Marketing Master David Reiss Reveals How To Compete At The Highest Level By Thinking Differently

Being unique in your niche will always bring you to greater heights, especially in the world of marketing. David Reiss, the CEO of TouchCR and The Marketing Mastery Group, walks us through how his career evolved and gladly shares his secret to his marketing success. He talks about his marketing style and how making yourself as your competition can sometimes work, especially when others copy you. In today's show, learn how to compete at the highest level as David shows how you can eliminate ego and bias in your business and break negative marketing patterns to pave the way for better and fresher ideas. Prepare to know more about David’s amazing marketing strategies in this episode.

Some Topics We Discussed Include:

• How David started off as a 13-year-old marketing consultant and saving a family friend's company
• His “hot seat” strategy used at a speech that catapulted his credibility at a very young age with big-time CEO's
• Unique ways to increase a company's Valuation
• How O.C.D. = Higher Valuations
• How a 200-page spiral-bound notebook saved David $1million on a software company acquisition
• A masterful marketing strategy David used with a home-battery client who was competing with Tesla. (Remarkable!)
• The Biggest Secret In Marketing is ______
• How a simple Sold Tag on a sofa helped turn around a furniture company's sales
• Why and how to create your own competition
• What he thinks about Jeff Bezo's strategies
• How to use “Time Travel” to prevent disasters and open doors of opportunity in planning your business
• And much more

If you enjoy peering into the mind of an entrepreneurial powerhouse and marketing master like this, you might qualify to attend one of David's private Mastermind groups at http://themarketingmasterygroup.com.

About the Guest: David Reiss

David Reiss is one of the most successful men and marketing minds that you don't know about… and that's on purpose. David is a self-described, “Ghost” who builds and scales companies from $20 million to $200 million and far beyond.

He has been a consultant with Fortune 1000 companies since he was in his 20's and has one of the most unique, brilliant and sought after marketing minds in the country.

Yet Google him and you'll find almost nothing.

David is also the creator of http://TheMarketingMasteryGroup.com and several other companies on track do hundreds of millions (and potentially billions) in sales.

Marketing Master David Reiss Reveals How To Compete At The Highest Level By Thinking Differently

As you know, I took a couple of months hiatus from publishing. I was working on some pretty big deals, but I'm back and I’ve got some that I did with Roland Frasier and Matt and Joe from Evergreen Profits.

If you're reading this for the very first time, make sure you go back and read a couple of the previous ones as well. They are guaranteed to rock your world just like this is going to do that.

I am thrilled to have a guest who refers to his background or what he's doing as a ghost. You cannot find much information, if any, on the web about him at all. He was referred to me by a couple of people that I highly respect, former guests for marketing, Anthony Bates and my friend Gene.

David Reiss is such a dynamic entrepreneur, a consultant business owner and thought leader in this space. He's worked his entire career with Fortune 1000 companies and bigger, helping them go from $20 million to $200 million and above that.

He understands how to think completely differently than most standard consultants and business owners in order to achieve massive amounts of scale.

I've talked to him a couple of times and I was blown away by some of the case studies he shared with me and some of his thought processes.

I asked if he would come on and he graciously said yes. You guys are getting the opportunity to read about a real hive ghost. David, welcome. I'm excited to dig in and find out a little bit about what's going on.

Thank you very much. I didn't realize I was going to be that tall.

I googled the heck out of you. I was like, “This guy is hard to find. I can't see anything.”

I started as a marketing consultant. It's a hard part story. I was thirteen years old. My best friend's father's company was failing. I asked him what was wrong and he told me and I said, “Did you try this and this?” It seemed very logical to me, even as a kid at thirteen. It saved his company.

By the time I was seventeen, I had a lot of word of mouth. I was doing things at thirteen. I'd go to the zoo at with old speed graphic camera and color Polaroid film that I bought for $1 and say, “Your picture and color for $3.”

In a month’s time I did $3,000 of them and made $2 each. That was thirteen years old. I can't spell it, but I have definitely been at it for a very long time.

As on a side note, a buddy of mine and his wife published a book about the journey of the entrepreneur's wife and it says that on the title, The Journey of the Entrepreneur's Wife.

The word entrepreneur was misspelled on the cover published and a real publisher and everything didn't catch it. We were all laughing like no entrepreneur can spell entrepreneur. It's a hilarious gaff. I was like, “Keep it in there.” I'm sorry to side note. I just thought that was funny.

I try to do some fun things. Even on my iPhone, it says, “Please forgive the typos,” and I put tpyos for typos. On a form, we did on one of the companies I'm a partner in, there's always, “I am not a robot,” and I put, “A robot, I’m not am.”

You’ve got to have a little levity in there, but I want to circle back. At thirteen years old and through your teens, you’ve already been a hustler and an entrepreneur and making things happen, probably much more than a lot of your peers. What was the evolution of your career then?

I was always trying to get involved and figure things out and to me, looking at things, I had answers. It came to me. People say if I wasn't as successful as I have been, I'd probably be in a room with wallpaper. I don't doubt that. I see things differently.

I started doing consulting. I was a kid still trying to, then I got a chance to speak at the Direct Marketing Association and I did it a few years in a row.

The first year I had maybe 60 people in the room and I said, “I’ve got nothing. I've got no slides, I’ve got no script, I’ve got no pitch or story. How many of you have not a marketing challenge but an unsolvable marketing challenge?”

Hands went up and I chose six people and I took one at a time and said, “You have two minutes to explain the problem. I have five minutes to solve it.” I did it six times.

I would say, “This is the best weight loss program you've ever seen because I'm sweating bullets under here.” Twenty, 30 companies would come up and say, “How do we hire you?”

The next year I had almost 2,000 people in the room. It was a way of launching. A lot of these companies are very large companies and they were attracted to the way that I solve problems. It was my brain power if you will.

To interrupt you right there and I want to thank you for that idea because I was booked to give a speech in front of a very large group for EO, Entrepreneurs’ Organization.

About 600 or 700 people there. I am not 100% sure what I was going to talk about, but the skillset that you said is one that I have, most likely to a lesser degree than yourself.

I'm good on the spot and I love the fact that you said that, because they gave me a tremendous idea on how to add value without having to have a scripted speech, which I hate. It grew and they started seeing you as this oracle. It's like, “This guy's got the answer.”

They liked the way I thought. A lot of companies came up to me and they were significant. They were Fortune 1000 companies.

They didn't care about track record or who I'd worked for. What they wanted was the way I thought, the way I saw things. They would put me to a little bit of a test and I started passing these tests and helping them.

