In these marketing notes from the Dan Kennedy Super Conference you’re about to see the five levels of transformation that lead you from being a fearful and broke business owner to being a wealthy business owner who reigns supreme in any market they choose to go into

In the Dan Kennedy universe of customers there are businesses in a WIDE varying degree of diversity.

marketing notes dan kennedy Dan Kennedy Speaks On The Evolution Of A Successful Business Owner

So naturally an objection he has to deal with is that of, “My Business Is Different.”

All markets divide into niches and subcultures. Everyone belongs to at least one niche (occupation, vocational, business) or multiple niches (hobby, interest, personal preference) and at least one sub-culture.

He’s got people in his buyer universe who are doing well for themselves thanks to what they learn and use of Dan’s teachings that own sewing machine stores, a guy who builds self-cleaning fish aquariums, a financial psychic, a woman who sells only collectible items for lovers of Scottish Terriers and even more that are unique.

And then he’s got the customers who are kicking ass and taking names with what he teaches in markets and niches that aren’t so unique like authors, realtors, sales trainers, etc.

The lesson he says this provides to you if your smart is that “My Business Is Different” doesn’t apply if you won’t allow it to.

Dan believes that it is impossible to not improve your business if you apply what you learn from him, regardless of the business you’re in.

He has found that somewhere around 80% of the people that come into the Glazer/Kennedy universe leave pretty quickly.

They miss out on the possibility to transform their business because they have zero imagination and ability to translate and adapt ideas to their business.

This means that if they’re in the construction business and they go to Dan’s Super Conference and not one of the success stories/examples they hear about isn’t about specifically about a construction business, they will feel that this seminar doesn’t apply to them.

Aside from lack of imagination, laziness gets in a lot of people’s way.

Some people don’t want to do more than 3 minutes of additional work than they’re already doing now so as soon as they see that radical transformation is needed in order to get themselves out of the hole they’re in, they retreat because they’ll be damned if any “work” is going to threaten the time they spend glued to their TV.

Not everyone welcomes transformation because not everyone is willing to put forth the effort it would take to transform.

Dan Kennedy has noticed than anyone who’s been with him for over a year is in a special arena and that the richest clients of his end up going through the following evolution . . .

Big Money Transformation #1: Going From Being The Doer Of Their Thing To The Marketer Of The Their Thing

Most people get into business for all the wrong reasons.

The primary idiot reasons to get into business are . . .

A) “I hate my boss and the regimen and the discipline and accountability involved with having a boss and I think I can run this business better than my idiot boss does”

B) “I think it’d be cool to be like Sam Malone from the TV series Cheers and run a business where all my customers and employees are friends that I get to hang with all day and be able to do this while doing something I like doing and make money in the process of doing so”

These two reasons for getting into business are fatally flawed.

For the guy who starts his own business who thinks his boss is an idiot and hates answering to a boss, he will very soon come to the realization that his new boss, him, is an even bigger idiot and because he mortgaged his house to get into business he can’t just quit and look for the next company to sponge off of until they’re feed up with him or he’s fed up with them.

And unlike a job where you can just do an “okay” job and still get paid the same as the guy doing the “great” job, if he doesn’t get off his ass and apply some discipline and effort, he’s going to end up in debt AND on the street.

For the guy who thinks that running a business is all about providing his service and having leisurely conversations with customers and employees, he soon finds out that doing his thing – tending bar, remodeling kitchens, doing peoples taxes, or whatever – isn’t enough because the doing of almost anything, with the exception of a 20-30 professions where extraordinarily high value skills are necessary, is the least valuable activity of any business.

And it’s the easiest to replace and replicate.

So for whatever business you’re in, there’s a very HIGH probability that you can find other people who can do it with high expertise and perform at a satisfactory level and they will work for very ordinary wages.

So the providing of the service you provide is the least valuable part of the business.

Some people find it very uncomfortable to come to grips with the reality that the money is not in providing the service or product but instead is in the customer and the relationship you have with them which comes from marketing.

Dan Kennedy has noticed that the people who succeed with his help find this to be the first big transformation they make.

For anyone who makes this transformation and then goes on to become a coach/guru to the field in which they’ve become successful in, the first hurdle they have to get their audience over is that the skill they’ve spent thousands of dollars and years acquiring, the certificates on the wall, are not what will make them the money they’d like to be making.

