The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [64]
I’m going to share with you my guide for self-education in marketing in a moment. But before I do, I want to share a personal story about how learning these skills has impacted my life in a major way. I hope this story will show you that learning marketing is not all just about money.
I fell in love with Jena on our second date, and told her so. She said she was falling in love with me too that very date. I moved from California to New York, to be where she lived, a month later, in June 2008.
Three months after that, in September 2008, the bottom fell out of the U.S. economy.
Overnight, Jena’s weight-loss coaching practice, her life’s dream and work, became empty of clients, as people slashed their personal expenses. Her sales went down drastically, while expenses stayed the same. The books were completely in the red.
Our relationship was young, and I had previously never given any attention to her business, wanting to keep that separate from our love. And besides, she had a team of very impressive advisers, including an MBA and many seasoned corporate veterans, guiding her. What good could I do when she’s getting advice from them? I thought.
Nonetheless, Jena was coming home crying every night. She was staying in the office until 11:00 P.M. trying to save the baby of her business, then she’d come home and we’d often stay up until 1:00 A.M. as I comforted her from the stresses of her day and tried to reassure her. But the situation was not looking good. She faced the unsavory choice—which so many other small business owners faced during that time—of pouring savings into a business that had just collapsed, during a nasty recession when there were few assurances that the money would ever come back again, or getting out and moving on from this life dream of owning her own business.
I was also under a lot of stress financially, as I’m sure you were too during those months. The combination of my financial stress and hers was putting an enormous amount of pressure on our fledgling relationship. As I’ve told Jena, the only time I ever questioned to myself whether our relationship would last was during those fall months of intense stress and pressure on both of us.
But I wasn’t going to give up so easily. “Money and love are already mixing in this relationship,” I told myself. “Money is all we talk about these days!” So I overcame my self-imposed ban on mixing business and love. I vowed to find a way to help turn Jena’s business around. I knew it was one of the only ways we could save our relationship because there was just too much pressure on it otherwise and all our dreams seemed to be falling apart.
By a coincidence, I had just been introduced to the work of Eben Pagan and Dan Kennedy, via my friend Brent Smith. Brent is a dating coach (and non-college-graduate) who was earning $10,000+ a weekend taking millionaires to Monaco and training them in dating skills (http://www.absolutepowerdating.com). He was a voracious student of every word Eben and Kennedy wrote, and he told me to check out their work.
I listened to some of Eben’s recordings and started reading some of Kennedy’s books, and instantly I could see that Jena’s business would be benefited by their direct-response marketing approach. Jena didn’t know what direct-response was (I barely did either at that point), and her advisers were not recommending it either. I saw an opportunity to make a difference and decided to go for it. What the hell, it’s not like either of us had much to lose at this point—everything was pretty much crashing in on us. It was a Hail Mary pass of marketing.
The crucial turning point for me was listening to a recording that was part of Eben’s “Guru Mastermind” home study marketing course. The recording was called “How to Write a Killer Sales Letter” and featured Eben’s main copywriter, Craig Clemens, who has generated over $50 million in sales through his copy.
The key revelation from that recording, for me, was that when you’re communicating with a marketing message, you need to get