Do not look at things head on. Rather, look at things inside-out, up, down, or backwards because there’s always a backdoor. Click To Tweet

All of a sudden, I'm in my twenties and I'm working at the CEO level of the Fortune 1000. One CEO tells another, it was the chairman of the board of one automotive company who told the CEO then of another automotive company to call me to solve a problem, which I did.

It was all word of mouth. The equity firms who were behind them started taking notes. I started working with a couple of dozen equity firms who would bring me their deal flow, their portfolios.

I would not just solve the problems, but I'd see things in companies that were used to increase valuation. I'm good at that because there are so many things people don't see.

Valuation, people say, “It's a multiple of EBITDA,” but it's not. Forgive me, I don't mean this to be rude, but that's a cop-out from bean counters. Accountants who say, “It's an eight-time multiple. You have $6 million in EBITDA, therefore it's $48 million.”

That's not true iceberg. I'm aware of starting, but it does not determine where you end up.

I had an equity firm once who calls me and says, “We've got a reinsurance company that's on the blocks of $30 million and three large insurance companies are bidding on it. We're missing something. Would you come in?”

I said, “Sure.” I came in, I looked at it and I thought, “You've got to take this thing off the market. Give me the 90 days.”

I restructured a few things here and there and we put it back on the market for $53 million and the same three companies bid on it and bought it. One of them bought it. You have to know where to look.

I'll give you a very simple example. I'm at a dinner party with some friends and we're in Tulsa, Oklahoma. One of the guys there, he's a contractor. He did remodeling of homes and he wanted to sell his business.

He had nine vans with guys out there. It was doing very well. He asked me, “Here are my numbers, here's what I do, here's how it works.” It wasn't a lot of room there.

He said, “What can I do? This is how much I can get from my business.” I don't want to give you the number, but there was a reasonable number. I said, “There's more you can do. Let me give you a formula. OCD equals higher valuation.

When people ask me what I aspire to be, I'm not, but I would aspire to be proudly OCD. Cross every T and dot every I. Did you come here to one of your vans?”

He said, “I did. I'm doing a job down the block.” I said, “Show me the van.” He opens the van and it's what you would expect.

Tools piled up. I said, “If you were OCD, what would this van look like? It would be pristine. Everything would be in its place. The extension cords would be wrapped up and coiled and hung up, and everything would be meticulous.

Do that with your nine vans and let the buyer see that and you won't have to worry about getting the higher valuation.” He wanted to get an extra $1 million on top of what he was asking and he felt he was top of the market.

I said, “Now when you do that, ask another $3 million on top of it.” They look at the vans and they go, “This is amazing. This guy has crossed every T, dot every I. I've never seen anything like it.”

The concept of how you do one thing is how you do everything. I imagine if a buyer sees those vans in particular, these are amazing. The rest of his business must be amazing as well.

It’s interesting you say that. Another example of a company that I bought, I went out to look at a data company.

Anytime you buy a technology company, here's the big secret. Everybody’s software code sucks. I'm sorry, that's a technical term, but it sucks because it all gets to the documentation later. We don't have time. We’ve got to get to market. They're rushing to market. It's terrible.

There's a company I was looking at and it was $5 million and it legitimately was $5 million. It was worth it. I go in, I bring in a team of forensic programmers and I say, “I want a 200-page three-ring book that shows me why their code sucks.”

They do this analysis and their code sucks. I put it on the table and I say, “I’ll give you $4 million because it's going to cost me $1 million to fix your code.”

The CEO and the investors, there's nothing they can say. You've now found their worst nightmare of a secret and they know it. Because they know it, they can't argue it.

Here's the reverse of that. If I'm selling a company that's worth $5 million, I'm going to sell it for $7 million.

Because I go into the code and the way I write code is aside from the programmer's documentation, which means nothing. Everyone says, “We're DOD. We do the Department of Defense standards.” A technical term, bull pucky.

I go in and I have a narrative for every module because everything is written in a modular fashion. Every module has a module written in English, a narrative of what that module does. It has links to the screenshots. It has a screencast with the end-user using it and discussing it.

There's an audio recording, an MP3, with the end-user talking to the developer, the programmer. The end-user goes first, and the programmer goes second. Otherwise he'll tune out after he talks. That's in the code.

When they bring their people in to look at the code, they go, “Look at this thing. If he did this, I can't even imagine how good everything else is.”

It can be probably just a nightmare to get it all together, but if you can increase or decrease the valuation in the seven figures, sometimes even more by doing that and it's a step that most people aren't willing to take.

Where do you look? I'll share some of the secrets. This reinsurance company from $30 million to $53 million, what I did was I said, “What's the persistence? How long do accounts usually stay on?” It’s down 31 months.

This company, they were on 74 months. Do you know what an incredible profit that is not to have to go out and spend the cost of acquisition for new customers and to not have that sales force because they stay on? How many admin people does it take to service every 100 clients?

They were running at 40% of the industry average. Four people for every ten that the industry had to service them, which meant they were incredibly efficient. I go down those routes and I found a dozen things that were there.

I know then you get into loss carryforwards, credits and a lot of financial things as well. When you put the entirety, the totality of the package together, we were able to take it from $30 million to $53 million, which is incredible.

Unless you don't like those extra taxes, you have to pay on all that extra money to make.

Capital gains besides.

I'd love to dive into a handful more of examples of about the way that you think differently versus conventional business and marketing wisdom from some of the things. Maybe you impressed the Fortune 500 CEOs from the early days in your twenties to some of the ways that you're doing now. How's the way most people think? What are some of the twists that you bring?

I look at different places. I don't look at things head-on. That's the easy way. I look at things from inside out, up, down, backward. There's always a backdoor and I take contrary views. I can shotgun a few of these to you.

A battery technology company came to me. I didn't go with them. I didn't have the bandwidth, but they were having a struggle. They were very high-end battery tech for large corporations and they decided to create their own home battery to compete with Tesla, only their battery was much better.

I didn't use their battery, I went by the specs they sent me. They had brought in five different marketing consulting companies and they said, “We need a comparison chart but it has to be disruptive.”

They called me because the Silicon Valley investment banking firm had suggested they give me a call and I said, “My guess is that they gave you a comparison chart and said this is how you'd be disruptive. Show that you're better.” He said, “Yes.”

I said, “That only puts you firmly in position number two. The longer you do that, the more you're going to smell like number two and that's not what you want. What you have to do is use the comparison chart as a support, not as the main message.” He didn't understand that. He said, “Give me an example.”

I said, “You have to take a strategy. It's about spin and positioning.” Let me digress and give you an example. It's all about what's in it for me. You could want to save the gay black whales for Jesus, but it's about you and your family first.

A priest goes up to a bishop and says, “Your eminence, do you mind if I smoke while I pray?” He says, “Of course I mind. Praying is a sacrament. I refuse to allow you to defile it by smoking. I forbid it.”

