Ultimate Lead Generation Machine

Special Bonus Report

How To

Get Off
The
Financial
and Emotional
Roller-Coaster,
Once and For All
THE CORNERSTONES OF
FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE
ACHIEVED THROUGH
DIRECT MARKETING

by Dan S. Kennedy
DanKennedy.com

© 2012/GKIC. All Rights Reserved. This publication is designed to provide

information and opinion of a general nature only. It is provided with the
understanding that neither the author or publisher is engaged in rendering
legal, accounting, marketing or business consulting or other professional
services by means of this Report. Neither author or publisher accepts any
responsibility for the decisions or actions of any individual reader of this
Report.

Off The Roller-Coaster, Part 1.

THE WORLD OF DIRECT MARKETING, at
the entrepreneur level, is unfortunately
made up of a lot of confused people. They
think and say that they own businesses, but
they confuse a web site or Facebook site
with a business, or episodic income events
as a business, or the making of money as a
business. It’s not a business if you do it. A
business is something you own, not
something you do.
THE ONLY THING YOU CAN ACTUALLY
own is equity – not income.
Thus, a business has to contain and be
creating equity, not just producing income,
to, by definition, be a business at all.
THE FOUR EQUITY CORNERSTONES
ARE (1) relationship with responsive
customers on your lists, that you own or
control; (2) process – for obtaining customers
and adding them to your list, retaining and
sustaining interest of customers, and
monetizing customers; (3) a toll both position
between your customers and the world,
which people are willing to pay to pass
through; and (4) proprietary intellectual
property and brand assets, of value to you
and to others who will pay to use them,
noting that #4 tends to lose value if #1, #2
and #3 aren’t vibrant. (That’s not always true.
Elvis is earning more dead than alive, solely
based on #4. But this is rare.)
To the degree that you fail to build these four
cornerstones, you remain on a financial and
emotional roller-coaster. For example, the
person who has a lot of #4, but is entirely
dependent on other peoples’ #1, is
constantly subject to ups and downs, booms
and slumps, disruptions and disasters largely
beyond his control. With distribution, for
example, the person depending on having
his product sold by CVS Drugstores lives on
an emotional roller-coaster: every phone call
from CVS causes a burst of bile in the
stomach, if CVS gets in trouble and closes
stores he’s going to suffer, if a knock-off
product appears at lower cost he may be
thrown under the bus, etc., etc. No sane
person can sleep well under these
conditions. The traditional defense is spread
risk – selling through CVS, Walgreens and
Rite-Aid. But even so, there is NO EQUITY –
there is complete dependence on others’
whims.
If a person has #1, 2 and 4, but not 3, he
lives on a financial roller-coaster, as his own
core business and his own efforts are all that
separates him from slumps and down-turns
and vulnerabilities. Only #3 has people lined
up to pay you and paying you on an on-going
basis for access and endorsement, so there
is income separated from your own sales.
Even when Disney had a clinker of a movie
(John Carter – Mars) and a theme park with
sagging attendance (California Adventure) it
had plenty of advertisers in its media,
concession holders in its parks, and others
paying for access to Disney’s customers and
fans.
Direct marketing, or better said, direct to
consumer marketing is THE ONLY kind of
business that facilitates development of all
four cornerstones or kinds of equity. Most
other kinds of businesses emphasize one, at
most two, at sacrifice or diminishment of
others. But if direct marketing is not
“deployed” to build these four cornerstones, it
may be no better than other kinds of
businesses.
In short, clarity of objectives is important.
You have to understand what you are about
and setting out to do. If getting and staying
off financial and emotional roller coasters is a
key objective, then that will dictate certain
strategy, and supercede other dictators of
strategy – such as simple income or most
money that can be made this month. Direct
marketing is a very flexible thing, but it
cannot stretch to serve multiple masters in
conflict with one another.
Off The Roller-Coaster, Part 2
Nothing forever goes up. Nothing lasts
forever.
Direct marketing is a place where you can
observe huge numbers of foolish
entrepreneurs acting as if their fortunes will
rise without interruption or stall or reversal,
thus they spend at or above their true
income, never slowing spending in order to
create personal net worth outside and
separate from their businesses. Thus, you
can also observe a lot of people who lose
everything in very short order, over short-
term and temporary problems – when they
should only lose a little.
Not long ago, I visited with a direct marketing
entrepreneur who’d suffered a business
crash. A business worth maybe $10-million,
generating about $2-million a year, after
about 8 years at that level, collapsed. The
reasons aren’t important to this story. It’s this
entrepreneur’s behavior that is. Year to year,
