ve come to find, a very ineffective question. The question I have learned to ask myself is, “What will I do in the midst of this?” Not denying it, and not pretending it doesn’t exist, but, “In the midst of this particular challenge, what will I do? Who will I be? Will I give up, or will I go on?” And then, “What does that look like, to go on?” Jim Palmer: You know, Susie we’ve talked. I know you and I are both of the same faith and have many of the same beliefs. We know that we grow and fulfill our purpose when we help and serve others. Susie Miller: Sure. Jim Palmer: I’m so inspired by what you’ve done with everything you’ve faced. I can’t imagine— I mean, I’m like you, a Type A, and I’m a person that when my kids, maybe five or six years ago, bought me a hammock for Father’s Day . . . I have sat in that thing for really maybe two and a half minutes total. It’s a big thing. I cannot sit still. I’m always on the go. I’m always doing. Same with you. So to go through that kind of debilitating disease and the scare of cancer.

64 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up We’re recording this in the final days of December. Two days ago was the one-year anniversary of losing my brother-in-law to cancer, and tomorrow is the two-year anniversary of losing one of my best friends, Eric Paul, who had four young kids, and it’s been a really hard time for them. So cancer touches so many people. I feel funny asking this question, because your story is so large. But what did you learn from the experience that can help others? Susie Miller: Well, I appreciate the tenderness with which you’re holding my story, Jim. And I think no matter what faith you are, we have to have something that keeps us going. So let me share two different things of the few lessons I’ve learned along the way. One was when I was diagnosed with cancer. It was really hard for me to keep my perspective, because my dad had died from cancer when he was young. And I wasn’t sure how serious the cancer was, because the doctors couldn’t know until they were in the middle of surgery trying to take it out. And so there were days that I walked around in a daze. And there were days that I struggled to keep going, to remain positive, or to stay engaged in my work. I remember, ironically, a lesson I had learned from my mom years ago, and that was to just do the next thing. I think we can get really overwhelmed when we face challenges, and we tend to overthink and overworry and get paralyzed. And it’s at those moments that I remember to get off my hamster wheel and just do the next thing. And for some people, the next thing is as basic as getting out of bed, getting dressed for work. That’s such a key thing for entrepreneurs who work at home, to suit up and to show up, and then to do the next thing on our list—to ignore the rest, and to do the next thing. Pick up the phone and make a phone call. Go to see one prospect. And kind of put the blinders on to all that’s pressing in on us, and just do the one next thing. 65 Do the Next Thing And then after that, do the next thing. And pretty soon we will have accomplished something, and we get out of the cycle of overwhelm. So that was one of the ways I really dealt with the uncertainty that cancer brings. More recently, as I’ve battled the seven years of chronic and debilitating illness and watched it take a toll on my life as a wife, mom, and a businesswoman, there were days that I would make plans, have a schedule, only to wake up and be unable to follow through with them due to the physical limitations. As I mentioned before, as a high-achieving Type A personality, that was so difficult. And as a counselor and coach who knows how to coach other people, I really took my own advice of how to be gentle with myself and how to be practical. And so what I learned was that the mental work of staying positive and hopeful, and to be productive in some area of my life and work each day, was at times like climbing Mt. Everest. At times it felt like slogging through quicksand to just get through the day. But I found that if I could do something on my list, that I could build successes one at a time. And the mental discipline, I think that is much harder than the physical discipline, because we can defeat ourselves in our minds before we ever take action. We can be in a place, especially when we’re amid difficulties, of seeing what isn’t being accomplished or seeing the roadblocks. And they can become really loud and overwhelming, if we let our fear or our worry take over. And so I remember one day the work of mentally disciplining myself to literally say, “Okay, I don’t think that way anymore. I’m going to think this way. I’m going to think what I can do today. How can I make a difference, in whatever way, in my business and my life today?” It was more difficult sometimes than one of my six-mile runs. To think proactively and positively is a mental discipline. I

66 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up don’t know. Do you ever feel that way, Martin and Jim, when your minds get in the way? Martin Howey: Absolutely, I do. And one of the things that I can relate to is what Jim was saying about the hammock, because the exact thing happened to me. The kids bought me a hammock for Father’s Day. Jim said two and a half minutes. I don’t think I got two minutes in mine. So I do beat that record. That’s the only thing I could beat Jim on. Susie Miller: And I’ll tell you, Martin, as a woman and as a coach and counselor, I would say that both of you got a hammock as your kids’ way of saying thank you for all you’ve done for me. Please take a rest. It was not meant to say you needed to go out to pasture. Martin Howey: Well, the thing for me—and you mentioned running, and I do triathlons—the hardest thing for me is that I’m an extreme Type A personality, and the hardest thing for me was to sit on the couch for one year in dealing with my cancer and not be able to even move. And go from 182 pounds down to 136 and just be skin and bones and have a bag attached to my stomach. Those are the hardest things for me. There were two things that really kept me going, and you’ve mentioned two of them already. One of them is mental attitude. You know, I learned how to focus. When I was doing triathlons, I hired a registered sports hypnotherapist to help me learn how to focus and to visualize. So that was really one of the big things. And the second part of it was my faith. I just knew that God wasn’t going to give me any more than I could handle. And this was a test, and I had to keep thinking. Every time one of our kids or grandkids has a problem, and my wife has taught me this, we ask, “What are we supposed to learn from this?” So this is the thing that I had to look and say, “What is it that I’m supposed to learn? How do I now help this and take the concept of this experience that I’m having right now and be able to help other people with what I’ve learned? I’ve gone 67 Do the Next Thing through something. What can I use? This probably wasn’t an accident, so how do I take that now and use it to help somebody else?” And I love what you’re doing and how you’re helping women with this process that you’re going through. It’s just inspiring. Susie Miller: Don’t you think that when we can take our experiences and use them for other people, it gives those experiences meaning? It doesn’t erase that they were hard, and it doesn’t deny how we felt about them. But it gives them some level of meaning and purpose, because we can use them to help others live their lives with even more grace, more resilience, more strength, and more success. I think it gives purpose to our struggle. Jim Palmer: I agree. Martin Howey: Well, here’s the neat thing that I think about what you’re saying, and that is don’t hide your light under a bushel. If you’ve got a challenge of some kind, maybe there’s a purpose for that. Maybe it isn’t just for you. Maybe it’s for someone else. It’s for you to learn and to be able to share what you’ve been able to do, and how to get through that, with someone else. And so I love what you’re doing, and that is, “Don’t keep it to yourself. Share what you’ve learned.” Susie Miller: That’s really hard, though, with Type A people who are high achieving, because what we’re actually sharing is our deepest vulnerabilities. And when you’re a driven, successful person, that feeling of “I’m going to expose these vulnerabilities” is something that we have to kind of navigate, I believe, to be able to say, “This is bigger than me, and it’s okay to be vulnerable in our success.” Jim Palmer: You know, Susie, you asked a minute ago about the wondering and the worry and not knowing. And I had a similar situation, It was almost three weeks—I believe it was like nineteen days—when I had the uncertainty of knowing whether my cancer was stage II or stage III. 68 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up And the difference, the only thing I knew, was that the average survival rate past five years if it’s stage II was 80 percent, and if it’s stage III, it drops to 50 percent, like 50/50, which a number I just couldn’t even fathom. But the way that I got through it at the time, other than sheer terror and panic, was staying busy in the moment. I just did what I could do. At the time I was unemployed, so I didn’t have the benefit of work, and I had a really hard time focusing on getting work. So I just tried to focus on how am I going to stay alive, and how am I going to be brave and strong for my kids. And I just really had a brave face on. Something just popped into my head that I’ll share with you. You know, I remember a couple of years after I was declared cancer free. My kids were teens at the time, and they asked me, “You were so brave. Weren’t you scared at all?” And I remember sharing with them, because I thought it would be a good fatherly moment to just talk about truth and reality. I said, “I was scared to death.” I just let it all hang out. And you know what happened? Six months later I got melanoma again. I was going to quarterly checkups, which are now six months. But they caught it early, so it was no big deal. But I said, “Oh no. I’ve got to go home and say I’ve got cancer again. And they know I’m going to be scared to death.” Susie Miller: They know you’re going to be scared. Go ahead. I’m sorry. Jim Palmer: I was just going to say that there was no brave face at that point. It was just reality, which again, I think is part of what a parent does is prepare a child for real life, you know? Susie Miller: Well, absolutely. As a counselor and a coach, I work with people and we talk a lot about our feelings. And I think even there sharing your feelings with your kids—I’m a true believer in

69 Do the Next Thing feeling our feelings, because we can’t deny them. If we do, they build up like a pressure cooker and they come out somewhere. I always tell people it’s like holding a beach ball underwater. It pops up somewhere. And so, if we pretend that we don’t feel angry or scared or disappointed, it’s going to show up somewhere. But I don’t believe in living in our feelings. I think once we feel them and we name them, we have a choice, like you said, of what to do with them. You talked about being busy and finding something to be productive at. That’s the mental work, and that’s the difference between people who are successful and those who just want to be successful, because you are honest about your feelings. And yet, even with yourself, Jim, you talked about that first time you were honest about how you felt. And then you made a decision about what you were going to do with how you felt, based on what you wanted to do with your children, with your work, with your wife. And those are the things that I think we can proactively control. Not what happens to us; but what we do with what happens to us. Jim Palmer: Exactly. You know, as I said earlier, it’s late 2011, our final days of the year, and our economy is struggling. It’s been a rough road for so many entrepreneurs and small-business owners. Is there one piece of advice or wisdom, or maybe a strategy, that you could share that may help them grow, help them become more profitable, or just be inspiring? Because I know you’re doing really great things with your business and coaching and helping women pretty much all over the country. Susie Miller: Well, thanks, Jim. I have thought long and hard about this question, and I think what I would say is that doing something that you’re passionate about is the key to success, no matter what the economy is. So I always ask people, “What would you do even if you didn’t get paid? What’s enough to get you out of bed and excited every day?” 70 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up I think Martin mentioned when you’re giving out and taking your life and making a difference in the lives of others. And so I think when we can find what we love to do, that we can build success in any economic situation. I can’t imagine there’s not anybody reading this book who hasn’t had one of those moments when you’re engaged in some type of work and you feel that thrill of “this is what I was made to do. This is what I was created to do.” It doesn’t feel like work when you’re doing it. You feel energized. You feel accomplished even after maybe an exhausting time of putting forth effort. Last month I taught a one-day seminar about understanding your story and how it affects your life and your relationships and your personal business success. And it was a very intense day, a very long day, and I was tired at the end of it. But I was exhilarated at the same time. And I think that was because I was doing something I was passionate about, which was helping people create a better life, to find their uniqueness, their divine design, and use that to make their life and their business different. I remember saying to my husband at the end of the day—I was so tired, so excited—and I said, “I love what I do. If I could do this every day, I would be thrilled.” And so even as I battled chronic illness, when the doctors weren’t sure I would ever get my quality of life back, being able to move outside of myself and my own difficulties and follow my passion, was what kept me going on the darkest of days. So my biggest advice for success is find something you love to do that stems from who you are, from your unique gifts and abilities. Then take this and make it your life’s work. I think if people can do that, success will come, along with personal satisfaction and fulfillment. That can be very motivating when life is hard or circumstances are less than ideal, because it comes from within us. It’s not something that we’re trying to make work. It really is something that flows from us. As I’ve talked with

71 Do the Next Thing successful people, that’s a common theme. They love what they do, and what they do comes from who they are. Jim Palmer: Wow. Martin Howey: I don’t know how you could say it any better than that. That really sums up the whole thing. There is a whole bunch of research that talks about that and about how endorphins are released when you get excited about something. Endorphins are natural chemicals released by the brain that are as strong as heroin or cocaine or any of the opiates. When you get excited about something, that helps release those, and that helps the healing process as well. Jim Palmer: Susie, thank you so much. This has been an unbelievable half hour. You have such a unique gift. You have such a unique perspective and outlook. And I think it is a true gift and a blessing that you are so energetic and feel your calling, and as you just said, you’re passionate about helping others. I’m quite certain that people who have just flipped the last few pages have felt that from you. Susie Miller: Thank you. Jim Palmer: Thank you very much for being an amazing part of this book. We really, really appreciate it. Susie Miller: Well, thank you, Martin and Jim, for including me. It really is a privilege. And you know, Jim, you’ve impacted my life deeply and have helped me create more success as a coach. And, Martin, I’m just so blessed to meet you and have a chance to spend some time talking with you. I’m very intrigued and look forward to maybe talking more in the future. So I appreciate both of you giving me this opportunity, and I do hope it blesses some of the readers and gives them a little bit of an edge in facing whatever this year brings. Jim Palmer: Very good. Martin Howey: Thank you very much.

72 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Susie Miller is passionate about empowering women to create & enjoy LIFE Success by helping them discover their divine design, embrace their uniqueness, & pursue intentional growth! Being a cancer survivor & living with chronic illness has given Susie a unique perspective on “creating & living your best life.” Susie is trained as a counselor, coach, & minister. Susie is a possibilitarian. She lives outside Washington, DC with her husband, John. They have three grown children. For more info, visit www.SusieMiller.com.

73 Martin Howey: Develop a Winning Attitude

Jim Palmer: Martin, where did your incredibly positive attitude come from? Have you had it all your life? I mean, is it in your genes? Here are other things you said. “Don’t worry about what you can’t control. Focus on the things you can control.” Kind of, keep smiling and work through the current situation. So was this training you had, or does it just come naturally? Where did it originate? Martin Howey: Well, it goes all the way back to when I was about two years old and I had polio. Back in the late ’40s, polio was pretty common. They didn’t really have the Salk vaccine then, but as we grew up and went to school in the 50’s, we would be given sugar cubes with the Salk vaccine inside. So I went through this stage of polio, which settled in my throat. We have two vocal chords, and one of mine is paralyzed because of the polio. Interesting enough, I turned out to be a speaker, and with just one functioning vocal chord, it’s been quite a challenge at times. Also, the polio made one of my legs half an inch shorter, which isn’t the optimal thing for a runner and cyclist to have. But that’s okay. I’ve reconciled it and have found ways to work with and overcome those problems. All through my growing up years and through high school, I was always skinny. I was an underachiever. I had poor grades. In order to compensate for my lack of physical ability—and by the way, I started school a little bit younger, so I graduated from high school when I was just seventeen, so I was really a year behind everyone else age-wise. I turned to humor and being a cutup, and that’s how I got through school. When I got out of high school, I tried to go to college, but couldn’t get in because my grades were so poor. 74 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up

I remember seeing a sign that said THE MARINE CORPS BUILDS MEN. And I thought, you know, that’s exactly what I need. I don’t have the discipline, I don’t have whatever it takes to get to where I need to be, I can’t get into school, I don’t have any kind of skill, so I can’t get any kind of a meaningful job. I realized that I had to start taking control of y situation and where I was. So I joined the Marines, and that was a real turning point in my life. Because I worked for my dad at his welding shop before I enlisted, when I graduated from bootcamp, I was assigned to a welding outfit. That wasn’t why I joined the Marines – not to be a welder. I heard about an organization called First Force Recon— which was to the Marines what the Special Forces was to the Army. The qualifications to get in that outfit were stringent. A very demanding physical fitness test was a big part of the qualification. So every day after work, I would go out to the P.T. (Physical Training) area and do pull-ups, push-ups and sit-ups and other exercises, then take off on a long run. On his way home, my commanding officer would drive by the area where I was exercising, or would see me on the road running. One day he called me in and said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I want to go to Recon.” He said, “Well, they’re not taking anybody.” And I said, “But some day they will, and I want to be ready for it.” He said, “I’ve never seen anybody so dedicated in my life.” Then he said, “I’ll watch for openings.” Sure enough, they opened up a position, and so I went to take the tests. They put me through their battery of physical tests, and watched closely to see how badly each candidate wanted it. It wasn’t how many of each exercise you could do. It was whether or not a person would stay with it until they just couldn’t do anymore.

75 Develop a Winning Attitude They weren’t looking for numbers; they were looking for attitude, determination, and perseverance. Fortunately, the person who was administering the test was with me, helping me and encouraging me. I would do push-ups until I couldn’t do any more, and I’d collapse. He’d say, “Get up, get up.” And I’d get up and do two more and collapse again. “Get up, get up.” And I’d get up and keep going. He couldn’t break me. I’d just keep going and going and going, because I wanted this so bad. I had such a passion, such a desire, that I really wanted this so bad I could taste it. I didn’t want to go back to being a welder. That’s not why I joined the Marines. I joined the Marines because in my mind the Marines were the most physically demanding and most disciplined of all the services. My perception was that they were tougher than the Air Force, tougher than the Navy, and tougher than the Army. The Marines were the epitome of what a fighting man should be, and that’s why I joined them. And because Recon were considered the elite of the Marines, I desperately wanted in that outfit. As it turned out I passed the tests and got accepted into Recon. Marine Recon is much different from the rest of the Marine Corps. The job of a Recon Marine requires working behind enemy lines gathering important information and relaying it back so strategic decisions can be made, so they use a variety of methods to gain entry to their targeted area. Because the Marine Corps is a small organization, they use certain training programs and schools from the other service branches. For instance, the U.S. Army’s Airborne School (Jump School), Ranger School, and Pathfinder School, and the SEAL training from the U.S. Navy. There’s a certain pride in being a Marine, and one of the worst things that can happen to a Marine is to wash out of an Army or Navy school. So it was important that every Marine who went to those schools was in top shape – physically and mentally – so there would be no way they could be broken. 76 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up My job was training Marines – before they went to jump school and before they went to SEAL school. We had a junior jump school and a junior SEAL school that helped them get in the best shape of their lives so they would be prepared for whatever was thrown at them. And so that’s where I really started to get this idea of being physically fit and taking charge. I had developed good habits, a good work ethic, and good responsibility in the Marines. When I got out of the Marines, I worked at Douglas Aircraft, building DC-8’s and DC-9’s. Douglas merged with McDonald Aircraft and became McDonald Douglas during the three years I was employed there. During that time I met Mike Cox, who worked for the company during the daytime and had nights off, and I worked at night and had the days off so I could attend Cal State Long Beach. Mike and I decided to start a gym in Long Beach, California. He would work at the airplane factory during the day and run the gym at night, and I would do just the opposite. The gym was doing well, but not well enough to support two families, so I quit McDonald Douglas, bought Mike out and ran the gym myself. Around that time, Jack LaLanne introduced the European Health Spa chain into the marketplace. Their gyms were outfitted with plush carpets and shiny, chrome equipment, and their prices were extremely low. Their facilities enabled men and women to work out seven days a week, and they were starting to drive the gyms along the coast out of business. Fortunately, I figured out how to make my gym profitable by selling vitamins, supplements, and protein powders. Those things were paying my overhead, and any money that came in from selling memberships was pure profit. It wasn’t long before the supplement companies felt the squeeze from the gyms that were going out of business. They knew

77 Develop a Winning Attitude what I was doing and asked if I could teach my methods to the other gyms. I started speaking to these other gyms and teaching them how to keep their gym doors opened during this challenge with European Health Spas. Then the supplement companies asked me to speak to the health food stores and show them how to sell more supplements. So that’s what I did, but what I learned throughout this whole process was, You are in charge of who you are, and you’re in charge of where you want to go and your destiny. And what I did, Jim, was think back through that Marine experience and all the way back through my earlier days in school, and I realized that if I kept going along and letting life happen to me, I was going to be taken to wherever the wind would blow. I realized that I had to take control, and I couldn’t let life happen to me. I had to happen to life. And that’s when I took control. That’s when I joined the Marines. I was only seventeen. If you’re eighteen, you don’t have to have a parent’s signature. My parents didn’t want to sign for me. I said, “Fine, don’t sign. I’ll just wait until I’m eighteen to go anyway.” They said, “You really want this don’t you.” “I really do,” I said. And they could see that’s really what I needed, some direction and some discipline in my life. So they signed for me, and I enlisted. It was during the Cuban Crisis, and things internationally weren’t the best, but that conflict didn’t last long. I was released from the Marines just before Vietnam hit. So I really was in at an ideal time. I wanted to join the Marines despite my parents wishes, so I took control of that situation. When they put me in the welding company, that wasn’t where I wanted to be, so I had to take control and do whatever it took to get out of that and into the Recon. Once in Recon, I didn’t want to do what everybody else did, so I took control and learned

78 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up how to be a trainer, and I started training the people to go to the Army and Navy schools. When I got out of the Marines as was working at Douglas Aircraft, I realized that this isn’t where I really want to be. So, once again, I had to take control of where I was and make necessary changes. That’s when I decided to start a gym. Then I saw my partner really didn’t know very much about the gym business and unless something was done, that it wouldn’t make enough money to support both of us. So I had to make a decision. I quit my factory job where I was making very good money and had good hours and a pretty good future. But factory work – even working for someone else as an employee – wasn’t where I wanted to be. I could see more potential working for myself in the gym business. So once again, I took control and aggressively went after that business and built it up into two different gyms, and eventually the consulting business. Then I sold those gyms and moved back to Arizona and worked in a gym here. I was going to buy the gym that I worked at, but decided that it really wasn’t what I wanted to do. Instead, I continued my consulting business. That’s how the whole “taking control of the situation” process happened. I remember watching television when Dwight Stones, the Olympic high jumper, was standing in front of the bar getting ready to jump. He rocked back and forth for what seemed like several minutes. After the jump, one of the commentators pulled him aside and asked, “Dwight, what are you doing? You’re rocking back and forth in front of this bar, just concentrating on this bar. What are you doing?” He said, “In my mind, I’m making this jump over and over and over. It’s automatic. I know how many steps I need to take before I get to the bar. I know where those footprints need to be. They’re burned into the grass in my mind. I know when I get to the bar how much thrust I need to have, at what point I need to turn my 79 Develop a Winning Attitude body so I clear that bar and lift my feet so the feet don’t drag. I go over that jump over and over and over in my mind, and I never miss. When it’s time to release, I don’t have to think about it. My body takes over, and it’s just automatic.” It was kind of like the Karate Kid. Remember that movie? His instructor taught him “wax on”, “wax off”. So when somebody throws a punch at you, you don’t have to think, “Oh, oh, here comes the punch. I guess I’d better block that.” It’s just “wax on” or “wax off” and you block the punch. It’s automatic. And that’s what Dwight Stones was doing. By watching Dwight Stones, I learned about visualization. So when I was in my bike races, I realized that you can only push your body so far. You and I are in a bike race, and there’s only so far we can push our bodies, so far we can train our bodies, and so far we can condition our bodies. The rest of it, then, has to come from the mental strength and focus. That’s when I heard about Pete Siegel, a registered sports hypnotherapist, from Santa Monica, California. Pete trained a lot of the professional athletes, baseball teams, football teams, hockey teams, as well as some of the top bodybuilders, to be able to focus on what they were doing to improve their performance levels. So I hired Pete to teach me the mental connection I needed to get more out of my training, and be a more competitive athlete. Pete taught me about relaxation, focus, visualization, and the mind- muscle connection. Before every race, I would practice visualization and “anchoring”. You visualize what you intend to achieve, and do something physically to anchor that connection. When you get into a situation and you need extra power, energy, or endurance, you repeat that physical action and it recalls the state you visualized and your performance improves. Once I started doing that, I became more successful in my racing and in my body-building contests. I was able to focus on the

80 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up ideal workout, or the ideal race, or the ideal whatever it happened to be that I was involved in. When I was in the hospital recovering from cancer, that’s one of the things that I did as well. I would lay in bed and go through this complete relaxation stage. Then I would start to focus on what’s going on in my body, and how to heal that. Interestingly, what I found in this whole process and in working with Pete was that you can control the blood flow in your body. You can get what’s called a skin thermometer and put it, for instance, on your calf, and you can measure the temperature on your calf. Then if you focus and concentrate, you can control the blood flow so that it goes through that muscle, and you can watch the temperature on that skin thermometer go up, which indicates there’s an increased blood flow at that point. So knowing that, knowing that you can increase the blood flow in your body to certain areas, I would then focus on where the cancer in my body was, and I would direct the blood flow to that area to take away the waste products and bring new oxygen, and building nutrients into that area to help the healing process. I started using the visualization techniques and the other things I used in my athletic events to help get myself through my illness. If I started feeling a little down, I’d find something to laugh at, and then focus my mind away from whatever it was that was causing me the pain, or the problem, or the depressed feeling, and focus on something else that was more pleasurable. So again, one of the things I had to learn was, How do I take control of whatever situation I’m in? In this case, it’s mental control. How do I focus my mind? How do I focus my mental activity away from the thing that is pain-producing, over to something that’s pleasure-producing? So that’s how I got through this whole thing. Jim Palmer: That’s really incredible. You know, I call visualization “the power mind movies.” I’m sure I didn’t invent 81 Develop a Winning Attitude that phrase. But it’s like that big book Psycho-Cybernetics, and I think they talk about visualization in Think and Grow Rich. That’s very powerful. I use that a lot. Some of the best ideas I get are because I darken the room, sit in a chair, and close my eyes, and I basically watch a movie on the screen in my mind, as if I’m sitting in the back row. For instance, if I have to go give a talk and need to generate ideas. When I sort of wake myself up a little bit, I remember everything I saw because some really great ideas come out of doing that exercise, some pretty cool stuff. Martin Howey: You know, you’re absolutely right, Jim. And I’ll tell you a couple of things about that. My oldest son wrestled in high school. Now this is back in the day when Rocky and Eye of the Tiger and those kinds of movies were out. And you remember the music from those. It was motivational music. So I recorded music from Rocky, Eye of the Tiger, Superman, and Mannix on TV, and other motivational songs. At that time we didn’t have iPods, we had the Walkman. Before every meet, my son would lie down on the mat behind the team bench and get into a relaxed state. Then he would put on his Walkman, listen to this music, and by the time Eye of the Tiger and Rocky were over, this guy was so psyched up – so pumped – that his competitor didn’t have a chance. And he went out there and won all his matches and won the state title. I did it for another son. He won the city title and lost the state just by one point. It’s simply a matter of conditioning your mind to take your body to a whole new level. Now, just like you said, before every talk, I do the same thing. I visualize my opening. What am I going to do to impact that crowd? What are the points I want to make? What do I want them to do? I can visually see them doing whatever it is that I want them to do. And then the closing; when I get to the close, I want to make sure that I am right on with that close. If it’s going to be an

82 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up emotional close, I want to bring them to tears or I want to bring them to a certain cause of action. And, by the way, I anchor that. I either clutch my fist real tight or touch my middle finger and my thumb together. Then that will remind me of what I visualized before, and it will put me in that state, then I can go through the process and cause the audience to take the action that I was trying to get them to take. Jim Palmer: Martin, you told us so many stories starting with childhood, then high school, getting into the Marines, Douglas Aircraft, the gym, and all that. And you kept saying one thing. I don’t even know if you recognized it. But you kept saying, “I just took control. I took control.” And I think that’s a big lesson for people. You just have to take control. You’ve got to take stock of your current situation. Start with where you are, what you have, and move forward and build on it. I also believe taking control equals personal responsibility. In my own opinion, I think this country’s at somewhat of a crossroads with this mind-set of whether it’s personal responsibility or just entitlement. I think the people who are out there making it happen and starting and building businesses, those are the people who are taking control. I’m not saying we don’t need certain safety nets in our society. We do. But for the most part, people really have to take stock of the skill and talent they have, and look at their situation, and move forward. I don’t want to go off on a political tangent, but that’s when you said, “I took control. I took control.” That’s why you became so successful. You took control and you had personal responsibility for your situation. And you kept building on the skill and talent that you had. Martin Howey: Yeah, that’s really true Jim. And it doesn’t have to be a political connotation at all, but it does apply. I remember Charles “Tremendous” Jones, one of the great motivational

83 Develop a Winning Attitude speakers, said, “You’ll be in five years where you are today, except for the books that you read and the people that you meet.” In other words, if you don’t do something different, you’re going to be in the same spot that you’re in today. And sadly, so many people in our society continue to go from day to day to day, never improving. They get up in the morning. They eat their breakfast. They shower and shave. They get in their car and go to work. They come home. They sit down and watch television, maybe talk with the family or something for a few minutes, right? That’s key, a few minutes. They’ll eat dinner. They’ll go to bed. The next day they get up and do the same thing all over again. If you want to move forward, you’ve got to do something different. The skills that got you out of Egypt aren’t the same skills that will get you to the Promised Land. You’ve got to figure out what it is that’s going to move me to the next level. What Charles “Tremendous” Jones was saying was that the book that you don’t read can’t help you. The person that you don’t meet can’t influence you. The seminar that you don’t go to can’t have an impact on you. If you want to go to another level, you’ve got to start doing things differently than what you’re doing right now. And that means you’ve got to take control. Because guess what? The next level ain’t going to fall out of the sky and hit you in the head. You have to find what is it that you want to do, come to some type of a decision. Get clarity on it. And take decisive action. And that’s the key. I watch people go through their lives, and when they get to retirement age, they don’t have enough money to retire. Or maybe the company they were with downsized or merged with another company and made their job obsolete or redundant; there is somebody else doing the same job, so we don’t need you anymore. They’re fifty years old. They’ve got kids in school. They’re living up to the income level that they’re earning, so they have no money in savings, or very little. They may have a 401(k), but when they 84 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up get laid off, they can’t survive, so they have to use that 401(k) to help them get through. And then when it comes time for retirement, they’ve got no retirement, because they didn’t take action. And taking control, taking action, I think is one of the real keys to improving your situation, whether it’s in business, in your personal life, whether it’s with your family. And remember what I said. They come home from work and they spend a few minutes talking to the family. What about the ball games? What about wresting with the kids on the floor? What about going out and throwing the ball? What about doing something on the weekend with them? What about sitting down and helping with homework and showing an interest in the kids? If you don’t do that, somebody else is going to have an influence on the kids, and it may not be the people you want to have an influence on your kids. So it’s a matter of taking control and taking charge.