A couple of weeks later a priest gets off the bus in the seminary and says, Your eminence, do you mind if I pray while I smoke?” “Go right ahead.”

It's about your motivations. In this case, they wanted to go up against Tesla home batteries. I said, “Put up the comparison chart. At the top of the ad you say, ‘We are committed to helping Tesla raise the bar on home batteries.’

Now show your comparison chart with a bar over a Tesla and a higher bar over you and below it say, ‘Come on, Tesla. We know you can do it. If you need our help, please feel free to call.”’

Now you're in position one. The CEO, they were all laughing. They said, “What if they raised the bar?” I said, “I hope they do because the next ad is, ‘Congratulations, Tesla. We knew you could do it. Unfortunately, we raised our bar as well, so you still have a way to go. Give us a call if we can help.”’

That's so great because Tesla is such a strong brand with a lot of emotional appeal to most of the country because of who Elon is, what he represents and all the publicity they get without any marketing.

I love how you used a psychological tactic to have the client put themselves above even. In order to do that, you're assuming a superior frame as it is. There are a lot of cool psychological things there.

I'll give you the biggest secret about marketing. This is what no one will tell you. I share it all the time. Marketing is psychology. If you want to be a marketer, study psychology, read all the social psychology books. Gladwell, Erlich, all of them.

Read those. Especially, Persuasion and Pre-suasion are fabulous books. Read The 48 Laws of Power. Robert Greene. Read The Game by Neil Strauss. Read things that show how people respond. That's what it's about.

One of the largest furniture chains in the country had come to me and they were making their own sleeper sofa and they couldn't give it away. It wasn't a brand name. It was seen by everyone that came in as a sloppy attempt at making something.

It was a second-class citizen. They asked me what to do and I said, “Show me the display.” There were fifteen sleeper sofas in all the stores.

I said, “Go back two rows, go over three, put it there. Do you know that big red sold tag that goes on an item that sold? Put that on the couch.” They couldn't keep them in stock. It had already given people permission to buy it because someone else had bought it. It's about psychology.

Many years ago, the late ‘70s. I’m dating myself. I was a zygote at the time. A friend of mine built townhouses in Southern California, in San Fernando Valley. I don't remember if it was 20 or 24, and he was selling them for $349,000, which was high then.

Cognitive bias and emotional attachment are the death knell to businesses. Click To Tweet

It was high-end, the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. He could not sell them. He couldn't move them. He came to me, he said, “What do we do?” I said, “I don't know what you do. I know I have no problem. I have no money invested in this. Here's what you do. Raise the price to $395,000.”

He said, “Are you crazy? I'm at $350,000 and I’ll go down to $275,000.” I said, “Raise the price to $395,000 and say if you buy within the next 60 days, you can choose either a completely refurbished concourse condition Ford Mustang coupe or convertible or a Camaro in the driveway.”

“A ‘69 Camaro, ‘67 Mustang, classic refurbished.” Within 30 days, every one of them was sold. The cars cost them $20,000 each.

You got a comparison to another marketing campaign or something else. Something like this drives directly into the desires of the consumer. “I want that so badly.”

It has to do with relative value and what value people put on it. We used to run contests and we'd say, “The winner gets a round two around the world airline tickets.”

If you go up to ten people and you say, “How much do you think it costs to get an unlimited stop around the world airline ticket that's good for a year so you can go around the world, two of you?” People say, “I don't know, $100,000 each, $50,000 each.” They're $2,500 each.

The perception or I would say, “The winner has their mortgage based on the national average, their mortgage or rent paid for a year.” That's $746 at the time we ran it. I think it's $900-something now.

“We'll pay your income tax based on the national average.” It was like $14,000 and tax on top of tax, maybe $20,000, but the perception is over the top. You would ask me about techniques for the small entrepreneur, small startup guy.

I'll give you two stories about competition. Competition is a wonderful thing if you know how to use it. A guy comes to me. His family sold carpets, rugs and art carpets and they wanted to get online. There were already a few 800-pound gorillas selling carpets online who had all the traffic.

He said, “What do I do?” I said, “I want you to form five online companies. I want five different websites, five different names, colors, phone numbers as if you are five completely different companies.”

He's looking at me and saying, “What are you? Forty short in a jacket, eyes behind you in the back? Why?”

I said, “Because on the first one you're going to say, ‘We will not be undersold by a name number two.’ On number two says, ‘We will not be undersold by a name number three,’ and on three named four, four named five, five named one.”

Start generating traffic to it. It was exponential and eventually he bought out the other guys, the big 800-pound gorillas who had lost enough weight to be 80-pound gorillas or 60-pound monkeys and he bought them out because he took over.

I want to recap, make sure I understand that. His product that he sold was nice carpets, etc.?

They were art carpets. Everyone's sold the same thing. It was the same catalog.

He created these other ones, which gave him at least the illusion of a big imprint.

It gave him a chain where one became five. You've got so much traffic because whoever was on one went two. If I went to site number two and it says, “I'm not going to be able to sold by three,” I go, “Let me see what three's prices are.”

One piece of traffic, one person going to the first websites ends up going to five. It was getting five times the value of the traffic for every one he got. He got five different hits on five different sites.

If they buy from any of them, it's all his.

Game over. Many years ago, I did an infomercial that was a little different. It was the early ‘90s and computers were becoming all the rage.

The internet was in its infancy and there were some people, I think it was called NetZero, offering free internet access. Encyclopedia Britannica had come out on CD. I got on and I was king of the discount clubs, travel clubs, health clubs doing this for all the banks and insurance companies.

I provided all the benefits and some of the marketing. I said, “1,000 free software programs when you take a 30-day trial membership at our discount shopping club.”

It was, “Wait, there's more. If you call within the next ten minutes, we'll give you free internet. For the first 500 callers, you get the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on CD, a $500 value, absolutely free.”

It was September, they were going to come out with their next year and I bought their entire stock for $1 each. What I knew was everyone was going to copy this. I went through, got all the contracts and got signed agreements with all the programmers.

They didn't care. Other people would just copy it. How many ab flexes were there? What I did was I had bought all the A-time. A-time means the prime time. At that time I bought all the commercial time during Star Trek and all the places where people who had computers would be.

I had quietly bought the B-time. I created a second infomercial with a different name, different announcer, different product design, everything but the same offer.

I get on and a few weeks later when I figured everyone was ready to start copying me and launching, I launched my own competition to compete against myself and say, “Don't buy from them. We were the original, they took our idea and went with it. We're the ones with the contracts with the programmers.”

 

I started an on TV battle between the two and I'd get letters from people saying, “I bought from you because I know you were the first one,” and it became this cult. We pinned the needle and we dominated this whole genre. Everybody started offering a free product if you take a trial membership.

