The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [63]
His retainer for his consulting services starts at $170,000 per year per client. And, following his teacher Kennedy, his sales letter starts at $100,000 per year plus 15 percent royalty (the royalty on sales often ends up bringing in much more than the up-front fee).
He now works a few hours a day, from a beach house over the water in San Diego. A long way from serving fries in Macon and not having money to buy a tank of gas.
I asked Frank for his main message and words of wisdom for readers of this book.
“Understand that no matter what you’re doing, even if you want to be a ballplayer, a rapper, a movie star—nothing happens until something gets sold. Ever. The reason actors make so much money is because their face sells the fucking movie tickets. It’s not about their ability to act. The reason the musician gets rich is because he sells a lot of seats and records. Or his song gets used in a movie—it’s a license, a sale. The key to making money, and therefore living a life of less stress, is to cause someone to joyfully give you money in exchange for something that they perceive to be of greater value than the money they gave you. The key there is ‘joyfully.’ Most sales and marketing you study, you learn how to trick people into parting with their money, or badger them into doing it, or make them so miserable that they think you’re their only salvation. None of those situations involve the word ‘joyfully.’
“We’re in the information age, for the love of God! We don’t need to teach kids trigonometry. That’s why they make computers. It’s not like we’re going to get stranded on a desert island, without a computer, and need to somehow formulate an algebraic equation. I think it would be very intelligent to teach our kids the language of the world, which is the language of money, the language of sales, and the language of influence. Because they’re either going to be an influencer, or they’re going to be influenced. They’re either going to be a leader, or be led by someone else. There’s always going to be two sides to that coin. Which side would you rather have your kid be?”
■ HOW I BECAME A HIGHLY PAID MARKETING CONSULTANT (AND SAVED MY MARRIAGE!) WITH TWO MONTHS OF MARKETING STUDY
If you’re not already sold on the importance of learning marketing, seriously, put this book down and go and join the International Socialist Organization—I hear they’re recruiting.
For the rest of you, I presume you’re pretty excited about what’s possible for yourself, for your dreams, for your goals in life, for your material comfort, and for your ability to give your gift and get your message out into the world, through learning marketing.
In this chapter, I’m going to give you a world-class education on how to teach yourself marketing. Read those words carefully. I’m not actually going to teach you (much) marketing here. That’s just not the scope of the book. You know the adage about “teach a man to fish”? I’m not going to teach you how to fish. I’m going to do something better. I’m going to teach you how to teach yourself how to fish.
In many ways, that’s the intention of the whole book, with every life skill we talk about in this book. We’ll be discussing skills such as networking and connecting, marketing, sales, writing powerful business prose, clarifying your purpose in life, learning social media, taking charge of personal finance, building amazing relationships. Such a wide range of amazing topics—there’s no way I could do justice to all of these in a single book.
So, what I aim for in each course in this book is to give you a guide (and the inspiration) to get started educating yourself in these areas. I aim to point you in the right direction. That’s all a good teacher can really do anyway. The rest you’ll be learning on your