he mortgaged his first home to buy a 2nd,
bigger home, and mortgaged it to add a 3rd
mansion to the collection, all three
mortgaged to the hilt. He also took equity out
to expensively furnish them all and buy other,
highly leveraged, speculative investment real
estate. He went from buying nice clothes off
the rack to buying all custom clothes,
including $800 custom tailored jeans. He
leased ultra expensive luxury cars at each
home. He traded wife and a costly divorce for
a new, much younger, much costlier
girlfriend for whom he bought lots of instantly
depreciated assets, like jewelry. He actually
reached a point of out-spending his $2-
million income with credit cards with huge
limits, so that he was 30 to 60 days ahead of
income in spending. He put no money away,
and created negative personal net worth.
Thus, when his business collapsed, he lost
everything: homes, cars, some possessions,
and credit. He needn’t have but he did. Had
he lived on, say, $1-million a year and
banked the other million in safe, “grandma”
investments, he could have walked away
from the business and taken a vacation
before starting over, with $8-million in the
bank.
Some years back, I worked very hard to
discourage a young entrepreneur with a fast-
rising income and a booming business from
buying a vacation home worth about twice
what his regular residence was worth. His
wife was actually quite peeved at me. Seven
months later, the entire industry he was in
crashed. I hold a thank you note.
Different people have different terminology.
Robert Ringer uses “no touchies.” Foster
Hibbard talked about your “wealth account.”
The principle is to divert a pre-set, inviolate
percentage of all the money that comes to
you into a safe and secure place that is off
limits for business or personal spending.
Depending on your circumstances, you may
want that place to be sheltered from
creditors, lawsuits, etc. Further, I believe you
should live at least 50% beneath your
means, at least until you have achieved what
my friend Harvey Brody calls your Safe
Harbor Position: enough savings and assets
in place that you will never need another
earned dollar to live the remainder of your life
satisfactorily. That doesn’t mean you stop
earning; it means you could. At that point, if
you want to let your spending escalate from
50% of your income to 70%, 80%, even
100%, knock yourself out. I am also opposed
to unnecessary debt. You need a car and if
you must incur debt for one, then you must –
but you do not need two or even three cars
with loans or leases. Your business needs
capital and reinvested capital and may need
debt to grow, but it does not need debt for
fancy office furniture. Like the 2nd car, this
can be saved up for and paid cash for. As a
nation, incidentally, we are borrowing 40-
cents of every dollar spent from China, and
in that context, we are buying and paying for
a whole lot of things we ought to do without
until we can buy them out of our own
revenues.
If you haven’t read them, I suggest my book,
No B.S. Wealth Attraction in The New
Economy, the classic Richest Man In
Babylon, and The Millionaire Next Door by
Thomas Stanley. As adjunct, for wealth
philosophy, I recommend The Virtue of
Prosperity by Dinesh D’Souza and Ayn
Rand’s novels The Fountainhead and Atlas
Shrugged.
Simultaneous Or Sequential,
As It Applies To Wealth
Most people think sequentially – with regard
to money, first I’ll get a job and get out of my
parent’s house, then I’ll get furniture and pay
student loans and get married, then, as my
income goes up, in time, I’ll save, then, when
the savings amount to something, I’ll invest.
Most never get there. Most stay poor. Their
lifestyle goes up, with spending matching or
exceeding income. But they are poor
nonetheless. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who
got very rich, largely through pouring
earnings into real estate investments, began
investing in real estate before he owned
even his own home or even had his own
apartment; he was bumming nights on
friends’ couches.
In my RENEGADE MILLIONAIRE SYSTEM,
there is expansion of this as over-arching
entrepreneurial principle: moving forward
simultaneously on many fronts, rather than
organizing sequential steps. With regard to
money, you simultaneously meet your living
expenses with lifestyle restricted to no more
than 50% of income, pay own debt, save,
invest, and give to charity or people. With
regard to, say, getting customers for a
business, you find ten things you can do
simultaneously, not one thing to be done to
then make possible the next. And, looping
back to Part 1 of this Report, you engineer
business activities so that you
simultaneously create income and equity
from the same activity. As example, selling
something to make a profit but not getting a
customer with certain, good back-end value
by doing so fails the test; it does not
simultaneously create equity along with
income. I teach this in terms of making
simultaneous deposits to Present Bank and
Future Bank. It’s a very important concept to
understand.
All This, Contrarian
Never forget, the majority is wrong –
especially about (anything and everything
related to) money. The fact of 1% vs. 99%
tells you so.