I've heard of that concept many times, which is start your own competition. I have not yet talked to anybody who has done that. I love that story because I’ve always been fascinated by it and I get it conceptually, but I love the fact that you did it.

I teach people how to do it all the time. Here's one for digital marketers, because we're working in the digital space. How do you live in an Amazon world?

How many times have you seen a product that's on Amazon and it starts to scale and it's moving up. What happens? All of a sudden you lose 80% of your business.

What do you know? Amazon has the exact same product. Because they own the customers and the traffic, they're diverting everybody to their product. If I'm a marketing consultant, I say kudos to Amazon. I have to. It's brilliant.

If I'm the guy who made the fat formula, I'm not happy. Do you think there's a little guy with glasses and a bald head sitting there waiting for a certain number to hit? No, it's an algorithm.

I say to people on Amazon, “Take your product and make five of them and start scaling all five.” You'll never get as high as you would with a single one, but the height you get is times five and you stay under their algorithm.

You end up making more money than if you had one that scaled all the way up. Certainly, you get to be on their radar.

You own more real estate. You may have five on one page as opposed to one and you can take that scattershot approach. That's it. I know that it's a very real issue for a lot of Amazon sellers out right now.

There was a great article from The Onion. There was a funny article that says supposedly it's not written by Jeff Bezos, but it supposedly is. The title is “My Advice to Anyone Starting a Business is to Remember That Someday I Will Crush You.”

It gives great entrepreneurial advice and he's like, “This will serve you up until the time we come and take your entire market within ten strokes.”

Perspective is interesting and I’ve traveled a lot. I was in Madrid and I went to a bullfight because I wanted the psychological and cultural experience of this. The matadors they're vicious and they're hurting the bull and you're saying, “This is terrible.”

The bull gets angry and rams the matador and you go, “That's not right. Go get them.” It's how it changes on a dime. Here's how I look at Amazon. I'm a big Amazon fan. I have tremendous respect for Jeff Bezos.

I think the man is brilliant because if I were a marketer doing what he does, I would do exactly the same thing.

There's not one person I believe who wouldn't want to be Jeff Bezos if they could and do the same things. The problem is most people, everyone who is not Jeff Bezos is at a different position saying, “He's hurting me.”

Unless you’re a consumer. Consumers like him, investors love him. The only people that don’t love him are small businesses who are trying to compete with him.

If you're a small business, don't be angry. Learn from him. Look at what he does. He's a wonderful strategist. People say he bought Whole Foods. If you dig deeper and you look into the future, and we're going to talk about the future.

Originally, he bought half of the RadioShack that went out. He's buying standalone locations. He's not buying something that's in a high-rise.

What do you think the flat roof of a Whole Foods can be used for? Talk about staging for drones in the city. There are strategies.

I would say to people, “In several years, there won't be any franchise car dealers.” The OEMs have been trying to get rid of them for years. They tried the recession. Chrysler shut them all down. They all have to come back. The franchise laws are so strict.

The way cars will be sold, if they're sold at all, and they won't be, would be in shopping malls because electric cars are in the inevitability and we know that.

The way Tesla does theirs.

If you think about it, dealers make five times more in the service department. I've worked in 30 industries, so I'm a wealth of useless information. They make five times more in the service department than they do in sales and they won't be anything to service. That goes away.

The dealers, in their inevitable wisdom say, “I’ll make it up on sales and F&I, finance and insurance.” You're not going to buy a lot of service contracts on a car where the whole motor costs $500 or $800 to replace.

There's not a reason to buy extended warranties on all these things. Because there's no barrier to entry to electric cars, the Chinese and the Indians are going to come in and the Eastern Europeans are going to come in.

It becomes a commodity. How can the dealers survive? That being said, all the parts companies, the support companies for the dealers, all of that goes away. That's going to have a big hit on the economy. Cars are going to be autonomous. We know that.

Do you think the cities are going to just say to Uber and Lyft, “Knock yourselves out?” The cities are losing parking revenue for meters, no tickets. They still have to maintain the roads and the streets.

Simply shifting your perception frees you up and opens up a million different ideas. Click To Tweet

Maybe not traffic lights anymore. Where's that going to go? You have to start asking questions about where we're going to know how to frame your business within it.

I think it does dovetail perfectly into a concept that you and I discussed, which is time travel.

This is where people take my measurements for a white jacket with ties in the back. I teach time travel and I do this in my mastermind group. I've done it to corporations, I’ve trained multiple departments.

Time is a construct created by our minds to help us create mile markers, if you will, and navigate through our lifespan on earth. That's what it is. It gives us relationships, it gives us analogies, points of reference.

The way that we're wired is that we can only answer present and past tense questions. Let me propose something. Every project, we're going to call it Project X. You decide you're going to do something and we’re calling it Project X.

Brad, you have three sides to Project X. The Project X you plan to do, the Project X that you launch and do and that same Project X a year later, you look back on with hindsight and wish to God you had done.

Which is the best of those three? It’s hindsight, always. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could see the future? If we could, we'd all be living at the beach driving Aston Martins. That's not viable.

What if you could go into the future? What if you could, and I'm not talking about an HG Wells time machine. This is the white jacket and its foam rubber wallpaper conversation, but I’ve created techniques.

I teach them. It takes about 45 minutes to go through the process. It takes about an hour-and-a-half to teach them where I can take you ahead into the future, 30 days, 90 days a year, two years, three years, five years.

I can get you to a point where if I asked you what year it is, you're going to say 2023 and you will believe. You can sit there believing you are in 2023 and I’ve perfected a way to do this.

Once you're there, I don't need to worry about your inability to see the future because I'm going to ask you past tense questions about the project you launched a few years earlier in 2018. What happened when you launched? What did you learn?

What was the response? What was the reaction? What do your customers think? What do your suppliers do or their regulatory issues? What did your competition do?

I start asking questions through different lenses. One of the most important lenses I use is what did the critics say? You look back and you find all the holes in your product because now you have to face reality.

If I asked you what the critics say, you're going to have to look at this through their eyes. I'll digress. When I would interview someone, I'd say, “What are your weaknesses?”

They'd go, “I work too hard. I never know when to stop. I push too far. Employers are going, ‘No, yes.’” It's all crap. What I say is, “When I call your references, and I will, and I ask them what they consider to be your weaknesses, what are they going to tell me?”

Now they're backpedaling and they can do some damage control. They're very open about what their real weaknesses are because they know I'm going to find out and they want to do damage control. Here's the same thing.

If I say, “What did the critics say?” A Silicon Valley software company, a very prominent one, calls me and they're coming up with a new product, really cutting edge at the time.