85 Mike Koenigs: Invaluable Gleanings from a Barber

Jim Palmer: Hey, Martin, our next guest expert, which I’m super thrilled and excited about, is none other than Mike Koenigs. Readers and listeners, he’s a good friend of both of us, and he’s a brilliant marketer. We’re truly blessed to have him in this tight time frame that Martin and I have set up for this book, because he’s been involved in another hugely successful launch in his business. Mike, welcome. We’re so appreciative to have you be part of this book. Mike Koenigs: It’s my pleasure. Believe me, it’s always my pleasure. You’re two of my favorite guys, and I’m here to support Martin in any way I can. And just love being here. So, ask me anything. Jim Palmer: Awesome. Martin Howey: Well, Mike, I can’t tell you how excited I am to have you with us. We’ve been friends for quite a long time, and I’ve watched you in your marketing efforts. You’ve always been so kind to me, so open to share anything you have. And it’s a thrill to me to have you with us today because I know we’re going to get some great information from you, information that others can not only benefit from, but prosper from, as much as Jim and I have. Mike Koenigs: It’s absolutely, again, my pleasure. Everything I can do and anything I can do, I’m here to serve, and every day I learn a little bit more about how to give more, be more authentic, and heart-driven, which has been one of my personal struggles as I’ve been growing. It’s one of my big lessons in life I’ve had to learn. Martin Howey: You know, Mike, one of the things that impresses me so much about you is the fact that it’s not only about business. You mentioned heart-driven, and I’ve watched you and your wife, 86 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Vivian, and the things that you’ve been involved in, and how you do give back from the heart, and from the pocketbook, and from your business experience. It’s nothing short of inspirational for me to watch what you do, and hopefully not only learn from what you do, but do what you do, as well. And I hope other people can too. So this is going to be very exciting. Mike Koenigs: Well, thanks. Jim Palmer: The title of the book, Mike, unless we have an eleventh-hour change is It’s Okay to Be Scared, but Never Give Up. It’s a book of hope and inspiration in life and business. So the first thing I’d like to ask you, Mike, is what was your biggest challenge, whether it be something in your personal life or maybe in your business. Something that really set you off the rails. And then tell us how you handled it. Mike Koenigs: Well, thanks. Well, to start, many people have heard me speak before, present, and I do tell a little bit of my backstory. I grew up the oldest of four kids, in a little tiny town called Eagle Lake, Minnesota. It always seemed like the census passed us by, because I can remember our sign said Population 763 as long as I can remember. It’s actually up to about 1,779 now. But I grew up in a little tiny town. My dad’s a barber, and at seventy-four years old, he’s still a barber. He goes in three to four days a week and cuts hair. And if you look at him, his whole body is actually tilted and shifted to one side because of standing and cutting hair all this time. It’s like he sacrificed his body. One of the things about my dad that I admire most is he’s always been service-oriented and relationship-driven. His whole life is about giving yet asking for nothing. What’s beautiful about being a barber is there’s a statistic that barbers are one of the longest living and longest to stay in their profession. And it’s because if you think about it, they get to touch people. They get to communicate. As if every human need gets fulfilled every twenty minutes, because someone walks in, you cut 87 Invaluable Gleanings from a Barber their hair, you connect with them. You bond with them. You’re like a therapist. You’re talking family. You’re touching them. And in twenty minutes, you somehow transform their life. They get to have some transformation, whether it’s a mental one or a physical one. They get to look at themselves, and it’s like you get to complete a little work of art with a human being. It is really a wonderful, wonderful thing. And one of the greatest gifts he ever taught me was—I don’t think I was five years old—and he taught me how to shake another person’s hand and look at them in the eyes. And just acknowledge them. Through my life, I think for some reason I had forgotten that he taught me, and just remember what he’d taught. It’s like it became a subconscious or an unconsciously competent thing. But I didn’t understand the magnitude of that gift he gave me until recently. Now I didn’t have any money growing up. My parents were basically lower middle class. Some would call us poor. I distinctly remember a time in the ’70s when my mom literally had a dollar in her purse, and she said, “Go out and get a pound of hamburger so I can make some meatloaf.” We grew up eating out of the garden, so this pound of hamburger had to feed six of us. What she did was she filled up the rest with crushed up Saltine crackers and whatever else she could gather together to make this meatloaf. And it was a delicious meal. By the time I was eighteen, I had spent my life trying to think of how I was going out of Eagle Lake, Minnesota. I did not like my childhood at all, because all my focus was, “I don’t have enough. I don’t have enough.” And I didn’t feel like I was enough either. And I really struggled with that. I taught myself how to program, and I became reasonably successful at an early age. I started a company called Digital Café in Minneapolis, St. Paul. Ten years later, I sold it.

88 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up My business partner and I, at the time, then made a feature film that got distributed by Warner Brothers, but I was always chasing the dream and always chasing the feeling of not feeling and being enough. It was in 1996 that I got introduced to Tony Robbins. At that point, I wasn’t successful yet. I was a quarter million in the hole. I was struggling just to pay my bills. We were on the edge of bankruptcy. I married my high school sweetheart, but she kicked me out of the house. I guess you could say, she just said, “I want a divorce.” It was over when literally she announced it, and that was the last time I ever heard from her or talked to her again. And as I would say, I was fat. I was broke. I was lost. I was heartbroken, and really, really struggling. And I saw Tony Robbins on an infomercial. I bought his CDs and had them delivered the next day. The only way I managed to get them is I used a brand new credit card that some fool company sent to me. Because I certainly wasn’t credit worthy. I was literally paying my employees by credit card check. That’s how desperate we were. A couple of weeks later, I went to a Tony Robbins live event. There I had an epiphany, came home for the first time with a life plan, and executed everything in ninety days, and literally manifested and transformed. I manifested a business that was buying my company, changed my body, changed my life, and changed my spirit and my emotional state. And lo and behold, a year later I was selling my business for the equivalent of a couple million bucks. All my debts were wiped away. And I had freedom and time to breathe again. I won’t say again. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had freedom to breath. But moving forward, I ended up meeting Vivian on a journey to Greece several years later. And now I’ve got a son. He’s nine years old. My wife has a foundation, and she’s raised millions of dollars to build schools and hospitals in Africa. 89 Invaluable Gleanings from a Barber Even now, I’ve just gone through a kind of a personal reinvention over the past, I’ll say, nine months, where I really had to self-examine again, on one hand looking at my life from the outside. You’d say, oh, man. Mike’s got it figured out and he’s got this business. It’s generating $10 million a year, and yada, yada, yada. But the reality was, I didn’t realize until this year that I was operating out of fear. I wasn’t operating and following my true life’s path. And I can’t say I’ve got it all figured out, but I have a lot more figured out. And it just goes to show that with every episode, everything that happens inside your life, as soon as you get to a certain stage, there’s another mountain to climb. There’s a new level of self- realization and self-development that you’ve got to look at. And a lot of what you’ve learned, other than operate from a heart center, is give completely and fully, and recognize the value of the people in your life, not the things. Not whether or not you’re good enough. It’s just all about relationship. And it really had to club me in the head again. As a business, we’ve gone up and down as well. I had a very challenging year this past year business-wise. Fortunately we’re really good manifesters, and we figured it out and got things back on track. But we grew too fast, and spent too much, and we paid the price of success. So I know I was probably all over the place here, but the bottom line is it doesn’t matter where you come from, always remember your roots, and always remember the things that matter most, which is that smile of pure love that your child gives you, and that innocence. It’s the deep relationships, whether it’s your spouse or your family. And no matter what your financial accomplishment is or what metal or award or trophy you have, that’s just dust. It’s really irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. It really is all about what is your life journey. I’ll you about more of that a little bit later on in the interview here. 90 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up But there have been a few really motivating, inspirational books I’ve read over the past month that changed the way I think about living and life. Jim Palmer: What a phenomenal story. I just have so many things I want to ask you now, but, Mike, one of the things I truly admire about you, on a personal level and also how you run your business, is something that I’ve also discovered. I will say, at fifty-three, embarrassingly, I discovered it only in the last couple of years. When you focus more on giving and serving others instead of where your next sale is going to come from—or where your next statistic that you can flaunt, and things like that—the business grows. I really believe that no matter what, we’re all supposed to do—to give and to serve and to help others. I feel like I’ve come to that realization a little late in life, but I guess we’re all works in progress. So as long as I’m here, I’ll continue to grow and continue to learn. But everything you do about your business, from even your big launches, you are so focused on giving to the affiliates and just making sure you over-deliver on value. So first of all, I just want to say that. But did that come also from your dad? Or was that realized maybe a little later in life, kind of like it was for me? Where did that come from? Mike Koenigs: Well, I’ve got my wife to thank for that, because I’ll tell you where it came from. And it’s certainly an evolution. First of all, I’ll thank you for that acknowledgement. That’s very kind of you. And I’ll tell you what it came from. For a long time, and I think this is the disease of the male. It’s about being strong and being enough and being alpha, or whatever that thing is that motivates us to always go after more, more, more, more, more. And I was always focused on technique and strategy, not realizing that the universal truth is that every answer is already inside you, right now, and that you’re enough.

91 Invaluable Gleanings from a Barber And that if you just listen to your heart, and recognize and acknowledge the fact that that thing that’s talking to you all the time and chattering and making you afraid—that thing is trying to get me to be concerned about yesterday, or to blame, or have resentment or regrets. Or if you’re in a state of fear, meaning you’re constantly focused and worried about the future, the journey, the pathway—then the solution is to live in the moment, and to recognize this second, right now, and not be concerned about or worried about the past or the future, because that isn’t the now. And that was one of the greatest lessons I learned from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. And also if you read any of Christ’s works, ultimately it comes back to being in the present and being true to yourself. But to get specific, here’s what happened. For a long time, I’d been developing skills of influence and persuasion, learning how to sell and being able to speak and present from the platform. And grow, and always the quest for knowledge. It’s learning more and getting more and all that. It’s more, more, more, more, more. My wife had a very interesting observation one day. And it was right after she had started the foundation and we had raised some money for it. She said, “Why don’t you tell people about what you do and what you give and what you’re highest purpose is when you speak and present? Your heart is missing from it. And if people understood that you’re not just about getting, and not just about selling, I think it will completely change how people perceive you.” At first, I was like, “Ahh, no one wants to hear that stuff. And no one’s going to care.” And what wound up happening is I resisted. I resisted. I resisted. Finally I integrated the story of what her foundation was about in one of the lessons that I teach on stage. And I basically tied it into the idea: if you’ve ever wanted to

92 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up give completely and live your passion and be able to make a big difference, here’s how video marketing can help you do that. I talked about how you could become an instant expert and authority on any topic you can imagine, even one that you’re passionate about, about giving, and making a difference, that it doesn’t have to be about making money. And I told the story about how Vivian had been motivated to go to Africa. She brought a little tiny video camera with her, and shot a video story about a baby girl whose mother died giving birth. The baby was there with these twelve Catholic nuns who had delivered her, and they were feeding her glucose water. All they had was sugar. They didn’t have enough money to buy formula. Of course, the mother’s dead. And the baby’s going to die. It’s as simple as that. Vivian bought some formula, but she thought, “I want to make a difference. I want to do something that’ll last. I don’t want to just save one baby. I want to make a difference and create something that’s sustainable.” So she asked the nun, Sister Ernestine, who ran this little clinic—it wasn’t a hospital, it was basically a room and they’re delivering babies by kerosene lamps. And mothers are dying of the worst just incredible stuff. Stuff that no one in the developed world dies of anymore. Vivian said, “What would make the biggest difference?” Sister Ernestine told her, “We need electricity. If we had electricity, we could refrigerate medicine. We could at least get some state support here in Uganda. And we’d be able to have light so we could deliver babies by something better than kerosene lamp. That would save so many mothers’ lives.” My wife came back to the States with nothing more than her story, bearing witness, and a little bit of footage shot on a cheap little $200 camera. That, and her desire to raise enough money to buy a generator. So, she needed $30,000 to do it. What happened was, we edited that little video—hired a video editor on Craig’s List for $400—and he put this little thing 93 Invaluable Gleanings from a Barber together. She started showing that video, and we put it online, and put it in Traffic Geyser, and started distributing it all over the place. In ninety days, she had raised enough money to buy the generator. She went back, delivered the generator, and the nuns couldn’t believe it. Because, for a decade, people would come and show up. They call us Masungoo over there, which means “fortunate ones.” And the nuns are used to the Masungoo going over there and telling them about all the stuff they’re going to do, and how they’re going to help, and blah, blah, blah. And of course the Masungoo never come back. It’s promise, promise, promise. The Africans’ hopes get lifted, and their hearts are opened up, but then more people die, and more people die. And they feel so hopeless. So, not only did Vivian care and make a difference for that short bit of time that she was there, divinely guided to that little place, but, she delivered on her promise. And the nuns couldn’t believe it. By the way, the only thing that my wife, Vivian, has in common with the Africans, that really drives her, is she’s the daughter of Holocaust survivors. So, tens of millions of people have died in Africa, and Vivian has no living relatives. So she sees another Holocaust happening, but one that she can prevent. And that’s what motivated her. So the generator’s there, and instantly it transforms this little area. Then she’s able to get the attention of more and more people who give more and more. Then we’re able to do a little live event—we called it Paid for Life. We had raised $100,000 the first time, then $250,000 the next time. And five years later, on my stage in a room of 650 people who are at my live event, I could show one video and tell a short story in fifteen minutes, and we raised $250,000. So the point of the story is this. Vivian is the descendent of Holocaust survivors. She went there, she saw something. She made a commitment to make a difference. She went back with nothing 94 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up more than a story. She told her story using the most powerful medium imaginable, which is video. She bore witness to something. And people connected with it on a heart-based level and give and give and give. Anyone can do that. Anyone can reach in and tell a great story. So, the lesson learned is we are all in a place where we can literally create a story with a $200 video camera. Nowadays, it’s built into your mobile phone. For no money, you can press a button and share your story to the entire connected planet, billions of people who can watch your story. Raise their hands and say, I want to help. I want to make a difference. You move me. You motivate me. You inspire me. And people would raise their hands and want to be part of something bigger than themselves. Anyone can become an instant expert and authority. Anyway, I share that little story. Of course, I told a little bit more than I do on stage. The first time I did, I was at a Dan Kennedy event speaking on stage. And I had three different people walk up to me and say, “You know what? I have never purchased anything from someone who speaks on stage before because I know it’s always all about the money.” These three people, independently from each other, all said the same thing or a variation of it, which is, “I can tell you’re not in it just for the money.” First of all, it brought a tear to my eye. And the second thing is, one of those guys, every time he’d see me speak, he’d invest in my programs, giving me $2,000 or $2,500 or $3,000, and he did it five times over a period of two and a half years. And every time he said, I just love what you’re doing. He said, until this year, I never actually used your product. I just wanted to give you something because I love who you are and what you’re about. It was like, my God, that’s the answer.

95 Invaluable Gleanings from a Barber Jim Palmer: Oh my goodness. Mike, I’m chomping at the bit. I gotta share this with you. I actually wrote here so I didn’t forget about it. It’s so funny you just mentioned that, because I wanted to, again, just give you some kudos. The two people I think I’ve learned the most from, as far as speaking from the stage, are yourself and a mutual friend, James Malinchak. But three years ago, I heard you, and I believe it may have been the time you’re talking about, the first time you mentioned what your wife, Vivian, was doing. I remember, because I always like to sit in the back at these events and observe, and I saw the connection that was made. You talked about this for ten minutes, maybe fifteen, talking about this. Not selling. Not telling what you’re good at. Not telling about your programs. You talked about the good that you’re doing and that your wife is doing. And you made such a connection. One of the things that my wife, Stephanie, and I are doing—our two big passions—are feeding the hungry and rehabbing homes for low-income people. I used to not share that because I kind of felt like, hmm, maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you’re supposed to be humble and not talk about that. And after hearing you speak, I now mention that when I’m out speaking, just as a way of introducing myself. And when people come up, it’s about, “Hey, your newsletters are great.” They’re talking about, “Ah! We do that too. And isn’t that wonderful?” And it’s such a human connection. So I learned that from you, so I wanted to say thank you. Martin, I can see you’re chomping at the bit to jump in here too. Martin Howey: Well, just like Jim, I heard you at James Malinchak’s program just recently. First of all, you were so kind to me and came up and gave me a hug and we talked for quite a long time. And then I saw your presentation, and again, you pulled out all the stops and talked about the good that you were doing.

96 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Like Jim, I’ve got my own personal story of struggle and I was going to keep this very personal. I wasn’t going to say anything. Until one day, Joel Bauer came and said, “Martin, I’m speaking in Phoenix at Debbie Allen’s event. Would you come and see me?” So I went and saw him, and afterward at lunch, he said, “Tell me your story.” I told him my story, and he recorded it. We went over to Joe Polish’s, and Joe did an hour and a half video interview. Then I went on to chemo and radiation. Then Joel came along and said, “Now you’ve got to get this story out.” He put it out for me. I really wasn’t going to do anything with it. And then our friends, Ray Edwards, a copywriter, and David Frey came along and said, “You’ve got to tell your story. You’ve got to get out there because you’re saving so many lives already. People are coming to you with e-mails and Facebook posts and phone calls and all these different methods of communication. Telling you what you’ve done to help save their lives so that they don’t have to go through the same thing you’ve gone through. You have an obligation to tell them the story.” So Jim and I were sitting down talking. And he said, “You’ve got to get the story out.” I said, “Well, Jim, you’ve got a similar story. Why don’t you tell your story? You can write the book.” He said, “Well, why don’t we write it together?” And that’s where it came about. I really wasn’t going to say much because I don’t like to talk about myself. But now I see the numbers of people, literally hundreds, who have come and thanked me for helping them see what I’ve gone through and how they can easily prevent it. My own wife got her colonoscopy, and they found four polyps in her, and she would never have done this had it not been for me. She would have gone through the same problem that I’m going through. And so I think it’s so important to tell your story,

97 Invaluable Gleanings from a Barber and to tell what is going on in your life, and the good that you’re doing to help other people. And you’ve been a real inspiration to me, Mike. And, Jim, you have too. In helping me realize that this story, although it may be personal, it shouldn’t be private. It needs to be out there. If you have a story of struggle, it needs to be out there, so that you can talk about how you’ve overcome it, or how other people have overcome it, the good that you’re doing. And then other people can get on board and do something about it as well. So I’ve got to thank both of you for being great inspirations to me. Jim Palmer: Martin, I don’t remember who said it, but it’s in this book: “Sharing is caring.” Because when you tell your story, you’re going to make an impact and help people. I see we’re getting a little long on this part of the interview. So I want to jump back to Mike real quick. Mike, as we’re writing this book, we’re in the very last days here of 2011. Our economy is struggling. I know all three of us on the call, we all work with entrepreneurs and small-business owners across the country. It’s been a rough couple of years. And I was wondering if there’s maybe one piece of advice, or some wisdom, or strategy that you might be able to share that could help readers and listeners grow or help make 2012 a better year. Mike Koenigs: Absolutely can. And the good news is we can tie it all back to this. And I’ve got a little video that I can refer people to, to watch that’s super easy to find and get. So, here’s what it is. Interestingly, I just saw a movie last night that was so wonderful and heartfelt. It’s called Hugo. It’s a Martin Scorsese film that’s in theaters at this moment that we’re doing this. Of course anyone, by the time they’re reading the book, can get it, I’m sure, order it and watch it on their iPhone, their iPad, or whatever. It’s about the history of filmmaking, but more importantly, it’s about story telling. And the key and the secret and that answer to all. It’s the answer to your prayers. 98 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up To answer regarding motivating, inspiring people, instilling hope, and creating transformation for them—in their hearts, and then in their minds, and then in their lives, and being able to manifest a greater, better tomorrow—is being able to first and foremost connect with people by sharing what’s in your heart, by becoming a great storyteller. And so, I’ll tell you some resources that I highly recommend, and I’ll follow that up with a video you can watch. And I’ll relate that to this whole deal, which is this. I believe there are two great gifts on this planet right now. One is TED, Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference. It’s been taking place now for well over a decade. What they do is bring together great minds and inspiring ideas that change the world that we live in. (You can watch all the videos for free.) Basically, some of the greatest life transformers on the planet meet and present and share their entire life’s work, often inside of an eighteen-minute presentation on stage. It is hyper concentrated, and each is always a great story, because the woman who helped design the TED talk—her name is Nancy Duarte—has written a couple of books. One of them is called Resonate, which I highly, highly recommend everyone read. She’s also written another book called Slideology, which is how to make great slides and presentations. The other great book worth reading is The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo. He also wrote a book called The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs. There’s a friend of mine, his name is Bo Eason—Bo Eason is a former Houston Oiler, a five-year NFL football player. Eventually his legs got all mangled and gangled, so it basically ruined his career as a football player, and he was a safety. He has a play called The Runt that he’s been performing on Broadway and now all over the world. He’s dedicated himself to becoming a professional storyteller and helping people share and tell their story. 99 Invaluable Gleanings from a Barber So the point is, as a businessperson the most important thing you can do right now is intimately connect with your prospects. Tell your story so they understand who you are and why you do what you do. If they understand your reason, they will connect with you and they will want to buy from you. And you will elevate your value significantly. So you’re not trading time for money anymore. They will see that you and your products clearly are differentiated from someone else and will want to be associated and connected with you because of your story. And I know this, because I’ve proven it time and time again. It’s one of my signature speeches that I’ve been doing now. I call it The Disruptasaurus. The disruptasaurus is my alter ego. Basically what I did was I modeled the TED eighteen-minute speech, and I told a little bit of my personal story and some of my successes in doing all these. We just finished our fifth consecutive multimillion dollar launch. Literally, a couple of days ago it ended, as of this moment. And I tell the story of what I call escalation with your customers. The goal is that any time you want to sell something, you want to focus on your clients’ and your customers’ success, because they need to understand and truly believe that you’re fully invested in them succeeding with your products and your services, or even without them, that you are about transformation, and ultimately what I can transcendence. You carry them and pass them through a five-stage process. The first one is hope. And that’s where you hook people. It’s sort of like they hope they can change or have a transformation of some nature in their lives, in their business, or whatever. Every product, every service, every book, every movie, every everything, has hope attached to it. And when you connect with a message that feels intimate and real and authentic with your prospect, they’ll raise their hands

100 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up and say, I want that. They will feel and be inspired, which is the second step—inspiration. You inspire them with stories of transformation. Other people have used your products and services. We call it social proof. It’s showing testimonials. Showing some sort of physical evidence that what you say is true and that who you are is real. And the third stage is motivation. That’s where someone says, “I want that. I need that. And I am going to invest in whatever that product and that service is.” So the three phases so far are hope, inspiration, and motivation. The fourth stage is when they actually implement, they use your product. They use your service. You consult with them. They read your book. They watch your movie, whatever it is. And they’re transformed somehow. They actually experience the same thing that they were inspired by after they were touched by that hope. And finally, in the fifth stage, and this is where economically we’re shifting now into a true social economy, into a transcendent economy, which is you turn your customers into ambassadors, advocates for your products and services. Because when other people connect with the story that you’re attached to and what’s associated with your product and your service and your character, they are going to want to have something to do with that too. They will transcend and become teachers and ambassadors and advocates. And that’s when your product, your service, and you can go viral. So the five stages are: hope, inspiration, motivation, transformation, and finally transcendence. I say this often, but I truly believe we’ve gone from a transactional economy to a reputation and relationship economy. And the secret, the key to selling, online or offline, is by increasing intimacy, increasing authenticity. 101 Invaluable Gleanings from a Barber In this day and age, you can’t get away or lie to people anymore. The online marketplace, look at what’s happening to the dictators. Look at what’s happening to Russia. Look what’s happened to the Middle East and Syria. You’ve got an entire culture where the kids are saying, “I won’t have any part of this lie anymore. I’m not going to participate in the abuse, the clear physical, mental, emotional, spiritual abuse that’s taking place on this planet anymore. I will have no part of it. And I am going to stand up,” and they are able to communicate with mobile devices. Get mobs together who raise their hands and raise their fists and say, “No longer. I will not participate in this lie.” And the dictators and the politicians who have been essentially ruining the hearts of this planet—and ultimately affecting every cell, every molecule that connects and binds us together—people won’t stand for this. It’s a disgrace. And so, I think now is the greatest time in human history where everyone has a voice. Virtually the entire populated planet has mobile access now, and Internet access of some nature. We all can be as one. It’s the first time in human history where every human being, almost, has a voice. And can raise their hands and raise their spirits and raise their minds and all be one. So there you go. That’s my big motivational speech of the day. But, I had to go with it. Jim Palmer: Very, very profound. Holy smokes, that was hugely, hugely powerful. Martin Howey: As usual, Mike has over-delivered. Way more than what we ever expected. I had no idea this was coming. So, this is absolutely blows me away, and your five-step process here is absolutely one of the things that I think will make this book not only inspirational, but something that’s actionable. So, thank you so much. Jim Palmer: Mike, it’s awesome. It’s been an honor and a pleasure to have you as part of this book. Thank you so much for 102 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up taking your time out here, right during the holidays to be part of it. We’re very, very much appreciative. Mike Koenigs: It was easy to do. All I had to do was talk. Martin Howey: The thing is, Mike, you said it’s easy to do—just talk. You talked about things that you’re living, so that’s what makes it so easy. It isn’t some abstract thing that you’re trying to come up with. It’s something that you actually do in your regular life, and it shows. So thank you so much. Mike Koenigs: It’s my pleasure. You know, anything I can do again to support you, and maybe when we finish here I’ll share a little idea that I have with you and for you too. On how I can support the book when it comes out. Jim Palmer: Awesome. Martin Howey: Love to, absolutely. Thank you. Jim Palmer: Mike, Happy New Year. God bless you. Thank you very much. Mike Koenigs: My pleasure, gentlemen.

Mike Koenigs is the “2009 Marketer of the Year” winner, entrepreneur, filmmaker, speaker, author, and he holds a patent in “Cross-Channel” Marketing Technology. He is the CEO, “Chief Disruptasaurus,” and Founder of Traffic Geyser and Instant Customer. His products simplify marketing for tens of thousands of small businesses, authors, experts, speakers, coaches, and consultants worldwide. His celebrity and best-selling author clients and friends include Paula Abdul, Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, Debbie Ford, John Assaraf from “The Secret,” Brian Tracy, Jorge Cruise, Dan Kennedy, and Harvey MacKay. Visit Mike at http://MikeKoenigs.com.

103 James Malinchak: Mind-Set, Skill Set, Get off Your Assets

Jim Palmer: Hey, Martin, our next guest expert, James Malinchak, is the premier speaker, trainer, big money speaker. He’s got such a wealth of information, and he’s one heck of a nice guy—one of the biggest hearts, most genuine people I know. It’s just an honor and a privilege to have him in this book. So, James, thank you so much for joining us. James Malinchak: My pleasure, Jim and Martin. It’s an honor to be with you guys. I’ve looked up to you guys so much for so long, and now to be interviewed by you guys, it’s a true honor. So thank you. Jim Palmer: Awesome. Martin Howey: You say you’re excited, Jim. You’re not nearly as excited as I am. Because James has been such an inspiration to me, and I’ve learned so much every time I’m with him. So I can’t wait to hear what he has to say to the questions that we have to ask him. Jim Palmer: Great. Well, let’s get to the first one. James, what’s the biggest challenge in your life, whether it be in your personal life or your business life? And then, how’d you handle it? James Malinchak: Without a doubt, it’s when I lost my sister, Vicki, to a brain tumor several years ago. I just don’t know how you, or if you, ever recover from something like that. At least I certainly haven’t. You lose somebody who is your soul mate, your best friend, and that’s the way Vicki was for me. You have a lot of friends, family members, and certain people who just resonate with you and touch you at a core level that I believe become sort of your soul mate in life. Soul mate doesn’t have to be a significant other. For me, it was my sister. I looked up to her. I admired her. When I got that call from my dad and he said my sister’s in the hospital with the right side of her body completely paralyzed, it 104 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up just shocked the heck out of me, because I was with her a few weeks before. We were perfectly fine, hanging out, a brother and sister, going to a movie, grabbing pizza, that sort of thing. Initially, we thought it was a pinched nerve in her hip or her back, because Vicki was a young person, thirty-eight years old. What else could it be? Then the first set of test results came back. It wasn’t a pinched nerve. And then we thought, well, maybe she had a stroke, because medical research was telling us that people of younger ages could get strokes. A second set of results came back. It wasn’t a stroke. A few days went by, and I couldn’t reach Vicki on the phone in her hospital room. I tracked her to another hospital room, and she answered the phone. I got all jazzed up and excited and I said, “Vicki, hey, how are you?” And she asked, “Did you hear?” I got even more jazzed up. I said, “What? They figured it out. That’s why you’re in a new room. They upgraded you. Everything’s cool. You’re coming home.” And she said, “No. I have a brain tumor. The doctors say I’m going to die in three months.” And, guys, I didn’t know what to say, because we never think it happens to us, or we never think it happens to someone we love and care about. And you’ll see why this was the most challenging thing to date in my personal life or business life I’ve ever experienced, and how it propelled me to be better as a person and as a business person. But when she said that to me, I tried to speak back to her, and nothing came out of my mouth. You hear people say they tried talking and nothing came out, and you figure, well, they just decided not to speak. No, I’m telling you. Sure as I’m talking to you right now, I was talking to my sister Vicki, but there wasn’t one sound coming out of my mouth.

105 Mind Set, Skill Set, Get off Your Assets I don’t know if my body was in shock or what it was, because I know I was talking. But there was no sound coming out of my mouth, and it was the scariest, freakiest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. And I hope I never experience again. I would never wish anybody ever experience something like that, because I can’t explain how that happened, because I know I was talking. Unfortunately, three and a half months later, Vicki went on and died. It just taught me some very valuable lessons about life. And so when you ask what is the most challenging thing that you’re facing or maybe has faced, without a doubt it’s that. Because, you know, if you look at business, you can always make more money. You could always get more customers, more prospects, more clients. But the one thing none of us can get more of is time. You can’t put an order in for time. You could try as much as you want, but next to breathing, that time and how you choose to spend that time is one of the most valuable choices I think we have. And I’m very blessed with what I have, but I’d give up everything I have, and I’d sleep in the streets the rest of my life, if it’d bring my sister back. And that’s just never going to happen. So for me, that has been the most challenging thing I’d ever gone through. Jim Palmer: Wow. I know what you mean about not speaking. When I was first diagnosed with cancer ten years ago, and the doctor gave me the prognosis, the same thing happened to me. I just couldn’t get any words out. Thankfully my wife was there, and she was able to carry on questions, make the next appointment, and do the rest of those things. But it is so mind blowing. And, Martin, you faced that news, and it’s like short circuit that makes you completely unable to talk.

