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"Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a 10 percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of ten . . . We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In
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what does it take to grow? Thankfully, just three simple things: Get more customers Increase their average purchase value Get them to buy more times
You spend the same amount of money for the same eyeballs. Then, you get 2.5x more people to respond to your advertisement because it’s a more compelling offer. From there, you close 2.5x as many people because the offer is so much more compelling. From there, you are able to charge a 4x higher price up front.
I have a saying I use to train sales teams “The pain is the pitch.” If you can articulate the pain a prospect is feeling accurately, they will almost always buy what you are offering.
Business is hard enough, and markets move quickly. So you might as well find a good market to give you a tailwind to make the process easier.
There are three main markets that will always exist: Health, Wealth, and Relationships. The reason that those will always exist is that there is always tremendous pain when you lack them. There is always demand for solutions to these core human pains. The goal is to find a smaller subgroup within one of those larger buckets that is growing, has the buying power, and is easy to target (the other three variables).
Example #1: Even if you have a bad offer and are bad at persuasion, you’re going to make money if you’re in a great market. If you’re on the corner hocking hot dogs when the bars close up at 2am, with mobs of starving drunk folks, you’re gonna sell out your hotdogs.
I have coined the term “niche slap” to remind entrepreneurs in my communities to commit once they pick. All businesses and, all markets, have unpleasant characteristics. The grass is never greener once you get to the other side. If you keep hopping from niche to niche, hoping that the market will solve your problems, you deserve to be niche slapped. You must stick with whatever you pick long enough to have trial and error.
“There is no strategic benefit to being the second cheapest in the marketplace, but there is for being the most expensive.”
First and foremost, charge a premium. It will allow you to do things no one else can to make your clients successful. We were able to charge a premium because we provided more value than anyone else in the industry. In a real way, we were charging on a fraction of what our clients made using our system. This is important. Our clients still got a deal.
The truth is that 99 percent of businesses need to raise their prices to grow, not lower them. Profit is oxygen. It fuels the fire of growth. You need it if you want to reach more people and make a bigger impact. In order to charge so much, though, you must learn to create tremendous value.
Many entrepreneurs believe that charging “too much” is bad. The reality is that, yes, you should never charge more than your product is worth. But you should charge far more for your product and services than it costs to fulfill it. Think up to a hundred times more, not just two or three times more. And if you provide enough value, it should still always be a steal for the prospect. That is the power of value. It unleashes unlimited pricing and profit power to scale your company.
The best companies in the world focus all their attention on the bottom side of the equation. Making things immediate, seamless, and effortless. Apple made the iPhone effortless compared to other phones at the time. Amazon made purchasing a single click of a button and made purchases arrive almost immediately
if you can reduce your prospects' true time delay to receiving value to zero (aka you realize your immediate dream outcome), and your effort and sacrifice is zero, you have an infinitely valuable product.
“Any fool can sell a product by offering it for a discount, it takes great marketing to sell the same product for a premium” Logical solution: make trains faster to increase satisfaction Psychological solution: decrease the pain of waiting by adding a dotted map Psychological solution: pay models to be the hostesses on the trip (people would wish it took longer to get to their destination!) Logical solution: make elevator faster Psychological solution: add floor to ceiling mirrors so people are distracted staring at themselves and forget how long they were on the elevator
People who help others (with zero expectation) experience higher levels of fulfillment, live longer, and make more money.
Reminder: You only need to do this once. Literally one time for a product that may last years. This is high-value, high-leverage work. You ultimately get paid for thinking. You got this.
Fundamentally, all marketing exists to influence the supply and demand curve. We artificially increase the demand for our products and services through some sort of persuasive communication.
Ironically, local business marketing is both easier and harder than national level marketing. It’s easier to get to work, but harder to keep working or scale. And the reason is - in local markets, it’s easier because there’ is trust in the familiar. So selling in- person at higher prices in a local market is inherently easier. It means you will convert a much higher percentage of your leads. This makes marketing work most of the time. The downside of local marketing is that offers fatigue rapidly because there is only a limited radius that a local business can serve.
Entrepreneurship is about acquiring skills, beliefs, and character traits. To advance, I find that we must determine which skills, beliefs, and character traits we lack. Most times, we simply need to improve. And the only way to do that is through learning from experience and/or high quality sources.