I look at it and I do this exercise in my mind all the time but with everything. I think about what's missing. I do this exercise with them.

I say, “Show me your version two and your version three lists of what you want to put in.” They do. I bring them through this exercise and I take them a few years in the future. I look back and I ask them all these questions and we whiteboard all the answers.

I get to, “What did the critics say? Did they give you five stars or how many stars did they give you? What did they say you were missing?”

When I asked that question, they started filling in all the holes. What do you know? A lot of those holes were in version two and three, which in the present day you say, “We'll put it in later. We can't do it now.”

I show them how for the little bit of extra time, and this was the difference between launching January 1 or April 1.

They came out with version three because once they were committed to taking version two and three and blending it into their production schedule, their programming schedule, it didn't take much longer.

They launched two five-star reviews in that particular software at that time period and dominated the market.

What I love about this psychologically, the effect, and at least what I'm hearing or what I believe. Putting yourself in the future and looking back, it almost disassociates you.

If I'm thinking now what could go wrong in the future, I'm still so involved in the present and so invested in it. It's hard to zoom out.

If you imagine that it's already done, you're a little dissociated from it and I think it's a lot easier then to view it with an impartial like, “I'm looking back, I can see how these things went.”

 

It's not what's out in front of you, it's behind you. There's a less emotional attachment to all the potential negatives.

I don't know if that's part of the psychology of what makes it work, but I can see it as one of the reasons this is highly effective.

It's freeing because if you are in the present trying to look for the future, one, we're not wired that way. Two, it's a struggle. If I take those barriers away and free your mind so that you believe it's the future and you're looking back, it's easy.

It's a piece of cake. You remember things from several years ago and several days ago and in your mind, they're the same. They happened at the same moment.

I teach people how to pin themselves. When I say pin, you can jump to 30, 90 days a year or a couple of years, you can jump to a certain pin in a map and stay there and live there.

This works perfectly with one of my favorite strategies I learned years ago and I employ it both in my life and with my clients and partners. There was a strategy that Walt Disney used to do.

You may be familiar with this or maybe not, but they used to say you never knew which Walt was going to walk into the office. Was it going to be the dreamer or the critic?

He was very deliberate to the point where he had three different offices as well when they imagined a new movie, ride, project or office. They were only allowed to come up with what is possible but not plan it or critique it.

There was another office where the only thing they could do was a storyboard or plan what it is, but not dream it or not critique it.

Finally that third room, which is the critic’s room, that's where everybody's job is just to sit there and think about, “We're not here to add more stuff to this and we're not to plan it. We're here to think about what did we miss? What are we missing out?”

“What are the problems of the hurdles that we weren't thinking about before that could derail this whole thing?” I've always loved this framework of giving each dreamer, doer and critic their time to have their say.

You've taken that concept to the next level of saying, especially if you are critiquing it or anything, do it from this time travel, futuristic perception.

I can see how that would make it so much more powerful and effective in doing so. That's interesting how your strategy there aligns perfectly with something that I do a little bit of as well.

It's the most powerful technique people have told me they've ever used. It's life-changing. It’s changing their business.

There are a lot of things that will affect things. Cognitive bias and emotional attachment are the death knell to business. They destroy more businesses.

Ego and bias are the things that kill more businesses. I show people how to eliminate them, how to step aside from them and away from them because they'll kill you. Your pre-determined beliefs or your emotional attachment to something is irrational.

That happened to me. I started an eCommerce brand and fell in love with the brand and the idea. I knew at the time that I was putting blinders on myself because I was so emotionally attached and I thought, “I can will this to work.”

When it got to the point of a few months to a year in, I started going, “I broke all of the cardinal rules of planning this stuff out and I ignored so many things. I've got to shut it down and lose a bunch of money.

Yet you would do that again. You would because if people can't help themselves, I liken it to dead horses. You can't beat a dead horse.

I say, “Where are the dead horses here? What am I holding onto?” I start questioning how other people would take it on, examples of things.

If you came into a company as a new CEO, what would you do differently than that company does? Given that question, because you'd have your own plan, if you were taken out of your company now and a new CEO came in, what would he do that you're not?

What would he see that you don't? What direction would he take it? If you can answer that question, you've opened your eyes to new possibilities.

Simply by shifting the perception around frees you up and probably opens up for a million different ideas.

I remember the government when George W bailed out the car industry. It said Cash for Clunkers. We're going to do whatever it is, $30 billion, $3 billion. I don't remember what the number is.

I said, “Why don't you just write a check to Toyota because that's all you're going to do? You bailed out the American automotive industry. Not Ford, but Chrysler and GM.” You're going to give people $4,500 extra cash when they trade in their cars and all you're doing is feeding Toyota, Nissan and Honda.

That's where they're going. Why don't you apply some logic and say, “If you buy a US brand car, Ford, Chrysler, GM, we give you $4,500. If you buy a foreign make car made in America, Toyota, Nissan, Honda that are made here, you get $2,500 and anything else, you get zero?”

Everybody would have bought a Ford, Chrysler or GM car to get their $4,500. The car industry problem’s gone. Nobody takes that next step.

A little bit of humor or creativity can make a difference in the world. Click To Tweet

They look at something for what's put on the table and they don't question it. My advice to your readers is to question everything and keep questioning. If you don't ask why at least five times in a row for everything, you're not going deep enough.

Why are you doing this? That's why. Why did you do that? That's why I did that. Tell me why you felt that was important. You’ve got to go deep and not just why, but you know who, what, why, when, where and how.

The more you question, the more things occur to you. When you take things for granted or make assumptions, then you get into cognitive bias, emotional attachment, willing something to happen that won't and you do it over and over.

People repeat their patterns. I show them how to break that. One of the things I want them to say, humor is one of the greatest tools in marketing, but people don't use it.

I did the thing of not a “robot I am” thing. Even emails that I send out. I took over as CEO of a multinational software company.

It's a marketing intelligence platform. It's not marketing automation on steroids. It has an artificial intelligence base foundation to it and it does everything.

You don't need to buy any other software. If you use something like one of my companies, we use Infusionsoft and probably 40 other programs with this.

Everything is baked in and you can scale. When you successfully scale a product, it's addictive. We coined the term and trademarked it called Digital Crack. Digital Crack is successfully scaling.

People are already calling saying, “Would you come and speak about Digital Crack?” I'm getting a kick out of it. How you use humor.

I don't want to blow my own horn, but we did a trade show when we got leads and I was coming on the company at the time, and they were sending out follow-up emails that were mind-numbing.

“Thank you for stopping by our booth. We were so impressed with what you had to say and we want to meet you. We want to have your children and all of this. Can I send you a puppy?” That stuff.