106 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Martin Howey: Well, they say you’re supposed to go through these five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, and all the rest of it. And it didn’t happen with me. When I found out that I was diagnosed with stage IV cancer and he said you’ve got six to eight months to live, my first thought was, “So, what do we do? What’s the next step?” I don’t have time to be angry. I don’t have time to be upset. I don’t have time to blame God. I don’t have time to do any of that. It’s “where are we going to go right now? How do I fix this thing?” We’d been married, Cheryl and I, for thirty-nine years. We’ve got six kids and twenty-six grandkids, and I still have weddings to see. And I’ve got grandkids to see and great grandkids to see. So I’ve got plenty to do. And I’ve got my business and I’ve got so many things I need to do. And no time for any of this other stuff. So for me it was a real eye-opener. But it was a real motivator to let’s get moving. You don’t have time to drag your feet. James Malinchak: And I’ll tell you, for me, there was one other thing, and I’ve thought a lot about this. I prayed a lot about this, and I thought why has this affected me. I mean of course, it’s a sibling, a family member, your sister. Whoever is affected by this, you’re affected. But the reason for me it was so tough, and has been the biggest challenge, is watching what it did to my mom and dad. Because parents are never supposed to lose children, right? We lose our parents. But to watch what it did and how it took a strong man and strong woman and really just tore them to pieces, which is understandable because it’s your child. And to know that it doesn’t matter how much money you have, how much power, how much success, who your connections are. When you realize there’s absolutely nothing you could do to take that pain away from somebody you love and care about, especially when it’s your parents . . . How could I face

107 Mind Set, Skill Set, Get off Your Assets anything that would be more difficult of a challenge for me in my life? I lose a client. How tough is that compared to watching the pain of my mom and dad. I lose all my money. Who cares? I was on this reality TV show, Secret Millionaire, for ABC and had a competitor attack me after saying some nasty things. Who cares? I can overcome anything after seeing the pain that my mom and dad went through. And they kept going through life, and didn’t stop, even as painful as it was. Seeing a piece of their soul just gone . . . What do I have to whine, moan, and complain about in my life? So that’s why that’s the biggest challenge. Jim Palmer: I’m sorry. Go ahead, Martin. Martin Howey: Go ahead. That’s all right. Jim Palmer: I was just going to say—I’ve never told you this before—but when we first met (and my wife, Stephanie, hates when I do this), but I feel like I can size somebody up pretty quickly. She goes, “That’s not right.” I had a really good feeling when I first heard you speak live in front of your big audiences, James, and you shared that story. I instantly made the connection why you had the outlook and the whole demeanor and everything there is about you, because when you dealt with something like that, whether it’s personally or family or whatever, it completely changes your outlook. For me, I am such a different man than I was ten years ago. Almost nothing bothers me. Nothing upsets me. Nothing is important except the relationships that we have in life. Like you say, money, business, who gives a crap. It’s all about the relationships and the people that we love and the people that we can help. I never shared that with you, but I finally understood why you were different after hearing you share that story. James Malinchak: Well, thank you for that. I appreciate that. And kind of piggybacking on what you just said, it is also one of the reasons why I won’t associate with certain people in our industry, if you will, if that’s even a good way to say it. And that’s because I 108 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up don’t feel that they’re that same type of person that we are all, the three of us are, and that so many other folks are. I think they’re doing certain things for the wrong reasons. I think they’re definitely not doing certain things for the right reasons. And I just refuse to even be around those folks. Because there’s more to life than churning a sell, like some of these folks want to do. And I just will not be around those folks. I don’t want them around what we’re doing, or around our loyal followers. I don’t want any piece of what they do. And so I think when you go through a situation like what I went through, like what you, Jim, and you, Martin, went through, I think it also starts to make you look at who you’re really giving your time to, and do you want to be around folks who don’t have the same values and the same characteristics that you believe in for how you run your business? And I think that’s an important point as well. Martin Howey: I am really with you on that. When you go through a struggle like what we’ve all gone through, it really helps you get focused on what’s important in life, and what really isn’t important in life. And I watch, like you do, so many people doing the right thing for the wrong reason and it really made me stop and think. And like you, I’ve had to distance myself from some people that I’d considered to be pretty good friends. But unfortunately, the way they were doing things, and the reasons they were doing certain things, were not in alignment with where I was trying to go. And it made me very uncomfortable. I watched you do this last program, and I watched you so many times giving back, giving back, giving back, and then at the end you said, “I want to raise $100,000.” And you challenged people to open their wallets and give something. I watched people rush that back table. To me it was like, here’s a guy who really could care. I’ve known this for a long time, because I’ve heard your story about your sister many times, but when I saw again firsthand, because 109 Mind Set, Skill Set, Get off Your Assets it’s been a while since I’ve seen you, when I saw you again firsthand open up your heart and pour this thing out, not just one time, but throughout the entire program, it really gave me a whole new appreciation for you and who you are and what you stand for. And it inspired me. James Malinchak: Well, it’s an honor to hear you say that, Martin. And I appreciate it very, very much. Jim Palmer: You know, James, you’re one of the sharpest marketers and savvy business people that I know. It kills me that you’re a lot younger than I am. I’m a slow learner, I guess. But anyway, our economy’s been struggling for a couple of years. The three of us coach entrepreneurs and small-business owners, and there’s a lot of people struggling and got a couple of tires in the soft shoulder, as I like to say, and they’re spinning their wheels. They don’t know what to do. What one or two pieces of advice or wisdom or some strategy can you share that might help them make 2012 a more profitable year? James Malinchak: Well, I’m going to give three pieces. And before that, I just want to wrap something up that came to me, that I think would be a good exclamation point for what we were all just talking about, what Martin said, that there’s a lot more to life than the biz and the money, and all that kind of stuff. When I was going through what I went through with Vicki, there were three things that really helped me, and I’ve tried to maintain these three as a foundation. So if anybody is scared and thinking of giving up, or maybe going through a tough situation, maybe these three will give you some light on your situation. The very first thing it made me realize is life’s too short to ______, (and then fill in the blank). Life’s too short to moan. Life’s too short to bicker with people you love and care about. Life’s too short to complain about what you don’t have. I always keep that in perspective. Life’s too short to, and then I fill in the blank, whatever the blank is. 110 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up So I think we all have times, no matter how accomplished or successful you become, especially in business, we all have times where we kind of go back to that. Where we start to moan, complain, bicker, and the thing that snaps me out of it is, I always just say to myself, “Hey, man. Life’s too short to ______.” Fill in the blank. So, maybe that helps anyone who’s reading this. This is what I’ve used since my sister died in 1991, that’s life’s too short to have drama. Life’s too short to be around people you don’t want to be around who don’t have your same values or aren’t aligned with the way you think and treat people. The second thing is, always count your blessings. So many folks wish for things they don’t have. Man, some folks have more blessings than you give yourself credit for. My dad used to always say this: “If you have good health, safety, and peace of life, you’ve got everything you need.” And so I’ve always said that. If I have good health, safety, and peace of life for myself and my family and friends, people I love and care about, I could always get a job flipping hamburgers if I need to. It ain’t that big of a deal. So I always count my blessings. And be grateful for those blessings, by the way, too. I think we don’t express enough gratitude. You know, Martin, I got that wonderful thank-you note in the mail right after my boot camp from you. And, Jim, I got that amazing nice little gift for your pal Sonny Crocket. Jim Palmer: James and I big Miami Vice fans! James Malinchak: Thank you Jim, that’s one of my favorite restaurants. But I mean, that’s just being grateful. How long does it take to sit down and write a note? What does it do? That that stuff makes an impact. If you come to my house—Jim, you’ve never been here, right, to my house? Jim Palmer: I have not. No. James Malinchak: And, Martin, I know you haven’t. 111 Mind Set, Skill Set, Get off Your Assets Martin Howey: No. James Malinchak: But if you were ever at my house, right across from my office I have what I call my Appreciation Room. Some people have game rooms with pool tables, and I have a little pool in there, but I have shelves that hold probably four hundred, five hundred thank-you cards. And I call it my appreciation room, because I appreciate when someone appreciates something I’ve helped them with. And I’m a big note writer, just like you guys are, and I think a lot of folks don’t count their blessings to where they express gratitude toward others. So I always try to remember count your blessings. Show the gratitude. So, life’s too short to ______, count your blessings and show your gratitude. And the third thing—and I know everybody has different spiritual beliefs—but I’m just very big on prayer. If I didn’t have prayer, and I didn’t have a church to go to, and have a Bible to go to, and certain spiritual books that a pastor of mine over the years has written, I don’t know where else I would have turned to when I was going through that situation with my sister. Because that’s the lowest I’ve ever been in my entire life. You lose somebody you really love and care about, and what hurts even more is when they’re the sweetest, nicest, most loving person, never harmed an ant type of person. And you start thinking, man, we’ve got people out there doing bad things to other people, and here my sister never hurt a soul. Why? You don’t have any answers for that. And who do you turn to? For me, I turn to prayer. So, I don’t know if that helps anybody who might be going through a tough time, but those are three things that sort of serve as the anchor for me to help pull me out whenever I want to go into that old, woe is me type thinking. So I don’t know if you guys want to comment or, Jim, you wanted to move into the question?

112 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Jim Palmer: No. I like that. Cheryl Crow is an artist I like. There are two sentences in one of her songs. I think it says, “It’s not about having what you want. It’s about wanting what you have.” I think that’s so cool, because you have everything you need. In reality, we all have what we need. It’s nice to have some hopes, dreams, and desires. But realistically, I think about even the poorest person in the United States. I read they were like ten times better off than some of the people in other countries who really even have no drinking water. I don’t want to transition down that road because we’re starting to run short, but it’s true. Life is short, and we all have many blessings. Martin, unless you want to comment on that, we can go to the third question? Martin Howey: Let’s go to the third question. That’s fine. Jim Palmer: Excellent. James Malinchak: Okay. You had asked maybe some piece of advice or wisdom or strategy to help someone grow their business become more profitable. Well, you can build a house on a solid foundation or on shifting sand. It’s pretty obvious what we want is a solid foundation. So this is my core philosophy, and I’m writing an entire book based on these three. I think these are the three business secrets for success in every single niche, every single industry, every single business there is, and any personal success that you’re trying to create. Here are the three things. It’s mind-set. It’s skill set. It’s get off your assets. So the first is mind-set. I’m not talking about positive thinking. I am not talking about sitting in a lotus position on a couch, going um, um, um, hoping the window opens up and money flows through. That stuff doesn’t work, at least in my real world of business. I tried it. Martin, you’ve been in business, and Jim, you too, a lot longer than me. But, man, I’ll try anything once, so I tried it. I 113 Mind Set, Skill Set, Get off Your Assets didn’t see any customers walk through the window. I’ll tell you what did happen every month. Bills. They kept showing up. So I’m not talking about positive pie in the sky wishful hype that a lot of folks try to sell people on as a means to make money in a business. Mind-set is about how you think—consistently, habitually on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. Do you think like a six-figure entrepreneur if you’re below those numbers? Do you think like a seven-figure entrepreneur, if that’s what you’re striving for? If you want to do eight figures, are you thinking the way an eight-figure entrepreneur would be thinking? Are you acting? Are you putting those habits into place based on your thoughts? Do you train your entire staff to think like a seven- or eight-figure business would run, if that’s your goal? Or if your goal is a six-figure business, are you training your staff to think that way? Are you, yourself, are you doing what you need to do in order to think that way? Are you hanging around people who are thinking in that seven-figure way? Eight-figure way? So I think a lot of people don’t run businesses. I think they run hobbies. And they think they’re running a business. And I always say, look. There’s how you run the business, and then there’s how you really run the business. And I think that there’s a lot of misinformation out there about what it takes to really run a business when I come to your mind-set. So I often hear this—and I was a big proponent against it and I just started speaking out about it, maybe about three, four years ago—but there’s this thing about dream big and you’ll be successful. No you won’t. You’re just dreaming big. That’s all. If it’s pie in the sky, wishful thinking, all the dreaming in the world ain’t going to cut it for you. You’ve got to really be thinking like a top-notch businessperson.

114 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up And I know something that you two guys do for your clients. As a matter of fact, in my new book, I have a chapter—and I’m revealing this for the first time, guys, so here it is, history in the making. People say, “Just think positive,” right? “Just have a positive attitude. Have passion.” Well, one of the chapters in my book is called Your Passion Can Make You Broke, because everybody talks about “just have passion” and “jump and the net will appear.” You know, how many times I have jumped and crashed and skinned up my face, right? You know how many times I have followed my passion with no real training of my mind to think like a real businessperson and how many times I’ve lost money? Just like following the passion. I’m not saying passion is not important. You have to be passionate. But if you think passion is all that it takes . . . See, that’s what I call this wishful mind type of thinking. Okay. So mind-set is the very first business secret I want to get across. Look, the bottom line. Folks, we’ve got to get real, and we’ve got to realize we’re running a business. And every business is in business to make money. That’s it. There’s no other reason. It’s not the money that you’re really after when you’re an entrepreneur. It’s the freedom that the money provides, freedom to donate to a charity, freedom to get your parents a home, and the freedom to make the decision of what you want to do, how you want to live. I was just talking to a friend of mine earlier today, and the friend said to me, “Gosh. I wish I could be like you.” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” “I work for a company, so I don’t have the freedom you have. I can’t just take off and go somewhere when I want. I want to do that.” So my response was, “Let’s do it. Let’s find a way to create this for you, because that’s what you want. Why do you want to spend your life doing things you don’t want to do? Let’s figure out. 115 Mind Set, Skill Set, Get off Your Assets Will it be difficult? Will it be hard? Will we face some roadblocks? Yeah. But we’re going to start with our mind-set, and I’m going to get you to think like a six- and seven-figure entrepreneur, the right thoughts, the right habits. And let’s get this cranking for you.” So, I have those three business secrets, mind-set, skill set, get off your asset. Before I go into skill set, do you guys want to chime in on anything about mind-set? Jim Palmer: No. I’m with you. I’m completely in agreement. Martin Howey: Same here. James Malinchak: Okay. So then a lot of folks will teach you have to have a millionaire’s mind-set, or billionaire mind-set, or whatever. And that’s all great. That’s 100 percent correct, and I’m one of those people who are a proponent of it. But I learned early in my young life that just thinking about it doesn’t make it come about. You actually need the second key, if you will, which is a skill set. You’ve got to go out and get the necessary business skills to do what you want to do. You’ve got to understand you’re running a business. So you’ve got to go get the selling skills, the positive epical influence skills, the how-to-close sales skills, how to write copy skills, how to do a keyword search to drive more traffic to your blog or to your Web site. See, those are all learnable skills, and that’s what’s cool, the key word is “learnable.” It’s like riding a bike. We can learn all this stuff. We can learn just about any skill set out there. I was just with Lloyd Irvin, Jim, at the UFC fights out here. And I’m flying to DC this weekend to speak for all of his martial arts school owners. Lloyd, he greets me the same way. Now, I love Lloyd. He’s one of my dear friends. But the way he greets you could be questioned. He comes up—when I don’t know he’s coming—he comes from behind and puts me in a rear naked choke to say hello. 116 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Okay? Now, here’s my point. Every time he does this, I feel like my head’s going to pop off. And once I said, “Holy cow. I mean, Lloyd, you know exactly where to touch so I feel like my head’s going to explode.” And he said, “Well, yeah, but I could teach you to do that.” And that’s the way it is in business. See, I don’t know anything about the proper way to administer a rear naked choke, but it’s a learnable skill. And so are closing, selling, marketing, and copywriting. They’re all learnable skills. The difference is, the two of you, and me, and other accomplished entrepreneurs, we made a decision based on our mind-set to go seek out people to teach us how to do those skills, so we could do them for ourselves and it can bring us customers, clients, and money. So, it’s that second thing—skill set. The third business secret is get off your assets. I say there are two types of people, talkers or doers. And you don’t want to be an “I gotta” person. I gotta do this. I gotta do that. I gotta do this. I love what Jim Rohn, famous business philosopher, used to say. He always said, “You cannot hire other people to do your push-ups for you.” And bottom line is we’ve got to get off our butts and we’ve got to make it happen. Tony Robbins has a great line. He always says, “Take massive action.” James Malinchak has a line. “Get off your ass and do something, okay? Even if it’s not perfect, you could course- correct along the way.” So, those are my three business secrets—mind-set, skill set, get off your assets. Jim Palmer: Love it. Love it. Martin Howey: That makes it so easy, because there are just those three things. And there are other little subsets that go under each one of them. But those things are real easy to remember, and if you just remember those three major components, you can’t help but be successful, if you take action on each of those.

117 Mind Set, Skill Set, Get off Your Assets James Malinchak: One hundred percent. And that’s what you guys do, and I’ve learned so much from you guys over the years. So you guys have paved the way for young guys like me. So, thank you very much. Jim Palmer: I don’t know what Martin’s first paver looked like, but he’s been around a lot longer than even I have. Martin Howey: I was just going to say, Jim’s paved the way for young guys like me too. James Malinchak: Well, Martin sent me a thank-you recording, Jim, and it was recorded on eight-track. So I don’t know if that says anything. Jim Palmer: Mine was on one of those 78 LPs that were about a half-inch thick of plastic. Martin Howey: By the way, I got your thank you for my thank you, James. And I appreciate that very much. That’s an awesome card, very nice. James Malinchak: No. Thank you. I appreciate it. And we laugh about it, but I mean that sincerely. If it weren’t for learning from guys like you who’ve been doing this a lot longer than me and watching what you do . . . Jim, I see your Web TV show. I watch it all the time, especially the ones you put on Facebook. And, Martin, how many times I used to study your top line ads that you used to have ads all over the place. I met you. You were the nicest guy. You were one of the gurus, the few gurus I might add, who when I was starting out several years ago, was actually polite and kind and nice to me. You weren’t the guy who acted as if above other folks. Even though you were so much further above other folks. So, I don’t take that stuff lightly, and I don’t forget that stuff. I remember those things. Jim Palmer: Well, James, this has been an awesome half-hour with you. You’re one of the really good guys in, as you said, in this industry, so to speak. We just want to thank you for sharing, and you and your family are in our thoughts and prayers. I can’t 118 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up imagine. It may get easier day by day, but it’s something you’re obviously never going to forget and not deal with. We wish you all good things in 2012 and continued success helping hundreds, and probably thousands, of people by now who come to your live events and your trainings and so on. You’re a wealth of information, and I don’t know if you’ve ever added it up, but the number of people you must have touched, even in the last five or ten years, must be phenomenal. James Malinchak: I have actually never added it up, never even dawned on me to do that. I always say, “Look. I’m not out to hit a record.” I see some of these folks who want to do all that stuff. I remember when I couldn’t pay somebody to let me talk to them. I remember those days. And now to think that, man, we get six hundred people at a boot camp, or guys like you who want to interview me for something, or I get asked to even give a book endorsement to somebody. I’m like, really? You know, I’m still just a steel mill town kid from Monessen, Pennsylvania, that happened to do some things right. That’s all it is. Martin Howey: Well, you’re obviously doing a lot of things right, James. To be able to put the number of people into a seminar that you put in a multiday, four-day program like you did here recently, when everybody else is struggling trying to figure out how to sell just a handful of seats. You’ve obviously got to be delivering some value, and it’s recognized by a lot of people around. And this one, how to be a speaker, how many programs are there on how to be a speaker out there? And yet so many of them are struggling, and you’re filling these seminars. James Malinchak: Well, if I could just say a couple of things. I know we’re over time, but I don’t mind a couple more things, Jim, if this is okay, because it might help folks listening or reading the book. Jim Palmer: Yes. James Malinchak: You know, I decided there’s a very strategic move put in place several years ago. I saw all these speaker 119 Mind Set, Skill Set, Get off Your Assets seminars declining, or I saw what is known as a pitch fest sellathon brewing in most trainings. Specifically, I was looking at the speaker-type trainings. And I just got disgusted. I literally wanted to throw up. I’m not saying that you can’t have certain people offering certain programs, but to have twelve, fourteen, sixteen people. I just never wanted to go to that stuff. That was just a bad taste, and I literally said, if this is the way it’s got to be, I’ll go do something else. I’ll go run the sales department for a company, because I don’t want to be a part of this stuff. And then I made a decision. I have a very, very, very wealthy cousin, wealthier beyond belief. And he taught me something years ago. And the reason I’ve always admired him is he came from the same small steel mill town I grew up in. And he’s worked for everything he had. And he taught me something a long time ago. He said, “In every situation, you could be bitter or better. You can’t be both. Which one are you choosing?” And I thought, wow. I mean, this is a guy who does hundreds of millions of dollar deals, living by very simplistic core philosophies. And so here I am going through this, thinking, I’ll get out of the industry. I’ll do something else. I said, “Hey. You could be bitter or better. You can’t do both. What are you going to do?” And I decided to make it better. I decided to try to make the speaking training better. And I said, “I am going to teach people.” And my belief is when you run a seminar, you teach. Do you offer certain programs, continuing education where people could be better? Absolutely, no problem with that, but to turn it into this pitch fest sellathon stuff, I just said, “I don’t want to be a part of that stuff. I hate that stuff.” So I said, “I’m going to put a seminar on where, when they come to mine, they don’t ever want to go to another speaker training ever again.” Now, one of the things I created was a visual brand, big money speaker. Well, first of all, I created a positioning brand, and 120 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up my whole positioning was, “When you’re really ready to make big money as a speaker, you come to me. Go to everybody else, then when you’re ready to make money, you come to me. I’ll show you how to monetize your story, your wisdom, your how-to advice, your expertise for whatever niche you’re in.” So then I created a visual, because most people try to create a brand. You don’t need a brand, you need a positioning, something that makes you different, something that makes you unique. One of the little secret things I do with all my clients, is I want people to have a visual. So if I say “rich dad poor dad,” you can see a rich dad, you can see a poor dad. If I said to you “chicken soup for the soul,” you could see chicken soup, you could see a soul. It’s a visual. That is the greatest type of positioning—that will help you to evolve into a brand—that you could ever come up with. So for me, I created “big money speaker.” You could see big money. For a long time, I used to lean on a big money stack. And people would say, “Oh, man, the guy’s all about making money.” And I’m like, “No. If you understood anything about what I was doing, I’m creating a visual in your head so you never forget me.” So, big money and speaker, you could see that. So I strategically created all this several years ago and decided I am going to really teach folks. And my whole goal is “once you come to mine, I don’t want you to ever go to anybody else’s. And when you do go to someone else’s, I want you to be so dissatisfied for the lack of nuggets that you’re taught on a per- minute basis that you can’t wait to come back to mine.” And I think that’s how you serve a client or a customer, with that in mind, whether they buy anything from you or not. You have that intent to really give a lot of great stuff, impact them, and connect them with other great folks, because I’ll tell you something else we do that I don’t know most seminar folks do: There are certain people I won’t let come to my seminars.

121 Mind Set, Skill Set, Get off Your Assets This is my seminar, my business, my loyal followers. I only want people who I believe have great values that we’re trying to, I guess, promote is a good way to say it. And I want great people there who are going to be there and serve and add energy and value to the place and to other people’s lives and not take it away. So those are just some strategic things that I’ve always adhered to, and people are shocked when I tell them they cannot come to my seminars. They’re like, “We’ll pay your fee.” I’m like, “I don’t care. I don’t want your fee paid.” They’re like, “But you don’t understand. We want to come to yours.” And I’m like, “You don’t understand. I don’t want you there.” So thank you for saying that, Martin. And we’re very proud of what we’ve done. And what we’ve done is pretty much tried to own a category. Martin Howey: Well, you should be proud. I’ll tell you, James— and I don’t know where I got it. I think I know now because you just told me—I’ve used this “bitter or better” when somebody’s talked about my health situation. I say, “Well, what are my choices, right? I could either be bitter about it or better about it. I can’t be both.” I didn’t know where I got that, but I must have gotten it from you. And I will now give you the credit for that, because I’m sure that’s where I got it. But I’ve used that so many times, and it’s impacted so many people, because they’re sitting around, the woe is me kind of a thing, and it could be a health problem. It could be a business problem. It could be a personal problem, a relationship problem, whatever. But you do have that choice. And you have demonstrated how to take something and make it way better in a very, very crowded marketplace. You’ve demonstrated that by how you fill your seminars. And have passed the value on. I wasn’t kidding earlier when I said the value that came out of that program was, head and shoulders, above any other program 122 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up that I’ve ever seen on the same or similar topic. And it was nonstop, giving, giving, giving, and then at the end challenging people to come up with something that they could do to help other people who are less fortunate. And so you do have a right to be proud of what you’ve done, and the results really show. Jim Palmer: Let me jump in here and summarize if I can. The last ten minutes, the extra stuff here, has been worth the price of the book alone. So, James, I guess what we’re trying to say is one of the reasons you’re doing so well is you operate your business with integrity and you always over-deliver on value. That’s a winning combination in any niche, as you said. So, James, thanks again for being part of this book. It’s an amazing book as we’re coming in on the final pages here. And we’re so blessed to have you as part of it. Thank you so much. James Malinchak: Oh, it’s my honor. Are you kidding me? I’m honored to be in anything with you guys. Jim Palmer: Awesome. Martin Howey: Thank you very much.

James Malinchak is one of America’s Top Motivational and Business Speakers and is the “Behind-the-Scenes Go-To Marketing Expert” for top speakers, authors, information marketers, celebrities, sports coaches, and entrepreneurs. James has been called “America’s #1 Speaker Trainer.” Since 2003, his BIG MONEY SPEAKER BOOT CAMP™…Millionaire Secrets for Getting Highly Paid Sharing Your Mission, Message & Story™ has helped aspiring, beginning, and experienced speakers and entrepreneurs become Big Money Speakers.® James was Profiled and Featured on Season #1 of the Hit ABC TV Show, Secret Millionaire. Visit James at www.BigMoneySpeaker.com.

123 Stephanie Frank: Those Who Are Flexible Triumph

Jim Palmer: Hey, Martin, our next guest expert is someone we know well, the very highly successful and super talented entrepreneur, Stephanie Frank, who is the author of the best-selling book The Accidental Millionaire, which is a phenomenal book. I read it twice. It was originally how I came to know Stephanie. And just some of the sharing that she’s done in that book from her personal life, but also the business-building strategies, was pretty amazing. So it’s quite a blessing to have you join us today, Stephanie. How are you doing? Stephanie Frank: Oh, you know what? I am great, Jim and Martin. I’m so excited to be here today. Jim Palmer: Awesome. You know, one of the things that we are doing in this book is we’re talking to different people, because we all face challenges in life, and some of those obstacles feel very overwhelming to us until we hear what some of the other people are going through. So what I wanted to ask you first off is, what was one of the biggest challenges that you faced in your life, or maybe even your business, something that maybe took you off the rails a little bit, and how did you handle it? Stephanie Frank: That’s such a great question, and I was thinking that the premise of this book is really a lot about, as you said, problem solving, and I love that whole concept. When you’re out of problems, you’re out of life, really. That’s how life should be—you should go through life as a problem-solver. And I definitely have done that. Even in my earlier career, I was a professional hacker, a professional person who would go in and solve computer problems and misbehaving computers. Today, I solve human problems and misbehaving humans. So to me, it’s not that big of a jump. 124 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up I’ve been in business now for a little over twenty-seven years and had two major careers, like I said, one in computers and one as an author and a speaker. When you asked the question about the biggest challenge, I have to say there have been so many challenges along the way, it’s hard to pick just one. But what I can say is I realize now, looking back, that one of the biggest challenges that I had, that I didn’t even realize that I had, especially starting out, was the need to control everything, the need to “be in charge” and be the one who pretty much says how everything happens and how it goes, and so on. I remember being a very young entrepreneur with this need to control everything. I had started my first business when I was nineteen years old, made my first million at twenty-two, and it kept going from there. So we were probably at about the $3 million mark when I was trying to still control everything. And I remember walking onto the salesroom floor one day. I had four salespeople, and I told a salesperson that he was doing his job wrong. And he said to me, “Well, what do you think I need to do?” And I proceeded to tell him. He was a much better salesperson than I was, but that didn’t matter, because I was the boss and I’m going to go in there with my ego and I’m going to tell him what to do. So I did that, and I did it three times. After the third time, he stood up and said to me, “If you tell me that I’m doing it wrong one more time, I’m out of here.” I’m like, yeah right, what are you going to do, walk out? Well, guess what? My ego got in the way, and the fourth time I did it, that guy stood up and walked out. And I remember thinking, Maybe you’re not such a hotshot after all. But of course, at the time, I couldn’t really admit that. Fast forward twenty-some years. I’ve been humbled a lot along the way, and I think my biggest lesson or my biggest challenge has been that—the need to control. But I have mastered it to the point now where I allow things to happen. I work with 125 Those Who Are Flexible Triumph teammates and partners and people who are just phenomenal at what they do. And I don’t have the control anymore. We watch the outcomes, certainly. We’re watching the bottom line. But I don’t ever tell anybody how to do things anymore. I don’t have the need to control everything. We just look at everything as a problem to be solved. Either we’re making our numbers or we’re not. If not, how do we solve the problem. So there’s no emotion in it anymore. There’s no blame. No judgment. There’s just superior teamwork and superior partnership. That’s it to begin with. I don’t know how far you want to go with that. Jim Palmer: The first thing you said, I absolutely wrote down. I loved it. It says, “When you’re out of problems, you’re out of life.” I mean, that is so true. You should trademark that. That’s your next book title right there, I would say. I think the need to be controlling and in charge is something that most entrepreneurs deal with. But it’s funny. The other thing you said is you’ve been humbled. I’ve been humbled many times, and as we get older, we can look back on all the areas and the times in our lives when we were humbled and recognize it as a good thing now, though, it really sucked when we were going through it. Stephanie Frank: That’s right. Jim Palmer: It’s really huge. Martin, I’m going to turn it over to you. Martin Howey: I think that was awesome. I really like the idea that you either know your numbers or you don’t, and you’ve removed the emotion from it. And really, that takes it to a whole new level. Now you can look at it logically and rationally, and you don’t have to get all upset about things. You either make it or you don’t. And now you can figure out what you need to do and how to move forward, without getting all upset, and upsetting other 126 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up people’s feelings and their egos, and having them walk out on you, like what happened to you. Stephanie Frank: Yeah, exactly. It flows over that concept. We call it facts versus feelings, how we teach it here. Is it a fact or is it a feeling? I’ve noticed that a lot of entrepreneurs really run their business by their gut, or their intuition, or how they’re feeling that day. And while that’s an important part, of course, of direction and strategy, it’s not the only thing by any means, as you both well know. There has to be a tactical, very specific way that you run a business. Otherwise, you might as well just call it a hobby, if you’re going to run by “Oh, my gosh, I’m so passionate about it.” We laugh, internally. A lot of people who come to us are suffering from what I call passion addiction, and they’re so excited about their project or whatever it is, that the ship is sinking. The boat has holes in it, but everybody is ignoring the holes, and even though the ship is sinking, it’s like, “Yes, but if we just row faster, it’s going to work.” So we plug up a lot of holes with people, to make sure that they can move forward with passion in their lives but without getting that emotion in the way, because emotion makes for some really strange and crazy decisions. Jim Palmer: Stephanie, you said that you started your first business at nineteen and then had your first million at, I think you said, twenty-three? Stephanie Frank: Yeah, at twenty-two I was running a million- dollar business, and that one went from one million to two, to three, to four, to five. It sounds really good on the outside, but let me pull back the curtain for a minute, because I was a college dropout. I did not go to business school. Not that business school would even teach you the things that I teach people today in terms of behavior. But even though we were very successful financially, I’ve got to tell you I was not balanced personally, and I had horrible 127 Those Who Are Flexible Triumph relationships. I had very little time for friends. I was sleeping four hours a day. I was doing most of the things wrong, because here I was trying to control everything, as if I had to do everybody’s job, and it made for some really long days. I was really, really burned out. I’ve got to tell you, I think that was one of those humbling lessons. I was in a space where I was in an abusive relationship. It was one of the most ironic things I think I could ever imagine. The ironic thing about it was that I would go to work during the day—this was in the computer industry—and my customers were all police departments. I had 120 police departments in Wisconsin that were my clients. I would travel around to police departments with my bruises covered up, and then I’d go home at night and be in front of a physically abusive person. It was so ironic, and so out of balance, and just so disintegrous in what was going on. We were making a lot of money, but I had no life. I was working in police departments, and I was being bruised and hurt. It made no sense. I remember very vividly. I’ve had a couple of catalysts in my life, but that was obviously one of them, a catalyst to stop one day and say, “You know something? This is not what I signed up for. This is not what being an entrepreneur, being a business owner, is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be a life-giving business, and this is life sucking.” And that’s what really started me on the path to make a huge commitment to do it properly. I didn’t even know what that meant at the time. But I left that business, and I literally started over with no clients, with no list, with no money, basically. I left the relationship. I completely started over. I had one major commitment, and that to life balance, and putting systems into place, so that I didn’t need to do everybody’s job.

