The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [38]
“So I started calling up his outbound telemarketers. These guys are trying to sell you on something, so they’ll talk to anyone! I told them about my experience at the workshop and became friendly with them. Once, I found this set of Tony Robbins tapes at Goodwill for ten bucks, and I knew one of the guys I was talking to there would like it, so I packed the tapes up and sent them to him. Things like that.
“One day, they sent me some audiotapes of Joe. I called them up and said, ‘The audio on this program is not good—I think it could be a lot better.’ I had a background in sound from my band days. Turned out, coincidentally, their audio guy wasn’t working out, and they let him go. So I talked to the general manager of the company, and I went to work for them. I worked there for three years, doing audiovisual seminars. I had never done audiovisual seminars, but I took my knowledge of gear and made it happen.
“This turned out to be the most significant decision in my business career—to find someone who is massively successful and go to work for him. Through that, I got into the world of marketing and sales. I discovered a lot of the past marketing and sales geniuses, like Claude Hopkins and Eugene Schwartz and John Caples and David Ogilvy, and read all of their books. I read Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, which was very impactful on me.
“I started applying all I was learning about marketing and sales to consult with real estate businesses how to market and sell themselves. And my clients were having such success with it, I was able to work about a week a month and live quite comfortably on that.”
On the side of this successful consulting career, Eben began building up a business selling products and services (mainly e-books, membership communities, Web-based trainings, and in-person weekend workshops) focused on helping men and women be more empowered in relating to the opposite sex.3 He built this into a $20 million business (in later chapters I’ll go into more detail about some of the secrets by which he did this).
So many people started asking him how he built his business so rapidly, he opened a second division of his business, which teaches info-marketing skills to entrepreneurs (http://gurublueprintblog.com). In the world of Internet marketing, he’s a living legend, widely considered one of the most advanced practitioners of these skills in the world.
His company, Hot Topic Media, now brings in around $30 million a year in revenue and employs about seventy people around the globe. He founded it himself, and grew it over a decade with no investors. He is now a self-made multimillionaire, and would never have to work another day in his life if he didn’t want to. But he’s not about to retire to an island in the Bahamas—he loves leading and growing his business and often works twelve-hour days by choice. He runs this business off his MacBook, and he spends his time either working from his home office, which has a majestic view of the Empire State Building, or on the go, attending and speaking at conferences around the globe.
I first heard about Eben when a friend of mine joined Eben’s home study program. My friend let me listen to one of the recordings, on how to write a direct-response sales letter. I had been earning my living for several years writing book proposals on a freelance basis. Within a short period after listening to that one recording, I was earning more from writing sales letters for clients than I had ever earned writing book proposals; I’d often earn $1,000 for a few hours’ work, and my clients would come back for more, because the sales copy—which I’d learned how to write through Eben—was earning