It was the same thing you've seen all the time. It was around Christmas time and I said, “No. You’ve got to step out of the mold.”

I wrote an email. It took me fifteen minutes that was light for a holiday and we pinned the needle on response and people still call and say, “I’ll never forget that email you sent.”

Do something that's memorable, do something that sticks out that people will remember, that people will take notice of, that people can enjoy. I try to put a little bit of humor into things where I can.

That's one of the reasons that people ask me, “Why do you create a show called Bacon Wrapped Business?” I was like, “Because it actually introduced, it's not The Brad Costanzo Show,” which bored me and creating something with a little bit of fun and humor.

It almost gave me permission to even have a little bit more fun with it and create a more entertaining vibe. I had that in my mind precisely when I named the show. We're in an entertainment society, especially this country, entertainment is our biggest export.

Can I offer something? If your readers won't think, “He's an egotistical jerk,” which they might think anyway. Can I share an email with you?

I think that they might get a kick out of what it does. If your readers can start to do things like this, don't go overboard. Maybe have a friend or someone who's a writer to help you.

Before I read it, I'm going to give you an example of something. How many times have you gotten an email and you say, “I don't want this?” You hit unsubscribe. What happens when you hit on subscribe? It says, “Sorry to miss you. Sorry to lose you.” That's it.

I don't do that. What I do is I realize, “It cost me a lot of money to get that person’s email and have them subscribe and now I'm losing them.” I don't accept that. When they hit unsubscribe, that goes to a page and then there are four rectangular blocks.

The first one is in sixteen-point type and a little checkbox and it says, “I'm under a lot of pressure recently. I'd like to cut back to just once a week.”

The next box has a twelve-point type and it says, “My significant other tells me I cannot read more than two of these emails a month. Please change my subscription.”

The third box has a ten-point type and it says, “My therapist says once a month is all that I can handle or he's going to charge me more.”

The last one is an eight-point type and it says, “There is nothing I can say or do that can keep me on this list. I've taken counsel, I’ve talked to religious leaders, I have spoken with family and friends. I must unsubscribe (wink, wink). Why don't you check back with me in six months just to see how I'm doing?”

That's the last box in small print. People get engaged. It's fun, it's engaging. In many cases, I can't go with those specific ones.

About 40% of them stay with us. 40% of the people who were ready to unsubscribe and guess how engaged they are and guess how much they buy and reengage with the whole company?

Nobody thinks about this. We do the same thing with safety programs. When you were on a continuity program and you leave, people go, “Okay.”

 

In our case with the software, we use AI and we make them an offer they can't refuse. I use animation, I use fun, I use gags, I use all kinds of things that get them to laugh.

It's huge because when you think of also with the unsubscribe mentality, we've all done that. Sometimes we're in a bad mood and we get an email from something we normally like.

It's often we're like, “Screw it. I don't need this anymore. I'm going to unsubscribe,” but you don't necessarily mean that.

It’s because you're busy. I have a lot of newsletters and there's this one that I liked because it's what's new in technology. I read it all the time, but there are days that I just delete it.

I go, “I'm too busy. I can't even think about this now,” but I’ll do this, “No. I'm going to unsubscribe. I've had enough of this.”

We all do that. I'll share this email that I wrote. Not to show off, but to hopefully show people what they can do. It was Christmas time.

The company is called TouchCR. That's the name of our company. It's the marketing intelligence software and we can do data pins and it's micro-targeting.

We've even achieved 98% not deliverability but inbox placement. It's amazing what we do. This was the third in the sequence of emails and it was sent out a few days before Christmas and the subject line is, “Santa Claus takes Christmas in stride,” and it was the year so and so.”

“That’s right. Santa is chilling for Christmas. Thanks, TouchCR. Santa not only knows who's been naughty and nice but just how naughty and how nice.

He knows when you're asleep and he knows when you're awake and thanks to more than 700 data points that can be upended in real-time, Santa knows exactly what you want for Christmas. (That's right. Thanks, TouchCR. You won't get an ugly sweater this year.)

Can you say Aston Martin? Wouldn't you like to be Santa Claus to your customers knowing what they want and then selling it to them? You're in luck because Santa’s work is done.

He has the time to tell you exactly how TouchCR can help you target your customers like he did. After all, don't you want to deliver the right product to the right customer, just like Santa? (If not, we know a warehouse where you can buy a lot of ugly sweaters).

It was the night before Christmas and TouchCR were there with data points, tracking and intelligence software. The customers were filled with food from the market while messaging and emails never failed to hit their target.

When out on the lawn, there arose such a clatter because your competition didn't use TouchCR, so their presence didn't matter. To schedule a one-on-one with Santa, click the link below.”

The response, to this day, we get people who refer back to it and say, “I found you because of that email,” or “I responded because of the email.”

“I've never forgotten that. We use it as a template for our company now.” It engages. Don't be afraid to take a chance.

Most people are bored. Most people are going through life in this zombie-like haze. Sometimes you’ve got to shake it out of them and oftentimes a little bit of humor, levity or creativity can make the difference in the world from being this stodgy, eCommerce brand.

I'm going to use a different word. I don't think people are bored. They're overloaded. I think that there are so many messages and so many companies vying for their attention. It's not that they're bored. It's that they're desensitized a little bit. They're numb.

To break through the numbness, because people generally like their lives and what they're doing. I'd like to believe that, so boredom wouldn't be it. It's overloaded and numb. There's so much out there.

Grabbing somebody's attention, being a little bit different, that’s the key these days.

I saw a billboard in Dallas. It was amazing. I'm slowing down driving. It said, “Your wife is hot.” I thought, “That's a billboard.”

It was for an air conditioning company, “We could cool her off,” that kind of thing. I thought that's wonderful. Things that are so clever. Taco Bell, “Think Outside the Bun.” It's absolutely brilliant.

A friend of mine did an ad for a photo lab way back in the day. It says, “We keep our best people in the dark.” You can have some fun with things.

It just hit me, I don't know if you guys know each other, but we've got a lot of mutual friends and he's down there in Austin. Are you familiar? Do you know Roy Williams?

No, I don't.

You think a lot like him and especially with your story. Roy owns a company called the Wizard Academy.

I have heard of it. I don’t know him.

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I think you and Roy would probably get along swimmingly well because a lot of your approach to the different angles, the different stories and different ways to stand out in the minds of your consumer are alike. They are unique.

It's not the same straight line approach that most people end up taking. David, I want to move to some of the big things that are taking most of your time these days. What are some of the projects?

You mentioned that you are the CEO of TouchCR and there's probably a bunch of other things you're working on. Is there anything else to give us a window into your world?

It changes all the time. I always owned four or five companies. I'm always consulting for another four or five. I'm up there in what I charge for consulting. I own a corporate training company. We do online training for corporate employees.