128 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up I had to figure out how to hire the right people, how to manage those people properly, and how to be strategic in my business, because I was one of those feely people—“Let’s do this; let’s do that.” I made this huge commitment, and even though I made the commitment, I didn’t yet have the education. So that’s what started me on the path of leadership and human behavior. Systemic work was always a part of my business anyway, because I was a professional troubleshooter. That business, by putting those commitments into place, went from zero to $10 million in less than three years. That’s where “Accidental Millionaire” came from. I inadvertently put together a system, out of that strong commitment and desire for life balance that gave me the time, money, energy, fun, travel, and all the things that I really wanted to do lifestyle- wise. That’s what was chronicled in the book. So in 2000, I sold that business, and honestly, I was just going to retire. I wasn’t going to do anything. Then I realized there were so many entrepreneurs, 18.5 million self-employed people in this world. Fifty-one percent of them never make more than a thousand dollars because they don’t know what they’re doing. The SBA did a study and found that the number one reason that small business fails is because of a lack of entrepreneurial skill. I thought, well, I have the entrepreneurial skill, not just tactically, but behaviorally and strategically. So today, that’s what we do. We teach people how to overcome those challenges, like how to hire without giving up control, how to be strategic in the business, how to do the work in facts versus feelings, and how to manage when strong feelings do come up. Does that make sense, you guys? Jim Palmer: It makes incredible sense. Wow. Stephanie, I want to tell you, of course you know this now, but I read your book. It was recommended to me. But in addition to the great business stuff, 129 Those Who Are Flexible Triumph which I was looking forward to, the depth of which you shared about your personal struggles, like you just did now, really touched me. That’s what made me reach out to you. We interviewed Adam Urbanski, and he shared something really incredible. He said, “You know what? When you share, you care. And that’s how other people can learn.” So being upfront, and sharing that, I’m sure it takes a lot of nerve, and you may have even had to think about it. But that’s the way that you impact lives. I just want to thank you for that. It’s just an incredible story, and whew, I was blown away when I read your book. It was awesome. Stephanie Frank: Ah, thank you. Thank you. You’re welcome. Just a little insider thing on that—the first version of that book was all strictly business, and I sent it off to my editor, and she sent it back to me. She didn’t even look at it. She said, “This is garbage. Anybody can write this book. Go write your story.” I said, “Oh, no. Who wants to hear all this up and down and the drama?” And she said, “Everybody does. Go write your story.” That’s what I did. So there it is. Jim Palmer: That’s awesome. Martin Howey: That’s great, yeah. Jim Palmer: So it’s now the very early days of January. Our goal is to have this book out in early February. I met with my publisher/printer this morning, and he’s like, “Seriously?” We’re starting to infringe upon that deadline a little bit, but it’s going to happen. You know, our economy has been struggling for a couple of years, and it’s been a rough road for many entrepreneurs. Martin and I, very much like your own business, we talk to and counsel different business owners. So I want to ask you if you could share maybe one piece of advice or wisdom, or maybe a business growth strategy, that may help people have this become a more profitable year for them.

130 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Stephanie Frank: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are many. I’ve been through two recessions now, and retooling during a recession is imperative for some businesses. Martin certainly knows about this too. I was watching a TV show the other day about parade floats. And the woman being interviewed said, “At the beginning of the year, we had two multimillion-dollar contracts, and here we are at the end of the year, and we’re out of business.” The lesson there was that they could have learned the lesson of flexibility. In that case, what that business was doing is they were doing work the way that they’ve always done it, hoping that the economy would change and hoping that circumstances would change. And when those things didn’t change, they became a “victim” of economic conditions. Those businesses that are trying to do things the same way that they did, at the same price point, with the same delivery system, with the same sales system, are probably not going to make it. So the way I counsel my clients is to really take a look at what people are asking you for, because the thing that you’re most probably resisting is probably the direction that you should take. I’ll give you two examples of that. Four years ago, I was asked to do a speech to the National Speaker’s Association. It was a last-minute thing, about info product models. I got the speech, because I was frustrated with the fact that they were teaching all these marketing tactics. I said, “That’s the third step. You’ve first got to organize your system—you’ve got to have a model—and then you’ve got to have a funnel, before you have a marketing plan.” All of these speakers are out there trying to sell stuff who don’t know what they were selling. I showed them my data models and how I teach my systems, and they said, “Can you speak about that?” So I did. And after the NSA speech, I had twenty-five people come up to me and say, “I want to work with you.” 131 Those Who Are Flexible Triumph Well, I wasn’t teaching this. It was just something I do in my business. I said, “Well, okay. Yeah, I’ll teach you how to pull your systems out of your head, and how to document it, and how to get sounds bites, and all this stuff.” It was a totally new direction that has now become my signature program, called the Two Day Turnaround. I never, ever would have come up with that in my head had I not been aware and awake, going, “Wait a minute. These people are asking for something. We’ll add that in.” I have a client right now, he’s trying to go in one direction as a software developer, but what’s happening is he’s getting asked all over the place to basically do something different. He’s strongly resisting it, saying, “No, I’ve got my blinders on. I’m going in this other direction.” Slowly but surely, we’re working together to say, “But look, here’s what the marketplace is asking for.” It’s the old “tell them what they want and give them what they need: philosophy. So flexibility is key in this economy. And really, an awareness of what people are asking you for requires you sometimes to put aside a little bit of that yes/but passion. It will always lead back around to giving you what you need from the emotional and the passionate side. Martin Howey: I love that. I love the idea that you paid attention to what your market was telling you and didn’t even know it was your market. It was just people you were talking to. But you figured out very quickly that there’s a product that you can turn into a profit center, just from listening to people who were in your audience. Stephanie Frank: Yes, and I’ve been doing it now for four years with no marketing, almost entirely on referral. I send an e-mail once in a while, but that’s about it. It’s constant, continuous revenue that I never would have had, that I’ve now had for over four years.

132 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Jim Palmer: You know, before I take on a coaching client, they always say, “I want to have a more profitable business.” So the question I ask them is, “Are you prepared to have, and run, a business that looks completely different than the one you have now, six months or a year from now?” It really catches them off guard, because in most cases, they do need to retool and offer something different. Like a small-business owner, if you own a jewelry store, all he wants to do is sell more jewelry. He’s not interested in creating wealth by figuring out different ways of recurring income, and things like that. “I just want to figure out how to sell more bracelets.” Being fast and agile and flexible, as you say, Stephanie, is very important, being open to doing things differently, which I think ties back to your original point about passion. It sounds like this computer software guy is so passionate, he’s so convinced what he has is the homerun, and maybe it is. But a lot of other, savvy people are saying, “Yeah, but this is not what’s being asked for, and here’s a greater need over here.” I think people who are more flexible are probably more profitable. Stephanie Frank: I would agree with that, especially in this marketplace. Let’s face it, we are not Fortune 500 companies. We can shift on a dime. As a matter of fact, one of my mentors, Bill Bartmann— you guys probably know him—I watched him three years ago. We were talking about what he was doing with his business. At the time, he was advertising in USA Today every week for the Bartmann Business Institute. I’m sure you guys remember that. Martin Howey: Right. Stephanie Frank: He was busy doing that. This was in July, and he said, “By September, my entire business will change. I can feel it coming.” This was before the crash. He said, “We’re going back to exactly where I started and how I built my billion-dollar business. But I’m going to do it differently this time.” 133 Those Who Are Flexible Triumph Bill Bartmann, for those of you who don’t know who he is, made a lot of money in the credit collections area. He had 3,000 employees, and he didn’t want to go back and build that kind of a business. So he revamped his business between July and September to be a partnership model, going back into credit and collections, but teaching other people how to do that, how to be profitable, and taking a piece of each person’s business. He’s now grown quite huge again. But I watched him just change on a dime, and that was very inspirational to watch a billionaire do that. I have another billionaire mentor who did a very similar thing three years ago, and said that they’re not attached to the one thing that they’re doing. They really want to help people, and they don’t really care how it happens. They just want to help people. It’s very interesting. It’s really not about the money at that level. Jim Palmer: Exactly. Well, Stephanie, we need to wrap it up. Again, thank you so much. This was an awesome interview. Thank you for sharing some amazing and inspirational things with our readers. We’re just thrilled and blessed to have you as part of this project. So thank you so much. Stephanie Frank: Thanks to both of you. It’s a wonderful project, and I support it wholeheartedly. Martin Howey: Well, we’re just excited, Stephanie, to have you on board, and we need to get together sometime soon and see what else we can do together. I know you’ve got a lot of things cooking this year, as both of us do. I know that working together in various ways, we can bring a lot of value to other people. Stephanie Frank: Absolutely. Jim Palmer: Take care, Stephanie. Thanks so much. Stephanie Frank: And thanks to you guys.

Stephanie Frank, human behavior expert and Best-Selling Author of The Accidental Millionaire, helps people master their lives so 134 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up they can enjoy more of everything—time, money, laughter, and love. Stephanie has helped thousands of individuals and organizations around the world be more efficient, productive, and streamlined so they can get more of what they want, faster than ever. She has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company Magazine, SelfGrowth.com, Fox News, and hundreds of other media outlets. For a FREE digital copy of Accidental Millionaire, visit www.StephanieFrank.com.

135 Jim Palmer: Make the Most of Second Chances

Jim Palmer: You know, Martin, I had a scary situation ten years ago, what I call my season of crisis. As you know, in October 2011 I celebrated both ten years in business and ten years as a cancer survivor. So I’d like to tell you a quick story, well, hopefully it will be quick. But I’m focusing on the whole taking charge and taking action that you were talking about, Martin, because in a similar way that’s what I did back then. Let me give just a little bit of recap. Up to July 2000 I’d had a pretty successful career, it progressed nicely and I made good money. I’d spent many years in retail as a store manager and then as regional manager. Next I was part of a management team that franchised a small chain and we grew that business from 14 stores to 80 stores in 18 states. Initially I created the franchise training program but I also did the marketing for the company and over the years I rose to become director of national franchise operations. After ten years there I was then recruited to start a new marketing association for chains of independently owned music stores, which was very successful. So, basically, I had done pretty well in my career. Then suddenly in July 2000 I lost my job. At the time I was vice president of marketing for a training company, and the owner walked in to my office, talking in short sentences. He sits down at my desk and goes, “Jim, I can’t believe all the stuff you can do. You’re so talented.” And I thought to myself, Okay that feels nice. And then he goes, “So I have no problem knowing that you’re going to be okay.” And I went, Uh-oh. And he goes, “We’re eliminating your job. Your services are no longer needed.” I said, “Really, when?” He said, “Pretty much today.” I thought, Wow. So I drove home, Martin, and I was scared witless. I didn’t know what to do. I actually thought I’d done pretty well for 136 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up myself. My wife was able to be a stay-at-home mom all these years and raise our four kids. But I found myself suddenly without a job for the first time since I was fifteen years old. Then, what I thought would be just a couple months of fielding multiple lucrative job offers, turned into over a year of real anguish. It really devastated my self-confidence, and my self- esteem was ground up into powder. Then in August 2001, 13 months later, I was really trying to figure out what I was going to do. I was trying to take charge of my life which was out of control. I was networking, reading every newspaper, applying for jobs online, and being creative as much as I could, but nothing was happening for me. I had come close to good jobs over the course of a year, three different times. I’d come from this big pool of applicants and get whittled down to being one of the top two or three for the position. Then I wouldn’t get it. So, as I said, my self-esteem and confidence was really in the toilet. On the first Tuesday of August 2001, I was standing in my kitchen thinking, What am I going to do to make today different? I’ve got to find a way to turn this thing around. We had blown through all the savings we had and we were really racking up some serious debt keeping the family afloat. And then the phone rang. I remember this clearly. It was 8:58 in the morning, and with caller ID, I said, “Oh, crap.” I saw that it was my doctor. He said, “Jim, it’s Dr. Gottlieb.” I said, “Yeah, I know.” He said, “I’m really sorry to tell you this, but it is cancer. It’s malignant. It’s probably stage II, but it could be stage III, and you need to see a surgeon right away.” I said, “Okay.” He said, “Jim, I mean right away.” And I said, “Okay, I get it.” I hung up the phone and I thought how am I going to tell my wife this one now? How much more can she handle? She had 137 Make the Most of Second Chances gone back to work. Actually, she remembers this too, because that was her first day at her new full-time job, that specific Tuesday. She had to tell her boss, “I can’t come to work tomorrow. I’ve got to take my husband to see a surgeon.” So she was worried about that. We went to the doctor, and I really didn’t even know the term melanoma. I’ve heard of skin cancer. And I remember telling my family and my brothers and sisters. They said, “Oh, it’s skin cancer. That’s nothing. You’ll be fine.” Okay, I’ll be fine. And then, Martin, I was in a different place, because it happened so fast. Like you, I needed some help right away—this doctor told me, “Right away!”—and I called and I did my best sales job ever. I said, “I’m coming in tomorrow. What time do you want me?” “Well, the doctor doesn’t have an opening.” “No, I’m coming in tomorrow. What time?” I really just badgered an appointment. Then I’m sitting there on the metal exam table, and my wife, Stephanie, is sitting in a chair next to me. The doctor goes, “Well, it’s melanoma, as you know. It’s either stage II or stage III. We won’t know which until after the surgery in a few weeks.” I said, “Okay, what’s the difference?” He said, “Well, with stage II the average survival rate past five years is 80 percent.” I thought, That’s pretty good odds. I didn’t say it out loud, but that’s what I was thinking in my head. And I said, “What if it’s stage III?” He said, “The average survival past five years is about 50/50.” Martin, I felt like I got hit with a baseball bat in the chest. I have two boys and twin girls, and my girls were only thirteen at the time. I quickly added thirteen and five, and that would have been eighteen, obviously. And I said, “Oh, no. This can’t stand. What do we have to do?” And, long story short, my very skilled surgeon removed the melanoma. My sentinel lymph nodes were removed and found to 138 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up be clear, so thankfully it was not stage III, which was great news and a huge blessing. But I remember I came home and was recovering in October, getting my strength back after the surgery. When the doctor, after a few weeks of looking at the biopsy, told me that I was considered cancer-free, I was elated and very relieved. So now in my mind I went back from fighting a potential life-threatening thing to What am I going to do to support my family? And Martin I just started praying. But this time, instead of praying a job I began praying for wisdom and guidance. And it quickly became very clear to me that I was supposed to start a business. I immediately said, “Yes, that’s what I want to do.” And that’s how I started my business in October 2001. I immediately felt a sense of relief because I finally had a job again; I just didn’t have any income! So I knew I had to fix that part of it. But you know, there are many lessons about taking action. Let me back up and recap because, remember, I said a little while ago this is probably a man thing. Well, growing up, I loved to be tan. We went to the beach every summer. I loved to be tan even up to the point where I was diagnosed with cancer. If you came over to my house on a Saturday, I’d be out cutting my lawn in shorts with no shirt. I loved to have the supposedly healthy look and healthy glow. So it was a Saturday afternoon. My wife, Stephanie, was sitting outside. I finished mowing, and she said, “What’s that thing on your back?” “Oh, I don’t know.” I couldn’t even see it, Martin, so just said, “That’s nothing.” In effect I said, “It’s okay. Let’s go to lunch,” right? But then one day I was building something. I’m kind of like Tim the Tool Man Taylor. I can do things, but I usually hurt myself! Well, I hurt my leg and had to go to the doctor to get it looked at. And he said, “Well, that’s nothing. That’s just a bad broken blood vessel.” Which only looked horrible, right? But he 139 Make the Most of Second Chances said, “That thing on your back, we’ve got to get that checked out.” So he sent me to a dermatologist, and he removed it and sent it to the lab. Then five days later is when I got that phone call that I had melanoma. So that’s how that started. I truly think it was an act of God that I hurt myself. I’m sure there are some women who also say, “It’s okay. Let’s go to lunch.” But men and women—you’ve got to get checked out. It’s all about early detection. For the first five years, I had to go back to the doctor every single quarter. Every ninety days I’d have to go back for a complete head-to-toe skin check. And because I actually had melanoma two more times since then, I still go back every six months and will for the rest of my life. But now it’s always caught during my checkups. As I said, it’s all about early detection. So that’s another lesson learned from Martin’s and my stories—get checked out and get it out early, because your chance of survival greatly increases with early detection. That’s my story, Martin, about how I had to face that ugly phone call, took immediate action, and then starting my business. I took control that bad incident. Martin Howey: Jim, that’s a great story. But one thing that I don’t want to minimize, that I don’t want people to overlook, and that is your wife said, “What’s that thing on your back?” You dismissed it. Jim Palmer: I did. “I’m okay. I can go to lunch.” Martin Howey: How many times do the guys—I’m one of them— dismiss what our wives tell us? And all they’re doing is looking out for you. So I say to the spouses who may be reading this, make sure that if you see something that your husband, wife, or your significant other can’t see that’s on their back or wherever, and you point it out to them, make sure they take it seriously.

140 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Don’t let them dismiss it, because there was a lady in the hospital room next to mine who had melanoma on her back, and they tried to cut it out. They thought they got it, but what they got was the surface part. Inside, it had continued to grow. And they thought she was pregnant, since she was a thin lady. She had a tumor the size of a soccer ball. Jim Palmer: Oh, my gosh. Martin Howey: She survived for about two months, and then she passed away. That was from melanoma on her back, and they had thought they got it. If somebody would have pointed that out to her sooner, or she would have found a way to detect that sooner, maybe they could have gotten it when it was still very small. So I can’t minimize the fact that when you see something on somebody you love or somebody you know, make sure they take that seriously. And whoever you are, don’t be too proud to be able to say, “Hey, you know what? You’re right. I probably ought to check this out.” Jim Palmer: You know, suddenly when you become aware of something, you start seeing it everywhere. And this will help pinpoint the time frame for some folks. That Tuesday I got the call, and then I, obviously, shared with my family and made calls to my brothers, sisters, and parents, everybody said, “Oh, don’t worry about it. Melanoma’s nothing.” The next morning, that Wednesday morning when we turned on the news, that’s when they announced that Maureen Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s daughter, died of melanoma. And of course Jim Johnson, the defensive coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, died of melanoma, and it was like oh, goodness gracious. But you know when we started this book, Martin, we said we’re going to try to keep centered around three things. What was the biggest challenge? How did you handle it? So I think we’ve started there. What did you learn that can help others? 141 Make the Most of Second Chances I started telling everybody. I even got in contact with cousins that you see once a decade at a funeral or a wedding. One of those cousins sent me a very nice card and said, “Jim, because you told me what happened, I had a melanoma removed off my leg. It was very early, but I probably never would have had it checked out.” So I think as human beings, we need to share some of what goes on in our personal lives. And some of it, as you know, Martin, I don’t think we like to share, because we don’t want it to be seen as either a weakness or something you did wrong. You and I have been in mastermind groups. When you’re masterminding with other business owners, that’s a safe environment, because you can talk about things you’ve done well, and things that didn’t go right, so other people can learn. But I think, in general, we don’t like to talk about mistakes, or challenges, or boy, I really screwed up and lost $20,000. But, there’s so much to be learned from people who went down the trail before you. Martin Howey: Well, you’re absolutely right. We both have a couple of friends—Ray Edwards, a wonderful copywriter, and David Frey, a great marketer—and those two men have been really pushing me to write a book. One day while was talking to David, I said, “David, I just don’t know if I have time to do that. It’s a lot of work to put a book together.” He said, “Martin, how many e-mails have you gotten from people saying, ‘Thank you very much for telling your story, or allowing your story to be told. I went in and got my colonoscopy and they found a couple of polyps and I got them removed. Thank goodness I got them removed. I’m okay.’ Or, ‘They found a precancerous polyp and they got it cut out.’ How many of those have you gotten?” I said, “Lots.” He said, “Hundreds. I know. You’ve told me, ‘I’ve gotten e-mails, and Facebook posts, and phone calls.’ Think of how many 142 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up people you’ve touched. If you wrote this book and it only helped one person, it would be worth it. But what if you don’t write it, and that one person got cancer, passed away, and left their family. How would you feel about that?” I said, “Yeah.” “You’ve got an obligation to get that book out there to help other people, and if you only touch one person, that will be worth it.” And, Jim, that’s what you talked about at the beginning of this conversation, that if we only touch one person, we’ll consider our work to be successful. Jim Palmer: Absolutely. Martin Howey: And you’re absolutely right, Jim. We do have an obligation to tell other people about it. You know, you mentioned something—you talked about the five-year survival rate. Once you have cancer and it goes into remission, if you can get past the five years, then you have a pretty decent chance. The key is getting past the five years. Now, let me take you back to what happened with me. I went through this treatment and afterward got a pronouncement that they couldn’t find the cancer. It’s in remission. So I’m thinking, okay, I’m out of the woods. That’s great. And then about two months later, in fact, the day before Thanksgiving— Wednesday—I went in for another colonoscopy, the first colonoscopy I’d had since before my surgery. And not thinking too much about it. I think, I’m feeling great, no problem. The Monday following Thanksgiving, the doctor’s office calls and says, “How fast can you get down here?” I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “We want to see you right away.” I said, “Is it that urgent?” They said, “It’s that urgent.” So we jumped into the car, drove to the doctor’s office, and went in and sat down. My surgeon came in and said, “We got your 143 Make the Most of Second Chances report back from the pathology lab. We found six more polyps in your colon.” Now, remember, they couldn’t do the complete colonoscopy before, because the tumor was blocking the colonoscope, and they couldn’t go all the way up. It’ll be a critical surgery. Do we go in there, do that, which they really don’t want to do, because surgery comes with some major problems, or do we let it ride, or treat it with chemo and radiation? What do we do now? So we decided to let this thing go for a month. Then we’ll going to go in and do another scan, and then the following month we’re going to go in and do another colonoscopy. Now, the thing they don’t know is, Has this gone outside of the colon? If it has, it’s in the lymph nodes. A scan doesn’t pick that up unless the lymph nodes get to be a certain size. The only way they could tell would be to go in and do surgery. Well, we don’t really want to do that at this point. So we’re going to watch and see how fast- growing this is and what’s going on. Even though I was in remission, I got a new cancer. This isn’t a metastasis or spreading of the original cancer. This is a new form of cancer in the colon, and he said only 5 percent of people get this. Here I was thinking I was home-free, not realizing I’m still in that critical five-year period, and I got caught again. So things can change very quickly, and that’s why it’s critically important for me to tell as many people as I can to get this out. Now, there was a movie a couple of years ago called The Bucket List, with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson. Jim Palmer: Yep, a great movie. Martin Howey: I’ve talked about it, and a lot of people have seen that movie. I’ve talked about what these two cancer patients decided to do, and that was to make a bucket list of all the things that they wanted to do before they kicked the bucket. Then go out 144 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up and do those things, all the things you’ve wanted to do. And so Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson jumped out of airplanes, climbed a mountain, raced cars, and they did all these fun kinds of things. As I watched that movie, I got to thinking how selfish that was. You see, I’ve been given a second chance. They got this cancer the first time. I’ve been given a second chance, and I don’t know what that means, but the doctor said to me, “Martin, I think it means that when the Man Upstairs says it isn’t time for you to go, you’ve got more work to do.” Does that work include jumping out of airplanes and climbing mountains and racing cars? I don’t think so. I think if he’s given me additional time on this planet, then my obligation is to do as much as I can for his other children, for those people who are here, to help them not to have to go through the situation that my family and I have gone through. And so that’s why it’s so critically important for me to do as much as I can, to tell as many people as I can, about the situation and alert them to the fact that you’ve just got to get checked out. You have to control of who you are, where you are, and what your situation is. Of all the things I’ve taken control of in my life, this one thing—watching my health, taking this simple test that I didn’t even know about—I didn’t do that, and it put my family in a real tough situation. Now, let’s suppose that my cancer continues to spread and continues to grow, and they have to cut this out and I end up with a bag hanging off my waist. I had that for a while after I went through the first operation. And I’m telling you, it’s not a pleasant thing to have to wear that bag on the outside of your body. It’s tough to wear clothes. You can’t tuck a shirt in. You can’t put a belt around it. It’s just a real messy situation. So I just want to encourage as many people as I can to make sure that they’re taking care of their health and taking responsibility for it, like you said. 145 Make the Most of Second Chances Jim Palmer: Absolutely, and that very nicely ties back to when I first started about why you and I met two weeks ago. We’re starting the book now. It’s one of the reasons that the style of the book that you’re reading right now is a transcript, so Martin and I don’t have to write it and go back and forth with editors. We’re going to get it done in less than thirty days time, and then have it produced and, hopefully, out in early February, because one of the things, as Martin just said, everybody needs to hear Martin’s story and, hopefully, benefit from it and get yourself checked out. But the other reason that I want to be part of the project and get it done quickly is to start the prayer chain again. Martin, you know that I was working the East Coast with all of my connections. And I think we had 10,000 people praying for you, if not more. So let’s count this as one of the most important pages you’re reading right now. Start praying for Martin and, hopefully, by the time you’re done reading the book, it will be a much different situation, a more positive situation. Everybody can use prayer, so that’s one of the things we’re going to do now. Martin Howey: Jim, let me stop you here just for a second, because what you said is so critically important. The first conversation we had on the phone, you said, “Would it be okay if I prayed with you on the phone?” And I said, “Absolutely, I would be honored.” And you did. I remember that, and I thank you so much for that. But this has gone on with so many different people. One of my consultants lives in a little town called Louisville, Mississippi. He said to me, “Martin, we belong to a church down here, a very small church. We have a minister who comes in and preaches for us. The church isn’t big enough to support him, so he goes to two other towns and preaches at two different churches there.” And he said, “Would it be okay if we put your name on our prayer list?” I said, “Well, of course.” And of course, I’ve had other people around the country who’ve said the same thing. 146 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up But he said, “I want to send you a special gift. Would that be okay?” And I said, “Well, absolutely.” A week or so later, I got a package in the mail. Inside this package there’s a quilt. Now, you know how quilts are. They have strings that are knotted through it all over. Yarn, I guess. He sent me a handwritten note that said, “Martin, this is a prayer quilt. Some of our church members have made this for you. And you’ll notice there are pieces of yarn that are pushed through the quilt and they’re tied. And what we do is we put this quilt out and we explain your situation. And then people come up and they pray over the quilt. And for every prayer they tie a knot.” And he said, “We didn’t have enough people here in this congregation to tie all the strings. So we sent it with the preacher to these two other congregations, and they got all the strings tied. We want you to have this as a gift from us. We ask you not to put it on the shelf or in a drawer or in a closet. But to wrap it around you and realize that this isn’t a normal quilt. That you’re being wrapped in the prayers of people who don’t even know you, but love you so much that they take the time to pray for you and your healing.” Now, isn’t that special? Whether you believe in that kind of thing or not, whether that’s your normal practice of religion or not, doesn’t make any difference. The fact of the matter is that those people have petitioned Heavenly Father on your behalf to heal you. I believe that he hears and answers prayers, even if that isn’t what you normally do. But, Jim, that was so touching to me to have that, and to have people like you put my name on the prayer rolls of their men’s group, or their church, or whatever it is that they’re doing, and from all kinds of religions. It’s been very touching, and very humbling, for me realizing that these people are petitioning a higher power for my healing and my success.

147 Make the Most of Second Chances Jim Palmer: I’m glad we’re not doing a video interview right now, because I’m a little teary eyed. That’s just such an amazing story, and it is true. I personally believe there’s amazing power in prayer, and I believe prayers are answered. I do firmly believe you’re going to be okay from this latest challenge.