It was widely known amongst magicians that there were far better magicians than Harry Houdini but no one even knows their names decades later because Houdini was the best marketer rather than being the best doer.

Big Money Transformation #2: Going From Being The Marketer of Your Thing, To DIRECT RESPONSE Marketer of Your Thing

The next big transformation that the successful customers of Dan Kennedy’s make is that of ditching dumb advertising and marketing that doesn’t work.

Dan included in one of his newsletters an entry form for an advertising awards competition, you know the kind that ad agencies compete it like the CLIO awards, and the last line on the entry form where they talk about how the advertising is going to be judged reads . . .

“And the performance results or sales produced by the advertising is NOT considered.”

That tells you pretty much everything you need to know about traditional advertising.

When David Ogilvy said only the mail order guys know what they’re doing in advertising, it was just as true back when he said it as it is today.

Only direct response marketers know what they’re doing because they measure results.

Big Money Transformation #3: Becoming A Professional Direct Response Marketer Of Anything

This is the rarest transformation but it is the most valuable transformation you can make.

When you do this, you can move from business to business, product to product without a problem.

These people can go into a business coaching dentists on how to improve their practice without ever having been a dentist like one of Dan’s clients currently does now.

These people can do like Dan and set up a mega-profitable business coaching chiropractors how to improve their business without ever having been a chiropractor.

You are severely handicapped if you haven’t personally made this transformation yourself.

The mortgage industry and residential realty industry are two areas that have hit bottom. There’s a woman who is a bank teller at my local bank and she was telling how just 4 short years ago she was making a high six figure income selling real estate.

Now, she’s a bank teller. Why? Because she didn’t make this transformation.

I can’t imagine all the sales people who were rolling in the dough during the boom who are now working at Wal-Mart or other low paying jobs where they’re lucky to even have the barely above minimum wage job because they never made their sales knowledge universally translatable from one market or product to another so that when the delicious and nourishing food dried up, they could easily pack up all their wisdom and migrate to where plenty more delicious food was just waiting to be eaten.

Big Money Transformation #4: Becoming A Professional Entrepreneur

Most people’s primary motivation for getting into is business is because they don’t want a boss telling them what to do.

And then they’re shocked to find out they’ve now got 500 bosses because now they’ve got customers making them jump when they say jump.

And some people have even more bosses because they let their employees boss them around.

Most people who get their act half way together and keep their business afloat stay confined to an identity of “Small Business Owner”.

Reaching the level of being a small business owner is better than having a job. This might allow you a slightly higher than average income, a title of being a business owner and that’s about it.

This person is gonna be in the same position five years down the road as he is thirty years down the road.

Guy has a pawn shop in a strip mall and some businesses have come and gone through the years and maybe he’s knocked down a wall and expanded but the guy’s business is pretty much the same as it’s been for years. He has maintained a little income for himself.

The next step up from “Small Business Owner” is that of “Business Developer”.

These people figure out how to take their ordinary pawn shop and make it an extraordinary pawn shop.

And the next step up from this is becoming a “Professional Entrepreneur”.

Another term for these people is “Serial Entrepreneurs” because they start one business, sell it off and then go start another business or add another business to the business they already have and they do this over and over again until they retire.

Bill Glazer went through all these transformations.

He started off as a small business owner, developed the men’s clothing business into something extraordinary, and then started his BGS information business selling coaching to retail business owners, eventually sold off his clothing business and then bought into Dan’s business.

This is a transformation that expands your possibilities and makes your future a lot brighter.

Big Money Transformation #5: Merchant or Peddler To Rancher – Spender To Investor

Merchants and peddlers go get customers in order to make sales. That’s as far ahead as they think about operating their business. These people live to make a sale and their days are judged by whether the amount of people they sold something to was satisfactory or not.

Successful entrepreneurs think the complete opposite way.

We make sales to get customers. The sale is not the outcome. The sale is the path to equity.

When investors bought into Glazer Kennedy, they weren’t buying a building. There’s no locations. There’s no equipment. There’s no patents.

There are copyrights and trademarks and big ass library of content but Dan admits that there’s no value in the content if there’s not customers to buy it.