It’s a very big scale. I do some reinsurance work. I have a few products that I do digital marketing on that are fun and a little bit different.

I'm always involved in a lot of different things. I only take things that are different, unique, disruptive or considered impossible. A large insurance company came to me and said, “We want you to help us build a whole new line of insurance brokerages.”

My response, although it wasn't my out-loud voice, I said, “Shoot me in the head.” I couldn't do that if my life depended on it. They backed up a truck of money.

I said, “There's no way. It's not me. I can't do anything like that.” Give me something that I can do disruptively that I can pin the needle, break records and no one will know I did it.

I'll share something with you. I do a lot of philanthropy and I’ve come up with ways to provide jobs for veterans and help people on medical lists.

I'm a big supporter of the military. I'm a very passionate American and I love this country. I'm very eternally grateful for men and women who put their lives on the line for our way of life.

For a few years, I hosted the military ball VIP reception in my house in Dallas and we'd have 200 or 300 people come and it's a big fundraising event. The VIPs would come. It's why I do the mastermind.

People do masterminds because that's their living. It's not for me. It started out as a burden because I'm so incredibly busy. I was challenged to do it to give back and to teach people what to do.

One of the companies who came to it, because the person who challenged me to do this said, “You're going to change lives and companies.” One company was stuck at $9 million, couldn't get out of his own way.

We got him unstuck and he's going to shoot up to $30 million. Two other people had startups. They couldn't figure it out.

Now they've got all the answers and they're going and the more questions they have, the more answers they know how to get. It's been incredibly, emotionally fulfilling to do this and a bit of fun too.

I don't have guest speakers. It's me. We do some roundtables. We do some hot seats where everybody gets fifteen minutes of fame where we solved their problems.

Who are some of the types of people that you think would be a good fit? Go ahead and give the URL now if people are interested in The Marketing Mastery Group.

There's a shorter version, TheMarketingMG.com.

Either one, people can check them out. What are the ideal types of people? Are they doing a certain amount of business? Are there industries that are better than others?

If you go to the site and you look at some of the testimonials, the one thing that everyone says is that they couldn't believe the quality of the people. I keep it small. I keep it to 30, 32. No more. I'm not into doing 100, 200 people. That's not what I do. I want to keep it small and intimate so it's effective.

I turned down eleven people because they didn't have anything to offer. It's not that everyone has to offer because some people just have a need. I'm looking for smart people.

I'm looking for people who are passionate about what they do, who want to learn and improve, and who have perspectives to share and aren't afraid to share them. I have the head of a very prestigious boutique investment banking firm. I have the CEO of a chain of clinics.

I have some of the top digital marketers in the country coming as well because digital marketing is so important. I have a dear friend of mine who's there. He's an underachiever.

He's a doctor, lawyer, a concert violinist, a championship figure skater and a professional magician. He is so lazy, but he's also one of these single most brilliant people you'll ever meet. His perspective on everything is so unique and that's what I look forward to.

Our mutual friend Gene was there and Gene is a consultant to large companies and he's been around the block a few times and has a couple of t-shirts to prove it. The first half, the first day it was Gene, “What do you think?” He says, “It's interesting.”

The second day it was like, “You knocked my socks off with this thing.” Everybody gets something. That's what I'm looking for.

A lot of these people own companies. Most of them own companies and a few are starting entrepreneurs. Others are running very high-quality companies doing $15 million to $40 million a year.

 

It's all over the board. One woman came and she's a small startup working out of her garage. She was a little intimidated.

I said to her, “You earned your seat at the table. You are here because you are scary smart. You are one of the smartest people in this room.”

You have nothing to be intimidated about. It’s because you haven't achieved what you've chosen to do now, you've been very successful in other things.”

She let go of it and she was a rock star. She came out of her shell and participated and got feedback. People make connections and they're working together with doing deals. I'm so proud of what the people are accomplishing. It's humbling.

It’s four times a year. If people want to go, they can go to TheMarketingMasteryGroup.com.

You fill out an application and then I’ll interview them and they can interview me and make sure that they're comfortable.

I want people who want to learn, who are willing to open their minds up to new possibilities and new ways, who genuinely want to take their companies to the next level and get out of neutral. That's the criteria.

I had some people who are in the oil and gas industry who might have known for years from consulting and they said, “We want to be there.”

I said, “Why? You can offer nothing to entrepreneurs to existing businesses. You are in a niche that doesn't translate.”

I turned them down and a few others. I had some people who I felt would be disruptive even though they were successful. They were missing a few dots on their I’s and I didn't want that disruption.

Eleven people were turned down, but we had 30 people there. I'm trying to run two groups of 37 and that's it. I won't go more than that.

That way I can intermix them so there’s always fresh blood if you will and new connections to be made. I have to admit, it's exhausting.

I hosted a dinner at my house in Dallas, the night between the two sessions. It is exhausting and I tell people, “If you want laser lights, fancy seats and pyrotechnics, go see Tony Robbins.

If you want to roll up your sleeves and have your brain explode, have your head explode and walkout two days later more mentally exhausted and excited that you've ever been in your entire life, begging for Valium or Thorazine or a vodka drip, then this is the place to go.

This is a roll up your sleeves, high-intensity session.” I don't have guest speakers. The morning, it's me, one topic after another and I move fast. People take twenty pages of notes, but it's all on video so they can watch it again and again.

We do two one-hour sessions of five different roundtables. It's ten hours of the roundtable. Even though everyone can go to only two of them, we record it all.

They're online. We do two hours of the hot seat. Every fifteen minutes, there's a new challenge if someone in the group has a problem, a challenge, a stumbling block.

We ask a few questions, I pick out some tools that we're going to use to do it, psychological tools or techniques. We'd go around the room and everybody gets into the frame of mind of solving the problems and I guide them and tweak everything a little bit.

We do that eight times. We repeat the exact same thing the second day. It's six hours of me doing a brain dump and it's four hours of roundtables, which is twenty hours total. It’s five different roundtables with subject matter experts in each one. It's four hours of sixteen hot seats.

I like the intimacy of it too, the size and then the ability to interact. It's not just sitting there listening to somebody talk the whole time, but it's that interaction. It's a hot seat. The roundtables, when you fill it up with not just yourself but other smart people, magic can happen.

I make myself available. There's no one in this mastermind who could hire me as a consultant. That's not why I do this, but I make myself available to them in between so that if they have a question or a stumbling block, that's my obligation to them.

I say, “Call me. Don't call me every day, but call me when you have a need.” I spend time on the phone and work it out with them and solve the problems for them.

I encourage everybody to check out TheMarketingMasteryGroup.com. You do these multiple times. David, are there any nuts in your business you're trying to crack?