148 Joe Polish: A Marketing Piranha Dangles Juicy Bait

Martin Howey: Welcome, all! We are so excited, Jim and I, to welcome Joe Polish with us today. Joe has been a long-time friend and one of my real mentors, the one who has really helped me probably more than anyone else, through his teachings, through his program, Piranha Marketing, and through so many different things that he’s been able to teach me, just in the way I’ve watched him and in the things that I’ve learned from him being around him. And so, Joe, it’s a genuine pleasure to have you with us. I’m real excited about our call today. So, welcome. Joe Polish: Well, thank you so much, Martin. Always a pleasure to do anything with you, because frankly, if anyone’s really taught a lot of people, and overcome just so much stuff, and is in a great position to be sharing their life experience and guidance with other people, that would certainly be you. So, thank you so much. Yeah, ask me anything you want that would be helpful to your listeners and readers. Martin Howey: Well thanks, Joe. Jim and I are putting this project together, and what we’re trying to do is help other people benefit from some of the challenges that some of us have gone through, and what we’ve done to overcome those. And maybe giving them some hope, some inspiration, and some direction in their lives, to be able to move forward in a more positive manner and be able to accomplish and experience some real success in their businesses. So, with that said, let me just ask you, what is one of the biggest challenges that you’ve had in your life, whether it’s personal or business, and what are some things that you did to see your way clear, to move through that, and to have some success? Joe Polish: Okay. Well, there’s a lot of stuff that’s happened to me in my life, as has happened to most people. I mean, everybody has their challenges and issues and whatnot, and I’m going to keep this 149 A Marketing Piranha Dangles Juicy Bait to a business focus with some practical tips that I think would be most useful to your audience. Especially those who are entrepreneurs, have a business, have a career that involves having to go out and make money. And I’ll keep it to that. Although I will set the stage with saying that if I was going to talk about personal stuff in depth, I’ll just identify one of the problems I had. I did not have a very happy upbringing and childhood. A lot of bad experiences. And I got heavily, heavily involved in abusing drugs between the ages of sixteen and eighteen years old. I started with smoking pot and doing practically everything, and was at my worst possible state when I was eighteen when I was freebasing cocaine three months straight. At my worst state, I weighed one hundred five pounds—as an eighteen-year-old man, if you want to call it. I was really probably just a kid. At 5’1” I was in really, really bad shape, if anyone can imagine how skinny that is. I was close to dying at one point from just drug abuse. I removed myself from that environment, moved into Mexico. Lived in a trailer for six months with my father, and I pretty much cleaned up my act that way. So I’m a big believer in recovery, and twelve steps, and that sort of stuff. But that’s a whole another conversation. The reason I wanted to mention that, is that I never got a college degree. I’ve got no formal education. I did go to college for a couple of years in New Mexico, but again, I never got a degree. I failed owning and operating a small business at a community college and got a C- in marketing. But now I have a multimillion-dollar marketing business, because I’m self-taught. People always say, “How’d you learn what you learned?” And I’m like, “Well, like Abe Lincoln, I’m self-taught. I’ve read a lot of books. I go to a lot of seminars.” The seminars were a world of personal development, amazing human beings that would encourage me, just like you, Martin. There are a lot of people in the world that have gone 150 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up through a lot of crap. And if you’re willing to listen and learn from them, you can overcome many, many obstacles. And the human body and the human spirit are, quite resourceful and can really come back from a lot of stuff. Okay. So that was just sort of a setup I wanted to give before I get into the business stuff. So basically I came from that sort of situation. I spent from age nineteen to twenty-four or so bumbling around, working different jobs, trying to figure out what to do. I ended up in a carpet-cleaning business, because a friend from high school recommended it. He was working for a company that was grossing about $600,000 a year. I had some money saved up from odd jobs and various things that I was doing. Not a whole bunch of money, but about $1,500. And he talked me into buying some chemicals, equipment, and getting business cards, and voilà, overnight I’m partners with this guy in a carpet-cleaning business. That partnership lasted about two months. Then I realized that my partner was not going to help much with stuff. I’d spent all the money that I had, and I was stuck with the equipment. So, I proceeded to spend the next two years of my life begging jobs from friends and family, and every month going deeper in debt trying to figure out how to make this carpet- cleaning company work. I had gotten to the point where I was about $30,000 in debt. I was working my butt off every day, sometimes ten-, twelve-, fourteen-hour days, cleaning carpets with a portable steam cleaner. I always remember the middle of Arizona—which is where I live, and it gets very hot here in the middle of summer—when you’re cleaning apartment complexes that have the electricity turned off, and you’re running extension cords up three stories to try to get electricity to a third-story apartment, and it’s filthy and dirty.

151 A Marketing Piranha Dangles Juicy Bait I’m allergic to cats, and so I always remember a couple of episodes where I would end up getting these apartments where it was just soaked with urine in the carpets and cat hair everywhere. It’s doing hard manual labor in the middle of a sauna when you can’t breathe and you’re allergic and wheezing, and that was just miserable. Then you would get paid practically nothing to do it. I mean, it was such hard work. So I always use that as a reminder of the stuff I originally did to try to make money. I had this company, and I didn’t want to go work for anyone, though. I just wanted to have my own business. I wanted to do what I wanted to do, and I had this dream that I could be successful running this business. I was in this industry, but I never grew up saying, “Hey. I’m going to run a carpet-cleaning company.” But here I was stuck with all this stuff, and my life wasn’t very pleasant at that time. Another friend of mine, who I’d gone to high school with, invited me to go Jet Skiing. At this point in my life, I didn’t really hang out with any friends from high school anymore, but back then, I still had those relationships. I think there’s a lesson there. But anyway, he said that this guy who owned the Jet Skis was a multimillion-dollar real estate investor, and that I should go on this Jet Ski trip with him to Saguaro Lake, which, Martin, you being here in Arizona, you know where I’m talking about. It’s a lake not too far from the Phoenix area. I went Jet Skiing only because he told me this guy was a multimillion-dollar real estate investor, and I figured I could maybe talk to this guy and learn something about how to make money. And so I went on this Jet Ski trip. Finally I had an opportunity to sit on the tailgate of a pickup truck and talk to this guy about business. And I said to him, “You know, I hear you do really well in business. I have a small carpet-cleaning company, and I’m not doing really well. I’d like to go into a business where I

152 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up can make some good money, and I figured maybe you would have some suggestions on what sort of business I could go into.” And this guy said to me—and by the way, Martin, let me also mention that a lot of speakers have stories that they tell, many of them exaggerated or embellished signature stories, and things like this. I have told this story to people before. Everything I’m telling you is absolutely true. This really did happen. It was one of the most profound conversations that I ever had, and it was never intended to be. It just happened to turn out that way. So this guy says to me, “Well are there other people in your line of business who are making money?” I said, “Yeah, there’s a couple of companies in Phoenix that are making more than a million dollars a year, and to me that’s a lot of money. But they’ve been around for a long time. They’re established. They have employees. They’ve built name recognition. All people really care about is price, and I just don’t have the advantages they do.” He said, “Well, if there are other people in your business making money and you’re not, there’s nothing wrong with the business you’re in. There’s something wrong with you.” I said, “Well, no, no.” And I continued to say, “I’ve gotten certified. I went and got training. I’m really good at what I do. I don’t use any bait-and-switch advertising, which a lot of these companies do. They run low-price coupons in order to get into someone’s home, and then they high-pressure sell people, and I don’t do any of that sort of stuff.” He said, “All I can tell you is, if you think that the opportunity is in another business, what’s going to happen is you’re going to spend another six months, another year, another two years, going out and learning the technical skills of another business. So you repeat the same bad business habits that have caused you to be a failure in this business.” And he said, “You think the grass is greener on the other side. But what you need to 153 A Marketing Piranha Dangles Juicy Bait do, young man, you need to learn fundamental business principals. Because if there are other people that are making money in what you’re doing and you’re not, there’s nothing wrong with the business you’re in. “There’s something wrong with you, and you need to learn fundamental business rules. Because until you do that, you’re going to go from business to business to business, and you’re going to never make it work. And you’re going to think that it’s always something like opportunity that’s allowing others to succeed and you to fail.” And he was right. There’s plenty of opportunity everywhere, and if you could always point to the fact that someone else is making money in the exact sort of business—or industry, topic, subject, niche, or whatever the heck you want to call it—and you’re not, then they’re doing something that you’re not doing. So I left that Jet Ski trip. I remember driving back from the lake, and I was sunburned as heck. But I had this motivation in my mind. And I thought, “You know? That guy was right. I live in America. I think I’m intelligent enough. I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but there’s people making more money than me who I think I’m smarter than. The fact that I live in America is a blessing. I have the use of my legs and my limbs. I can work. And I’m going to figure out how to make this darn business work.” So I made a commitment to myself. I said, “I am not going to get out of this carpet-cleaning business until I figure out how to actually make it work, because this is ridiculous that I’m working my butt off and going broke.” That’s when I realized there was no relationship between being good at what you do and getting paid. I mean, none. That is a myth that people function under, that if you’re a good human being, if you really care, if you do hard work, that that somehow translates into financial success. It has absolutely nothing to do with financial success at all.

154 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up At the time, I was reading Think & Grow Rich, and The Power of Positive Thinking, and other books like those, trying to give myself a great mental attitude. But there’s no difference when it comes to money, whether you have a great mental attitude or a poor mental attitude. Now, certainly I think you’re going to do much better when you think positive thoughts and you have a great focus in that direction. However, Martin, we could all identify people that are miserable, cranky human beings that have a lot of money. The real key to success, I think, is to have both. Not only have financial success, but also be a pleasant human being who adds tremendous value to other human beings. So anyway, I just thought I was going to figure out how to make that business work. But the guy on the Jet Ski trip gave me no solutions to my real business problems, which was marketing. I didn’t know how to get people to hire me. But what he did was he opened up my mind to learn how to figure out how to do that. He put me on the path of really studying and learning marketing. So one of the first books I read was The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. In that book, he talked about systemizing and automating your business, how to replicate yourself. And so with that mind-set, I thought if there’s any area of business that would be most important to replicate, it would be the one area responsible for bringing in the money, which is the sales and marketing division. If I could figure out how to automate that, running a business would be much easier. Replicate yourself. Then a friend gave me a newsletter written by this crazy guy by the name of Gary Halbert. Gary Halbert was sort of a tormented human being, a brilliant marketer though, absolutely brilliant. And one of the first things I learned from Gary when I was reading his newsletter was, can and clone yourself. I learned that selling is what you do when you’re on the phone or face to face with somebody. Marketing is what you do to 155 A Marketing Piranha Dangles Juicy Bait get someone on the phone or to face to face with you. And if you do your marketing right, you don’t actually have to do much face to face selling. Even if you do face to face selling, if you have marketing in place, it totally enhances when you’re selling face to face or on the phone. So that’s why I learned positioning, so that when you’re well positioned with a prospect or a client, people are pre- interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, and pre-disposed to do business with you. With the whole concept of can and clone yourself, you could be the best salesperson in the world, but you’re limited by the clock because there’s only so many people that you can talk to in a given day. I was a really good carpet cleaner. When I had the right sort of prospect in front of me and I was able to talk about my carpet- cleaning services, for the most part, I was able to be pretty persuasive and convincing, simply because I just talked about what I could do for people. The problem was how to get myself in front of those people. So with that first concept of can and clone yourself, I hired a copywriter on credit card, paid this guy $1,800, and I had him create a tool for me. And here’s the big takeaway I want for all your listeners. I’m not going to go too deep into this. I have a free podcast on iTunes where people can listen to hours of training. It won’t cost them anything if they want them. I’m just going to talk about this one concept, and hopefully everyone takes this away, because it is completely replicatable to any sort of business. Heck, someone could even use it in a personal ad in order to get a date if they wanted to. Basically, it involves taking your message and replicating it, putting it into a printed form. Gary Halbert would say, “Any problem in the world could be solved with the right sales letter.” And I never used to believe 156 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up that. The older I’ve gotten, the more I realize that almost every problem in the world can be solved with a sales letter, even if you have a disease, even if you have an illness. If you needed to find a doctor, if you needed to find support, if you needed to raise money, you can still sit down, construct a letter, and write a story, and you can engage people and find resources through the written word, even if the “written” word is audio or video or print, online or offline. So, one of the first things I did was I created a consumer awareness guide. I thought, What are all the things that people don’t know about hiring a carpet cleaner? And I thought of all those things that people didn’t know. And the number one question everyone would always ask is, “How much do you charge?” I hated that question, but that’s what people ask if they don’t know what else to ask about how to hire somebody. So with this first consumer awareness guide, I created a template. It was called A Consumer’s Guide to Carpet Cleaning. It said, “Read this guide, and you’ll discover how to avoid four carpet-cleaning rip-offs, six costly misconceptions about carpet cleaning, seven questions to ask a carpet cleaner before you invite him into your home, eight mistakes to avoid when choosing a carpet cleaner,” and about crawling critters and crud. “This is a guide to the slime, grime, and livestock that’s seeping, creeping, and galloping through your carpet, the difference between value and price. Read this guide, and with this information, you can make an informed, intelligent decision.” After that, I learned that the number one question in all consumers’ minds is, “Who can you trust?” Your job as a marketer is to just establish trust and rapport, so that people feel confident and capable of making a buying decision. So that consumer awareness guide became the first template for me to use education-based marketing, meaning one of the most effective ways to sell to other people is to simply teach them. Simply educate them. Don’t try to manipulate them. Don’t 157 A Marketing Piranha Dangles Juicy Bait try to trick them with techniques—not that techniques and strategies don’t work, because they do. I use a ton of them. The point is, though, one of the most ethical ways that you can actually sell whatever it is you’re selling—even if it’s a non- profit, a cause, a dog shelter, or even if it’s for disease, feeding children, or simply a capitalistic business trying to sell something—you just simply educate people about the things they don’t know that they don’t know, and you present it in a way so that it actually makes sense. When someone is more educated and informed, they can make an intelligent, informed decision. So that consumer awareness guide became the first marketing tool I would get into people’s hands. Whenever they would call and say, “How much do you charge?” I’d say, “Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, let me mail you a consumer awareness guide. Read it. It’ll teach you everything you need to know about choosing the right carpet-cleaning company. And then if you decide you want to do business with us, we’ll let you try us out.” That was before the Internet, Martin. You couldn’t e-mail it to anyone. Today we have videos. We have Web sites with consumer awareness videos. I’ve been on ABC’s 20/20 with Barbara Walters. They put a consumer awareness guide on the ABC 20/20 Web site back in 1999. So this has been read by millions and millions of consumers all over the world. We’ve got thousands of cleaning- companies that use this sort of strategy every day. I’ve licensed this stuff to multiple different industries. Tens of thousands of people all over the world use this sort of stuff. The point is, it started when I was a dead-broke carpet cleaner, figuring out what I needed to do in order to communicate why people should do business with me. That process ended up becoming huge. It’s the ultimate leverage.

158 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up So my takeaway for all your listeners is, no matter what it is you do, if you’ve got something important that you want to sell, sit down and write a sales letter. Or sit down and record it. If you don’t want to write, put a video in front of yourself and just record a really heart-felt message, teaching people what it is they need to know about you, so that they have trust and rapport with you, so that they can make important decisions. And by doing that, since you’re the one the providing them that information, if you’ve got something to sell, they’re probably going to end up doing business with you, because you’re the one who’s educating the public. So I know I just like went off on that, and probably didn’t give you any opportunity to ask me any other questions, but hopefully, in as condensed a period of time as I could, I took something that took me probably four years to learn how to do, and explained it in about ten minutes. Martin Howey: I’m sitting here laughing, because I don’t know anybody who could share so much, so many hard-hitting, practical, here’s how you do it, step-by-step, go do this, and be successful ideas, in such a short, condensed period of time as you. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the Jet Ski story, and heard the struggling carpet cleaner. I heard all these stories over and over, and I still have a page of notes. I’m blown away with what you’ve shared with us. My gosh, if somebody can’t take what you’ve just shared with us, and take it from the carpet- cleaning business and transition it into their own business, they’ve got rocks in their heads. I mean this is so step-by-step, here’s what you do. And, man, I don’t know how I could be any more pleased. Jim, what about you? Jim Palmer: I am marveling, because I was waiting for Joe to take a breath. I’m not even sure he breathed through that whole thing. Joe Polish: Well, you guys told me you had a limited time frame. So I was like, okay, I’ve got to deliver a lot of stuff in here, because I want to be helpful to everybody. 159 A Marketing Piranha Dangles Juicy Bait Jim Palmer: Well, you’ve been more than helpful. One of the things I appreciate about your story, Joe, is what a blessing it is when we have mentors in our life. And as you said, you were fortunate to have a very successful businessman who told it to you straight, even though you were young and a somewhat rebellious age, and I almost heard you say, in what you were saying to him, “Yeah, but this business is different.” He just kept telling you, and he wouldn’t let you get off the cold hard facts of what it was. And then I just applaud your efforts, from your tough upbringing and all the challenges you faced, to pull yourself up from your bootstraps. I’ve heard you speak a number of times. I’m just a huge fan. One of the things I recommend is that people read your books and other materials. This might get somewhat off track, but I just can’t help but want to say it. We have to have more young people learn your story. Because I think what is going on in this country right now is a woe-is-me and a kind of handout mentality. Where in the world did the drive go that you had as a young man to want to make it yourself? Like you said, we’re in the greatest country God ever created, and yet too many people are sitting on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to solve their problem. And I just think if you haven’t written it yet, you’ve got to write your memoirs, because it can be hugely inspirational. Joe Polish: I have told quite a bit of my story on our podcast. People can it get for free on iTunes if they type in my name, Joe Polish, like nail polish. I Love Marketing is the name of the podcast. ILoveMarketing.com is the Web site, and we just literally have all kinds of free training on marketing, because I want to re- brand the way the world looks at marketing, because I really consider marketers as saviors. They’re the ones who get the message out to people, and marketing is so critical. It’s the one thing that really changed my 160 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up life, because it wasn’t until I had some real methodologies and strategies to communicate to people that they were able to see that I actually had something of value to share. And going along your lines, Jim, I totally agree with you about we live in a world where there’s a tremendous amount of entitlement and shunning responsibility. Two things that are critical to be successful, not only as an entrepreneur, but I think also in life, is that, one, you’re not entitled to anything. And secondly, you’re 100 percent responsible for your success. You are not entitled to have the world give you money or give you opportunities or give you relationships, until you create value for another human being. Money earned ethically is a byproduct of value creation. Until someone gets that in their head, they can protest. They can complain. They can whine. Even if someone truly is a victim—and every human being has some area where someone’s probably taken advantage of them, or flat out horrible abuse, physical, sexual, mental. The reality is there are people in the world who are victims. There are people in the world who had a bad deck of cards dealt their way. However, the problem is you’ve got no power in a victim state. Even if things were done to you or you have disadvantages that others don’t, if you believe you’re a victim, you can’t do anything with that sort of mind-set. So part of it is reading books, learning from other people, getting mentors. We are surrounded with so many great resources out there, if you avail yourselves of them. And so where someone’s going to be a year from today is the people they hang out with, the books they read, and the actions they take. So my recommendation is to absorb everything that you guys are putting together with this interview series. When I think of challenges, I think of someone like Martin. Look at what Martin has been through in the last year. He’s still got a great attitude. He’s out there still sharing things with the 161 A Marketing Piranha Dangles Juicy Bait world, creating value for other people. That is tremendously inspirational. So inspiration is around you all the time. You just have to tap into it. So I’m happy to share whatever I could, because what you guys are doing is awesome. And so I appreciate it. So thank you. Jim Palmer: I want to give you a plug here. We haven’t made this a program of plugs, but what you do with Dean Jackson on the I Love Marketing Web site is so valuable. So the Web site is ILoveMarketing.com (http://ILoveMarketing.com/). You deliver so much value, and there are never pitches. It’s just value. It’s like you give people information that can help their lives. And at your event, it’s just clear, Joe, that you guys operate with integrity, which is very, very high on my scale of priorities. So I just want to thank you so much for being part of this project. It’s a real blessing to talk with you and have you part of this. And, by the way, we’re shooting to have the book done February 1st. So, Martin and I are in massive-action mode right now. We’re going to have this thing become a book, and we’re just excited to share the message about what Martin went through and what I went through ten years ago. We’ve interviewed some amazing people, so we’re really blessed to have you part of it.

Joe Polish is the Founder and President of Piranha Marketing Inc., and the creator of the Genius Network Interview series. His marketing expertise has been utilized to build thousands of businesses of all sizes, from small mom-n-pop cleaning companies to large multi-national corporations. In the general business market, Joe’s marketing audio program with Nightingale-Conant, “Piranha Marketing,” has been their #1 selling general marketing program for the past 3 years. Visit Joe at www.JoePolish.com.

162 Renee Airya: You Will Sing Again, You Will Dance Again

Joe Polish: This is Joe Polish, and I’m here with Martin Howey and Jim Palmer, and we are going to be talking with a personal friend of mine who I just wanted to introduce into this interview series that Jim and Martin have created. Her name is Renee Airya, http://ReneeAirya.com/awaken-your-source/, and she is a pretty incredible person who has survived some pretty incredible things. I won’t give too much away about Renee, other than to say this. She is one of those people who I can always look at her, see her, realize what she’s going through, and it puts a big smile on my face, because she is a testament to the human spirit, and someone who really believes in capabilities and possibilities. Renee, give a thumbnail sketch of who you are. There are so many things we could talk about, but I would really like to focus on the thing that happened with the tumor in your brain stem. So first, who are you, and then let’s talk about your story. Renee Airya: Okay, thank you so much Joe. Thank you everyone who’s listening and reading. I feel really honored to be here today, and share my story and, hopefully, awaken and inspire more people who are out there. At the very least encourage people and give them strength to really believe in themselves, no matter what’s going on in their lives. So the short story is I’m thirty-seven years old now, and I’ve gone through three pretty major near-death experiences that began around the age of twenty-three. And as Joe was just mentioning, I think he would like me to focus on the brain surgery story.

163 You Will Sing Again, You Will Dance Again Martin, is there any way that would be best for me to lead in for your guests? Would you like me to tell the story in a way that is sharing the takeaways of the story, or would you like me to first share the general background about what happened during my brain surgery experience? Martin Howey: Let’s talk about your background, what happened, and maybe you could give us a couple of ideas about how we might be able to learn from what you’ve gone through and how we can benefit from that. Renee Airya: Okay, great. I was living in Los Angeles. I was twenty-nine years old, was professionally modeling, and I was doing healing work. I’m certified in various different healing modalities, from cranial sacral to NLP hypnosis, faith healing work. So, since age twenty-three, I’ve ran an on-again, off-again energy and healing practice. I was actually at the gym one day, and I went to a Pilates class. And during the Pilates class, something really weird happened with my foot. I know this sounds kind of strange, how all the connections got made here, but as I share in my takeaways for your audience, it will make a little bit more sense. I looked very healthy from the outside. I was very, very strong. At this point in time, I was working out at the gym for about two hours a day, every day—seven days a week—and hiking between five and seven miles every day. So I took really good care of myself, definitely ate very healthy. I’m extremely educated with herbology and nutrition, as well as being someone who is just very interested in spirituality and in healthy mind-set. I was one of these people that just had a pretty impeccable daily ritual when it came to exercise and taking care of myself. So when I was at the gym working out one day and had this random injury happen with my foot, something clicked inside of my mind that something didn’t seem right. It felt off to me that by doing something so simple, I could injure myself to the degree that I injured myself. 164 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up So I went home, sat, and meditated about it, and I asked for some answers as to what was going on. I also had, and I still actually have this now, a practice of journaling in the morning, just a brain dump to get all of my thoughts out. So what was coming to me all that evening and that morning when I got up to journal was that something was really wrong with me. And when I say wrong with me, the specific information that I got was that I was going to die soon and I needed to figure out what was wrong with me. Now, you can imagine that sounds a little harsh and shocking, to have an inner voice tell you that you’re probably going to die and you need to figure out what’s going on. But by this point in time, I had been consistently meditating for six or seven years. So I trusted myself to know that if I was having that voice, that there probably was something that was going on, and I needed to take massive action on all of this. So I called my family and told them what was happening. I started going to doctors. And again, from the outside perspective, I was fitness modeling and I looked incredibly beautiful. Nothing appeared to be wrong with me. So I went in and had the standard blood work done. That didn’t show anything. But over the course of about two months, my body was deteriorating quickly, and I was also under a lot of stress, because I was hearing this voice that something was wrong with me. During that two-month time period, as I was getting all these tests done, nothing was coming back with any type of conclusions as to a possible diagnosis. I started getting feedback from the majority of doctors that I was seeing—and these were mostly western medical doctors at the time—that there was nothing going on with me and that I needed to pursue some sort of mental health, because I obviously was having hypochondria that was causing all of my symptoms.

165 You Will Sing Again, You Will Dance Again I sat with that for a few days, and I tried to not take that on, because I really kept having this inner voice saying there something going on. I removed myself a little bit from the doctors and getting testing done. I sat and meditated about it and just asked for the best solution for what was going on, because I felt pretty strongly that I was getting the right feedback from meditating, that there was something up. I eventually ended up going to a chiropractor who was someone I really trusted in as far as my heart-to-heart connection with him. I felt like even though maybe it wasn’t his specialty, that was going to be able to help me, that it was something about his being that was going to be able to get me to the right place. So I went and disclosed everything to him. He immediately referred me to a man who he just intuitively thought was going to be able to help me, who ended up being a neurological chiropractor. I went in to see this neurological chiropractor, and he sent me for a brain scan. Very long story short, because there are so many intricacies in my story, a day later after I had the MRI scan done, I got a call from the chiropractor saying you need to come into our office right away. I went in, and my brain scan was up on the shiny light machine. I had huge tumor connected to my brain stem. I mean this was a very, very big tumor. In fact, my brain stem was almost, I won’t say bent in half, but it was pretty bent. He said, “Wow, this is a miracle that you’re alive, because this tumor is so rare and so slow growing, that it had to have been here for at least ten to fifteen years.” That was obviously a very big thing for me to deal with, and simultaneously I felt a little bit of relief that wow, thank God I kept trying to figure out what was going on, because obviously there was something going on here.

166 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up But now that I have the clear answer as to what’s happening, this is pretty intense, and I don’t think it was necessarily what I was expecting. So I sat with this for a few days and started gathering a lot of information. Basically, what was coming up, in as far as my particular situation, was that the tumor was so large, that there was essentially no treatment options for me other than getting emergency surgery. So it’s a very long story, Martin, about my experience with getting the surgery done, because I didn’t have health insurance then, which added on an extra stress that, I realize in looking back, was an opportunity for me, because this really shows a lot about determination and connecting with your spirit throughout a process. I didn’t have the money to pay for the surgery, yet I knew that I had to get the surgery done or I was going to die. I went back to my resources again, about connecting with people and showing up in relationships from a heart-based place, which was the thing that got me to the diagnosis to begin with. So I was intuitively feeling into a doctor that I thought might be able to help me in this process, since I didn’t have health insurance. And lo and behold, I ended up calling him, and he found the top surgeon in the field for the particular type of tumor that I had, and he offered to do the surgery for me pro bono within a two week time period. So I went in and had the surgery done. When I went into the surgery, it was really fascinating, because it was obviously very, very scary. I had my shaved on one side, and was wheeled down the corridor by myself. When I look back, it looked like a movie when you see people on hospital beds and everything is really dark. It literally looked like that, and I was being wheeled down there by myself, but in such a state of grace. I was very, very grateful, and I was surrendered to the process. I went into the surgery with a lot of hope and a lot of optimism. 167 You Will Sing Again, You Will Dance Again The next thing I remember is being wheeled down that same corridor, but in the opposite direction. I looked up, and one of my friends who was waiting for me in the waiting room looked down and said, “Something has gone really wrong.” From that point, I was in intensive care for a few days, and I was really, really sick. This is a major surgery. I slowly started coming back into consciousness and found out that the surgery that was supposed to be seven hours long actually ended up being fifteen hours long, because the tumor was so large. In fact, it was the biggest one and the most aggressive one that they had ever operated on. My facial nerve could not be saved during the surgery, because the only thing holding my facial nerve together was the tumor. So what that means as far as the physical effects is, I’m totally deaf in the right ear, and I also lost the balance nerve on that side of my head. But when I woke up, my face was 100 percent, completely paralyzed on the right hand side, which was very intense and not really what I was expecting, especially since I had gone into the surgery with this very optimistic, hopeful, and surrendered spirit. My doctors came and explained to me that I had an eye patch on my eye because my eye wasn’t able to move or close at all. Then they started crying and said we can’t believe that this happened. We know that you’re a professional model. You have this beautiful smile. You’re never going to be able to smile again. You’re going to have to go in and get emergency surgery on your eye, because it doesn’t blink or close at all, and because it doesn’t blink and close, it doesn’t produce moisture and there’s no protection. And your life is basically completely changing as of today, because this is a pretty major disability. I remember, Martin, looking at the doctor. I was having very blurry vision, of course, at the time. But I remember looking up, and I just felt this immediate sense of “No” overcome my 168 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up system. I remember exactly what I said: “That’s not true. I’m going to smile, and I’m going to laugh, and I’m going to dance again.” So that moment was very defining for me. And I made a goal for myself while in the hospital, that it was going to take six months for my face to start getting motion back again and to bring itself into an expressive state again, meaning that I was going to heal myself from the facial paralysis. I had no idea, by the way, how this was going to happen. I just knew in my heart and in my soul that that was a miracle that I was going to create for myself. So in six months, give or take a few days, I was standing in front of the mirror in my apartment, and I felt this little teeniest, tiniest flicker in my facial nerve. It was so small that you could barely feel it at all. But I thought, this is it, and I can build on this little tiny flicker. From that flicker time, I believe that it was around three weeks and my smile starting coming back, slowly but surely, and my face starting lifting up on the right-hand side. I had an MRI scan done and the doctors could not believe it. You could actually see my facial nerve on the scan, which is very rare. They actually said they’d never even seen a facial serve on that particular scan, but they could see where it had reconnected itself and was growing itself back together. This was eight years ago, so it’s been quite a while now, but the conclusion for that story is that within about a year’s time—so this would have been 2005—my facial nerve grew itself back together 60 percent. Martin Howey: That’s amazing. That’s amazing. So what do you attribute that to, and what can we learn from that? I mean, obviously you had your mind going in the right direction. You had confidence in the fact that you wanted to dance again. You wanted to sing again. You wanted to be able to model again. So there was a mind-set going there. What can people who are struggling with 169 You Will Sing Again, You Will Dance Again some of their own challenges learn from what you did? How did you do that? Renee Airya: Actually, the healing work that I do with people now is based on the same energetic principles that I used to heal myself. But in as far as useful information that I can give to your audience today, it’s an eight-step process when I break everything down. Step one. At the beginning of the story, I communicated that there was an inner voice, and there was a place that I could retreat to, to really get my own answer and know that what I was hearing was correct. To me, the way that a person can develop that type of inner listening and ability to hear their inner voice involves setting up a practice of creating silence in your life. That can look different for a lot of people. Some people can feel very relaxed when in a meditative state, and can go in and can inquire when they’re sitting in meditation. For other people, that might mean being on a nature walk and feeling relaxed, with the ability to tune out the outside world. So that’s definitely the first thing that I would recommend, is create some sort of practice where you’re able to disassociate yourself from the outside world enough so that you can really listen to what’s going on inside. Step two. Accept exactly where you are in the present moment. That’s really tricky for a lot of people, especially because we’re living in a society where people are exposed to a lot of information about manifestation and focusing on goals and what is it that we really want. Oftentimes, people can get discouraged about the gap between where you are in the present moment versus what you want. But it’s been my experience that without complete acceptance of where you are in the present moment, it’s going to be very challenging to get to where you want to be in the future. So that would be my second piece of advice. 170 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Step three. This, for me, is probably my greatest gift in the healing processes that I’ve gone through, which is find your source of what you consider to be a higher power. That can sound really spiritual to a lot of people. But higher power for me really is connecting to a force of what you consider to be unconditional love and a place within yourself that you can really believe in miracles. Without that faith and without the belief that there are miracles that exist, I think that it’s going to be pretty much impossible for someone to get to that state of a miracle without connecting to that power every day in their life. So that would be the third one. Belief. Step four. Like you said at the beginning when you asked me about the positive mind-set, absolutely create a positive mind- set in your life, and connect with tools, so that you can use and focus your free will for whatever outcome it is that you desire. Now, for some people, that looks like affirmations. That’s a really beautiful way to state that you know where you are in the present moment, and you are giving your intentions some sort of direction for whatever that specific outcome is that you want. So that would be number four, connecting to a positive state of mind on a daily basis. Step five. This is huge for people, and probably one of the main reasons why you’re even creating this program for people with the interviews and with the book, is finding a support system for yourself. We are beings that want to connect with other people. We want to create with other people. We need to feel heard. We need to feel understood. And to have the power of two or more gathered to really assist you in your process is so completely crucial. So I definitely would recommend that if you do not have a support unit that you feel strongly about in your life, call that in and seek that out in your life immediately.