So what did investors buy? Customers with long-term equity value.

The hardest transformation to make is that of moving from what most business owners do which is try to spend as little as possible to get the customers they need to make the number of sales they need in order to meet payroll for the month and hopefully have some money left over for themselves.

“How can I spend as little as possible?” is most business owners’ primary question. They see themselves as spenders and they think of everything they have to do in order to get a customer as an expense.

And this is why they’re in complete terror if any of those expenses go up. These people are traumatized if postage goes up or if the rates of any media they’re using goes up.

When you know how to find customers that have enormous equity value, you have made the switch to becoming an investor; not a spender.

The direct response marketing business Guthy Renker, who sells over a BILLION dollars worth of stuff a year dominates their competition, not with their products like the acne glop Proactiv, but rather because they’re willing to outspend their competitors to get a customer.

If I’ve got $500 bucks to go get a customer and my competitor is only willing to spend $50, I’m going to kick their ass all over because I can get more customers. Even if I’m dumber than they are and new to the market.

Figuring out how to become an aggressive investor is a massive transformation that will empower your business like little else can. Growth is opened to you when you step into this role.

Here’s the four doors this opens to you . . .

1. Income At Will Status:

When you nurture a big growing and responsive customer base that you’ve invested in getting and developing, you can bring in income at will.

Dan likes the idea of letting his herd pay for things he wants or needs. If he wants a new horse, new car, someone to pay for his divorce, all he does is send out an invoice a.k.a. a sales letter.

He divides up the expense by the number of customers in the herd, writes that amount on the invoice and he just figures out what to put between invoice and price and get it in front of customers.

This is where you want to live.

2. The Only Equity You Have Is In Your Herd

This is why you better be open to investing in it.

3. Toll Positioning

Other people are always willing to get access to a well nurtured and responsive herd of customers.

4. Print Your Currency

If you have media where you communicate with customers online or offline, blog, print newsletter, events, etc. you get to do barter with marketing joint ventures and the like.

Big Money Transformation #6: Generalist To Specialist

When most people start in business their description of their perfect customer is VERY broad and in some cases people would tell you that their perfect prospect is anyone with a pulse and wallet with money in it.

As a business owner gets smarter and seeks to invest in quality customers, not quantity, they start to specialize and narrow the list of people they’ll take money from by becoming specialists.

A cardiologist makes more money than the general MD working at the InstaCare in your local strip mall. When you specialize with the intent of serving a segment of the market who has plenty of money to spend on high priced products or services, you end up needing a lot less sales in order to become wealthy.

Big Money Transformation #7: Casual Dabbler To Serious Student

The majority of the American population will go all of 2013 without having read one single book.

And of those who actually buy book, most of them will not finish the book, nor use anything they actually did read.

The average buyer of a 6 CD course never even gets to the 5th disc.

Most people skim their way through life.

Dan was backstage at a speaking engagement with Donald Trump. Dan found that Donald and him have something in common – they both do quick assessments to determine whether a stranger they encounter is either toxic or an idiot.

You should be doing this as well so that you minimize your exposure to both of them.

Once Trump determined Dan wasn’t an idiot he asked him three questions.

Two of the questions had to do with how money was being made at the event they were speaking at. He knew everyone speaking there wasn’t getting paid like him so he was curious to see how it worked.

The next question was, “What three books are you reading now?”

This is an important question for two reasons:

1) This is one way Trump can see whether someone he’s talking to has discovered something he hasn’t that might prove useful to him.

2) He didn’t ask what book you’re reading. He asked Dan, and you can safely assume he asks anyone who passes the idiot test the same, for the three books he was reading. If someone can answer this question with three books it reveals a lot about them because most people don’t even read one book in an entire year, let alone three simultaneously.

Only a serious student would be reading three books at the same time. This not only improves the chance that the person isn’t an idiot but it also improves his odds of hearing about something that could prove useful to him.

Most people skim their way through life.

Dan has found that the clients of his that make the most money are serious students of marketing, direct response advertising, selling, human psychology, money math, and the industry they’re in.

This is the framework for the job at hand of anyone who sets out to own their business.

Are you up to the challenge? marketing notes dan kennedy Dan Kennedy Speaks On The Evolution Of A Successful Business Owner