By that, trying to get to good people to The Marketing Mastery Group is one thing, but is there anything you're working on that you're either particularly looking for a resource, a skillset, a person?

I'm always looking for good project managers. They're so hard to find. If I could find ten, I'd hire ten. It’s people who think outside the box, people who question. I want someone who doesn't take no for an answer. I'm always looking for that.

I'm looking for a new executive assistant. My person who was with me twelve-and-a-half years working from home left after twelve-and-a-half years.

I've got a good recommendation for you on that. He lives in Austin. He's not the executive assistant, but his name is Tim Francis, a former guest. He's a good friend and an amazing human being. I don't know if you've ever come across Tim.

Time is a construct created by our minds to help us create mile markers and navigate through our lifespan on earth. Click To Tweet

He owns a company called GreatAssistant.com and he is methodical about recruiting, training, personality profiling, everything, the best executive assistants for people. He is top-notch. I'm happy to make an introduction, but if you are looking for an assistant. Is it US-based?

Everything I do is virtual all around the world. All my people are virtual. I've been doing that for many years and many years ago, it was not that easy.

Technology has caught up with it. It's easy. You're not restricted to the talent pool within a twenty-mile radius of your location.

You can use some of the better people. Going offshore for certain things makes a big difference. I've got programmers offshore, I’ve got data people offshore. The world is a wide-open place.

I was speaking about project managers because that's what one of the things I always say as well. I think we're cut from the same cloth in a lot of areas. I was interviewing the owner of the company Freeeup and it's FreeeUp.com. It's a new platform for outsourcing global workers.

Both are US-based, about half of them are the US, but they take an extra step. If you go to Upwork or one of these other sites and you post a job posting, you're going to get inundated with 50 different applicants.

In this case, they're out there actively recruiting for their people. If you post, “I need a web designer,” they're only going to deliver you maybe one to three, potentially have one to three people that they've already pre-vetted, pre-interviewed, etc.

In order to streamline the process, in addition, regarding project managers, I told him they do have PMs there.

I said, “A great service that you guys could offer would be some of the people who build themselves out as project managers. I would work deeper with them in creating integration with them in your business.

If I'm coming, if I’ve got an eCom project to do and it's going to require five different skillsets, if you let me know that we also have one of these project managers on board who knows our system and our people well.

You can hire them to work in our system and just one extra layer of easiness for the client, which would be us.”

I'm a big fan of training. For example in TouchCR, our team is all going for the Salesforce certifications. Richard Branson said something that I think is brilliant.

I have such respect for some of the things he has done. He said, “Train people so that they can leave you and get a better job somewhere else. Treat them so that they never want to.”

Train people so they can find somebody to replace themselves at your business and move up.

It depends. You never want to make your best salesperson a sales manager. They just sit there and go, “We have no more sales. What happened?”

It depends on what position. I love that because I'm a big fan of training and I train our people in all different areas and cross-train and show them perspectives. I've owned a lot of businesses.

I remember one time I had a business that had a warehouse printing shop and warehouse and shipping. I had all the desk jockeys, the accounting people, the customer service people go out and work the warehouse and work in a print shop.

Not the presses but the whole idea. It gave them a whole different perspective. This was years and years ago before it became in vogue. It worked. I'm going to share one more idea that's near and dear to me.

I hire the handicapped. If you have some things customer service people that work from home, there are people who are physically disabled and looking for work and they want so much to please work, to be valuable.

The level of appreciation there is probably through the roof.

Not just appreciation, but dedication and hard work because they want to be productive. They want to be useful. I have the warehouse in question and at the time.

This was many years ago plus in LA. It was a pick and pack. We'd pack things and ship them and I hired a ton of people in wheelchairs and put up the ramps and everything.

One of them said, “You treat us like any others.” I said, “You're subject to my joke abuse like everyone else.” At 4:00 I'd come out, tell jokes and they'd all be hiding, “Go back to work, leave us, we're busy.” It was so gratifying to be able to do that. Anyway, whenever I can put a plugin, I do.

David, I can't thank you enough for your time. The insight, the wisdom, the ideas and the transparency has been phenomenal.

I get a lot of great guests, but I'm especially thankful for getting people who have played in our plane at the levels that you are. Thinking in a way that it takes a lifetime to create these viewpoints and perspectives that you can bring to any business owner, entrepreneur, consultants, anybody out there.

For my readers, once more, I highly encourage you to go to TheMarketingMasteryGroup.com and look at this. Only if you feel as though that there is this stuff that you could learn and grow from as both a person and an entrepreneur.

Using some of the insights that they get as he shared. David, thank you very much. To all my subscribers, at any point that you have a question for me, you want to reach out and send an email to AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com and I'm more than happy to hear you out.

 

If it's something that you'd like a second opinion on, whether it's a strategy or a pursuing, an issue you're having in your business trying to figure something out and you're at a crossroads and you don't know where to go, shoot me an email.

If it's good enough, maybe we'll even have it here. David, is there anything else you'd like to add? If people would like to get a hold of you? You are a ghost.

If anybody wants to reach out, they can get me on The Marketing Mastery site and they could send an email or fill out an app and glad to respond to anyone who has a question. Thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun.

It was my pleasure. If you think other people need to hear about it, the single best thing in the world you could do is share this on your social profiles and tag me in it.

Don't tag the ghost, you can't find him, but there's nothing that we love more than just letting us know that this had a big impact on you.

Important Links:

• Roland Frasier – past episode
• Matt and Joe – past episode
• Anthony Bates – past episode
• David Reiss
• Entrepreneurs’ Organization
• Persuasion
• Pre-suasion
• The 48 Laws of Power
• The Game
• My Advice to Anyone Starting a Business is to Remember That Someday I Will Crush You – article
• Wizard Academy
• TouchCR
• TheMarketingMG.com
• Tim Francis – past episode
• GreatAssistant.com
• Interviewing – past episode with Nathan Hirsch
• FreeeUp.com

About the Guest: David Reiss

David Reiss is one of the most successful men and marketing minds that you don't know about… and that's on purpose. David is a self-described, “Ghost” who builds and scales companies from $20 million to $200 million and far beyond.

He has been a consultant with Fortune 1000 companies since he was in his 20's and has one of the most unique, brilliant and sought after marketing minds in the country.

Yet Google him and you'll find almost nothing.

David is also the creator of http://TheMarketingMasteryGroup.com and several other companies on track do hundreds of millions (and potentially billions) in sales.

• Here’s How »

• Bacon Wrapped Business on Facebook
• Brad Costanzo on Facebook
• Brad Costanzo on LinkedIn
• Brad Costanzo on YouTube
• Brad Costanzo on Twitter