171 You Will Sing Again, You Will Dance Again Step six. Create daily rituals. Creating the daily ritual is a lot like going into your quiet or meditative space. It’s basically stating to yourself that you know that the external outside world is going on out there and that we can be very influenced by that. But by creating a daily ritual with meditation, with a prayer, with exercise, with nature walks, you are finding a way to stay grounded into yourself, into the outcomes that you want to create. And you’re cultivating a lot of power when you go into those daily rituals. So again, find things that you are interested in that make you happy, whether that’s mediation, or nature walks, or spending time with friends who are your support system, or exercising, so that you feel really strong in your body. Make sure to have those daily rituals out there, every single day. Step seven. Trust and gratitude. Basically what that means is to trust the entire process of numbers one through six, all the things that I just shared. Why bother to even take your time to do these things unless you have a very deep sense of trust that things are going to work out? And at the same time, have gratitude for knowing that, simply because you are choosing to do those things every day, everything is already in motion for you. You know that you are going to be receiving your outcome. Step eight. I think that this is actually the most important out of all of them: Do things that make you happy. It’s absolutely crucial that, no matter what you’re going through in your life, no matter what—even if you are lying in bed, immobile, and can’t get up and do some of the things that you used to be able to do—you need to find something with where you are right now that can make you happy, and do it as much as you can. Because when you do that, you’re sending out the endorphins, and you’re putting your entire energy body into the space of celebration, of excitement, of knowing that everything is okay. 172 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up I personally believe, and it’s my experience, that if you can really stay in the happy state, then you just continue to magnetize more and more of that to you. So, yeah, be happy. Find the happiness in whatever you can do at the present moment, and build from there. So those are the eight steps that I think are the most crucial to supporting yourself and to providing transformation through challenging times. Martin Howey: I’ve written all of these down. They are very practical, and anybody can use these things. I really appreciate you sharing those with us. That’s very valuable information, it comes from a position of personal experience, and it was delivered in a very heartfelt way. So thank you very much for that. Renee Airya: You are so welcome. Jim Palmer: Renee, this is Jim. I just want to tell you what an amazing person you are. I feel so blessed to spend this time with you and have you be part of this book. Martin and I we conceived this book on December 2nd over breakfast. Actually, you are the final interview for this book, and I have to tell you—Martin, I’m sure you’re probably feeling this—I can’t even believe the sense of . . . I’m trying to think of the right word. Not completion, but when you finally realize that, yes, you’re on the right path. Doggone, I’m at a loss for words here. I am just blown away with what you shared. The degree that you are going to help people, with your story and what your shared, really epitomizes what we wanted this book to be about. I’m going to think of the word as soon as I hang up the phone. I got it. It’s validation. Martin, do you not feel validated just hearing Renee’s story and all the things we’ve heard? And none is any more important than the other, but we’re ending on a note of validation, which I think is just so incredible, because one of our goals is to give people hope and inspiration. I just want to think you for that.

173 You Will Sing Again, You Will Dance Again In just the last couple of minutes we have left, I want to share that I totally believe in the strategies that you’ve shared. Number one—I won’t go into it now, but you’ll hear a little bit about more story, what I faced ten years ago—but definitely belief in a higher power and connecting through prayer with others in a higher power, I think, is important. Second, what you said about your full acceptance of where you are, but also with your full intention of where you’re going to be. I think the human body is incredible, and things can happen when you do believe and you work with intention to get there. The third thing that I always believe—and Martin and I, every time we get together, we’ll spend hours just making each other laugh. I think laugher is hugely important. It really does something for the body when you can have a good belly laugh at something. It really makes you feel good. So I am just tickled to death that you spent this time with us. I feel very blessed. Renee Airya: Thank you so much. Energy is kind of my thing. I’m like the energy-healing girl. So I’m very perceptive to people’s intentions and awareness, and the two of you really are just creating and holding such a beautiful and wise place within yourselves. I know that all of your guests and listeners are definitely going to connect with that. So I thank you on my behalf for giving me this opportunity to share, and on their behalf as well, because this work is very much needed in the world. So thank you for stepping it up and making it happen for yourselves and for all the rest of us. Martin Howey: Well, we couldn’t thank you enough. And my thanks go to Joe for introducing you to us. I hope to get to meet you this weekend. It’s going to be awesome. I’m really excited. Renee Airya: Definitely. Jim Palmer: And we wish you much continued good health and success in your life, Renee. Thank you.

174 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Renee Airya: Thank you so much. Martin Howey: Thank you so much for being with us.

Renee Airya is a spiritual inspiration and former fashion model, who has healed herself from three near-death experiences, including massive brain surgery and facial paralysis. As a Professional Intuitive Consultant and Mind/Body/Spirit Healer for fifteen years, Renee transforms others with her signature “Emo- Healing” Sessions. It also brings Renee great joy to serve as an “Awaken The Dreamer” Facilitator for Pachamama Alliance, Co- Founder of “The Sassy Lassy Revolution” for Female Empowerment, and author her soon-to-be-released book. “Sexy Intuition: Turn Yourself On.” Visit Renee at www.ReneeAirya.com.

175 Joel Bauer: Identify Your Mastery and Take It to the Marketplace

Martin Howey: Welcome, listeners and readers! I’m so glad that we’re here today talking, Jim and I, with Joel Bauer. Joel has been a long-time friend, and I’ve learned so much from attending his seminars and just in personal conversations with him. Joel is a master at presenting, branding, and teaching people how to be more successful in their businesses. Joel, welcome. It’s very exciting for me and for Jim to have you with us. Joel Bauer: Martin, I’ve come to love you and trust you, and it all began when I attended a four- or five-day very intensive seminar. You inspired me to want to take my own expertise and translate it into my own seminars, just as you had done when you became self-reliant and helped people to make the kind of money they never made on their own before. Your seminar showed me what was possible, because you were authentic, you were in the moment, you told the truth, and you showed the proof. And as a result of it, people left there transformed. You literally handed us your life’s work. That’s where our friendship began. Martin Howey: Well, thank you very much, Joel. I appreciate those nice words. We have a mutual admiration society here. I trust and love you so much, as well, as a great friend and mentor. What we’d like to do today is to ask you if you wouldn’t mind sharing one of your biggest challenges, either business or personal, and what you’ve done to handle that and come through it. And maybe give us a couple of ideas about what we might be able to do when we’re facing some of our struggles and challenges. Joel Bauer: Well, twenty years ago, my wife had given birth to our first child. We had gone through my life’s savings from the cruise ship and some bad investments. I’d had a lot of money, and then I didn’t. Then we were down to our last $2500, which barely 176 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up covered the mortgage on our home, which we had bought in an upside down market, and now we had the baby. I was a performing hypnotist and magician. I was no longer on the cruise ships where I had made a lot of money. I was on land, raising a family. And quite frankly, I’d never been in that position financially, where I pretty much needed to make a decision. We were not going to be able to pay our bills. And I was not going to reach out and ask for help, because there was no one to reach out and ask for help from. Our family didn’t have money. I don’t come from money. My mother I had helped to support. My father wasn’t there, didn’t raise me. So I get a call from David Jones, my mother’s friend, my attorney friend from San Francisco, who is now dead. He said, “There’s a ten-day trade show in town at Mascone that begins tomorrow. You indicated to me if there was a show that I thought may be appropriate for your skills, that you might want to know about it.” I said, “David, let me talk to my wife. How big a show is it?” He said, “Oh, there’s a good quarter to half a million people that move through the show.” So I said to my wife, “David will let me stay in his home for free, so I have no overhead other than my gas. If I go there and cold-call, I might be able to book an account that could net us a lot of money and turn the gears. Otherwise, I’m looking at car sales or something else. I’m going to have to get a job, and I don’t have specialized education.” For the first time in my life, I had considered getting a conventional job at that point. For me that was really almost, well, it was rock bottom. I had walked down the street two days before, Martin, with my friend Dale Penn who is in the car industry. And I said, “Dale, I may need a job selling cars.”

177 Identify Your Mastery and Take It to the Marketplace He said, “Nope, I’m not going to let you do that. Not yet. You’re just not in the right space. You need to pursue your mastery at what you do and what it is that you believe in. And if you do that and it doesn’t work out, we can always talk about the ultimate compromise, doing something that you have no desire to do.” Hmm, I didn’t really want to hear that. I was hoping he would offer me a job, but he was offering me something far more significant, my self-esteem, my integrity, and my freedom. So flash forward to the phone call, the invitation from David Jones to visit Mascone Center. Of course, he really wasn’t inviting me to anything other than free room and board and an opportunity that I had to create. I packed up some gear—a miniature speaker, my cards, my coins, my sponge balls, and my books, and I went to Mascone and snuck in. I didn’t really sneak in, I just walked in. I picked up a badge off the table that somebody else hadn’t picked up. I planned on trying to get an account the first day, but I failed. I went from company to company, doing demonstrations on the stages. People were quite nice to me, but they just weren’t hiring. Day two I get up again. I go over there, sweating as I go from booth to booth, doing demos, integrating, messaging, and trying to make something happen. I failed the second day. Eight days left. The third day, I’m failing all day long. I’m getting more experience. I’m actually getting better at the demos. I’m getting better at the approach. But part of me is just not enjoying this process. It’s so painful. And I was at the point of “I do not want to go home without a gig. I need to make this happen. This is what I want to be doing. These are my skill sets.” About 4:00 pm on day three, I see in the foyer, in the front of Mascone, a company called QCI, Quarter Calling International. They’ve got these gals in little red skirts, and they’re trying to get people to sign up for different phone service, which is a quarter a 178 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up minute anywhere, anytime. That’s the whole slogan, a quarter a minute, anywhere, anytime. At that time, that was a good deal. I pitched the guy and said, “Let me do a demo.” I stood up behind these women and did my presentation on my little toolbox of props that I was carrying around, so that I would be higher than the crowd that I would have to build. It worked. I built a crowd. And he said, “Do it again.” I decided, What have I got to lose? I’d just be somewhere else doing the same thing. So I did it again. His crowd grew even larger. Some people had come back and brought friends. I didn’t even repeat the same show. I did a different show, because I had the material. He said, “That was good.” I said, “Well, you can hire me to stay here for the duration of the show, seven more days. If I stay with you, I’ll go to my hotel tonight”—of course, I was staying with a friend, David Jones— “and I will integrate your message more effectively than I am now, and I’ll polish the routines.” He said, “Oh, you’re doing fine right now. You want to make it better? That’s up to you. It’s good right now. But can I depend on you?” I said, “Oh yeah, you can depend on me. I need this work. Let’s sit down.” So we go in the side room. He said, “What’s it going to cost me to keep you here?” And I said, “Typically, I get $1500 a day.” Now, typically, but I wasn’t working then. I didn’t know what to charge, Martin, Jim. I didn’t know what to charge, but I knew that there were some performers working trade shows in the magic industry, Bud Dietrich and Herb Jaro, who were making upwards of a thousand dollars a day.

179 Identify Your Mastery and Take It to the Marketplace So I said, “Typically, I make $1500 a day, but I’d be happy to negotiate a long-term contract with you and commit to many dates. Do you have other events?” He said, “Yes, we’re going to the home and garden shows.” And he said, “I will pay you $800 a day, and I will keep you working twenty days a month for the next three months. And I will pay your expenses, airfare, ground transport, food, hotel. You will travel with us, and we will pay you promptly.” I did not renegotiate. I said, “Fine.” We wrote down an agreement right there on a piece of paper, and they paid me in full. I worked every single day, show after show after show. And quite frankly, I think we ended up making about $68,000, which ended up being leverage. Now, while we were doing those shows, I would walk around during my short breaks, because other companies would notice that we had the large crowd. I kept working on my technique to build larger crowds. I would plant seeds, and I actually got my friends invited—other magic buddies—to work for other companies that were maybe twenty or thirty yards away from us. I had them come in, and I made money on them. So I wasn’t just happy with the work. I was trying to make it bigger. I had a few days off between gigs. I went to another trade show—I already had money coming in now, my wife was very proud of me, and I was proud of myself—but I said, “This could end. I need momentum. I need inertia. I need to make sure that we have the money to raise our children and take care of our needs. I need to turn this into a business.” And so I would cold-call at other trade shows, even though I was being paid in between. This is my form, Martin and Jim, of direct-response marketing, because I would go directly to the decision-makers and generate a response, yes or no. There’s nothing in between the yes or no. That’s all that exists. You’re either on board or it’s not happening. There is no promise of a better day. The promise of a 180 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up better day, I’ll buy your system later, never happens. I’ve never seen it happen. They’re either on board on their not. And I started booking. I booked the Maxim America, IBM, Toshiba, Cargill, and Mitsubishi Electronics. I just kept booking and booking and booking. I became a machine at going after the work. And I hated it. I absolutely hating going after the work. But I loved the feeling of securing the work. I ended up working with Apple and IBM both, which is fascinating, and working the Mac World Shows and working COMDEX from the inception of COMDEX. I cold-called at ninety-six trade shows, and I booked ninety-four. And so for those out there who are thinking, “Well, I’ve got to have a better business card” or “I’ve got to have a fancy brochure or a fancy Web site,” I absolutely would argue that. What they need to do is identify their mastery and take it to the marketplace, and let someone try it on for size. And if they’re passionate about what they do, and they’re good at what they do, and they’re committed . . . Really, again, passion comes into this, because that’s the one thing we cannot argue with. It’s that charisma and that energy. You can’t turn it away. I call it the “gift shift.” When someone really has possession of a talent, and you can’t argue it, they believe in what they do, that’s when they get the yes’s. That’s when the crowd builds. That’s when the money rolls in and your freedom rolls out. That’s when you live your legacy and leave your dynasty. In the trade show industry, I ended up doing a couple million dollars per year. That was a lot of money, Jim. I leveraged it in real estate and conservative investments, and it set my life in motion. I decided I wanted to leave the trade show industry at a certain point. I met a man at Martin’s events. That man put me on the spot, which was a good thing. He said, “You are an excellent 181 Identify Your Mastery and Take It to the Marketplace speaker and closer. I’m going to put you on a platform and you’ll help me with my speech. I’ll do something for you. You’ll do something for me.” I ended up doing it. I didn’t want to do it. I was actually fearful. I didn’t even have a system, but I didn’t have a choice. He had already booked me, and I wasn’t into accepting failure. So I created some system on paper, and then my sales went through the roof. Suddenly my past, from magician at birthday parties, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other events, had taken me full force to the cruise ships in Miami, where I went for the interview, got the job, and they paid me very little. They paid me more when I figured out the system. Then I went to the trade shows, where I applied the skills that I had learned from the cruise ships as a performer. I didn’t realize that I was learning to be a negotiator, salesman, persuader, and influencer. But I had learned those things through the environment, through my mentors, the cruise directors. And then I became cruise director. Flash forward to the trade shows, my way of staying on land and raising a family. And then from the trade shows to the seminar industry, where suddenly I realized that all the things that I had learned the hard way—the unconventional wisdom that I now had—I could plug into my own seminars and transfer those skills to others, which I do to this day. I teach people how to take their actual expertise, their passion, and turn it into real, monetizable income doing what they love. And it was all the result of feeling like I was about to compromise the integrity of my life and not being able to take care of my family, which was my greatest fear. And so my life actually makes sense. I can see how everything fits together. And if only the people out there reading the pages in this book would take a look at their past, would take a 182 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up look at the choices they’ve made, it will reveal a pathology. It will reveal that there are unique skill sets that they have. And if they can access their passion and figure out what it is they would do for free if they had all the money in the world, and they pursue that and make it monetizable . . . That is what each of us teaches people how to do. Martin Howey: Joel, this has been very good, very enlightening, and you’ve shared a lot of great information. As we wrap up this year, we realize that it’s been a rough road for many entrepreneurs and small-business owners. If there was one piece of advice or wisdom that you could share with other people that would help them handle their problems or their challenges more effectively, or maybe grow their businesses and become more profitable, what one piece of advice could you give them? Joel Bauer: Well, it would come down to video. It would come down to the breakthroughs in technology. It would come down to the fact that most people have no idea what you do for a living. No clue as to what it is you’re motivated by or that you find compelling. So what I would compel people to do is have their son or daughter take a pocket video camera and follow them around as they do their process. Gather some testimonials from people who have radical results as a result of what it is that you do, your result. If you’re a doctor, lawyer, teacher, plumber—the result. People rave about what it is that you do, Jim. I’m sure they rave about you. Those testimonials plus demonstration, edit into a one- or two-minute piece you attach to your e-mails, that you put online, that you position out there, so that people finally know for the first time what it is you really do and understand the result. If I could only give one piece of advice, put that two- minute video out there. I teach people how to do this in a matter of an hour or a weekend seminar. 183 Identify Your Mastery and Take It to the Marketplace So the idea of being able to show someone on a sensory level . . . As I’ve always said, the more senses you involve, the more money that you make. I’m a sensory-based performer, presenter, and human being. And I know that we have to activate someone else by helping them. The first thing we have to help an audience do is to understand what it is Jim Palmer does—entrepreneur, author, speaker, coach. We need to understand the value of his newsletter. We need to understand who he is and what he’s about. We need to understand who Martin Howey really is and how he takes someone and their life’s experience and turns them into an expert who’s appreciated, a high-level consultant who can command the kind of money that most people don’t make. And so, if I only had one piece of advice here, it would be to start using video. I do not send written e-mails out very often anymore. I send video e-mails out, because we do not write the way we speak. My personal videos have gotten to people that you wouldn’t believe that would respond. And because they were personal and visceral and palpable and tangible, that’s why they responded. Because people respond to emotions and heartfelt communication, and that’s what that video does. Martin Howey: That’s wonderful, Joel. Thank you very much for that., That gives us a lot of great information that I’m sure will benefit many people who read or listen to this interview. You’ve been so sharing, as you always are. And I can’t thank you enough for taking the time with us and sharing your experiences, your expertise, and your ideas on what we could do to become better at what we do. So again, I can’t thank you enough for being with us and really do appreciate your contribution. Jim Palmer: Joel, I thank you very much. Let me also echo that. You and I’ve actually spoken for the first time today, but there hasn’t been one time when I’ve been together with our mutual

184 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up friend, Martin, where he’s not singing your praises. So it is finally nice to connect with you. You said two things I want people to really take away. Being scared is useful, and fear is a great motivator. I concur on both of those. We’ve all been through some stuff in our lives, and you and I share a similar story. I had a wife who was pregnant when I was about to lose my job. I was the man of the house, and I really had to step it up, and fear was the great motivator that kicked me in the pants. So it is okay to be scared. Just never give up. I also concur with what you’ve said about video. I just released my final episode of my weekly show, Newsletter Guru TV, today and I talked about how powerful video has been for my business this year. I actually get comments when people sign up. “Jim, we’ve been watching you every week. You seem like a real guy who’s got a bit of smarts or you know something about marketing.” And what I take out of those comments is it’s hard to hide behind video, especially when you do it every week. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but when you’re out there in video, they see who you are. And if you’re a person who presents value, video is a very powerful medium. So I just want to concur on that. And again, thank you so much for your time. It’s a very, very valuable lesson that we definitely appreciate you sharing. Joel Bauer: My pleasure.

Joel has made it his life’s work to develop his Passion to Profit system that anyone can follow no matter what their passion or interest. Joel is living his passion as a platform speaker and mentor helping others. Booked at mega events with tens of thousands of attendees, Joel has toured and opened for President

185 Identify Your Mastery and Take It to the Marketplace Bill Clinton, and has worked with some of the top producers in the industry including T. Harv Eker, Bill Glazer and Dan Kennedy, Larry Benet, and Brad Fallon. Visit Joel at www.JoelBauer.com.

186 Jim Palmer and Martin Howey: Top Business Success Strategies

Jim Palmer: So I think we’ve each taken some time and shared our biggest personal challenge, and described how we handled it, and what we’re doing to help others. So the third question, Martin, that I think we want to keep the book wrapped around is, our country is struggling economically. You and I both know many entrepreneurs who are going through some tough times. And so we each agreed back there in LA that, in this book, we would also share two or three of our own business nuggets of wisdom, from our areas of expertise, that could help make a difference for people reading the book. So let’s start to do a little bit of a transition. Are you okay going first, or do you want me to go first? Martin Howey: Well, I’d really love to hear what you have to say. Jim Palmer: Okay. Martin Howey: I haven’t taken a whole lot of notes on what I said, but I can always learn from you. You’re a real inspiration to me. Jim Palmer: I appreciate that. Okay. I’m known internationally as The Newsletter Guru. That’s kind of the niche as far as newsletters, but I’m really an expert in client retention and maximizing the profitability of client relationships. Of course, I’ve been working for entrepreneurs for my whole life, and then I started my own business ten years ago. I love marketing. And all kinds of marketing and building business just gets me so excited. In planning for this book, I looked at some of the best teachings I’ve done in my other books and in my Newsletter Guru TV video series, and I whittled it down to three different lessons. Lesson One. The first lesson—and I talk about this a lot in the coaching groups and with the entrepreneurs I coach every month—is listen, 187 Top Business Success Strategies really listen, to what your customers have to say. I actually call this LLP, which is not a legal term. LLP is listen, learn, and profit. To do this, you have to retrain your ear, because, first of all, people are very busy. We have electronics all over the place, five cell phones, iPads, computers. We’ve got all these things vying for our time. Then when you do happen to hear a customer—either in person face to face, via e-mail, surveys, or whatever, do you really listen to them? The progression and growth of my business resulted from listening to the pain points of my clients. When I started my first business in October 2001, it was called Dynamic Communication. I thought, I’m going to be a consultant and I’m going to do marketing. But I had been doing newsletters for about twenty-five years at all the different places I’d worked. I thought, I’ll offer newsletters as a way to generate some cash immediately, and then that will get me some consulting jobs. Well, you know probably better than most, it’s pretty hard to be a consultant and to sell consulting. But the newsletters really started taking off. So I started out doing newsletters one-on-one with a client—I write and design a newsletter and get paid for it. Then, boom, I’d have to go and find another client. I did that for five years and developed a pretty good business. As a brief aside, I’m friends with Carrie Wilkerson, The Barefoot Executive. I was really blessed to be part of her book, The Barefoot Executive. I had to do an in-depth interview with her publisher. The interviewer said, “Talk about the challenges when you started your business.” And they were looking for some real true grit and honesty, right? Not the usual fluff we shuffle out sometimes. I said, “My entire first year of business was revenue-free.” Which is a funny way of saying it took me well over a year to get my first client. That first year was tough. But after five years, I had twenty to twenty-five corporate clients. 188 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Now back to my lesson one point. While I was in clients’ offices, I kept hearing how it took them too much time to write and put together their own monthly newsletters. Besides that, they never knew what to put in their newsletters. Coming up with the content was a problem for them. Around then, I started learning about Internet marketing through my buddy Mike Capuzzi, the inventor of CopyDoodles. He introduced me to Dan Kennedy and the whole Glazer-Kennedy world. Then I started my first online business, No Hassle Newsletters, and put together all the content a fun, informative business newsletter should have. Right off the bat, I started getting monthly subscribers. Of course, my rates back then were like $27 a month, which is kind of embarrassing. But hey, we all start somewhere. So my client list grew, and then I started getting feedback saying, “Jim, we love the content, and our customers love to read the content.” Now, Martin, this is officially listen, learn, and profit point number one. When the customers said, “My customers love reading your content,” I went and dubbed the articles that I put together as “My favorite customer loving content.” So I trademarked that. Then my clients said, “We have a hard time getting designers to design newsletters the way you say they should be designed. And I thought, Okay, there’s another pain point and opportunity. So I created my No Hassle Newsletter templates, basically done-for-you templates that are already filled in with content, but they’re easily editable. People can just take them and literally put out a newsletter in less than an hour each month. So I included that. I added more value. In November 2008, we were exhibiting at a marketing conference in St. Louis. A client came up and said, “Jim, I love the newsletters, the content, and I love the templates. But we have a hard time working with printers who understand the way that you 189 Top Business Success Strategies want them folded and mailed. They also don’t know how to work with the mailing list.” Literally within two months, I launched The Newsletter Guru’s Concierge Print & Mail on Demand Service. I went to my printer and got a strategic partnership going. Now we print more than 70,000 newsletters a month for my clients. So when they do their No Hassle Newsletter, they just send us their newsletter mailing list, pay for the quantity they want, and then we do the printing and mailing. They never even have to leave their desk or talk to anybody on the phone. It goes on from there. But every single one of those businesses came from listening to what my customers were telling me. Either just telling me conversationally, or telling me what their pain point was. I listened and then added more value to my customers. When you can hear and address the pain point for your clients or your prospects, and if you can deliver it with what I call world-class service, if you can give them real good value, you’re going to have a customer for life. So listen, learn, and profit is the first strategy that I’m sharing. Martin Howey: I really like that, Jim. Just to piggyback on that, you talked about talking to your customers and listening to what they have to say. Equally as important, or probably more important, is talking to yourself and listening to what you have to say. We talk to ourselves many times during the day, thousands of times during the day. You find yourself talking to yourself without even realizing what you’re doing. And about 80 percent of what we say to ourselves is negative. So it’s really important to be able to control what you say and then to listen to the response. And it’s critical that you say the right things to yourself, because what you say can have a massive impact on the results that you get. 190 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Some of my best thoughts come when I’m driving and I just turn the radio off. There’s not a whole lot to listen to on the radio anyway, so I turn that off. And then I have an opportunity to reflect on where I’ve just come from and what I just did. What could I have done differently, or how could I have improved it, or what can I take to the next meeting similar to what I’ve just been to that will be of benefit to someone else? You thought about what your customers had to say, which gives you some great insight as to how to provide additional services to them, based on what they’re looking for, because you listened to them. But I think also in talking to yourself, you can now determine what I can do better next time. What did I learn from this? How can I improve? Or what can I take with me to my next meeting? Jim Palmer: You’re right. Martin Howey: Listen and talk to yourself in positive terms, analytical terms, but make sure you listen and you apply what you just heard. Jim Palmer: There’s something else important about what you just said, Martin. When I talk live and first introduce myself, I tell people that I love to go kayaking, and that my big, fat dog Toby and I walk around the lake. And Toby goes kayaking with me. But what I share with people is that that’s not just fun. Walking and kayaking are inspirational for me. I don’t know if I could even pinpoint one really good idea that I’ve ever had in my office. When I’m out paddling the lake by myself or when Toby and I are just walking in the woods, or, as you say, driving in the car, for me those are times when the floodgates open up and all these ideas just start coming down. The other thing I’ll say real quickly and then I’m going to ask you to share one of your strategies, is that in this age of Internet marketing and home-based offices, it is super critical to get out and talk to your customers or meet first prospects.

191 Top Business Success Strategies You and I are kind of seminar junkies in a way. We’re always running into each other at different events. Do I need to go to seminars? Well, first of all, you should never stop learning. In reality, one of the main reasons I go is to be out and connect with people, because we spend so much time in our offices. You need to do that. So listen to what your customers are saying. Listen to what their pain point is. Listen to what’s either holding them back, or something they long for. Find a way to deliver it to them. Give it to them with world-class service and you’re going to have a customer for life. Find a time and place that work for you to review conversations and to brainstorm new ideas. So that is our strategy tip number one—listen, learn, and profit. Now, I’m going to turn the microphone over to Martin and you can share some words of wisdom. Martin Howey: Well, one of my early heroes in business was Walt Disney. And I remember Walt Disney saying that you could have anything in life, you could have the most successful business, it doesn’t matter what kind of business it is, whether it’s an insurance company, whether it’s a financial planning company, whether it’s a publishing company, or a theme park like Disneyland or Disney World. If you’ll simply follow what he called his Law of Unlimited Abundance, and here’s what it is. Do what you do so well that the people who see you do it want to see you do it again. And they’ll bring others to see what it is that you do. So here’s a question. You do what you do, not what he does, not what she does, not what they do. You do what you do. What is it that you do? Well, I sell cars, you might say. Really? What you really should be thinking is what the benefit of what you do is.

192 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Rather than “I sell cars,” “I help people protect their families with safety. I help people enhance their self-esteem with this sport car.” Whatever it happens to be, find out what it is, the real benefit of what you do. So you do what you do, whatever it is that you do, and it isn’t the thing that most of us say that we do. It’s the benefit of what we do. How do you do it? Do what you do so well. So well doesn’t mean mediocrity. It doesn’t mean shoddy. It means with excellence. What do you do, and how do you do it so well that you don’t have any competition, that you’re above anybody else out there? You do what you do so well that people see you do it. Which people? Your customers. Who are your customers? Do you know who your customers are? Do you know what the profile of your average customer is? Do you know who they are, where they live, what they do, what they like, what they don’t like, what they’re interested in, what their families are like? Who are your customers? Do what you do so well that the people who see you do it want to see you do it again? We call that repeat business. What are you doing so well that the people just can’t stand to be away? They want to come back and have more experience with you. You do what you do so well that the people who see you do it want to see you do it again, and they’ll bring others to see what it is that you do. We call those referrals. So sit down and figure out who you are, how you do what you do, what kind of service or product you provide, how you do it better than your competition. And then how do you get your customers to want to come back and do business with you again? And then how you get them to bring other people to come and do business with you or see what it is that you do.

193 Top Business Success Strategies And we’ll take a look at that. What Walt Disney said was, “You can be successful at anything if you’ll simply do that little formula.” And it works with any kind of business. Jim Palmer: That’s pretty cool. You know, I think it was Dan Kennedy who said, “People will initially buy from you, because of either maybe curiosity or because they want or have a need for the product or service that you sell. But they’ll stay with you for a long time for who you are and the type of service that you deliver.” And of course, I always end my videos by saying, “Oh, by the way, the customers end up staying longer, end up buying more, and referring more.” So that’s pretty cool. Lesson two. I guess I’ll go into my number two lesson that I wanted to share. I learned this from my very first mentor when I started in business. And it really helped me build a much larger business. If you remember, I had been unemployed for a long time and then had the cancer. When I finally decided to start my business in October 2001, I was, first of all, obviously, happy to be healthy, and I was also excited to have a business. But now I needed to get the thing rolling. I had met somebody at a chamber of commerce networking event, and we became friends. He was an older gentleman who had started, built, and then sold off three businesses. He was in the process of doing his fourth one. He kind of took me under his wing. While we were having breakfast one morning at a local diner, he said, “So Palmer, what’re your goals for your business?” I said, “John, to be quite honest with you, I would be happy to do $50,000 in revenue.” And John looked at me. He was a big guy with a bald head. He kind of looked like Kojak. And he gave me this look, a cross between anger, shock, and disappointment. He said, “What the heck? $50,000, that’s chicken stuff.” (I cleaned it up for the transcriptionist.) And he 194 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up said, “Jim, what’s wrong with half a million dollars? Could you live on half a million dollars?” “Yes.” He said, “Well, here’s your problem. You need to think bigger.” I had thought, I’m starting a brand-new business; I could generate $50,000 in revenue. I pretty much knew how to do that. I knew that if I go out to networking events, start meeting clients, I would slowly get one, two, five, ten, fifteen clients, and I’d generate a decent revenue. I will say this. If I hadn’t had the whole cancer situation, I might have had a bigger goal. But there’s something there where my priorities had shifted. So irrespective of what my original goal was, I think it was clouded a little bit because of what I’d just gone through. So he said, “Jim, you need to shoot for half a million dollars.” He actually told me about Psycho Cybernetics and I read that book. What I figured out is that you need to embrace a bigger goal. He said, “Kick the door down, push back the walls, and don’t think of $50,000, because you know how to do that. You need to physically ask yourself inside your head, ‘What do I have to do to generate half a million dollars in revenue?’” That was clearly outside of not only my comfort zone, but also my scope of thinking at the time. And so I thought, I can’t just go meet one business owner at a time and have him engage me to write and design his newsletter. I need to create newsletter templates, and I need to sell one newsletter to hundreds of people, thousands of people, instead of one person at a time. So that was the genesis, if you will, of my whole idea of the second business by thinking bigger. But it wasn’t until I was challenged to do so that I had to ask myself, How I do that? About a year later, I was in Boston speaking, and I met with a friend for breakfast the next day. This guy is a pretty

195 Top Business Success Strategies successful executive coach. He said, “So, Jim, how the whole No Hassle thing going?” I said, “Oh, pretty good. I’ve got about forty-five members right now.” He asked, “So what are your plans?” I said, “Well, I’m working to get to a hundred.” He said, “A hundred? What’s wrong with a thousand? Could you imagine the kind of revenue you’d have if you had a thousand members?” And once again, Martin, my thinking had had horse blinders on. I was doing list-building strategies. I was speaking and doing different things. I thought to grow to a hundred, but what do I need to do to grow to a thousand. That’s when I started adding more value to the program. I actually drove to Boston. It’s not that far. On the long drive home, I’m thinking, You know what? John and Dave actually challenged me each time. What they did is they added a zero to whatever my goal was, and so I nicknamed it The Power of Zero. I shot a video, and I started teaching it to some of the people that I now coach. And, by the way, let me say this. This works not only with growth-oriented goals. It works also in the other direction. Let’s say you’re looking at your business right now and let’s say times are tough, and you’re looking at your P&L, your profit and loss statement. And you think, “Boy I really need to cut some fat out of my expenses. I want to cut maybe 2 or 3 percent.” Well, don’t do that. Try and cut 20 or 30 percent out, because here’s what happens. If you’re going to cut 2 or 3 percent out, maybe you stop going out for meals so much. You cut a few subscriptions back. You know, whatever it is. You can probably pretty easily get to 2 or 3 percent. But to get to 20 or 30 percent, you need to think creatively. Maybe somebody needs to get laid off, or maybe there’s just a 196 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up whole different way to look at it. But whether it’s cutting your expenses, or instead saying, “I need ten clients this month,” add a zero and say, “I’m going for a hundred.” If, at the end of this month, instead of cutting 30 percent of your expenses, you were only able to cut 8 or 10 percent, that’s still significantly better than 2 or 3 percent. In fact, it’s three times better than your original goal to cut 3 percent. And if you originally had a goal, say, “I’m going to add ten clients this month,” and you instead say, “I’m going to add a hundred,” and you fall woefully short and only add twenty, that is twice as many as you would have had if your goal had been only ten. So the big strategy and lesson of The Power of Zero is to think big. Once you adapt a bigger goal, you actually need to ask yourself—and this is again where the theater and the mind comes in; at least for me it works really well—if I need to add a hundred clients this month, how do I that? Then I’ll go into my dark room, close my eyes, and think about it, because the subconscious brain is so darned powerful. All the things you’ve heard and read and listened to, all those ideas are in there in your mind on this magic CD. And it’s only when you ask yourself questions like “How do I . . .” that the answers will become sourced on this giant CD, as I like to think about it. And the ideas are going to come down and dump into your conscious brain and let you move forward. So success strategy number two is actually quite appropriate for the times that we’re in, because Martin I believe that when people get scared, like with the economy, and they try to think their way forward, they start operating from a position of fear. Then they kind of pull their horns in a little bit, and they maybe get a little more tentative with their marketing or their growth plans.

197 Top Business Success Strategies I have not been timid the last three years. In that time, my business has had pretty amazing growth. We are in some tough economic times. But I have spent more money marketing. I have spent more money on what I call my personal development— working with coaches, going to seminars, and investing in programs, products, and the like. So when you don’t get shy about how you invest in yourself and market your business, it’s amazing. As long as you continue to deliver value and, again, I’ll say world-class service, people will stay with you longer, and you’ll attract new clients. So my success strategy number two is called The Power of Zero. Martin Howey: That’s amazing. I like what you say there. In fact, I use a similar illustration in my seminars as well, Jim, with this adding a zero to it. I ask the audience to imagine there was a bar that’s set at a ten-foot-high level. So it’s ten feet off the ground, and you need to get over that bar. You can’t go around it. You can’t go under it. You can’t do anything like that. You have to go over the top of the bar. Write down as many different ideas as you can think of about how you’d get over that bar. So that’s easy. They start to come up with get a long ladder, get a trampoline, pole vault. There are all kinds of things that they come up with to do that. Now, stop and think if we were to add a zero to that and we take it from ten feet to a hundred feet. Now come up with as many different ideas as you can to get over that bar at a hundred feet high. And so it becomes more difficult, because a trampoline doesn’t work. You’d have to have a really, really long ladder to be able to do it. You can’t pole-vault over it. You’d have to get a helicopter. You’d have to come up with something creative to get over the top of that bar.

198 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up So here’s the question. Will the same techniques that you used to get over the ten-foot bar get you over the hundred-foot bar? And of course, the answer is no. Maybe a couple techniques will, but for the most part, no. Now, reverse that. Will the same techniques that get you over the hundred-foot bar get you over the ten-foot bar? And the response is, of course, so why are we even thinking in terms of getting over a ten-foot bar? Why don’t we start thinking about the things that we can do to get over the hundred-foot bar? And they start thinking bigger than what they would normally think. And that’s what you were talking about, Jim. How do we think bigger than where our mind would normally take us? Add a zero to it. So now when we start thinking out of the box and we start thinking about getting more customers, it’s not a matter of getting over the ten-foot bar to get customers. It’s getting over the hundred-foot bar. How do we get more people coming back to see us? We use that very same model in our seminars. Jim Palmer: I like that. Martin Howey: What we talk about a lot in our program, is it’s important to realize that your success in whatever you do, in business or whatever, will always be determined by three different things: The need or demand for what you do, your ability to do it, and the difficulty in replacing you. In other words, how valuable are you and the services you perform to other people? So let’s think back to when you and I were kids. You remember we would get on an elevator and there would be a man on the elevator. He would shut the door and operate the controls to take us up or down to wherever we wanted to go. Today, we don’t see elevator operators. In fact, if you have young children and take them to a hotel or someplace where there’s an elevator, they will beat you. They will run to see who can push the button first.

199 Top Business Success Strategies Children today can run and operate an elevator. It doesn’t take much to do that. There’s no need, or there’s no demand, for an elevator operator. The ability to do it, children can do it. And the difficulty in replacing you, well, it doesn’t take much to replace an elevator operator. Therefore, that job is obsolete. But now let’s take a look at a major league baseball player. How about the need or demand for what they do? Well, if you put a certain kind of baseball player out on the field or he’s coming to town to play, they’ll sell tickets just because of a baseball player. In the game of basketball, when Michael Jordon came to town, they could charge whatever they wanted for a ticket. Tiger Woods out on the golf course, they could charge whatever they wanted for spectators to be out there. So there is a need or demand for what they do, and that will affect the price of the ticket. The ability to do it? They say that the action of hitting a baseball sailing toward you at ninety miles per hour is the single most difficult movement there is in sports, because you’re swinging a bat at seventy miles per hour toward a ball coming at you at ninety miles per hour. In basketball, the target, or the hoop, doesn’t move. The same in golf, and the same in football—the end zone doesn’t move. But in baseball, the target is moving, at an incredible speed. So that’s one of the most difficult movements in sports. Now, consider the difficulty in replacing a good batter, when the best in the world can hit the target less than a third of the time and most of the other players are successful far less than that. It doesn’t take long to realize why the best batters are among the highest money-makers in the world. And that’s if you only hit the ball a third of the time. So here’s the question. What kind of value are you providing your customers? What’s the demand or the need? See, if you’re selling what everybody else sells, there may be no need or very little need or demand, because they can buy whatever it is that you’re selling someplace else. 200 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up So you’ve got to figure out what you can do to plus the product or plus the service that I’m providing. What can I do to enhance it to make it more in demand? And it may not be the actual product or service that you’re selling. It could be what you sell beyond the product or service. It could be the support and service you provide in addition to the actual product itself. It could be your accessibility. It could be the bonuses that you offer. It could be a number of different things. So, one, you have to figure out what you can do to increase the need or demand for the services that I provide or that I do for someone. Then, two, how do I do it. How do I do this better than anyone else so it virtually eliminates them as a competitive factor? So not only do I become the logical choice for my customers or prospects to buy from, but, in fact, I become the only choice that they have, because everybody else is relegated to nonexistence. And then three, What’s the difficulty in replacing me? How can I figure out what I can do to become indispensible for my customers and my prospects? Now, if we take a look at computers, a PC is a PC and you can replace a Dell computer with a Sony, with an IBM, with any number of PCs out there. But when you have a Mac, you can’t replace Mac with anything else. There’s only one of them. They don’t have competitors who offer the same product. So what can you do in your business is to make sure that you embody those three things: the need or demand for what you do, your ability to do it and the difficulty in replacing you. And when you do those things, you’re going to command a respectable position in the marketplace that others just can’t compete with. Jim Palmer: That’s really strong. I also talk about something I call the Big Juicy Orange, not another red apple in the bushel basket. The last thing you want to do is to have your business, product, or service be seen as a commodity.

201 Top Business Success Strategies So you need to find a way, as you say, to wrap it up, add more value, or in some way make it different. Back in my early career, I was in the bicycle business. The bike shop I was running at the time—right after I was newly married, actually—was competing with similar businesses. I think the hot bikes at the time were Specialized and Trek and Schwinn and Raleigh. I didn’t have any of those brands. I had some no-name brands like Ross, Fuji, and St. Tropez. But we grew that business to be one of the largest bike shops in the country. Actually, the year that I left it to go join the franchise, we were doing a million dollars a year when the average bike shop was doing about $250,000 a year. This was in the early to mid ’80s. One of the things I did, Martin, was exactly what you said—figure out how you can set yourself apart. (As you’re reading what I’m going to tell you, just keep asking yourself, How I can use this strategy in my business?) So bicycles at the time had a manufacturer’s warranty. Well, you’re a big bike guy, Martin. You know it usually had a warranty on the frame, about twenty years, and usually one year on the parts, right? That was kind of typical then. Martin Howey: Right. Jim Palmer: What I did, Martin, is I said any bike that we sell is going to have a lifetime guarantee against defects. I had these little signature decals. At the time, bike shops were getting these little square ugly foil things and putting them down by the bottom bracket area. You know, Joe’s Bike Shop. I had these created that looked like a signature. It was clear. It cost me a little bit of money, but every bike that I sold had this clear signature. And as long as the bike came in, if there was a problem with it, we took care of it. I’m not talking about normal maintenance. And the rationale I used, Martin, was this. If something’s going to be defective, it’s probably going to happen pretty quickly 202 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up when they first start riding the bike, or even if it was a year down the road or five years down the road. And I figured that if it was defective, no matter what the manufacturer’s warranty was, if I was a good enough customer, I could probably get them to eat a derailleur or a brake or two. They certainly didn’t want a busted frame out there. Then I also figured if, by some chance, the manufacturer wouldn’t back me up on this, I was going to eat it anyway because it was going to be such amazing customer service. Why would they buy their bike somewhere else? It turned out to be true. As word started getting around, I had customers coming in the store who said, “I don’t know what kind of bike I want, but I was told this is the only place to buy a bike.” My major competitor called me up once, and he said, “What are you doing?” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “You’re offering a lifetime guarantee. How can you do that?” I said, “We’re just doing it.” He said, “You’re nuts.” I said, “Okay, I’m nuts.” And I hung up the phone. We grew that business by over 30 percent, three years in a row, just because we were backing up the bikes we sold. The other thought process I teach, which connects with what you were saying, Martin, about how difficult is it to replace you, is POD—Pain of Disconnect. You want to make sure that if someone’s doing business with you, that if they decide to leave, there’s got to be a negative result or a negative reaction. Now, there are different ways you can do it. For example, let’s say you have an online software that somebody’s using and their company’s benefitting from it. If they disconnect from you, suddenly their Web site’s gone down or they’re no longer able to use the survey function, whatever it is. 203 Top Business Success Strategies There’s got to be a pain associated with their disconnecting from you. And if you have pain of disconnect built in, it’s less likely that they’ll leave. I look at it as insurance against the speed bumps. Because every once in a while, you’re going to come up on a speed bump in your business where something goes wrong, or maybe your customer or client gets a little indifferent service, or something’s going to just cause them to not have a good experience. And when there’s a pain of disconnect, your customer’s loyalty will usually weather that storm. So those are two things I would add to what you said, which I think is pretty important. Be a Big Juicy Orange, not another red apple, and build in Pain Of Disconnect, so grow your business, even during a tough economy. Martin Howey: Absolutely. That’s perfect, a great tie in. Jim Palmer: All right, so the third lesson that I’m going to share, Martin, is called the power of massive action. Lesson three. I learned this from Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer. Probably like a lot of people who start their business, I had a corporate background where, if I put out a press release, or newsletter, or some kind of marketing piece, or—heaven forbid—there was a grammar or spelling mistake, it was like the end of the world. You’ve got to walk yourself into the owner’s office, and he really wreaks havoc on you. You’re doing too much, too fast, and so you’re making mistakes. I think for a lot of people, massive action is kind of scary. Well, let me define massive action. Massive action is the ability to implement on many fronts on multiple projects, and—here’s the key— simultaneously, not sequentially. Massive action is scary for a lot of folks because, quite frankly, it can be messy. And I think it’s Dan Kennedy who says, “Success leaves a messy kitchen.” But what’s weird is that 204 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up throughout school and our childhood, we learned to do things sequentially in steps. We go from first grade to second grade and then onward; we go to college. Or we do reports—we do research, then we start writing, then we get some feedback. But the reality of running a business, today especially, is that there is a real need to be fast and agile. I think of entrepreneurs as more wealth-oriented, compared to small-business owners who are usually focused on just doing more of what they currently do. When I think of taking action, taking action is just the best way to get things done. A lot of people stumble on that. So what you want to do is go down additional roads, and get more things done, and work on projects simultaneously. When I was writing my first book—while also running my business—it took me over a year, roughly fourteen months, to complete. My second book took seven months. And I wrote The Fastest Way to Higher Profits in six months. Let’s just be clear here. I’m not saying put out shoddy workmanship. I’m not saying that at all. I do think there’s a difference in wanting to do your best, as compared to being a perfectionist where I’m not going to release it until I’m 1000 percent sure that there’s no mistakes. I got some relief when I heard Bill Glazer, several years ago, talk about massive action and how some people never pull the trigger. It’s always ready, aim, aim, aim. . . . They never pull the trigger. He said imagine you are in Barnes and Noble and want to purchase a book. If the author of the book you need is still concerned that there may be a period missing, or somewhere on page 86 it says “sun” instead of “son” for son, which isn’t caught with a spell checker, in other words, if the book is still in the author’s word processor, that author is not going to make a sale. I thought that was very liberating. It gave me some great comfort. What I got out of that, and really how I operate my business today, is I focus on the value. I think if you give people

205 Top Business Success Strategies value, if you give them good information—and I always try to do that in an entertaining manner—then people are going to dig it. I will tell you that as we’re recording this call today, Martin, I’m doing my annual six-day holiday sale. I was on coaching calls all day yesterday, and literally at about seven last night, I realized I didn’t have an e-mail written to promote my sale today. So I literally pounded the thing out and sent it my guy Chris who does what he does to distribute it, because I don’t know how to do that. I knew I couldn’t make Chris wait forever, so I read through it two times, made a couple of changes, and sent it to him. The e-mail went out at six thirty this morning. Martin, by ten, I had two people say hey, Jim, you misspelled this, or it looks like blah, blah, blah. People are very happy to point out your mistakes. But you know what? It got done. It got out there. A funny story just popped into my head. When I was getting ready to launch No Hassle Newsletters, I prepared to exhibit at a Glazer-Kennedy event. I was going to introduce my new program there. I was in massive-action mode for two months before that, because I knew the cost would be about $5,000 for booth space plus airfare and travel. Let’s just say it would be like seven or eight grand for me to go there and exhibit. So I had to launch and, hopefully, get a good return on my investment. Well, I literally pulled the switch, pushed the green button to launch the Web site, two days before I went there. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I launched it. The first day I was exhibiting, I got some good reaction. I went to my room that night and pulled up the site, because I actually hadn’t seen it yet, because I have a guy who does all my Web work. I just write the copy. I’m looking through it, and all of a sudden I go, “Oh, no, oh, my goodness.” And I write a reply back to him. “Correct this. Change that. Do this, that, and the other thing.” I’m seeing all these problems. Some of them grammar, and others just things I didn’t want to have out there. 206 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up So I went through the whole site and sent him back, it must have been, thirty or thirty-five edits, for him to make for me. Then I signed off and I went into my e-mail. And guess what happened, Martin? I had five or six new subscribers to the program, despite the typos. So that right there is a big lesson on what Bill says. If it doesn’t come out of your word processor, you’re never going to sell anything. So, while I was concerned about possible spelling and grammar mistakes, I did pull the trigger. I launched the program, and I actually started getting business. Of course, I corrected and changed things as I went, but I started my business—that’s the lesson there. Earlier this year, 2011, I was in massive-action mode from January to March. It was like a ninety-day period where I basically sleep about five hours a night. I was getting ready to launch No Hassle Social Media. And what happens to me is, if I get up in the night—let’s just say “nature calls,” to keep it clean—I can’t go back to sleep again because my mind turns on and I start thinking about stuff. Well, a new idea hit around four in the morning, so I came down to my office and wrote it out on paper, because I knew I’d forget it if I went back to sleep. Now I was up and running, so I just kept working. But to me, that’s massive-action mode. As I said earlier, when we were school kids, we learned to be slow and deliberate and very cautious with our assignments. But that’s not how you make the most money. So I would encourage people to start implementing. Implement fast, implement on multiple fronts simultaneously. It will get a little bit messy, but it will lead to faster success. Remember, there’s an expression—I believe Dan Kennedy said this—“Good is good enough.” In other words, lose the need for perfection. Absolutely do your best work. Always provide value. Always provide good service. But lose the need to wait for

207 Top Business Success Strategies absolute perfection before pulling the trigger. And implement on many, many fronts. By the way, before I pause and let you respond, Martin, two weeks ago, before I went to LA, I had thought this would be the first December in a while that I was going to not have a thoroughly packed schedule. And then you and I decided to do the book. So here we are two weeks later, in massive-action mode. But the great thing is we’re going to get this book out, and we’re going to help some people. Who knows? Maybe we’re going to save a life or two with the information that you’ve shared, and that’s a good thing. So massive-action mode, it’s a good thing. Martin Howey: I love it. I’m fully with you on that because it’s not what you know, it’s not what you have inside of your brain or on your desk or in your computer, it’s what actually gets out into the marketplace that makes the change and produces the effect. Jim, the thing that I want to talk about here has to do with metrics, and this is something that’s really overlooked by a lot of business owners. In fact, I can sit down with a business owner and tell how much they know about their business just by asking a few different questions. It’s amazing how few of them have the right answers, or any answers at all. Metrics. It’s very important to know your numbers. By that, I mean the number of leads that you generate. In fact, let me just back up for a second. I can ask a business owner to tell me if they know all of the different places that they’re running ads to generate new customers. And generally they can. They tell me the different places they’re running ads, the different newspapers, or maybe radio, television, magazines, or Internet. They can tell me those numbers, because they have to write checks for those. The second question I’ll ask is, “How many leads from each one of those different sources do you generate?” And most of them can’t even answer that question. They run ads in three different newspapers, a couple of different radio stations. They can’t tell me how many leads they have coming from each one of 208 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up those sources, because they have no tracking mechanism to determine that. The third question, and they can’t answer this one, is, “Can you tell me what the cost is to generate a lead from each one of those different sources?” They know how much it costs to advertise in Newspaper A and Newspaper B. But if they don’t know the numbers of people that they’re getting from those two different newspapers, they can’t figure out the metrics about how much one of those leads cost. But that’s really critical. It’s important that you know that. The fourth question then has to do with conversion. “How many leads from each one of those different sources are you converting into buying customers?” Now, Newspaper A may generate a more leads than Newspaper B, but Newspaper B may have a higher conversion rate of those leads. Why would that be? Well, it could be they’re going to different demographics, different areas of town, difference audience. One could be a morning newspaper, one could be an evening newspaper, whatever the reason might be. But it’s important that you know what your conversion ratio is from each one of those different sources. You can’t just lump them all together and say here’s how much we’re spending on advertising and here’s how many leads we’re generating and here’s what the conversion is. You need to know the conversion based on each one of these different media sources. The fifth question might be, “What is the cost of converting those leads?” In other words, “How much do you pay for commissions, for invoices, for the sales materials, whatever it is that goes into the cost of converting the lead?” Some leads may take two or three calls. Another source of leads may just take one call, because people are more predisposed to buy. So those numbers are critical. Another metric you want to make sure that you know is, “What is the cost of generating a client from each one of those 209 Top Business Success Strategies sources?” Generating a client means how much a lead costs you and what was the conversion cost. In other words, the total cost of getting that lead and converting them. That’s how much it cost to generate a client. That’s important because you need to know what your money is buying. The sixth question might be, “What is the dollar amount of the initial transaction that you get from a customer?” So, when they come to buy from you the first time, what’s the transaction amount from your average customer? Some will buy more. Some will buy less. But what you want to know is this. Newspaper A, for instance, generates a customer that costs a certain amount. How much money do I generate on the initial transaction that I have from that customer? Compare that with Newspaper B and the radio, television, and whatever else you’re doing to grow your business. The seventh question then would be, “We know what the initial transaction is, but how many more times during the year do they buy from you, and what is the income from each one of those transactions?” Are they more or less than the initial transaction? What, typically, do people buy after they buy your product or service the first time? Do they come back and buy something additional, or do they buy that same product over and over and over again, because it’s consumable, it’s used up? What’s the average profit margin of each of your products or services that you sell? You need to know the profit margin, because you can’t just look at the dollar amount of the sale. You need to look at the profit value of that sale, because if it’s costing you more money to generate a sale or generate a customer than you’re making in profits on that customer, then you’re in trouble. So you need to know those numbers. What’s the annual profit value of every customer?

210 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up How many years does that customer stay with you? Do they stay with you for one year, for two years, for ten years? How long do they stay with you? Then, what’s the lifetime profit value of each one of those customers? How much money are you going to make over the lifetime of that person doing business with you? Then, how many referrals do you get from a customer, and what’s your conversion rate of those referrals? It should be higher than a brand-new customer that comes to you, because they’re referred to you. Now, once you know all of these figures, then it’s really easy to see what you can do to increase your business. We have an Excel-based calculator that we plug all these numbers into. Let’s say I’m currently getting one hundred new customer leads per month. If I were to bump that by 10 percent, I get ten more leads per month, what would that do to my business? Well, how difficult would it be to get ten new leads per month? What if we just change an ad? We change the headline. We change the bullet points. We add a call to action. We add a testimonial. We put a picture or a graphic of the product in there. We’re spending the same money on the ad, but can we tweak that ad some way to make it pull a better response? Now, if you stop and think about it, ten new leads in a month is one lead every three days. It can’t be that difficult. You can just go out and just stop people on the street and say, hey, do you want to buy something, and generate a new lead every three days. That’s not hard to do. So what could we do if we just took that ad up by, say, 10 percent? Consider our closing ratio, our conversion ratio. If that ad brings ten people into our store, and we sell two of them, we have a 20 percent closing ratio. What if you got just one more, three out of every ten? We now have a 30 percent closing ratio. We’ve just gone from 20 to 30, but that’s actually a 50 percent increase. We’d increase our 211 Top Business Success Strategies bottom line profits by 50 percent if all we did was get one more conversion out of every ten. In this example, we have two out of every ten now. If we go to three out of every ten, we’ve increased our sales, our revenue, by 50 percent. That’s huge. How about the average transaction value? What can we do to increase the transactional value of every sale? When you go to a fast-food restaurant, one of the first questions they’ll ask is, “Do you want to supersize that?” We’re going to sell more of the same product or service, nothing additional, just more, just a bigger size. What about cross-selling? “Would you like fries with that?” Do you have something you can offer in addition to what they’re buying? When you look at your customers, what do they normally buy the first time? (A cheeseburger, maybe.) What do they come back to buy, or what could you sell them in addition to what they’re purchasing the first time to enhance the value of that sale transaction? So many times, the second sale that you’re making, the upsell or the cross sell (French Fries), is not affected by advertising. It’s something that’s done in-house or in-store. You’re just making the suggestion that they buy something. So there are no advertising costs or marketing costs associated with that. What would that do to your business if you were to just increase the sales transaction by 10 percent? So if they buy something for $100, would it be that difficult to sell them something additional for $10 more? How could we enhance or bump the value of that sale? Maybe all it takes in that case is to raise the prices. Do a competitive analysis. Find out what your competitors are charging for the same or similar product that you’re selling to your customers, and figure out where you fit in that level. Some people may be selling an item at higher amount. And so you might be able to just bump your price a little bit and generate more revenue. 212 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up What about your profit margins? Are there some things you can do to negotiate a better price, or if you place a certain size order, to get free shipping, or get dating, or a delay in making a payment? So, are there some things that you can do to increase the profit margins? What can you do to generate more referrals from people that you’re dealing with now? See? There are a number of different things that you really need to take a look at. And if we’ll take seven of those different areas and add them up and just generate a 10 percent increase, we can double our business. And it doesn’t take very much time. How long would it take you to change an ad to where it can pull a little bit better, by adding a headline or some of the things that we talked about? You can do that in a day’s time. How long would it take to figure out something different to say besides, “Hi, can I help you?” And the typical answer is, “No, thanks. I’m just looking.” “Well, if you need me, I’ll be hiding over here somewhere.” How can you change that greeting? How long would it take you to change that greeting to something more effective that will now generate a different response than, “No, thanks. I’m just looking”? So what are some things you can do to increase of the value of the sale of the transaction? How long would it take you to do that? You see, all of these things can be put into place very, very quickly. And over a period of thirty days or so, at almost any business, you can double the amount of sales, or the amount of profits, that a business is generating. Knowing your metrics is one of the most important things that you could do in your business to get a handle on it, and it’s one of the most overlooked areas of any kind of business. Jim Palmer: It is so true. People don’t pay attention to the numbers.

213 Top Business Success Strategies One of the questions I think is very important to ask—and, unfortunately, I think a lot of people you ask don’t know—is, “What is the lifetime value of the customer?” Because when you know that number, it gives you what I call “marketing muscles.” It makes you feel okay about spending more money on your customer-acquisition efforts, or, as I like to talk about much more frequently, your customer-retention efforts. Know how much your customer is worth, because, if you look at, say, whether you’re going to buy an ad or do a little more marketing, most people will look at that and think, oh, that’s another expense to the business. I can’t afford another $5,000 this month in marketing. They look at it as though it’s an outlay of cash. They don’t look at it as, What if the $5,000 I spend brings in $7,000 or $10,000 or $20,000 in new business? So knowing your metrics is important. It’s funny, Martin. Do you know what I think? It doesn’t matter whether you’re starting a lawn-cutting business, or you repair sewing machines, or you do newsletters, whatever you do, most people come into a business with a core talent or a skill. They’ve been blessed with some kind of a skill. They’re good at it. And so I’m going to make a business out of it. We talked earlier about the five-year mark for a cancer survivor, but it’s pretty big news when you survive the five-year mark as a new business. And I think where a lot of new business owners get in trouble is they don’t understand the metrics, as you said. They don’t understand what they need to spend in customer acquisition, or what they need to do to retain a customer. What is the lifetime value of that customer, so I can feel better about investing there? Martin, in my book Stick Like Glue, I talk about what I call the Leaky Bucket Theory. It’s my way describing customer retention and where I think a lot of businesses fail. So I’ll tell you about the leaky bucket theory.

214 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Basically, I think everybody’s business—it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got an online business, a brick and mortar, or whatever—every business is like a big metal pail with a metal handle and it’s full of water. The water in your bucket represents your customers. It’s the very lifeblood of your business, if you will. Now, every business leaks to some degree. And you can picture bullet holes or rusted holes, but there’s water pouring out of this bucket. That water that’s pouring out of the bucket represents your lost customers. But it’s not just losing a customer. It’s losing all the future revenue, the future profits, the future referrals that that customer could have brought to your business. The only way to keep your businesses going is to pour more water in the top, and that represents new customers. That’s the cost of marketing and customer acquisition. Because if you don’t continually pour more water into the top of the bucket, as customers leave through holes in your bucket, eventually you wouldn’t have a business. I will say this. Every business, even the best-run businesses like Zappos and Nordstrom and Disney, they even leak. They may have a little tiny leak around the seam or a pinhole, but every business leaks to some degree or another, because, quite frankly, you can’t please everybody. But to me, Martin, I’m always talking about customer retention, and the strategy that I like to say is that I think it’s not only much more cost-effective, it’s much more profitable if you would actually plug the holes in your bucket or plug the holes in your system, your business, and keep more of the customers you have, instead of always going out there and trying to find new business and new customers. Martin Howey: You’re absolutely right, Jim. We have a little grid that we use in our seminars. You don’t have to get any new customers at all, if you just cut your client losses by 50 percent. Now most businesses lose between 18 and 22 percent of their customers due to attrition every year. And you stop and think 215 Top Business Success Strategies about it. If you want to grow your business by 10 percent, you’ve not only got to increase the 10 percent, but you’ve got to go back and replace the customers that you lost. So you’ve got to generate a whole lot more leads now. So if you could cut your losses by just 50 percent, so instead of losing 20 percent, you only lose 10 percent. How do you cut your losses? Well, you do exactly what you’re doing. You give them a newsletter. You send them something from time to time. You let them know that you care about them. See, your customers are very much like your spouse. If you don’t tell your spouse that you love them once in a while, then somebody else will come along and tell them that. And then you end up losing them, and that’s going to cost you a lot of money. Your customers are the same way. You’ve got to let them know that you care about them, because if you don’t, somebody’s going to come along and tell them that they care about them more than you do, and that’s going to cost you a lot of money. You’re going to end up with a business divorce there. So if you can just cut those losses by half, by taking care of them, keeping in touch with them, sending them a newsletter, making some type of an overt effort from time to time, you can save that 50 percent. If you increase your profit value from every sale by just 10 percent—that’s all you need, 10 percent—and you double the amount of referrals you’re getting right now, you’ll be there. Say you’re getting one referral. If you take that to two referrals, you can increase your business by 232 percent. Two hundred and thirty two percent, that’s doubling your business, and you haven’t gone out and gotten any new customers yourself, just the referral. So if you stop and think about what you’ve just said, it’s huge. One thing that you said here, that I wanted to go back on, and that is you said that if you invest $5,000 and it generates 216 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up $7,000. That was the example that you used. But what if it didn’t generate that for you? What if you broke even, or what if you didn’t even break even on the first transaction? But later on, sale two or three, you start to make a profit. And then sales four, five, and six are way more profitable. You see? You don’t have to generate the money on the first sale. This is where a lot of business owners get in trouble. They try to judge the effectiveness of an ad based on how much money it produces on the first sale. And here’s the thing. You and I each run an ad that costs $1,000. We run the ad for $1,000 and it generates three leads that pay us $200 apiece. Now, here’s the question I ask in our seminars. “Would you run that ad again?” And the answer is, “Most likely no.” And I say, “Well, why not?” And they say, “Well, the ad cost me $1,000, but I only made three sales, times $200. I made $600. I lost $400. I’m not going to run that again. That’s crazy.” And I say, “Well, here’s the difference. I’ll run that ad again. And here’s why I’ll run that ad again. I got three sales that each paid me $200. But I know those people are going to buy three more times during the year, so that’s going to be four sales times those three, or twelve sales total, times $600. So now I know I’m in the profit. I’m going to make $7,200 off of that $1,000 ad, where you’ve given up.” And here’s the other part of that. When you pull your ad out that you’re not going to run anymore, you pull out of the marketplace. Then my ad is the only ad that is seen out there that’s selling the same type of a product or service. And so now because the eyes that would normally look at your ad are only going to see my ad, I’m getting more bang for the buck by running my ad. So it’s really critical that you take a look at the big picture and say it isn’t necessarily what you generate on the first sale, it’s what you generate over the life of that customer. How long are they going to stay with you? You need to know your numbers to know that. So it’s a good point that you made. 217 Top Business Success Strategies Jim Palmer: You know, what you just said is hugely important, and it’s a strategy that I teach in newsletter marketing, which is called Tell Them What Else. When we gain a customer, we do so by way of a single transaction. Whether it is your marketing, or whether a referral sent a new customer to your business, that new customer has got to know, like, and trust you enough to say here’s some of my money. I want to buy product A, or I’m hiring you for service B. Whatever it is, we all gain a customer by way of a single transaction. What you do with it after that is where all the profit is made. So your example is spot-on. If all they look at is I just sold three $10 items, well that’s a bad deal. But see, when you first gain a customer, all that customer knows at that point is that you sell product A or service B. But most businesses, Martin, have a whole wide range of products and a whole different range of services that they provide. And the thing I try and tell people—which is a great reason to do a monthly newsletter—is, first of all, it’s not your customer’s job to remember your name. It’s your job to constantly remind them who you are. But it’s also your job every month to Tell Them What Else you sell or can do for them. Dan Kennedy said at one time, “If you want to sell more of your goods and services, for goodness sakes, why don’t you go to the people who have already identified themselves as buyers? Those are your current customers. Sell them more of what you have.” With your current customers, you’ve already overcome the know, like, and trust battle. So this is what I talk about, maximizing the profitability of your client relationship by telling them what else you do. Martin, if you have something else, I’ll pause. But there is something else I want to share. Do you want to jump in? Martin Howey: No, go right ahead. Jim Palmer: Okay. You know, this is the thing about the lifetime value of a customer and knowing your metrics. 218 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up I am the furthest thing from a numbers guy, but I do know some of the basic stuff. I have a good CPA, and he keeps me lean, mean, and legal, as they say. But I know, for example, when a customer comes on board. I know how they came on board. I know what their initial transaction is. I know, for instance, if they became a No Hassle Newsletter subscriber, and when that happened, and I also know when people leave. And so I started looking at this about two years ago. At the time, my average client was staying about six months. And I thought that’s incredibly too short for the amount of value that I’m delivering. I said, “I’ve got to fix this problem.” And I started studying it. We started talking to some of the people who wanted to cancel. What we found out is that for a number of reasons some people just flat out didn’t use it. It’s like buying a product and you never take the shrink-wrap off. Then there were other people who maybe were impatient while they’re waiting for more results. Anyway, I instituted a program, initially kind of behind the scenes. I called it my “gratitude keeps them longer program.” I’ve since renamed it Double My Retention, and turned it into a product. But, basically, what I did is I had a three-step program and called it my CPR strategy. The CPR stands for Consume, Position, and Reciprocity. I would say 100 percent of the people who are reading this book, because they’ve made an investment, are people who want to put out a good, high-quality product. If that’s the case, most likely when you created your product or your service, it includes a lot of stuff. Whether it’s a box of stuff, or it’s a membership program that includes tons of videos, audios, and transcripts, whatever it looks like. If you’re running a decent business, you probably are erring on the side of over-delivering. Now, when people consider becoming a member of your program, they read your sales letter, or your information, and decide they want to do it. When they get their username and 219 Top Business Success Strategies password, they go into the membership site, and it is like unlocking the vault—there is just a ton of stuff. You know the old expression of drinking from a fire hose. Your new members don’t know what to do with it all. So one of the strategies I put into place, Martin, is I started teaching them from the minute—the absolute second—that they sign up. We are with them with e-mails, both autoresponder and personal e-mails, from my client support team. We’re talking to them on the phone within 48 hours. And we are helping them to Consume the program that they’ve purchased. I want to help them get started, because I know that if they don’t get started, then eventually they’re going to cancel. So I’m going to cut this short and not go into the entire program, but that’s the consume part of it. The P in CPR is Positioning. You always want to be positioning yourself as the go-to expert, the authority, the place to solve their problems. That’s not just a sales strategy; you have to constantly remind them that you are the expert. And so we continue to market to them in different ways. The R in CPR is Reciprocity. I’ve studied this for a while, and I’ve figured out that reciprocity is a big thing. When you do something nice for somebody—whether it’s giving somebody a dollar, or just holding a door, or calling them up to say happy birthday, whatever it is—when you do an act of kindness, people feel an inborn need to reciprocate, to do something back. Our mutual friend Melanie Benson Strick, now Melanie Benson Strick Vander, she and I did a program called the MARS Training Program a couple of years ago, and we talked about reciprocity. The example that I taught to help people understand was that if you remember back in the ’70s, Martin, when you went to an airport, there were Hare Krishna around looking for donations.

220 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Well, when they figured out that people were just running by, the next thing they did is they would give a flower to somebody. And they even figured out that if somebody didn’t even want a flower, because they knew that they were going to get asked for money, they strategically pushed it out and kind of made you take it, they put it in your hand. Then as soon as they gave you the flower, they’d ask for a donation. And most people felt compelled to give a donation, even though they just received a flower they didn’t want, right? Then what they also learned is, as people walked away, they would put the flower in the nearest trash can, and the Hare Krishna would go back, pick up the flower, and they’d just keep recycling it. The kind of story demonstrates the power of reciprocity. So what I figured out, Martin, is when the average client is in my danger zone—the zone where they’re not 100 percent sure this is working for them and they might possibly cancel—we give them a gift. We actually use what I call the Gratitude Cookie Program. It’s a friend of mine, Lori Saitz’s, Zen Rabbit Cookie Program. We send them a gratitude cookie—well, a couple of cookies—and it comes with a nice custom note with my Newsletter Guru caricature on it. It says something like “Thank you. Welcome to the family. While you’re waiting for the sweetness of higher profits, here are some sweet cookies on me.” So that’s what we did. We launch that between months two and three. Then what we do around months four to five is we send them another gift, one of my books. We track if they have already purchased The Magic of Newsletter Marketing, and if they have, we send them Stick Like Glue. If they’ve purchased both of those, we send them another book. That’s a very abbreviated version of the Double My Retention program, but basically, the end result is my average 221 Top Business Success Strategies client that used to be six months a few years ago, is now eighteen months. So if you think about it, that’s phenomenal, because my cost of customer acquisition is the same. My cost of keeping them and delivering my service every month is the same. But the length of time they’re paying me has gone up by a significant amount of time. The last time I checked, it’s added about $1500 per member by keeping them longer. So client retention is critically important, and to bring it back home, that is the metric that you need to know about. You need to know when your customers are coming into your community—whether it’s just getting on your list, getting free information—or when they make their first purchase. I know for a fact that when people come on my list to get a free newsletter template, or what have you, I know it’s usually a certain period of time and then they’ll buy a book. And when they read my books, they’ll end up becoming a member. So there’s a cycle. Now, if I looked at the money I spend on either pay-per- click marketing or other types of marketing, and said, “Boy, that didn’t bring me a result today” or “That didn’t bring me a result this week or this month,” as Martin said, I’d be missing the big picture. You have to look at it in a much larger capacity, the metrics, and see how this whole thing is churning and burning and developing new business over time. Like you said, certain tweaks can really change up the results you’re getting. Martin Howey: That’s really true. That’s a great point. Thank you for sharing that. Jim Palmer: Martin, let me ask you one more question. I’m going to catch you off guard a little bit. Probably not too much. But, Martin, today as we’re talking, what do you think is the greatest

222 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up challenge facing entrepreneurs these days, and what do you think they could, and should, do about it? Martin Howey: Personally, I think too many entrepreneurs are trying to operate with their head in the sand. They’re afraid to make a move, because they don’t know what’s going to happen. They’re afraid to make the investment in marketing their business. And if you don’t market your business, your business is going to die. If you continue to lose in your business, 18-22 percent of your customers through attrition, it doesn’t take long before you’re not going to have very much of a business if you don’t replace those folks. So you’ve got to figure out what can I do to generate more business, be smarter in the way that I advertise or promote or attract business. I can’t just go out and do the things that I did a couple of years ago, because they don’t necessarily work that well anymore. So you’ve got to figure out how can I cost-effectively, in a non-salesy, non-threatening way, get in touch with my potential customers to get my name out there in such a way that they want to take advantage of what it is we have to offer. I’m not just saying go out and do advertising and put your name out there, because that’s what a lot of advertising folks would tell you to do, get your name out in the marketplace. It’s important that you put it out there for top-of-mind awareness, but entrepreneurs today need to be savvier about what they do. They need to take a look at direct-response marketing. How can I put an ad out there that’s going to generate a customer, or put some type of marketing and promotion out there—whether it’s a referral-based marketing, or whatever it happens to be—that’s going to generate a positive response? And what that means is you’ve got to know your market. You’ve got to know who they are. You’ve got to know what they’re looking for. You’ve got to know where to find them.

223 Top Business Success Strategies Two real critical things, Jim, when you’re doing marketing. One, you’ve got to know if you’re looking for your potential customers, where are they? Where do they hang out? Where can I get in touch with them in a cost-effective, non-salesy, non- threatening way? Where do I find them? And the second is if they’re looking for me, how do they find me? Am I visible to that market? Am I someplace where they can see me or find me when they’re looking for me? Because life’s a moving parade, things change in people’s lives. What may be right for you today wasn’t right for you yesterday or may not be right for you tomorrow. So we have to catch you when you are right in that target zone for looking for our product or service. So the most important things entrepreneurs can do is understand their market, be where they can be seen, and go where their potential customers hang out. And then make sure you do something. And you mentioned it earlier—it’s not a matter of doing things sequentially. It’s a matter of doing a whole lot of things. You have to sit down and decide what’s the most important thing you could do for your business to generate customers. I don’t know. I don’t know the one most important thing, but I know ten things that can generate fifty different clients. So that’s what you have to look at. What are some of the different things, because what appeals to you may not appeal to somebody else, and vice versa. So you’ve got to be able to get out there with multiple marketing poles in the water, you might say, more ways to generate customers so they can find out about what you have to offer them. It’s a matter of boldness and taking a look at it and making smart decisions for marketing your business. Jim Palmer: I think that’s great. I would add, from my perspective, to stop watching the news and taking in a lot of negativity. It’s kind of poisoning your brain. What you put in is 224 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up what you focus on, and I heard somebody say your brain is not capable of having a negative and a positive thought at the same time. It’s got to have one or the other. I thought that was pretty amazing. So if you think about whether you’re negative or positive, I guess you could be somewhere in the middle. But the fact is if you’re watching doom and gloom and the world’s coming to an end type stuff, that’s really going to affect the way you make decisions. The second thing I would say is you always want to be innovating and adapting to current situations. You always want to look at the program, whether it’s a product or service you’re offering. You always want to be looking for ways to add more value to what it is that you do for your customers. The third point I would make here is keep marketing. You never stop marketing. If you stop marketing, and we talked about this earlier, you’re pulling in your horns, so to speak. The result is fewer customers, and then the end result will be a decrease in your revenue. That like a self-fulfilling prophesy, right? So keep marketing. Be smart about it and make good decisions. Always know your metrics, and keep moving forward. There are people who are doing well. And the people who are doing well are being aggressive, and they’re being smart. Martin, some people say, “I choose not to participate in this recession.” I don’t necessarily buy that, but I do buy the fact that there is money being spent today. And you’ve just got to go and find out where that money is being spent and figure out how to serve those people who are spending money. Martin Howey: Great point. What always amazes me, Jim, is that in the same town with the same weather conditions, the same economy, the same potential customers, the same competition, everything, of two different businesses, one’s making it, bringing that money hand over fist, and another business is struggling. Why? 225 Top Business Success Strategies It can’t be the external factors. They’re all the same. The weather’s the same. The economy’s the same. The competition is the same. The customers are the same. They’re all the same. It has to be something that the business is either doing or not doing. One business is doing something, and the other business is not doing that. Or they may be doing that, but they’re doing something that’s counterproductive. So you take a look at it knowing if one’s succeeding and one’s not, it isn’t anything external. It’s the way the business owner not only perceives the marketing, but is reacting to the market. And in many cases, it’s not enough to react to the market. You have to react on the market. Like I said earlier, I had to decide in my own life to not let life happen to me. I had to happen to life. I had to be the one to make the change. I had to be the one to take control. I had to be the one to call the shots and direct my own life. You have to do the very same thing in a business. You are the captain of the ship. You have to run your business. You can’t let your business run you. You can’t let the economy run you. You can’t let the government run you. You can’t let the competition run you. You can’t let the news run your business. You’ve got to take control of it and run your business and be the one in control. And you have so much more control than most business owners realize. It’s just a matter now of claiming that and then making it work for you. Jim Palmer: That’s awesome. Okay, I think we’ve given some pretty good information and some good nuggets. You’ve inspired the heck out of me, Martin. I know that. So I feel confident that the people reading likewise feel inspired. This would be a good place to end this chapter. So with that being said, anything else before we end this chapter, Martin? Martin Howey: The only thing I would say is that if you have a product or service that you know can benefit your customers or 226 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up your potential customers, and you don’t offer that product or service to them or you don’t do it in such a way that it compels them to want it more than they want the money that will pay for it, you’re doing them a disservice. If you have something that will benefit me and you don’t share it with me, shame on you. That’s one of the worst things you can do, because you have an obligation. You’ve been gifted with the ability to create or to sell or to distribute in some way a product or service that can bring benefit to the lives or the businesses of other people. And if you keep that to yourself, that’s one of the most selfish things you can do. You have a moral obligation to do everything in your power to make sure I have all of the information necessary for me to make the decision that’s right for me. You don’t have that right to hold that back and make the decision for me. Your obligation is to share that with me, at least share the information with me so I can either say yes, I want it, or no thank you, it’s not right for me. Then you’ve done your job. And so if we don’t do that, then we’re not only hurting other people, but we’re hurting ourselves as well. So I would just say to all of those who are reading or listening, whatever you have to offer, make sure that it provides so much value that people want it more than they want the money that will pay for it, because they can see the value and how it will help them change their lives or their businesses or their families or their relationships or whatever it is that you product or service will satisfy. Jim Palmer: And how appropriate. That’s how we’ll end this chapter, because that’s exactly what you and I, in that hotel breakfast meeting, decided to do with the book in the first place. Because if the information that we had to share, both about personal and business challenges, if we didn’t share it, shame on us, so what a great way to end this chapter. Share what you know.

227 It’s Okay to Be Scared —but Never Give Up

Thank you, readers and listeners, for joining us! To wrap up, we’re including some of this book’s best practical solutions for overcoming obstacles, in business and in life. We hope It’s Okay to Be Scared, but Never Give Up has moved, inspired, and energized your confidence in surmounting any challenges that you face. And once more, we encourage you to get the proper screening to ensure that your good health is preserved. God bless!

Martin Howey’s Steps to Problem-Solving:  Focus on the things you can control  Take a look at what’s going on  Analyze the situation  Develop a plan of action  Take action

Jim Palmer’s Top Three Business Success Strategies: 1. LLP: Listen, Learn, and Profit—Listen to your customers’ pain points, Learn what they want, Profit by delivering it with world-class service. 2. The Power of Zero—Think bigger by adding a zero to the number you want to reach. 3. Massive Action—Implement on many fronts, on multiple projects, simultaneously. (You can view videos of these three success strategies (and a hundred more!) at www.NewsletterGuru.TV.

Adam Urbanski’s Business Success Mind-set:  Comedy is tragedy plus time.  Mistakes aren’t the manure that buries us, but that we grow from.

228 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up  Forget the losses, don’t lose the lessons.  Position yourself in advance to be able to handle obstacles.  Share your experiences to aid and inspire others.  Your business can only grow as fast as you grow as a human being.  The key question you’ve got to ask yourself is, “How can I find more people to be of more service to?” When you do that, money will come.

Melanie Benson Strick’s Business Success Mind-set:  Have courage.  Have confidence.  Be willing to evolve.  Be willing to lead, even when you don’t know what the path looks like.

Susie Miller’s Personal Success Strategies:  Suit up, show up, and then to do the next thing on your list.  Accomplishment pulls you out of the cycle of overwhelm.  Each morning ask yourself, “How can I make a difference in my business and my life today?”  Doing something that you’re passionate about is the key to success, no matter what the economy is.

Martin Howey’s Attitude Accelerator:  You are in charge of who you are, and you’re in charge of where you want to go as your destiny.  Take control. Don’t let life happen to you; happen to life.  Visualize success.  Anchor your conviction to win.

229 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Mike Koenigs’s Business Success Mind-set:  Any time you want to sell something, focus on your clients’ and your customers’ success. They need to understand and truly believe that you’re fully invested in them succeeding with your products and your services, or even without them.  We’ve gone from a transactional economy to a reputation and relationship economy. The key to selling, online or offline, is by increasing intimacy and authenticity.

James Malinchak’s Success Methodology:  Life’s too short to ______, (fill in the blank).  Count your blessings, and be grateful for each of them. Show your gratitude.  Pray. Stand on that solid foundation.  Mind-set: Do you have a hobby, or do you have a business?  Skill set: Get the necessary business skills to do what you want to do.  Get off your assets: Are you a talker or a doer? Get off your butt and make it happen.

Stephanie Frank’s Business Success Strategies:  Go through life as a problem-solver.  Stop controlling, lose the ego.  Work in facts versus feelings.  Retooling during a recession is imperative for some businesses.  Flexibility is key in this economy.

Joe Polish’s Business Success Methodology:  If there are other people in your business making money and you’re not, there’s nothing wrong with the business you’re in. There’s something wrong with you. 230 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up  Learn fundamental business rules. Until you do, you could go from business to business to business, but you’re going to never make it work.  There is no relationship between being good at what you do and getting paid. None.  If you do your marketing right, you don’t actually have to do much face to face selling.  When you’re well positioned with a prospect or a client, people are pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, and pre-disposed to do business with you.  Your job as a marketer is to establish trust and rapport, so that people feel confident and capable of making a buying decision.  Educate people about the things they don’t know that they don’t know, and you present it in a way so that it actually makes sense.  Since you’re the one the providing people this information, if you’ve got something to sell, they’re probably going to end up doing business with you, because you’re the one who’s educating the public.

Renee Airya’s Eight Steps to Personal Success: 1. Listen to what’s going on inside. 2. Accept exactly where you are in the present moment. 3. Find your source of higher power. 4. Connect to a positive state of mind on a daily basis. 5. Find a support system for yourself. 6. Create daily rituals. 7. Trust and have gratitude. 8. Do things that make you happy.

231 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up Joel Bauer’s Business Success Strategies:  Take your expertise, your passion, and turn it into real, monetizable income doing what you love.  Most people have no idea what you do for a living. Put out a two-minute video showing people what you do, and what you can do for them.

Martin Howey’s Top Four Business Success Strategies: 1. Do what you do so well that the people who see you do it want to see you do it again. And they’ll bring others to see what it is that you do. 2. Market the benefit of what you do. 3. Success will always be determined by three different things: The need or demand for what you do, your ability to do it more or better than your competition, and the difficulty in replacing you. 4. Know your metrics, then profit from what they reveal.

232 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up

233 About the Author – Jim

Learn More About Jim:

Some of Jim’s other books: The Magic of Newsletter Marketing—The Secret to More Profits and Customers for Life

Stick Like Glue – How to Create an Everlasting Bond with Your Customers So They Stay Longer, Spend More, and Refer More!

The Fastest Way to Higher Profits – 19 Immediate Profit- Enhancing Strategies You Can Use Today

Check out Jim’s popular marketing and business building programs:

No Hassle Newsletters – www.NoHassleNewsletters.com No Hassle Social Media – www.NoHassleSocialMedia.com Newsletter Guru TV – www.NewsletterGuru.TV Jim’s Concierge Print and Mail on Demand Program – www.newsletterprintingservice.com The MARS Training Program – www.MarsTrainingProgram.com Double My Retention – www.DoubleMyRetention.com Jim’s Free Weekly Newsletter – www.JimsNewsletter.com

Interested in hiring or learning more about Jim? Visit www.TheNewsletterGuru.com

234 About Jim

Jim Palmer is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and coach to other entrepreneurs. Jim is the founder and president of Custom Newsletters, Inc. and is known internationally as The Newsletter Guru. For many entrepreneurs and business owners, he is the go-to resource on how to maximize the profitability of customer relationships. His companies and business building solutions include No Hassle Newsletters, No Hassle Social Media, The Newsletter Guru’s Concierge Print and Mail on Demand Service, Double My Retention, The MARS Training Program, and more. Jim has been writing and designing successful newsletters for thirty years for clients in just about every industry. Several years ago, one of his clients was so over-the-top happy with his newsletter and the results that he telephoned Jim and said, “Jim, you are truly a newsletter guru!” Jim took it as a great compliment and has been using it in his marketing ever since. Jim is a cancer survivor, has been married for thirty-one years, and has four grown children. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania with his wife, Stephanie, their cat, Linus, and dog, Toby. Jim and Stephanie love to kayak, travel, and spend time with their family. For more resources and information on Jim, his blog, and his companies, visit www.NewsletterGuru.tv. To get your copy of Jim’s free weekly newsletter, More Profits and Customers for Life, visit www.JimsNewsletter.com.

235 About the Author – Martin

Learn More About Martin:

Some of Martin’s other books: The Official Guide to 7-Figure Consulting—Winning Strategies for Starting, Running, and Profiting From Your Own Highly Successful Marketing and Business Development Consulting Practice Even in the Toughest Economies

Killing It BIG Time As a Business Consultant in Today’s Tough Economic Times – Straight-Shooting Answers to Some Very Tough Questions About Starting and Running a Profitable Independent Consulting Practice

Achieving Breakthrough Business Success – Your Step-By- Step Action Guide For Dramatic Business Growth

Thump Your Competition – Time-Tested and Proven Strategies, Solutions and Systems for Creating Massive Profit Increases for ANY Business

Check out Martin’s popular consulting, marketing and business building programs:

Become a Highly-Paid Business Consultant – www.TopLineBusinessSolutions.com Speaker, Workshop and Seminar Leader Training – www.SevenFigureConsultants.com

236 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up

Interested in hiring or learning more about Martin? Visit www.TopLineBusinessSolutions.com

237 About Martin

Unquestionably one of the busiest and most respected business consultants in North America, Martin Howey’s 46+ years of practical hands-on know-how and experience has generated more than three and a half billion dollars in sales for his clients. The successes Martin has created for some of his corporate clients have been impressive and many, and have earned him substantial sums of money, recognition and notoriety. Having contributed to the financial success of more than 10,000 small businesses throughout the world, Martin has identified the patterns that limit and restrict business growth, and more importantly, knows what to do to prevent it from happening or to reverse the trend if it has already infected a business. A cancer survivor with a remarkable and miraculous story of remission and recovery, Martin has been married to Cheryl for thirty-nine years and has six children and 26 grandchildren. A highly competitive person, Martin holds several state, national and World Games records in cycling, running and triathlon events. For more information on Martin and how he helps people create successful and lucrative consulting practices, and to receive a free copy of his popular CD, How to Start, Run, and Profit From Your Own 7-Figure Consulting Practice, visit www.TopLineBusinessSolutions.com.

238 It’s Okay to Be Scared – but Never Give Up

BONUS OFFER

We’d like to thank you for investing in this book. We’d also like to thank you in advance for sharing this book with someone you care about and helping us to spread the message of hope and inspiration. To say thank you, we’d like to give you some FREE bonuses that you can use.

Here’s what we’d like to give you for free!

 The raw audio recordings used to create this book!

 Several amazing special reports from both Martin and Jim and some of their special guest experts!

To claim your free gifts simply go to www.ItsOkayToBeScared.com/Free

That’s it! You get it all absolutely free just for investing (or sharing!) this book!

239 IT’S OKAY TO BE SCARED – BUT NEVER GIVE UP CAUTION! JIM PALMER This Book May Prove To Jim Palmer is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and coach to Be Transformational! other entrepreneurs. A marketing and business-building expert and host of Newsletter Guru TV, Jim Each of us faces challenges in life and in business, some challenges more is known internationally as The severe—and fear-inducing—than others. The knowledge that you’re not Newsletter Guru, the go-to resource alone can be a tremendous comfort. In addition, the stories of others who for maximizing the profitability of have persevered and overcome great odds can help you surmount—or avoid customer relationships. entirely—similar obstacles. Those stories may also prove to be inspirational, even transformational. That’s why this book was written.

Marketing and business-building experts Martin Howey and Jim Palmer have come together to share with you their true stories of overcoming significant— even immobilizing—challenges in life and business. And not only theirs. They’ve interviewed a dream team of highly successful entrepreneurs—each one sharing his or her story of overcoming a significant challenge. They also reveal some incredible nuggets of wisdom on how to make your life and business more prosperous and enjoyable. Prepare to be motivated, inspired, more hopeful, and perhaps even transformed! MARTIN HOWEY Martin Howey is one of the busiest and most respected business THE DREAM TEAM: consultants in North America. He Melanie Benson Strick Vander, James Malinchak, has generated more than three Adam Urbanski, Joe Polish, Stephanie Frank, Joel Bauer, and a half billion dollars in sales Mike Koenigs, Renee Airya, and Susie Miller. for his clients, and has contributed

to the financial success of more JIM PALMER | MARTIN HOWEY than 10,000 small businesses throughout the world. “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

A book of hope and inspiration Success Advantage Publishing for life and business. www.SuccessAdvantagePublishing.com $14.95/US JIM PALMER | MARTIN HOWEY